BIO

Peter Pomerantsev is a senior fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, where he co-directs the Arena Initiative.

Previously, he was a senior fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science where he was the director of the Arena Initiative, a research project dedicated to overcoming the challenges of digital-era disinformation and polarization. His book on Russian propaganda, Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, won the 2016 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and was nominated for the Samuel Johnson, Guardian First Book, Pushkin House, and Gordon Burns prizes. The work has been translated into over a dozen languages and was dramatized on BBC Radio 4. His new book, This is Not Propaganda, was released in August 2019,. It was a Times Book of the Year and has been shortlisted for the Gordon Burns Prize.

Pomarantsev has testified on the challenges of information war and media development before the US House Foreign Affairs Committee, the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and the UK Parliament Defense Select Committee. He was a specialist advisor on the UK Parliamentary Committee on Fake News, and was a member of USC Annenberg’s Transatlantic Working Group on Internet Content Moderation and Freedom of Expression. He is a columnist at The American Interest, and writes for publications including the New York Times, Granta, and The Atlantic. From 2002 to 2014, Pomarantsev was a television producer on documentaries and factual entertainment programs for major networks including the Discovery Channel and the BBC. He continues to present and write radio documentaries for BBC Radio 4, most recently on disinformation about climate change.

Pomarantsev is frequently asked to host policy seminars at NATO, the EU, the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, the German Federal Foreign Office, and the US Department of State, as well as at numerous public events. He has helped write in-depth policy recommendations on counterpropaganda and media diversity for both national governments and NGOs, including the UK FCDO’s strategic communication policies for Russia and the western Balkans. He has led seminars and given talks on the subject of propaganda and media at universities including Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Columbia, and Princeton. He has been a fellow of the Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna.