Nathan Kohlenberg

Research Assistant, Alliance for Securing Democracy

Washington, DC Office

My Areas of Expertise:

Nathan Kohlenberg is a research assistant at the Alliance for Securing Democracy at the German Marshall Fund, where he tracks authoritarian interference activities in the MENA region and provides research support to fellows on issues including election interference, digital surveillance, and information manipulation on social media, among others. He previously served as a policy associate at the Truman National Security Project, where he remains a fellow. He has written about disinformation and foreign election interference in Defense One, Salon, Just Security, and elsewhere.

Nathan received a BA from Carleton College in Minnesota and an MA from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, where he conducted research on the South China Sea conflict and contributed a chapter to South China Sea: Maintaining Peace/Preventing War, published by the JHU Press in 2017.

Media Mentions

May 25, 2023

Nathan Kohlenberg

“ When tech companies or social media platforms comply with censorship requests from authoritarian or autocratic governments, they risk complicity in those regimes’ repression. ”

The Hill

May 20, 2023

Nathan Kohlenberg

“ There are a lot of commonalities that you can see between the rise of authoritarianism in both countries [Poland and Turkey]. ”

NPR

February 8, 2023

Nathan Kohlenberg

“ Autocratic leaders like Erdogan often use ‘maintaining order in the wake of a disaster’ as a pretext to restrict speech, especially speech that may be critical of their handling of said disaster. ”

The Washington Post