Beyond Disinformation

We are delighted to announce that Manchester members of our project team will contribute to the development of the “Beyond Disinformation” research network together with our colleagues at the University of Toronto and the University of Melbourne. The project “Beyond Disinformation: Assessing Digital Communications Strategies of Hybrid Neo-Authoritarian Empires” received funding from the three universities involved. It aims to bring together faculty members, postdoctoral researchers, and PhD students from Manchester, Melbourne, and Toronto (MMT) for virtual and in-person research cluster events. The project is headed by Stephen Hutchings (University of Manchester), Dara Conduit (University of Melbourne), and Kenzie Burchell (University of Toronto). It seeks to deepen the collaboration between MMT in disinformation research. 

More specifically, addressing major new international developments including Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and China’s embrace of foreign interference, the project aims to improve our understanding of the digital political communication strategies of emerging "hybrid neo-authoritarian empires", examining their impact on domestic, global, and diasporic audiences. We will extend our transnational, methodological, and interdisciplinary expertise in collaboration with Melbourne and Toronto to explore two new crucial avenues: 1) emerging translingual digital governance techniques and technologies of Neo-Authoritarian empires; 2) transnational networks of nonstate actors and diaspora media audiences participating in the construction of repressive informational orders, a permanent consolidation of hybrid war globally. Through intensive scholarly exchanges, we will develop pioneering toolsets for comparatively studying Russia’s and China’s global activities with concerted focus on the European, MENA and Australasia regions. 

The research network aims to produce publications, as well as further collaborative projects and grant applications.

BEYOND DISINFORMATION: Assessing Digital Communications Strategies of Hybrid Neo Authoritarian Empires

Our previous Manchester-Toronto partnership established the foundation for transformative cross-institutional Research cluster on media, public diplomacy and interstate conflict in the digital age. Since then, major new international developments including Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and China’s embrace of foreign interference have lent our agenda added urgency: we must improve our understanding of the digital political communication strategies of emerging "hybrid neo-authoritarian empires", examining their impact on domestic, global, and diasporic audiences. In this new, follow-up initiative, led by Stephen Hutchings (Manchester), Dara Conduit (Melbourne) and Kenzie Burchell (Toronto), we extend our transnational, methodological, and interdisciplinary expertise in collaboration with Melbourne to explore two new crucial avenues: 1) emerging translingual digital governance techniques and technologies of Neo-Authoritarian empires; 2) transnational networks of nonstate actors and diaspora media audiences participating in the construction of repressive informational orders, a permanent consolidation of hybrid war globally. Through intensive scholarly exchanges, we will develop pioneering toolsets for comparatively studying Russia’s and China’s global activities with concerted focus on European, MENA and Australasia regions.

Targeted at Early Career Researchers across all three institutions, the project will involve several PhD workshop events and staff exchange visits, culminating in co-authored journal articles and a major new grant application aimed at further consolidation of our transnational partnership in this vital area of global policy challenges.

Deepening our collaboration with the University of Toronto in disinformation research, Vera Tolz will be involved in the realization of the project “Beyond Disinformation: The Strategic Techniques and Transnational Contours of Evolving Narrative and Diasporic Information Orders.” The project is funded jointly through the Knowledge Synthesis grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and UK Research and Innovation’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (UKRI-AHRC). It is headed by Kenzie Burchell (University of Toronto) and Vera Tolz (University of Manchester). 

The project will support the development of the Manchester, Melbourne, and Toronto (MMT) research cluster. It aims to fund RAships for Manchester and Toronto-based graduate students over the next 6-9 months to work with our MMT faculty collaborators through the lens of "Evolving Narratives of Cultures and History" and survey the field roughly in terms of four domains: 

1. Evolving narratives of diaspora identity, communities, and culture

2. Interventions of commercial digital platforms and authoritarian digital governance techniques

3. Transnational networks of state-aligned and non-state actors 

4. Best practices assessment of stakeholder engagement and public communication of research.

BEYOND DISINFORMATION: The Strategic Techniques and Transnational Contours of Evolving Narrative and Diasporic Information Orders

This project is funded through the Knowledge Synthesis grant of the UKRI and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, supporting research collaboration between the University of Manchester and the University of Toronto. The project is led by Dr Kenzie Burchell (Toronto) and Professor Vera Tolz (Manchester) over the period of 12 months from September 2024. A larger project team includes Drs Jennifer Ross and Sherry Yu from the University of Toronto, Dr Dariya Orlova from the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in Ukraine, and postgraduate researchers from Manchester and Toronto.

The main aim of this project is critically to review the existing scholarship on how new technologies facilitate the emergence of new authoritarian techniques that seek to impose dominant "great power" narratives for the purpose of reinvigorating a militarized imperialism as the global status quo. To different degrees these techniques are used by actors affiliated not only with dictatorships, but also with democracies. The main project output – a report to be shared with academic and non-academic audiences – evaluates the findings of the existing research and the gaps which need to be filled. In our critical survey of the existing publications, we pay particular attention to the research on how the authoritarian techniques are used to suppress cultural diversity and marginalize local histories and diasporic voices. The report suggests the ways this research can be taken forward.  Within the ‘Beyond Disinformation’ project, the participating PhD students are offered an opportunity to develop their research skills and to establish a forum for discussing their own research projects and sharing their findings.  The ‘Beyond Disinformation’ project findings are shared with the following stakeholders outside academia: the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation; the Canadian Journalists of Colour Network; IBM Research Europe; the Interactive Advertising Bureau (Europe’s digital advertising industry’s professional association), as well as individual journalists with whom team members have professional contacts.

The project team argues that when the right to participate in the crafting, circulation and negotiation of worldviews is precluded, we lose the value of evolving voices, cultures and histories in conversation with one another. These forms of subnational, transnational and diasporic engagement are urgently necessary for negotiating a transnational democratic foundation for collectively attending to the permacrisis that accompanies increasing technological disruption and the widening chasm of geopolitical conflict.

This project is one of the initiatives in the long-standing collaboration between the Universities of Manchester and Toronto, the initial funding for which was secured by Prof. Stephen Hutchings and Dr Kenzie Burchell in 2019. Since then, our team, with the additional participation of colleagues from the University of Melbourne, have been at the forefront of studying transnational misinformation campaigns which undermine democratic institutions.