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
Lotem Bassan-Nygate is a research fellow at the Middle East Initiative and a postdoctoral research associate at the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance at Princeton University. Her research lies at the intersection of international relations, political psychology, and experimental methods, with regional expertise in Israel. In her book project, Lotem develops a multi-audience theory of foreign criticism that sheds light on the motives and intended and unintended consequences of `naming and shaming’. Lotem’s ongoing work examines how human rights shaming shapes attitudes at home; the role of racial rhetoric in shaping dynamics of foreign criticism; and the generalizability of international relations experiments beyond the U.S. Her work has appeared in several journals including Comparative Political Studies and Journal of Experimental Political Science. Lotem completed her PhD in Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2023.
Last Updated: Sep 7, 2023, 11:40am