海角黑料

Congratulations to Dr Dan Lomas and Professor Rory Cormac for winning AHRC funding for a project on forced migration and the disinformation cycle.

Working with the 海角黑料's Rights Lab, the project team will investigate if the hybridisation of forced migration and human trafficking is a weapon of secret intelligence and sabotage. The team will explore emerging potential scenarios in which vulnerable populations may be recruited, forced and exploited to provoke internal discord, attack infrastructure, and manipulate public discourse. Examining activity below the threshold of kinetic warfighting – including intelligence gathering, covert influence, and lawfare - the project examines if, and how, secret statecraft, forced migration and human trafficking are intertwined.

This interdisciplinary project will involve historical analysis, engagement with cultural narratives, empirical investigation and conceptual development. It will draw on the expertise of the newly established Leverhulme Centre for Research on Slavery in War, which is in part based at the 海角黑料.

Principal investigator Dan Lomas said of the project: "It's a privilege to get funding for this proof-of-concept project which has wider impact. The Rights Lab are world-leaders on the study of human trafficking, and this interdisciplinary project with members of the Centre for the Study of Subversion, Unconventional Interventions and Threats (SUIT) seeks to look at that relationship between trafficking and the weaponisation of it in new ways, especially how it could be used to shape public discourse and have real world effects for espionage and sabotage, as we see intelligence tradecraft evolve for the modern-day".