Why Sell a Story that Nobody Buys? Foreign Interference, Implausible Non-acknowledgment, and Interstate Strategic Relationships below the Threshold of War

2025 - present

This PhD project seeks to understand how states interact during non-acknowledged foreign interference campaigns, the conditions under which interferers get away with implausible denials, and the factors that help target states and their allies maintain and regain agency below the threshold of war.

States have always sought to secretly interfere in the political affairs of others. Such non-acknowledged foreign interference takes many forms, from the dissemination of lies and rumours to the assassination of high-ranking political figures. Today, countries across the world regularly face disinformation campaigns and election meddling, cyber-attacks and critical infrastructure sabotage, and GPS interference and ramming manoeuvres in the maritime domain. Varied though they may be, these activities share key commonalities. States employ such subversive and disruptive methods while taking care not to cross the threshold to war – and, crucially, without acknowledging responsibility. Interferers often go to great lengths not just to rhetorically deny their interference but to render it “plausibly deniable”. They utilise proxy actors or servers, employ false flags or troops without insignia, carefully orchestrate operations that can be framed as accidents, or flood the information environment with conflicting narratives.

There are many reasons not to interfere openly: Tactically, states may aim to delay responses as targets scramble to identify the origin of an attack. Domestically, leaders may seek to evade public scrutiny and outrage. Internationally, interferers may hope to avoid condemnation from observers, alienation of its allies, and retaliation by targets and their friends.

But can interferers still reap strategic benefits from this non-acknowledgment when their denials are unlikely to be believed? While interfering states often toil to achieve plausibility through evasive rhetoric and practices, they also disavow responsibility for foreign interference when they know that targets and observers likely will not believe them, be it due to widely available evidence or lacking trust. What, however, do states stand to gain from this implausible non-acknowledgment? Why do they sell a story that nobody buys, and more importantly: (When) do they get away with it?

This project seeks to elucidate how non-acknowledged foreign interference campaigns below the threshold of war affect the strategic relationship between states, with a particular focus on extended deterrence settings – and whether these effects persist even when non-acknowledgment is implausible.

I argue that during non-acknowledged foreign interference campaigns, both interferers and targets (plus the latter’s allies) seek to constrain the ability of their adversaries to act and respond strategically. Interferers do so by combining well-established mechanisms of subversion and disruption with the hitherto underconceptualised performance of non-acknowledgment and by simultaneously interfering across domains following a campaign logic. Targets formulate countermeasures and implement deterrence policies to constrain interferers – but also to send currently understudied signals to their allies and citizens in a bid to consolidate threat assessments and encourage support and imitation. These theoretical expectations are examined via case studies of the back and forth between interferers and targets below the threshold of war and via wargaming experiments.