Middle East & North Africa

11 Items

U.S. military vehicles on a road in Syria, showing the American flag.

Independent

Analysis & Opinions - Le Monde

International Whiplash over America’s Syria Policy

| Jan. 23, 2019

Confused messaging by the American government on Syria, with presidential tweets and dissonant statements from senior officials, has caused international whiplash in recent weeks. This hasty announcement and its botched implementation have already harmed American credibility and risk inflaming an already complex situation.

March 8, 2012: Norwich University student Adam Marenna, of Belair, Md.  Deep in the bowels of a building on the campus of the nation's oldest private military academy, students from across the globe are being taught to fight the war of the future.

AP Photo/Toby Talbot

Journal Article - Quarterly Journal: International Security

The Meaning of the Cyber Revolution: Perils to Theory and Statecraft

| Fall 2013

While decisionmakers warn about the cyber threat constantly, there is little systematic analysis of the issue from an international security studies perspective. Cyberweapons are expanding the range of possible harm between the concepts of war and peace, and give rise to enormous defense complications and dangers to strategic stability. It is detrimental to the intellectual progress and policy relevance of the security studies field to continue to avoid the cyber revolution's central questions.

Running Out of Time on Iran, and All Out of Options

Wikimedia Commons CC

Newspaper Article - The Times of Israel

Running Out of Time on Iran, and All Out of Options

    Author:
  • David Horovitz
| June 19, 2013

"...[Y]es, I think Stuxnet had a few down sides. One of those down sides was that the actual attack code became publicly available. As far as I can tell the attack code was supposed to die and not get out onto the Internet, but apparently the same way it got into Natanz [Iranian nuclear enrichment facility], it got out...."

Analysis & Opinions - The Australian

The Information Revolution Gets Political

| February 11, 2013

"Beneath the Arab political revolutions lies a deeper and longer process of radical change that is sometimes called the information revolution. We cannot yet fully grasp its implications, but it is fundamentally transforming the nature of power in the twenty-first century, in which all states exist in an environment that even the most powerful authorities cannot control as they did in the past."

Presentation

Cyber Disorders: Rivalry and Conflict in a Global Information Age

| May 3, 2012

The risks posed by the proliferation of cyber weapons are gaining wide recognition among security planners. Yet the general reaction of scholars of international relations has been to neglect the cyber peril owing to its technical novelties and intricacies. This attitude amounts to either one or both of two claims: the problem is not of sufficient scale to warrant close inspection, or it is not comprehensible to a non-technical observer. This seminar challenged both assertions.

Aug. 23, 2010: Technicians at work in the Bushehr nuclear power plant, Bushehr, Iran. Iran has confirmed that Stuxnet infected several personal laptops of Bushehr employees but that plant systems were unaffected.

AP Photo

Analysis & Opinions - Today's Zaman

Cyber War and Peace

| April 10, 2012

"Cyber war, though only incipient at this stage, is the most dramatic of the potential threats. Major states with elaborate technical and human resources could, in principle, create massive disruption and physical destruction through cyber attacks on military and civilian targets. Responses to cyber war include a form of interstate deterrence through denial and entanglement, offensive capabilities, and designs for rapid network and infrastructure recovery if deterrence fails. At some point, it may be possible to reinforce these steps with certain rudimentary norms and arms control, but the world is at an early stage in this process."