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Putin’s “Global Hybrid War”: The Anti-Russian Bias of the Atlantic Council

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Russiagate Revisited

Abstract

Despite the reputation of being non-partisan, experts frequently validate concepts and ideas popular within the dominant elite circles. To support this argument, we have taken a closer look into the Atlantic Council (AC), an American think tank with clear preferences for the US-centered international order and NATO as the foundation of security in Europe. We argue that these preferences have translated into anti-Russian bias in AC publications. This is evident in the organization’s reliance on the concept of global hybrid war in describing the goals and means of Russian foreign policy since 2014. We base our analysis on a sample of articles on Russia and “hybrid war” published by the AC’s experts. In establishing the AC’s pro-NATO and anti-Russian biases, we analyze the articles’ frames as well as the political and institutional preferences held by the organization.

The paper is a revised version of the paper “Putin’s ‘Global Hybrid War’: The U.S. Experts, Russia, and the Atlantic Council, Russia in Global Affairs 1, January–March 2021. The authors are grateful to the journal for the permission to use the material in the paper here.

“[N]obody wants to acknowledge the dire reality that a state of war—albeit

hybrid war—already exists between Russia and the entire democratic world.”

Peter Dickinson, The Atlantic Council, March 13, 2018

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Research Support

  • This research has been supported by the Interdisciplinary Scientific and Educational School of Moscow University. «Preservation of the World Cultural and Historical Heritage».

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA, USA

    Andrei Tsygankov & Haley Gonzales

  2. Moscow State University, Moscow, Russia

    Pavel Tsygankov

Authors
  1. Andrei Tsygankov
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  2. Pavel Tsygankov
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  3. Haley Gonzales
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Correspondence to Andrei Tsygankov .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Media and Communications, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, OH, USA

    Oliver Boyd-Barrett

  2. Department of Sociology, St. Francis Xavier University, Antigonish, NS, Canada

    Stephen Marmura

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Tsygankov, A., Tsygankov, P., Gonzales, H. (2023). Putin’s “Global Hybrid War”: The Anti-Russian Bias of the Atlantic Council. In: Boyd-Barrett, O., Marmura, S. (eds) Russiagate Revisited. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30940-3_7

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