Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference: Case Studies From the ATHENA Project

The ATHENA project was a €3 million EU-funded research initiative focused on the early detection and analysis of foreign information manipulation and interference. This volume, edited by project coordinator David Wright, distils the project's output into 32 case studies of FIMI operations — examining perpetrators (Russia, China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, North Korea, India), targets, disinformation channels, and countermeasures. It is the first book explicitly structured around the FIMI framework as defined by the European External Action Service.

The value of this volume is empirical and methodological. Rather than theorising about influence operations in the abstract, it documents them concretely: who did what, through which channels, targeting whom, with what effects and what responses. It also proposes a structured methodology for conducting FIMI case studies, which is a genuine contribution to a field where analytical frameworks are inconsistent. For practitioners and policymakers working within EU or NATO contexts — where FIMI has become the standard analytical category — this is required reading, both for the case study evidence and for the analytical vocabulary it operationalises.