When uncertainty is high, and verifiable facts are inconvenient or few, how do individuals learn about what to fear and how to respond to the threats they have identified? In this seminar, Professor Greenhill will demonstrate that across time and space, during the Internet era as well as long before it, some distinct and oft replicated patterns are discernable, whereby invented, embellished or simply unverified sources of security-related information materially inform and influence real world foreign and defense policy formulation and implementation.

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Drawing upon findings from an array of original public opinion surveys, survey-based experiments, and cross-national case studies, Greenhill will illustrate the sometimes surprisingly influential role that such sources of "extra-factual" information (EFI) can play both in the conception of national security threats and in the formulation and implementation of government responses to such threats. Both micro-foundations of belief in these sources of EFI and the macro-level consequences if and when such ideas become widely disseminated and adopted will be explored; cases to be examined range from pre–World War I Britain through Nazi Germany to post-9/11 America.

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

Evidence suggests that fiction and other socially constructed portrayals of political reality—including propaganda, false flag operations, and conspiracy theories—have long exercised demonstrable effects on political reality, albeit often in unforeseen and unintentional ways.

Through the lens of the invasion panic that gripped Great Britain in the late nineteenth century, Greenhill will explore how and why national security-related "social facts"—i.e., things that are deemed to be "true" simply because they are widely believed to be true—can become broadly adopted and disseminated and, by extension, thereby influence the development and conduct of national security policy. Greenhill will further explore what this historical case can tell us about the theoretical and policy implications such "social facts" may hold for the threats we face today, including terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come-first served basis.

The Power of Pictures? Evaluating Evidence from the Case of Abu Ghraib

In the context of counterinsurgency operations, states have frequently employed "regroupment camps" or "strategic hamlets" in order to?in Mao?s terms?"drain the sea" of water (civilians) to expose and kill the fish (guerrillas).