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
Marsin Alshamary is a research fellow with the Middle East Initiative. Alshamary holds a PhD in Political Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she was also part of the Security Studies Program. From 2019-2020 she was a pre-doctoral research fellow with the Middle East Initiative, where her work generally covered the intersection of religion and politics in the Middle East, with a particular focus on clerical involvement in the formal and informal politics. Her dissertation explored the role of religious leaders in anti-government protest in Iraq. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the Project on Middle East Political Science and the Center for International Studies at MIT. Alshamary holds a BA from Wellesley College, where she was an Albright Fellow.
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