Policy makers focused on relations with China and Russia received timely intelligence analysis from two Washington University students last month.
Policy makers focused on relations with China and Russia received timely intelligence analysis from two Washington University students last month. Seth Stevenson (MA International Affairs) and Matt Jones (BA Global Studies and MA International Affairs) published their article, “Sanctions Delay Chinese Equipment to Russian Arctic Energy Products” on October 25, 2022. The analysis was published on Tearline.mil, an initiative of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), which is headquartered in St. Louis. Tearline articles are widely disseminated throughout the intelligence and foreign policy communities. The article also appeared in The Early Bird, which is a widely circulated compilation of the day’s new stories, and was reported on in Breaking Defense.
In their analysis, Stevenson and Jones used open-source satellite imagery to demonstrate how sanctions against Russia were impacting Chinese investment in Russian Arctic energy projects. The project provided benefits to the policy community and the student authors. According to Ana Pizarro, an analyst at NGA and also a graduate of the MA in International Affairs program, “the students provided us invaluable data, insights, and analysis that we will be able to reference in the future.” Jones said about the experience, “While it took about six months of digging through news articles, conducting imagery analysis, and of course writing, being able to see our work get published and appear in defense news outlets was probably my biggest accomplishment during my time here at WashU.”
