A Compendium of Recommendations for Countering Russian and Other State-Sponsored Propaganda

Helmus and Kepe's compendium performs a methodological service that the counter-disinformation field badly needed: it systematically codes the recommendations from 64 policy reports on countering Russian and state-sponsored propaganda, identifying the consensus positions across the literature and the areas of genuine disagreement. The result is a structured map of what the policy community collectively believes works — and where the evidence base for those beliefs is strong or weak.

The compendium's contribution is as much epistemological as practical. By treating the policy literature as data, it reveals where apparent consensus masks thin evidence and where genuine agreement exists. For practitioners commissioning or evaluating counter-disinformation programmes, this is a useful corrective to the tendency to treat any plausible-sounding recommendation as established best practice. It is also a time-efficient entry point to a sprawling literature: rather than reading 64 reports, a practitioner can use this compendium to identify which recommendations appear consistently and then prioritise the reports that provide the strongest evidence for those recommendations.