The ASD European Policy Blueprint for Countering Authoritarian Interference in Democracies

Published in June 2019, the ASD European Policy Blueprint was among the first comprehensive frameworks to treat information manipulation, malign finance, energy dependency, and political capture as elements of a single, coordinated authoritarian interference toolkit rather than separate policy problems. The blueprint proposed a transatlantic coordination architecture that anticipated many of the institutional developments of subsequent years.

Read retrospectively, the 2019 Blueprint is notable for both its accuracy and its optimism. Many of the threats it identified have materialised as predicted; fewer of the coordination mechanisms it proposed have been fully implemented. For researchers tracing the development of ASD's analytical framework and for practitioners assessing how far European counter-interference architecture has advanced since 2019, this document provides the essential baseline.