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.”
Biography
Eleanor Freund is a Ph.D. candidate in security studies and international relations, with a substantive interest in Chinese statecraft and security policy. Her dissertation project seeks to explain variation in China's security partnerships with other states from 1949 to the present. She holds an M.A. in global affairs from Tsinghua University in Beijing, where she was a Schwarzman Scholar, and a B.A. in political science with highest honors from the University of California, Berkeley.
Prior to joining MIT, Eleanor was a research assistant and associate at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and a James C. Gaither Junior Fellow in China Studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
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Email: eleanor_freund@hks.harvard.edu
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