This event is co-organized with the Vienna School of International Studies/Diplomatische Akademie Wien and the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, CEU
'The narrative signature of Russian information warfare: A forensic linguistic analysis'
As part of its hybrid warfare, Russia has strategically conducted disinformation campaigns in parallel to its 2015 intervention in Syria and its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Based on corpus-assisted forensic linguistic analyses, this presentation will identify the narrative signature of Russian information warfare. Findings reveal how language aggression functions to mask human rights violations, i.e. how recurring linguistic configurations construct disinformation tactics that portray Russia’s adversaries as terrorist recruiters and Russia as a military superpower and a humanitarian protecting local populations. By comparing these findings to open-source conflict data, the talk concludes by discussing how these disinformation tactics were related to kinetic operations on the ground and closely tied to Russian military objectives.
Dr Eszter Szenes is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Research Fellow at the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Central European University in Vienna and a Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Resilience and Security, Norwich University, Vermont. She is currently a visiting fellow at Political Capital in Budapest. She holds a PhD in Systemic Functional Linguistics from the University of Sydney. Her research interests include violent extremism, disinformation, information warfare and critical thinking. Her most recent work investigates the links between climate change and violent extremism, ecofascism and Russian disinformation campaigns.
Please register for the event here: https://www.da-vienna.ac.at/de/Events