WEBINAR 2: Disinformation and hybrid warfare in Ukraine

23 March 2022 (Wednesday), 20:00 – 21:30 (Singapore Time)

This panel seeks to explore how disinformation and hybrid warfare strategies are deployed in Ukraine and other European countries and provide greater understanding of how resilience can be built.

Speakers

Ross Burley is Co-Founder and Executive of the Centre for Information Resilience, an independent non-profit that counters disinformation, exposes human rights abuses and combats online behaviour harmful to women and minorities.

Ross has over 18 years’ experience in national security-focused strategic communications and international relations. A former British civil servant, Ross served in the Foreign & Commonwealth Office in London, Washington D.C. and Tel Aviv. He was a foreign policy advisor to the former UK deputy Prime Minister, Sir David Lidington, leading on nuclear proliferation, international counter terrorism, human rights, and Latin America. He also worked for several years in the private sector for leading British strategic communications firms. From 2017 to 2020, Ross designed, implemented, and led several of the UK Government’s counter disinformation programmes, including the Open Information Partnership. Ross remains part of the UK Government’s Stabilisation Unit, as a Civilian Deployable Expert in strategic communications.

Ross has been published in the Washington Post, The Telegraph, International Business Times and Vice News. He holds a BA (Hons) and MSc in Anthropology from Oxford University, where he specialized in the intersection of counter insurgency and ethnography in Northern Ireland.

Jan Šír is a research fellow with the Department of Russian and East European Studies at the Charles University in Prague and editor-in-chief of Studia Territorialia quarterly. He is an Area Studies scholar with extensive expertise in policy-oriented research on the successor states to the former Soviet Union.

Aaron Erlich is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at McGill University, where he is a member of the Centre for the Study of Democratic Citizenship (CSDC) and a founding member of the Centre for Social and Cultural Data Science (CSCDS). He completed my Ph.D. at the University of Washington in Seattle. Broadly speaking, he is interested in democratization and democratic development. Much of his research addresses the role that information plays in developing democratic polities. He is also interested in advancing quantitative methods to measure the effect of information.

James Pamment is currently a non-resident fellow in the Technology and International Affairs program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. In recent years he has been Head of Department at ISK, a special adviser to the EU-NATO Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats, director of the Carnegie Partnership for Countering Influence Operations, and a senior analyst at the Centre for Asymmetric Threats Studies (CATS), Swedish Defence University, among other positions.

His research is about how states influence one another using strategic communication. His other main area of interest is in using strategic communication to counter foreign interference, such as influence operations and hybrid threats. He has consulted and trained for a variety of countries, international organisations, and companies.