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
Tuğba Bozçağa is a non-resident fellow with the Middle East Initiative. Her research interests lie in political economy of development, with a substantive focus on governance, bureaucracy, social welfare, and distributive politics. Her dissertation examines how local social structures and institutions affect state capacity and service provision in Turkey. Her other research focuses on Islamist service provision, urban and rural governance, refugee welfare, and the use of geospatial measures in the study of development. In her research, Bozçağa uses quasi-experimental statistical methods; data sources and tools such as geospatial analysis, automated web scraping, historical archives, and mobile call detail records; and qualitative fieldwork. She is a junior fellow at the Association for Analytic Learning about Islam and Muslim Societies (AALIMS). Bozçağa holds a PhD in Political Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a BA in Economics from Boğaziçi University. Dr. Bozçağa was a postdoctoral research fellow with the Middle East Initiative for the 2020-2021 academic year.
Last Updated: Aug 25, 2021, 2:40pm