Digital (Dis)Information Operations (Routledge Studies in Conflict, Security and Technology)

This book offers an interdisciplinary insight into the key debates around information warfare in the digital age and argues that transnational cooperation can mitigate the threat.

States and societies are increasingly vulnerable to cyber-enabled information operations. From efforts to divide nations, undermine public policy, manipulate elections, and generate social discord, malign actors use the online realm to wreak havoc on our offline lives. The book explores the digital disinformation dilemma that confronts liberal democracies, reflecting on shared socio-political challenges and solutions to contemporary information operations amongst the Five Eyes states and beyond. The work aims to generate a holistic human-centric perspective on the challenges of digital (dis)information operations through interdisciplinary insight into shared challenges and solutions to contemporary information warfare. Together, these perspectives enable us to more effectively identify opportunities to address the challenge and increase the potential to enrich international collaborative efforts to safeguard liberal democracies from threats to their information environments.

This book will be of much interest to students of information warfare, intelligence studies, foreign policy and International Relations.

Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Melissa-Ellen Dowling is a Senior Lecturer at Flinders University, Australia. Her research focuses on the ways in which liberal democracy can be challenged, sustained, and enriched in a digitising world, and she is the author of Writing Russia (2021).