Russia’s Information War & Western Fringe Communities

• Department of Political and Social Sciences

PhD thesis defence by Johannes Christiern Santos Okholm

Russia’s information activities have been widely debated by decision makers and scholars alike. Fears of what disinformation and interference campaigns mean for the integrity of liberal democracy and how to navigate a holistic interstate conflict have been key concerns in these debates. Through an interdisciplinary approach, this thesis joins these debates and conceptualises these activities as a sub-category of strategic narrative practices rooted in a Russian strategic culture of information warfare, which emphasises societal subversion of geopolitical adversaries. Key to this subversive goal is the pragmatic alliance-making and exploitation of fringe communities in targeted societies, whose feelings of discontent and disillusionment with the domestic status quo can be directed towards shared adversaries. Through four chapters, this thesis explores the conditions under which Russian information warfare operates in fringe communities and how this practice can be countered effectively. The first chapter qualitatively explores how the formation of Russian information warfare’s strategic narratives must account for the conditions of intended audiences’ pre-existing world view, by relying on four adaptation strategies. The second chapter explores how the online projection ability to reach fringe communities of Russian information warfare is dependent on societal resilience factors in Western Europe. The third chapter uses an online field experiment to test how the reach of Russian propaganda outlets can be disrupted by posting debunking and source exposure counterstrategies among these fringe communities. The final chapter studies the effectiveness of censorship to counter information warfare by investigating how this reach was disrupted by the EU’s geo-block in 2022 and pushed to find new alternative platforms. Through different theoretical and methodological lenses, the thesis provides a holistic picture of how Russian information warfare operates and how it can be countered.

Christiern Santos Okholm is a Ph.D.-researcher at the EUI specialising in Russian information warfare and Western European fringe communities. Through an eclectic approach, in which he mixes insights and methods from the fields of international relations, political communication, and computational science, Santos Okholm explores how Russian information warfare actors reach and adapt to democratically disillusioned audiences in Europe. In addition, he further studies the effectiveness fact-checking and censorship in stopping Russian information warfare actors from reaching fringe audiences. Besides his main focus, Santos Okholm has also worked on the geopolitical boundary-making practices in Ukrainian strategic communication, Russian adaptation strategies in the Global South, and Chinese influence campaigns in Denmark.