WHA Annual Meeting: Korea 2026

In the age of globalization, information was celebrated as the new connective tissue of humanity — a medium that would dissolve borders, spread democracy, and accelerate global integration. Yet in the post-globalization era, the same technological and communicative networks have become weapons of fragmentation. This paper examines Russian state-sponsored disinformation as a historical and contemporary force that thrives precisely because of globalization’s infrastructures while working to dismantle its ideological foundations.

Drawing from Cold War propaganda models and Soviet active measures, the paper situates modern Russian disinformation campaigns within a longer genealogy of transnational influence operations. It argues that Russia’s strategy of “global anti-globalism” depends on exploiting open information systems — Western social media, global news networks, and diasporic media ecosystems — to undermine trust, democratic institutions, and collective truth. By tracing case studies from the European Union, the Balkans, and North America, the analysis reveals how disinformation now functions as a post-global instrument of power: borderless in method, isolationist in message.

The paper concludes by exploring how this paradoxical phenomenon — global connectivity serving anti-globalist ends — challenges both historians and educators to rethink narratives of globalization itself. In a world of “closed borders and open networks,” world history must confront the new epistemological crisis of trust that defines our shared future.