Fighting Misinformation with Dalia Bankauskaite
The last episode of Season 2 of the Beyond BAFF podcast features Dalia Bankauskaite, a Lithuanian interdisciplinary expert in security policy, strategic communication, and political advisory.
She currently serves as a senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis, a professor at the Vilnius University, and an expert at the Swedish Defense University.
With decades of experience across government, academia, and consulting, Dalia focuses on advancing the understanding of total defense and the whole-of-society approach to security.
Learn more about Dalia’s experience fighting misinformation and leading strategic communication by listening to the full story on the podcast episode.
How did you choose your field? How did you decide to focus on public diplomacy, disinformation, and misinformation?
I started my career as a civil servant more than 20 years ago when Lithuania was preparing for EU membership. My task was to run communication activities to gain public support for joining the EU.
At first, I worked with the delegation of the European Commission, but later, I joined government institutions. And, since then, I’ve been going deeper into the subject, from communication as such to societal resilience.
And what does your daily work life look like?
My day-to-day job involves teaching at Vilnius University. I teach a master’s course on strategic communication and another one on public diplomacy.
Both subjects are soft power, not hard power fields. So in addition to teaching, I also do research and sometimes act as an expert who implements newly researched, and discovered things and comes up with recommendations.
You mentioned that you’re also dealing with a whole-of-society approach to security. What does that mean?
It simply means per word society. So when the government and society, us people, work together.
The best way to understand this term is to compare it with another one – a whole-of-government approach which is a top-down strategy in the defense and security field and where we talk about the government and military forces working together. Whereas the whole of society is more bottom-up, it's about the proactive nature of a society, its willingness to act in critical situations, cope with difficulties and challenges, adapt, recover, and continue to live.
Can you bring up any examples?
I will share a few insights from a comparative study that we carried out on the Eastern flang, NATO, and EU Eastern flang countries.
So, when comparing resilience at the individual and societal level, Ukrainians have the highest resilience at the moment. They are very much mobilized. It's true but at the same time, their belief in future possibilities is rather weak, not as strong compared to other countries that are not at war.
Then at the societal level, Lithuanians are right after Ukrainians. But as I said, it's not a competition. And the community level resilience is quite strong in Estonia. what else to say? And then other countries, and then other countries are followed.
But as I said, it’s not a competition. It's more about identifying certain symptoms, and possible vulnerabilities, and then thinking of the applicability of these findings. So politics and policies are extremely important.
Could you talk about the research you did in the USA with BAFF?
I was in a BAFF program in 2017, quite a while ago. Working at the Center for European Policy Analysis, I was part of the program of countering disinformation at the narrative level. I looked at how positive and negative narratives might change behavior because communication as such is meant to lead to certain behavioral changes.
Since I'm from Lithuania, we also looked into the Baltics and Romania was my focus too. So naturally, we found these classic narratives where people’s vulnerabilities are used to systematically spread disinformation, divide society, and prove that democracies do not work. By undermining the perceived trust among society members, you undermine the entire society.
Since you teach at the university as well, are there any common misunderstandings about your field?
Yes, the most common misconception is that strategic communication can solve all the problems.
Strategic communication is a facilitator to achieve certain goals. But first, you, any organization, or any agent, has to have these goals clearly defined and see how communication can lead to certain things. It can assist you, but it definitely won’t be the only tool for, achieving these objectives.
And when you think about building communication and crafting a story, how do you go about the structure to convey a message?
If we take communication at the state level, it’s about image building or we might even say reputation management of the country or reputation building. So if you want to position yourself as a dynamic country, you have to bring this idea of being dynamic into different sectors of the state.
For example, if we take agriculture, we have to show what’s so dynamic about it. Or if we talk about the environment or even tourism or education, the dynamic nature should be built in these sectors too. Because you have to deliver what you communicate about, especially if you want to attract investment.
Do you have anything particular in mind that you hope to see in the future?
My wish is that the gap between state institutions and society would be as shallow as possible. There should be close cooperation between these two parties.
It’s now more important than ever that we claim societal resilience. It’s a constituent part of our countries. We have great examples, like the Nordic countries, to look at but we should still do these things in our own Baltic way.
And I also think that we should continue building this bridge, this interactivity between the Baltic States and the United States. In that sense, I really appreciate the fact that I’m one of the BAFF alumni. We are all capable of deepening the cooperation between our countries and the US.
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