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
Allison Hartnett was a pre-doctoral research fellow at the Belfer Center’s Middle East Initiative and a DPhil (PhD) candidate in political science at the University of Oxford. Her research interests include the comparative politics and political economy of non-democratic regimes, welfare and redistribution, and political order in the Arab world. With a focus on Jordan and Iraq, her doctoral dissertation examines how colonial reforms impacted patterns of land redistribution and regime durability post-independence. Her work combines quantitative and qualitative methods, with an emphasis on spatial and time-series analyses, to explore the long-term dynamics of authoritarian rule. Allison’s research has been supported by the Centre for British Research in the Levant, the American Center of Oriental Research, Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and the Oxford Department of Politics and International Relations. Allison holds an MPhil degree in Modern Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Oxford and a B.A. from Boston University.
Last Updated: Jan 14, 2020, 1:38pm