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
Weila Gong is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Belfer Center’s Environment and Natural Resources Program and the Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program at Harvard Kennedy School. Her research explores comparative climate and environmental policy and politics, with a focus on China’s low-carbon energy transition, low-carbon cities, and greening the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). At the Belfer Center, her research investigates paths towards deep decarbonization in China, with a special focus on China’s just coal transition and on the energy transition in Inner Mongolia.
Gong’s dissertation and book project, “Low-Carbon Policy Experimentation in Chinese Cities: Leadership, Resources, and Implementation Strategies,” examines why some Chinese cities are doing better than others in initiating and implementing low-carbon policy experiments. Her work has appeared in the journal China Quarterly.
Previously, Gong was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Science, Technology and International Affairs Program at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and a visiting Predoctoral Fellow at the Brookings-Tsinghua Center. Gong holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the Technical University of Munich’s School of Governance. She also holds a Master’s degree in International Relations and a Bachelor’s degree in History from Sun Yat-sen University, China.
Last Updated: Mar 9, 2023, 12:53pm