The EU's Struggle Against Strategic Disinformation during the COVID Pandemic: An Assemblage Approach
Abstract
The Covid pandemic was a pivotal episode in the evolution of the European Union's response to strategic disin-formation. This article deploys assemblage theory to advance a critical, interpretive understanding of truth contestation as an increasingly salient dimension of geopolitical conf lict – one in which foreign actors seek to undermine the epistemic foundations of rival political communities. Strategic disinformation assemblages, conceived as foundationless, emergent, and heterogeneous composites of human and nonhuman elements, exploited pandemic-induced uncertainty to challenge public trust in EU institutions, health authorities, and countermeasures. In response, the counterdisinformation assemblage evolved at both EU and member-state levels. Through comparative case studies of France and the Czech Republic, the article demonstrates that even under a shared securitisation logic, counterdisinformation practices could diverge significantly: France pursued a state-centric model emphasising digital sovereignty and institutional capacity, while the Czech Republic exhibited a more diffuse, civil-society-driven approach that was marked nonetheless by a notable discursive militarisation.
Keywords
Disinformation, Covid, Assemblage, Borderscape, France, Czech Republic
Author Biography
Ondrej Ditrych
Ondrej Ditrych leads the analysis of Russia and the Eastern Neighbourhood at the European Union Institute for Security Studies and lectures on global order and great powers at Sciences Po Paris. He previously served as Director of the Institute of International Relations Prague and Associate Professor of Political Science at Charles University. He writes on geopolitical risks, hybrid and cognitive threats, war and revolutionary violence. His most recent book, edited together with Jan Daniel and Jakub Zahora, is Revolutionaries and Global Politics: War Machines from the Bolsheviks to ISIS, published by Edinburgh University Press.
Jakub Eberle
Jakub Eberle is Associate Research at the Institute for International Relations Prague. His professional interests involve theory of international relations, Czech and German foreign policy, politics of Central Europe, and critical approaches to digital politics.
Petr Kratochvíl
Petr Kratochvíl is a full professor and a senior researcher at the Institute of International Relations in Prague, and a lecturer at the Metropolitan University Prague. His main research interests include the religion-politics nexus, critical geopolitics, and theories of international relations. He has published extensively on these topics, including in top journals such as Geopolitics, Cooperation and Conflict, Politics and Religion, and many others. His latest book is Geopolitics of Global Catholicism: Politics of Religion in Space and Time; his study titled “The Patriotic Turn in Russia: Political Convergence of the Russian Orthodox Church and the State?” (co written with Gaziza Shakhanova) received the 2023 Ted Jelen Award for the best article on religion and politics, awarded by the American Political Science Association.
Linda Monsees
Linda Monsees is a senior researcher at the Institute of International Relations Prague and Assistant Professor at Masaryk University Brno. Her research focuses on the politics of digital technology, digital sovereignty and the role of Big Tech in world politics. Her work as been published in International Affairs, Globalizations and International Political Sociology, among others.