Research

Maria Golubeva explores how wargaming can better capture the diversity and ambiguity of hybrid threat actors — hostile states, ambiguous allies, and non-state groups such as hacktivists and criminal networks — at a time when the liberal international order is fracturing. She argues that existing frameworks err by assuming hybrid threats always pursue geostrategic objectives, when disruption itself is increasingly the goal. Golubeva examines how the information environment must be reconstructed in wargame scenarios to reflect real-world sense-making, strategic ambiguity, and strategic differentiation across multiple audiences. She proposes that credible hybrid threat wargames should assign ideological or non-geostrategic rationales to red teams, simulate differentiated information campaigns across platforms, and resist the temptation to reduce complex actor motivations to a single coherent strategy.

Professor Chiyuki Aoi, Paul Bacon, Shinae Lee, Corey Wallace, and Aurelio Insisa explore why diplomatic pledges between Europe and the IP4 democracies — Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand — have produced so little practical cooperation on countering foreign information manipulation. They find the gap stems not from lack of political will, but from misaligned institutions, uneven capabilities, and divergent threat perceptions across the four countries. The authors propose a phased, minilateral approach: building shared terminology and analysis first, then capacity building, and only later limited operational cooperation.

Dr Michlin-Shapir examines the deeper trends fuelling populist politics in Western libreral-democracies. She traced the emotional roots of discontent and grievance underlying a growing and dangerous backlash against liberal democracy.  

Dr Neville Bolt traces the origins and evolution of strategic communications in the twenty-first century, arguing that despite its growing prominence in Western security policy, it remains dangerously under-theorised and must be more rigorously grounded in liberal democratic values if it is to effectively address long-term geopolitical change.

Paul Bell reflects on Georgia's faltering democratic aspirations, arguing that the country's long-held hope for a Western, liberal future has become a kind of trap — a seductive but ultimately punishing force that keeps its people straining toward a freedom that autocratic capture continues to deny them.

Paul Bell is a consultant and writer with thirty years of experience of strategic and political communications in Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. He lived in Tbilisi, Georgia, for more than five years before returning to London in late 2024.

Maria Golubeva examines Angela Merkel's legacy and Russia's information war on Germany to argue that liberal democracy must evolve from an open, globalist model into a actively self-defending "battlesome democracy" — while warning that in hardening its institutions against foreign manipulation and hybrid threats, Germany risks abandoning the very humanist values it is trying to protect.

Andrew Cheatham explores the convergence of exponential technological advancement, geopolitical fragmentation, and deep cultural exhaustion to argue that the West faces a civilisational crisis that goes far beyond governance failure — one that can only be addressed through a fundamental renewal of shared meaning, epistemic humility, and human connection.

The report was the culmination of a year of in-depth research meetings conducted with many of the world’s leading technology thinkers. It was written by Dr Neville Bolt and Elina Lange Ionatamishvili in an association between NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence and Sympodium Institute for Strategic Communications.