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
Bulelani Jili is a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard University, as an Oppenheimer Graduate Fellow. His research interests include Africa-China relations, Cybersecurity, ICT development, Internet Policy, Law and Development, and Privacy Law. He is also a cybersecurity fellow at the Belfer Center, Futures Fellow at Mercator Institute for China Studies (MERICS), and Research Associate with the China, Law, Development project at Oxford University. He was recently named a Visiting Fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School as well as a Nonresident Fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Cyber Statecraft Initiative in the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. He has supported the Freedom House Africa Program and the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Human Rights Initiative at a large, which investigates the spread of facial recognition technology in Africa. His recent research brief, Chinese surveillance tools in Africa, particularly discerns the exportation of Chinese surveillance technology in Africa. His writing has appeared in leading publications and think tanks like the African Affairs, Theory, Culture and Society, Mail and Guardian, Africa is a Country, The Elephant, and African Center for Security Studies.
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