Overview:

Russia’s war in Ukraine has alerted the world to the effectiveness of hybrid war, particularly that in the cyber domain. Russian information operations (and the Ukrainian response to them) are an invaluable case study offering lessons applicable to every part of the world, but to Asian allies in particular as China increasingly turns toward new avenues for coercion.

A growing Russia-China nexus is developing in the information domain, swaying global audiences toward their authoritarian agenda. From the perspective of a researcher of Russian disinformation, this talk will discuss how China is learning from a country with one of the most sophisticated information war strategies and applying it to undermine the information space in the Indo Pacific.

Speaker:

Maya Sobchuk is a researcher within the Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology based at the University of Tokyo and a Non-Resident Fellow in the Artificial Intelligence and Global Governance Programme at the Global Governance Institute in Brussels. She studies Russian information operations, how emerging technologies are affecting the information space, and the increasing Russia/ China nexus in disinformation.

Moderator:

Benoit Hardy-Chartrand is currently faculty lecturer at Temple University Japan, and Associate Researcher at the Raoul-Dandurand Chair of Strategic and Diplomatic Studies in Montreal. He has been conducting research on East Asian security and geopolitics in academic institutions and think tanks for close to 15 years. Before joining TUJ, he was Senior Research Associate at the Center for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) in Canada, Junior Fellow at the United Nations University, and taught for three years at the University of Montreal.