Nina Jankowicz: How to Lose the Information Wars

ABSTRACT

Since the start of the Trump era, the United States and the Western world have finally begun to wake up to the threat of online warfare and the attacks from Russia. The question no one seems to be able to answer is: what can the West do about it?

Central and Eastern European states, however, have been aware of the threat for years. Nina Jankowicz has advised these governments on the front lines of the information war. The lessons she learnt from that fight, and from her attempts to get US congress to act, make for essential reading.

How to Lose the Information War takes the reader on a journey through five Western governments' responses to Russian information warfare tactics - all of which have failed. She journeys into the campaigns the Russian operatives run and shows how we can better understand the motivations behind these attacks and how to beat them. Above all, this book shows what is at stake: the future of civil discourse and democracy, and the value of truth itself.

BIOGRAPHY

Nina Jankowicz is a Washington DC-based writer and analyst who studies the intersection of technology and democracy in Central and Eastern Europe and Beyond. She currently serves as Disinformation Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Previously, she served as a Fulbright-Clinton Public Policy Fellow, a role in which she provided strategic communications guidance to the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry. She has also managed democracy assistance programs to Russia and Belarus at the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, a frequent target of Russian disinformation. Her writing has been published by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, BuzzFeed News, Foreign Policy and others.

Nina received her MA in Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies from Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, where she was a Title VIII and FLAS scholarship recipient, and her BA in Russian and Political Science from Bryn Mawr College, where she graduated magna cum laude. She has lived and worked in Russia and Ukraine, and speaks fluent Russian and proficient Polish and Ukrainian. Nina was a 2017 Foreign Policy Interrupted Fellow.