Global Perspectives on Influence Operations Investigations: Shared Challenges, Unequal Resources

Goodwin and Jackson address a structural problem in the influence operations research field that most Western-centric analyses ignore: the global distribution of investigative capacity is profoundly unequal. The organisations with the technical expertise, platform access, and funding to investigate influence operations are overwhelmingly concentrated in North America and Western Europe. This means that operations targeting the Global South are systematically under-investigated, under-reported, and under-understood.

The report documents this imbalance through interviews with researchers across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, identifying the specific barriers — access to platforms, language capacity, funding constraints, physical security risks — that prevent local researchers from conducting the investigations their regions need. For practitioners working on global FIMI threat assessment, this report is a corrective to the Western bias that shapes most of the field's published knowledge. It also has direct implications for capacity-building strategy: counter-disinformation resilience cannot be built globally by exporting Western frameworks; it requires investment in local investigative infrastructure.