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
Chagai M. Weiss is a pre-doctoral research fellow with the Middle East Initiative at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs for the 2021-2022 academic year. He is a PhD candidate at the department of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he is also a research affiliate of the Election Research Center.
His interests lie at the intersection of ethnic politics, political psychology, and intergroup conflict, with a regional focus on the Middle East. In his research, Weiss employs methods of causal inference to understand how minority representation within state institutions shapes intergroup relations in divided societies. He is also working on several projects examining the electoral effects of conflict, the consequences of segregation for intergroup relations, the institutional origins of polarization, and the empirical implications of abstraction and detail in experimental design. His research has been published by Governance, and Political Geography, and has received several awards including the Morris Abrams Award in International Relations. Weiss received a B.A. (Cum Laude) in Political Science and Middle Eastern Studies from the Hebrew University in 2016.
Last Updated: Jul 11, 2022, 2:48pmAwards
Contact
Email: cmweiss@hks.harvard.edu