From Propaganda to Finance: My Briefing at the United Nations CTED
A summary of my latest talk at United Nations Counter-Terrorism Committee Executive Directorate (CTED)
On April 22, I delivered an Insight Briefing to the United Nations Counter-Terrorism Committee Executive Directorate (CTED) on something I’ve been developing for a while: the idea that propaganda ecosystems don’t just spread ideology, but function as financial infrastructure.
The session was titled Trust Networks and Parallel Financial Systems: How Propaganda Ecosystems Enable Terrorist Financing. The core argument was simple, and largely overlooked.
Terrorist financing begins with trust before a single transaction occurs.
The Missing Layer
Counter-terrorism finance has been built around transactions. Bank transfers. Crypto flows. Suspicious activity reports. Flag the movement, freeze the asset, disrupt the network.
The problem: by the time money moves, networks have already hardened into place.
Extremist propaganda ecosystems operate as trust infrastructure — authentication systems for intermediaries, coordination layers for decentralized finance. They allow geographically and ethnically dispersed actors to validate who receives money, coordinate without direct contact, and maintain financial continuity under sustained pressure.
This is why groups affiliated with the Islamic State and al-Qaeda keep functioning even when their formal financial access is systematically restricted. While transactions get disrupted, the underlying trust that makes them possible does not.
What Happens When You Apply Pressure
Most disruption frameworks assume financial systems behave like centralized structures. They don’t — and the distinction matters.
In a centralized system, authority enforces coordination. Remove a node, the system degrades. That’s the model most enforcement tools are built for.
In a distributed, trust-based system, something different happens. Apply pressure, and the network doesn’t collapse — it fragments, then reorganizes. Trusted intermediaries still exist. Validation pathways remain intact. Coordination resumes without central control.
Financial pressure produces temporary disruption, not systemic collapse. As long as the trust architecture endures, the system regenerates.
That shift — from centralized to distributed — is exactly where current disruption strategies fail.
What the Current Tools Miss
Existing frameworks are built to detect transactions, wallets, and known actors. But these are interchangeable tools. Rather, the system depends on the underlying trust layer — one that is mostly invisible to transaction-based detection models.
Moving upstream changes the picture. Identifying trust nodes. Mapping cross-platform validation patterns. Linking behavioral signals to financial emergence before coordination hardens into infrastructure.
Done correctly, this means surfacing high-risk intermediaries before they receive funds, identifying coordination hubs that never appear in transaction data, and anticipating how networks reconstitute after disruption — rather than rediscovering them afterward.
The Distinction That Determines Outcomes
Most systems are built to follow money. Very few are built to identify the trust systems that determine where that money can move.
That distinction is the difference between tracking activity and disrupting the system that produces it. This is the gap I presented to CTED — and one most current frameworks have yet to close.
Video Recording
Because the session included sensitive propaganda examples, CTED has kept the recording private. To request access, contact info@btl-research.com.