This article introduces a dataset on the covert use of social media to influence politics by promoting propaganda, advocating controversial…

It’s been described as the “terrorist’s dilemma”—the trade-offs between maintaining security and exercising command and control that terrorist organizations must make. But how can counterterrorism campaigns be designed to exploit that dilemma? What do government agencies and organizations charged with countering terrorist threats need to know about those pressures? And how should an understanding of the dilemma inform the development of counterterrorism policy?

How do foreign agents, representing countries or other political actors, exert political influence in another country? While considerable…

What do sovereign bond investors know about the risks and costs of violent conflict? Do they rationally incorporate available information, or are…

Social media has become an outlet for extremists to fundraise and organize on, potentially
leading to deadly consequences. While governments deliberate on how to regulate this challenge,
some social media companies have removed creators of offensive content—deplatforming.

The world faces a forcible displacement crisis. Across the world, tens of millions of individuals have been
forced from their homes and across international boundaries. The causes and consequences of refugee
flows are, therefore, the subjects of significant social science inquiry.

Climate fragility afflicts more and more countries in the world today. Flood and drought, as well as changes in multi-year and seasonal variability, have become major risk factors.

The Wall Street Journal’s Facebook Files series resumed last week, revealing that the platform took action against an online campaign to set up a new right-wing “Patriot Party” after the Jan. 6 insurrection. Earlier this month news outlets reported that a number of former employees excoriated the company’s content moderation practices in their departure emails. 

In the past twenty years, during the US-led post-9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a million members of the National Guard have deployed to those two combat zones. Throughout that period, soldiers and airmen from the Army and Air National Guard have also played a vital role in responding to a remarkably wide range of emergencies at home, from wildfires and hurricanes to the COVID-19 pandemic. Those dual missions—serving both as a key source of combat capability for the joint force and as a resource in times of need in American communities—set the National Guard apart as a military force. But that isn’t the Guard’s only fundamentally unique quality.

In this episode of MWI’s Urban Warfare Project Podcast, John Spencer is joined by retired Brig. Gen. Yom Tov Tamir. He served a long career in the Israel Defense Forces as an armor officer holding positions from tank commander to division commander. During the Yom Kippur War in 1973, he commanded the 9th Armor Battalion, 14th Armored Brigade.

When information can travel globally at the tap of a finger, irregular warfare professionals must contend with an ever-changing environment. How does strategic messaging tie into operations on the battlefield? How can we build a more information-savvy force? And how can information act as both weapon and warfighting space?

The United States and other nations have spent billions of dollars and invested untold effort, not to mention lives, in a global campaign against Islamist terrorism—and yet the threat landscape is arguably worse now than it was on 9/11.

We consider how the U.S. news media reports on international affairs. Analyzing ≈40 million
news articles published between 2010 and 2020, we explore whether the American news media
report differently on various international affairs topics based on partisan leanings. We then
analyze ≈25 million articles published by top online news sites to determine whether collective
reporting shows disparities between the level of attention afforded major global issues and
objective measures of their human costs (e.g. numbers of individuals killed).

The US military and its allies are faced with the challenges of shifting focus toward great power competition while still maintaining the ability to counter threats on the fringes. Where does irregular warfare fit in this new strategic landscape?

Combating influence operations is a critical concern for civil society, governments, and social media platforms around the world. Empirical research on how influence operations can affect people and societies—by, for example, altering beliefs, changing voting behavior, or inspiring political violence—is limited.

Widespread acceptance of COVID-19 vaccines is crucial for achieving sufficient immunization coverage to end the global pandemic, yet few studies have investigated COVID-19 vaccination attitudes in lower-income countries, where large-scale vaccination is just beginning. We analyze COVID-19 vaccine acceptance across 15 survey samples covering 10 low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) in Asia, Africa and South America, Russia (an upper-middle-income country) and the United States, including a total of 44,260 individuals. We find considerably higher willingness to take a COVID-19 vaccine in our LMIC samples (mean 80.3%; median 78%; range 30.1 percentage points) compared with the United States (mean 64.6%) and Russia (mean 30.4%). Vaccine acceptance in LMICs is primarily explained by an interest in personal protection against COVID-19, while concern about side effects is the most common reason for hesitancy. Health workers are the most trusted sources of guidance about COVID-19 vaccines. Evidence from this sample of LMICs suggests that prioritizing vaccine distribution to the Global South should yield high returns in advancing global immunization coverage. Vaccination campaigns should focus on translating the high levels of stated acceptance into actual uptake. Messages highlighting vaccine efficacy and safety, delivered by healthcare workers, could be effective for addressing any remaining hesitancy in the analyzed LMICs.

How is breaching—a tactical task engineers specialize in—uniquely challenged by the complexity of cities? And why is it important that US Army units have this specialized capability within their formations? This episode of MWI’s Urban Warfare Project Podcast tackles those questions and more, as John Spencer is joined by Staff Sgt. Nicholas Garner, an instructor for the US Army Engineer School’s Urban Mobility Breacher Course.

Influence operations can have measurable effects on people’s beliefs and behavior, but empirical research does not yet adequately answer the most pressing questions facing policymakers.

The United States appears to have reached an inflection point in its relationship with the rest of the world. On the one hand, a new administration is eager to reengage with both allies and competitors, reasserting the role of global leader that the United States has claimed since World War II. On the other hand, something has changed. Former partners, made wary by indications of US withdrawal from the global stage, no longer look to the United States for leadership. Current adversaries, emboldened by apparent US apathy toward their breaching of international norms, are no longer cowed into restraint.

Five days after the World Health Organization classified COVID-19 as a pandemic, the Empirical Studies of Conflict Project at Princeton University began cataloging misinformation efforts surrounding the spread of the coronavirus in collaboration with Microsoft Research. Our initial goal was to support industry efforts to limit the spread of false narratives about the pandemic, and we realized that categorizing the stories we found in a systematic way and making the data public could contribute to a much broader understanding of trends in COVID-19 misinformation.