Stephen Hutchings and Vera Tolz will be presenting their new book, Russia, Disinformation, and the Liberal Order: RT As Populist Pariah (Cornell University Press, 2024), co-authored with Precious Chatterjie-Doody, Rhys Crilley and Marie Gillespie. Through the prism of the first comprehensive account of RT, the Kremlin's primary tool of foreign propaganda, the book sheds new light on the provenance and nature of disinformation's threat to democracy. Interrogating the communications strategies pursued by authoritarian states and grassroots populist movements, the book reveals the interlinked nature of today's global media-politics pathologies. The book challenges commonplace notions of disinformation as something that Russia brings to the West, where passive publics are duped by the Kremlin's communications machine, and reveals the reciprocal processes through which Russia and disinformation infiltrate and challenge the liberal order.

SPEAKERS

Stephen Hutchings is Professor of Russian Studies at the University of Manchester and Fellow of the UK's Academy of Social Sciences. He has published or co-published seven monographs and six edited volumes on aspects of Russian culture, film, media and propaganda with presses including Cambridge University Press, Cornell University Press and Routledge, as well as articles in journals ranging from Cultural Studies, Television and New Media, Journalism, and European Journal of Cultural Studies, to Slavic Review. He has held 7 large research grants with the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council since 2000. He was President of the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies from 2010-2013

Vera Tolz is Sir William Mather Professor of Russian Studies at the University of Manchester and Fellow of the UK’s Academy of Social Sciences. The author of six monographs, she has published widely on various aspects of Russian nationalism and the history of Russian imperialism, Soviet and Russian political communication strategies, and the relationship between intellectuals and the state in the imperial, Soviet and post-Soviet periods. She is currently pursuing a collaborative AHRC-funded project ‘(Mis)translating Deceit: Disinformation as a Translingual, Discursive Dynamic’. (for details, see https://www.mis-translating-deceit.com).