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
Sharan Grewal is an Assistant Professor of Government at the College of William & Mary, a nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a nonresident senior fellow at the Project on Middle East Democracy. He received a PhD in Politics from Princeton University in 2018, and was a post-doctoral fellow at Brookings from 2018-19. In 2023-24, he will be a research fellow at the Middle East Initiative at Harvard.
Sharan’s research examines revolutions and democratic transitions in the Arab world. His first book, Soldiers of Democracy? (Oxford University Press, July 2023), explores the conditions under which militaries support or thwart democratic transitions. Sharan’s work has also been published in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, British Journal of Political Science, and Comparative Political Studies, among other journals. His work has won Best Paper Awards from APSA’s Democracy & Autocracy section and from APSA’s Middle East and North Africa section, as well as the Perry World House-Foreign Affairs Emerging Scholars Prize.
Sharan’s research has received funding from the National Science Foundation, the Henry Luce Foundation, the John Templeton Foundation, and the Smith Richardson Foundation. He writes regularly for Brookings, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy, POMED, and the Carnegie Endowment, and has been interviewed by the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and Reuters, among others.