From left to right: Amy Thomas, Rachel Drummond, Dr. Joseph Fitsanakis, Sarah Harvey, Diana Evans

Research conducted by three members of the Chanticleer Intelligence Brief is currently featured on the website of the American Political Science Association. Founded in 1903, APSA is the world’s leading professional organization for the study of political science and serves more than 13,000 members in more than 80 countries. Earlier this week, the Association launched a webpage to mark the 2016 National Undergraduate Research Week. It features research by undergraduate students in universities such as Tufts, University of California at Berkeley, and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Among them is Coastal Carolina University, which includes the work of several students in the Department of Politics, including three CIB members, Sarah Harvey, Amy Thomas and Diana Evans.

Harvey and Evans’ research is on the impact on Chinese-American relations of the large data-breach suffered by the United States Office of Personnel Management (OPM) in June 2015, which has been widely blamed on China. Harvey, who helped bring CIB to life in 2015 as dedicated officer, and Evans, who currently serves as the CIB’s Communications Officer and chair of the organization’s Americas Section, recently presented their work at the 30th annual National Conference on Undergraduate Research (NCUR) in Asheville, NC.

Another CIB member featured on the APSA website is Amy Thomas, who co-authored a paper with CCU Intelligence and National Security Studies student Rachel Drummond. The paper, which was also presented at the NCUR conference, examines the online war between the Islamic State and the hacker group known as Anonymous. Both papers were among 400 that were selected from an initial pool of 4,000 submissions for the NCUR conference. The CIB students’ research was supervised by CCU Assistant Professor of Politics Dr. Joseph Fitsanakis.