International Disinformation: A Handbook for Analysis and Response

Textbook-style handbooks on disinformation tend to arrive too late for the phenomena they describe, or at a level of abstraction that makes them difficult to apply. This volume from Kupiecki, Bryjka, and Chłoń — published open access by Brill — navigates that tension with some success. Its dual audience structure is deliberate: the book is written simultaneously for the informed general reader seeking to build personal resilience and for students and practitioners in politics, international relations, security, and media studies. The coverage moves from conceptual foundations through identification methods to counter-measures, with consistent reference to the historical record of how state disinformation campaigns have operated.

The treatment of micro-targeting and strategic disinformation campaigns is the most policy-relevant section. The authors situate these within a broader account of how contemporary information environments create structural opportunities for manipulation that did not exist in earlier periods — a framing that resists the common error of treating disinformation as a purely technical problem susceptible to platform-level solutions. The open-access publication model is itself worth noting: the book is positioned as a resource that should circulate widely, and the Brill CC BY licence makes it genuinely accessible to the civil society actors and journalists who most need this kind of systematic analysis.