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.”
Speaker: Nathaniel L. Moir, Ernest May Fellow in History & Policy, International Security Program
Great power competition is not synonymous with conventional approaches to warfare. Over the last sixty years, irregular conflict — including insurgency and counterinsurgency, information operations, and other ways of war — predominated in most conflicts. Through seven chronologically organized case studies, the speaker will focus on conflicts in East and Southeast Asia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to analyze how vanguard movements formed parallel hierarchies to gain socio-political control over competitors. In assessing changes in the formation of parallel hierarchies over time, this project contributes to descriptions of irregular warfare in an era of renewed great power competition.
Everyone is welcome to join us via Zoom! Please register before the event:
https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0kdO-oqTwsHtxbixwYOATzKist2pZ0hjN1