25 January 2022

Europe’s security landscape has changed dramatically in the past decade amid Russia’s resurgence, mounting European doubts about the long-term reliability of the U.S. security commitment, and Europe’s growing aspiration for strategic autonomy. Could Europeans develop an autonomous defense capacity if the United States withdrew completely from Europe? If the United States were to do so, any European effort to develop an autonomous defense capacity would be fundamentally hampered by profoundly diverging threat perceptions and severe military capacity shortfalls that would be very costly and time-consuming to close.

Hugo Meijer is CNRS Research Fellow at Sciences Po, Center for International Studies (CERI, Paris) and the Founding Director of The European Initiative for Security Studies (EISS), a multidisciplinary network of scholars that share the goal of consolidating security studies in Europe. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Security, Diplomacy and Strategy (CSDS), in Brussels, and an Honorary Researcher at the Centre for War and Diplomacy, Lancaster University. Recent and forthcoming books: Awakening to China’s Rise. European Foreign and Security Policies toward the People’s Republic of China (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2022); The Handbook of European Defence Policies and Armed Forces (Oxford University Press, 2018), co-edited with Marco Wyss. For more details, see: https://www.hugomeijer.com/

A transcript file is available here.

18 January 2022

Malign manipulation of the information environment is an urgent security threat facing western democracies. This talk examines why and how state and nonstate actors have harnessed emerging technologies – social media platforms in particular – to shape the information environment for strategic ends. Weaponization of disinformation is neither new nor warfare in the traditional sense, but digital aspects in particular have confounded western efforts to manage it. This talk is based on interdisciplinary British Academy project that applies intelligence history, strategic studies, and technological perspectives to evaluate and counter influence operations that seek to advance strategic aims in an asymmetric manner short of war.

Dr. David V. Gioe is a British Academy Global Professor and Visiting Professor of Intelligence and International Security in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London (KCL). Prior to joining KCL David was Associate Professor of History at the US Military Academy at West Point and History Fellow for the Army Cyber Institute. David is Director of Studies for the Cambridge Security Initiative and is co-convener of its International Security and Intelligence program. He is a former CIA analyst and operations officer; he remains a senior officer in the US Navy Reserve.