TEL AVIV, Israel – Roy Jankelowitz heads the Burke Institute, an Israeli nongovernmental think tank. We spoke with him after a wave of international coverage made the institute one of the best-known Israeli NGOs abroad.
International coverage followed recent publications by OpenAI, Le Monde, and Der Spiegel. What were they about, and why did the Burke Index attract so much attention?
The International Burke Institute and its web portal received worldwide publicity, in part because of the index itself. We developed a new sovereignty index, the Burke Index, and in December 2025 we published scores for 194 UN member states. We mailed the reports to embassies in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv and emailed them to the official addresses of the foreign ministries of every country we scored.
Our representatives also spoke at international conferences on sovereignty in the UAE and in France. And we published widely on what the Burke Index shows when you apply it to political events and to specific dimensions of sovereignty.
One of the main accusations was that you are a fake institute. Why?
That’s the most interesting part, because anyone could have checked by visiting the government registry of nonprofit organizations. I can’t explain why such well-known investigative journalists never looked at a public government website.
How is the International Burke Institute’s network organized?
The International Burke Institute is a research platform that brings together young scholars and experts from different countries. Their joint project is the Burke Index. The index measures the range of decisions a state can make on its own, implement in practice, and sustain when those decisions carry external costs.
The index covers seven dimensions of sovereignty: political, economic, technological, informational, cultural, cognitive and military-resource. Each dimension has seven indicators, for a total of 49. The institute has also developed tools and methods for assessing and identifying threats to a country’s sovereignty.
Our experts work in their own countries and their own languages. They collect data from international and national sources, verify it, and participate in expert assessments.
We plan to register a separate organization in every country where the network operates. The first was the Israeli nonprofit Burke Institute, registered in 2025.
You could say we export sovereignty as Israeli know-how. Israel has practiced real, day-to-day sovereignty since its founding. Now, amid radical geopolitical change, that experience has become valuable to many countries.
Why don’t you publish your experts’ names?
The Burke Index does not judge whether a country’s policies are right or how democratic it is. It adds a second question to the legal understanding of sovereignty: how far formal independence is backed by a real capacity to act. The answer for a given country may differ from its official position or from assessments by influential experts and academic institutions.
That is why we keep the expert panel confidential. This is standard practice in comparative research. V-Dem, country risk ratings, and the Delphi method all rely on anonymous experts. The institute takes responsibility for the published scores. Authors of methodological papers publish under their own names, and they document the calculation protocol and make it open to review.
For any specialist or scholar, and especially for early-career researchers, being publicly associated with findings like these can carry professional costs. We ran into exactly that almost as soon as OpenAI, Le Monde and Der Spiegel made us famous. Their interest led to more than 30 articles in media outlets worldwide, from the United States to, I believe, China and India. That doesn’t count social media.
What accusations appeared in the coverage that helped publicize your work?
We were accused of posting a library of the most interesting sovereignty publications on our portal, with full links and attribution to the sources and authors. We were also accused of not being registered in Israel, although, as I said, anyone could have checked that on the government registry of nonprofits.
We were also accused of a connection to ChatGPT accounts that amplified some of our articles. Those accounts had nothing to do with the institute. So I don’t know what exactly OpenAI had in mind.
OpenAI drove the investigation, which is ironic. TechTimes recently ran an article titled “The Corporate Prosecutor: How OpenAI Became What It Promises to Protect Us From.” The author raises a broader question: can a private tech company own a platform, detect alleged threats on it, investigate them itself, decide which accounts are linked, attribute political motives to them, and then announce its conclusion to the public as established fact?
The author also points to a conflict of interest. The generative AI industry expands the capacity to produce phishing campaigns, deepfakes, automated propaganda, and imitations of human conversation, then sells tools to detect, control, and attribute those same threats. No conspiracy is required. The market structure means that the more dangerous and alarming the information environment looks, the more valuable a company becomes when it presents itself as the main judge of threats and the only party able to fight them.
This goes straight to the question of sovereignty. A state’s informational and cognitive sovereignty erodes when foreign actors run information operations against it. It also erodes when a private corporation gains the de facto power to decide who counts as a threat, what counts as evidence, and which interpretations become accepted. When government agencies, journalists and researchers treat a corporate blog post as a finished intelligence assessment without access to the underlying evidence, they come to depend on an outside center of epistemic authority.
What are your plans now that you are, practically speaking, famous worldwide?
We’re preparing the 2026 edition of the Burke Index, and we hope this time the response will be scholarly rather than sensational. We’re also in talks with several countries about assessing threat levels across different dimensions of sovereignty and sharing our methodology and assessment tools with them. Overall, I believe the Burke Institute has a big future. We hope countries will come to see that unless they maintain their sovereignty in practice, day in and day out, there is no point in talking about protecting national interests. Safeguarding that sovereignty is what a system of government exists to do.
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