On November 2–3, 2017 Deputy Director General, Director of Political and Legal programmes at the Razumkov Centre Yuriy Yakymenko attended the Global Forum of think tanks “Policy Studues vs. Alternative Facts: Will think tanks become the victims of the “Guerilla War” of ideas?”, held in Washington.

The forum was organized by the Think Tanks and Civil Societies Program of the University of Pennsylvania and the Getulio Vargas Foundation (Brazil), with the support of the Brookings Institution and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (USA). The event was attended by about 50 world leading think tanks from 25 countries.

The main issue discussed at the forum was the growing influence on public policy and public discourse in the areas of domestic and foreign policy such as “alternative facts, fake news, disinformation campaigns, post-truth politics”. Forum participants discussed these challenges and possible answers from think tanks, in particular, the need to ensure high quality of research, their impartiality, reasonability and factual validity, the use of new methods for presenting the results of research, taking into account technological and socio-psychological characteristics of dissemination the information through the social networks.

Yuriy Yakymenko took part in the panel discussion “Impact of “Disruptive technologies” on Politics and the Political Process”. Another participants of this panel discussion were experts with previous experience in government bodies in respective countries – Jennifer Psaki (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, USA), Winfield Boerckel (RAND, USA), Jose Luis Chikoma (Mexico), Natalie Salazar (Columbia). During the discussion the main attention was paid to assessing the practical impact of fake news and disinformation campaigns on the domestic and foreign policies of the respective countries and the stability of their governance institution.

During his stay in Washington, Yuriy Yakymenko met with Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Ukraine to the USA Valeriy Chaly.