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
Nasir Almasri is an Emirates Leadership Initiative Research Fellow with the Middle East Initiative. He is also a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at MIT. He specializes in the politics of opposition movements in the Middle East. His doctoral dissertation examines the conditions under which exclusion from politics leads to the moderation or radicalization of activists. He draws on archival work and extensive interviews with Egyptian Islamists, Palestinian Nationalists, and Iraqi Communists to illustrate the ways that exclusion transforms the strategies and ideologies of these activists. His other research entails rethinking the moderate-radical dichotomy and examining the causes and consequences of ideological tensions on minority and diaspora-based social movements.
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