Books
2024, Cornell University Press
This book, co-authored with Stephen Hutchings, Vera Tolz, Rhys Crilley, and Marie Gillespie, provides a systematic investigation of the Kremlin's primary tool of foreign propaganda, RT's. Through interrogation of its history, institutional culture, and journalistic ethos; its activities across multiple languages and media platforms; its audience-targeting strategies and audiences' engagements with it; and its response to the war in Ukraine and associated bans on it, the book sheds new light on the provenance and nature of disinformation's threat to democracy. It provides provocative insights into the nature and extent of the challenge that Russia's propaganda operation poses to the West, and reveals the interlinked nature of today's global media-politics pathologies.
2022, Routledge
This book, co-authored with Ilya Yablokov, provides the first ever study of how the Russian government engages with conspiracy theories in the international arena, with a particular focus on the use of conspiracy theories as an instrument of public diplomacy. With case studies including the Skripal poisonings, 2016 and 2020 US Presidential elections, and COVID-19, the book examines how global communication technologies influence the development and dissemination of conspiracy theories, which are also an important component of the post-Soviet Russian intellectual landscape and Kremlin-sponsored political discourse.