The overarching question imparting urgency to this exploration is: Can U.S.-Russian contention in cyberspace cause the two nuclear superpowers to stumble into war? In considering this question we were constantly reminded of recent comments by a prominent U.S. arms control expert: At least as dangerous as the risk of an actual cyberattack, he observed, is cyber operations’ “blurring of the line between peace and war.” Or, as Nye wrote, “in the cyber realm, the difference between a weapon and a non-weapon may come down to a single line of code, or simply the intent of a computer program’s user.”
Ondrej Ditrych's presentation will examine recurring themes in discourses of danger disseminated by governments in post-Soviet Eurasia. It will be assumed that the dominant role played by non-state entities (separatists, terrorists, bandits) in those discourses results primarily from incumbent elites' attempts to legitimize expanding political power and perpetuating "state of exception" to effect a "normal state" — e.g. of sovereignty over territory as delimited in dominant historical narratives — by eradicating these non-state others. Manipulation in representation of their identities, e.g. rendering separatists as "terrorists", is a frequent feature of these narratives, as is the deliberate confusion between the state and the government. Building on the tenets of critical theory and Foucault's analysis of discourse, the paper presented employs a modified securitization theory to analyze security narratives in Republic of Georgia disseminated by successive governments by Zviad Gamsakhurdia, Eduard Shevardnadze, and Mikhail Saakashvili.
Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.