Description: This course is focused on the contemporary perspectives of political warfare, its instrumentation and application in current global context. The course is aimed to provide a broader understanding of the nature of political warfare and its role and limits in achieving influence over opponents’ decision - making process and outcomes via non-lethal methods. The key aim of the course is to provide a framework of thinking about the specific aspects of the variety of techniques employed by political warfare that include psychological warfare and propaganda in combination with application of force, subversion, economic pressure and public diplomacy through exploration of variety of historic and contemporary cases. One of the key themes of the course is the evaluation of the deployment of “weaponized information” and its application in achieving national strategic and tactical goals and the role of intelligence in its crafting, dissemination and exploitation in historic and contemporary contexts. Another major theme of the course is evaluation of different contemporary “meta-narratives” employed in contemporary context that are “weaponized” via forms of disinformation, conspiracy theories, “fake news” by non-liberal democratic regimes in pursuit of their respective foreign policy goals. In order to evaluate critically the key concepts of political and psychological warfare, as well as their efficiency and efficacy, readings drawn from academic texts and journals dedicated to historic and contemporary information (IO) and psychological operations will be assigned, in addition to regular class room discussions. In addition, the course’s schedule will be synchronized with relevant events organized by UT Austin’s Intelligence Studies Project and the Global (Dis)Information Lab at the Center of Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies.