Divide and Conquer: Russia's Anti-west Campaign and Gender-based Disinformation
Owen Wong, Claire Mountford, Stéfanie von Hlatky · 2026
Read Divide and Conquer: Russia's Anti-west Campaign and Gender-based Disinformation by Owen Wong, Claire Mountford, Stéfanie von Hlatky (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/pmc-13313524.txt.
Description
Owen Wong, Claire Mountford, and Stéfanie von Hlatky analyze, in a 2026 article, how Russia wields gender-based disinformation as a geopolitical weapon. Research on such campaigns usually stops at domestic social harm, leaving their foreign policy function underexplored. The authors ran a qualitative content analysis over 367 pro-Kremlin disinformation articles, looking for the stories they tell about gender and what strategic work those stories perform.
Eight recurring narratives emerged, all aimed at Western governments and bodies such as NATO and the European Union. Two mechanisms organize them: sabotaging the adversary's moral legitimacy and burnishing Russia's own. The content is tuned to resonate with conservative audiences abroad, turning culture-war material into leverage in great power competition. The authors frame this as hybrid warfare through identity, and argue analysts should read gendered disinformation as deliberate statecraft rather than background noise.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Owen Wong, Claire Mountford, Stéfanie von Hlatky |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 53 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |