Our remit is global and our interests correspondingly wide. The below are indicative rather than fully comprehensive questions of relevance for our work and are arranged into ten overlapping categories.
The dynamic nature of world events and diplomatic work around them mean that we often need research based insights to help anticipate, shape, manage and benefit from unfolding developments and possible futures. The synthesised expertise of researchers can help us make judgements in a policy environment where experimental trials and replicable results are often impossible or inappropriate.
Because time can be of the essence we value emerging results and insights shared via updates, short events, websites and similar, in advance of peer reviewed articles.
Get in touch with fcocorrespondence@fco.gov.uk
This question was published as part of the set of ARIs in this document:
FCO Areas of research interest coronavirus COVID 19 update May 2020 GOVUK
Responding to the WHO's warning that misinformation surrounding COVID-19 constitute an 'infodemic', this project will focus on conspiracy theories as a particularly harmful kind of misinformation. Our research will lead ...
Funded by: COVID
Lead research organisation: University of Manchester
The project focuses on combatting the spread of conspiracy theories in the pandemic and analyzes how these narratives circulate in the online environment during the crisis.
This project is framed in the area of "crisis informatics", the study of how (mis)information about COVID-19 is generated and flows over media platforms. The main goal is that of reverse-engineering the manipul...
Funded by: COVID
Lead research organisation: University of Liverpool
The project aims to develop fake news immunity and provides guidelines on how to detect semi-fake COVID-19 news.
Effective mitigation of the coronavirus health crisis partly depends on trust that the measures which are being imposed are worthwhile, and that the people who have decided them are trustworthy. Such basic trust has come...
Funded by: COVID
Lead research organisation: University of Bristol
The project analyzes the relationship between endorsement of conspiratorial accounts of the pandemic and trust and compliance, providing evidence on the sources of distrust and noncompliance.