Aviation has played an important role in irregular warfare, from its use by the British against rebellious tribesmen in Iraq and Transjordan in the interwar period to the era of the unblinking eye and precision strike in Afghanistan. Our guests discuss this evolution in the use of airpower to support ground forces, illustrating that although rapid advances in technology have brought to the point of near perfection the various procedures recently employed in Afghanistan and Iraq, the role of aviation in war—irregular or otherwise—has not significantly changed to this point. 

Conflict forces millions of individuals from their homes each year. Using a simple structural model and new refugee data, we produce the first set…

Since 2015, there has been a huge increase in laws that ostensibly seek to counter misinformation. Since the pandemic began, this trend has only…

A study of social media content shows that Venezuelan opposition figures often take harder anti-government lines if they flee abroad. Exiles’ voices are important, but those trying to end Venezuela’s crisis should listen to others as well, recalling that compromise offers the only peaceful exit.

These data summarize 82 studies published since 1995 related to the effects of influence operations. We included studies that meet three inclusion criteria: (1) a treatment, or source of variation in exposure to influence operation-like content; (2) a clearly measured outcome of interest; and (3) credibly evaluable insight on the potential of influence operations to affect real-world outcomes and behaviors.

These data summarize 221 studies published since 1978 related to countermeasures designed to combat influence operations. We include studies which met four inclusion criteria: (1) a source of variation in exposure to the countermeasure; (2) a clearly defined outcome of interest for some specified population; (3) relevance to thinking about the potential of an intervention to impact real-world behavior; and (4) enough detail to evaluate the credibility of the findings.

The global reach of the pandemic creates a unique opportunity for a regional analysis of misinformation trends, allowing us to see how misinformation actors in different countries and cultural contexts respond to the same set of potential narrative conditions. Are the observed trends in misinformation similar or different?

Establishing long-term infrastructure around the study of influence operations and misinformation is more crucial than ever.

Information in its many forms has become a significant component of national power—the primary medium of competition between the United States and its adversaries.

Over the past decade, the international community has increasingly focused on leveraging private investment to support growth and achieve the…

Research on influence operations requires effective collaboration across industry and academia. Social media platforms are on the front lines of combating influence operations and possess a wealth of unique data and insights. Academics have rigorous training in research methods and relevant theories, and their independence lends credibility to their findings. The skills and knowledge of both groups are critical to answering important questions about influence operations and ultimately finding more effective ways to counter them.

Among the many sobering projections of harm to be caused by climate change is this eye-popping statistic: on average, according to economists, a rise in local temperature of half a degree Celsius is associated with a ten to 20 percent increase in the risk of deadly conflict.

Since COVID-19 spread to South Asia, there has been no need for government officials, news anchors, or private individuals spreading misinformation about the pandemic to reinvent the wheel. They’ve simply exacerbated the same tensions that have long existed between the major religious groups in the region.

As news media across the United States generally urged calm and patience as votes were counted in last week’s presidential election, the Russian government-funded RT, a multi-platform media organization which claims to be the most popular news network on YouTube, instead amplified voices of chaos.

The Irregular Warfare Podcast is a collaboration between the Modern War Institute and Princeton University’s Empirical Studies of Conflict Project. You can listen to the full episode below, and you can find it and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, TuneIn, or your favorite podcast app. And be sure to follow the podcast on Twitter!

The problem of “conflict minerals” has received widespread attention from the public and researchers alike. Studies highlight that countries with high-value resources such as diamonds are more likely to experience civil war. The “conflict minerals” narrative is generally understood as the use of funds from minerals to support and perpetuate violence by non-state armed groups. Although armed groups may extort industrial mining companies, artisanal miners are thought to be particularly vulnerable to predation, and therefore involuntarily prolonging this cycle of violence. But this isn’t quite what’s happening...

Late in May, an …

Scholars of the resource curse argue that reliance on primary commodities destabilizes governments: price fluctuations generate windfalls or…

Of the roughly 28.6 million cases of COVID-19 logged by the World Health Organization, only 1.1 million are in Africa, 4 percent of the global total. The relatively low number of cases, along with a similarly low figure for coronavirus deaths, has researchers stumped. But despite the coronavirus’s relatively light touch so far, the continent faces a problem familiar throughout the world: pandemic misinformation.