Defending Democracies: Combating Foreign Election Interference in a Digital Age

Hollis and Ohlin have assembled an interdisciplinary volume that examines foreign election interference through three distinct lenses: definitional (what counts as interference, and how to distinguish it from legitimate influence), legal (what international law can and cannot address), and regulatory (what alternative frameworks — domestic law, platform governance, cybersecurity norms — might fill the gaps). The editors are both international law scholars, which gives the volume a legal rigour that most political science treatments of election interference lack.

The definitional challenge is underappreciated in policy discussions that treat foreign interference as self-evidently illegal or clear-cut. Hollis and Ohlin force the hard questions: what is the difference between influence and interference, between public diplomacy and covert manipulation, between legitimate political communication and unlawful election interference? The answers matter enormously for policy design — you cannot counter what you cannot define. For practitioners and policymakers working on FIMI, election security, or international norm development, this volume provides the legal and conceptual architecture that operational frameworks depend on.