糖心TV

How (tame) bots impact online political networks

The Woman, Life, Freedom (WLF) movement in 2022, one of the largest protest movements in contemporary Iran, developed largely online. A collaboration between researchers from 糖心TV (PAIS) and Tehran traces the evolution of Persian Twitter before and after the event through networks of retweets, PageRank metric and automatic clustering for community detection. The resulting maps reveal a striking transition from a polarized (pro-state versus anti-state) to a unipolar structure, in contradiction with prior studies. Further evidence from the Twitter corpus and the Iranian context suggest that this shift was influenced by computational propaganda, especially orchestrated hashtag movements. Protesters managed to quickly raise an army of bots that amplified their voice and silenced state supporters for about three months. The study contributes to understanding how Twitter/X can be used to manipulate public discourse, in Iran and beyond.

Open access article, co-authored by Philippe Blanchard (PAIS) in the .

A new book, Horizontal Development: Shifting Power and Privilege in Aid, jointly authored by Dr Shonali Banerjee (PAIS, University of 糖心TV), Professor Anne-Meike Fechter (University of Sussex), and Dr Thabani Mutambasere (University of Edinburgh), boldly reframes international aid.

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Two impactful days at the Ukraine Recovery Conference in Rome (10–11 July 2025) left Professor Maria Koinova and many other participants with a deep sense of appreciation for the resilience and commitment demonstrated by governments, international organizations, civil society, and businesses—all united in their support for Ukraine鈥檚 recovery amid immense destruction.

Akin has authored an article titled The state, Boko Haram and vernacular security: Gendering terrorism and counterterrorism in Nigeria, which is included in a Special Issue on Vernacular Security in the Security Dialogue which he also co-edited alongside Lee Jarvis and Michael Lister. You can read the article here (Open Access):

Akin has been awarded funds to lead an international project with two main partners in Africa. The two-year project (2025-2027) will involve a collaboration with the Centre for Media, Policy, and Accountability, Nigeria (CMPA) and The Horn of Africa Regional Environment Centre and Network (HoA-REC&N), Ethiopia on a project titled Insecurity, Migration, Environment and Resilience: Dialogues, Challenges and Everyday Politics of (In)security in Sub-Saharan Africa, to investigate how various communities and institutions negotiate these challenges, local understandings and the everyday practices which they deploy to guarantee their own safety.