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.”
A seminar with Dr. Amy Austin Holmes, fall 2019 Kuwait Foundation Visiting Scholar, Middle East Initiative and Associate Professor of Sociology, American University in Cairo.
Professor Holmes is the first person to have conducted a field survey of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) based on numerous trips to all six provinces of Northeast Syria between 2015-2019. This project builds off her previous work on the contentious politics of the American military presence in NATO allies: Social Unrest and American Military Bases in Turkey and Germany since 1945 (Cambridge University Press) and Arab Spring uprisings Coups and Revolutions: Mass Mobilization, the Egyptian Military, and the United States from Mubarak to Sisi (Oxford University Press).
