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
Özgür Özkan is a postdoctoral research fellow with the Middle East Initiative at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs for the 2022-2023 academic year. He holds a Ph.D. in International Studies from the University of Washington, Seattle.
His research lies at the intersection of international security and comparative politics. He primarily studies issues related to the military’s role in domestic and international politics, focusing on the military’s organizational characteristics, particularly its social and ethnic representativeness, and their implications for political violence and military performance with a regional specialization in Turkey and the Middle East. His dissertation explores the historical origins and persistence of minority underrepresentation in the military. Drawing on about 150 years of original historical recruitment and promotion data from the Turkish case, he reveals resilient organizational and social structures persistently reproducing inequality and exclusionism in the officer corps.
Before pursuing his doctoral studies, Ozgur served as an army officer in the Turkish Armed Forces and NATO. He holds a master’s degree in Regional Security Studies (Russia-Eurasia) from the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA, and B.S. degrees in Systems and Electrical Engineering from the Turkish Military Academy.
Last Updated: Dec 19, 2022, 5:08pm