Cyber War and Cyber Peace

Rezensionen / Stimmen

Cyber War and Cyber Peace in the Middle East tackles the history of a new and complex domain in a richly historic and notoriously complicated region. Assembling a diversity of perspectives from the Middle East and around the world, it captures a snapshot of the region's cyber flashpoints, delineates their underlying drivers, and begins to chart a path forward. With finesse, it distills a rapidly developing universe of conflict that thornily defies distillation. Nations and courts struggle to keep pace with the worldwide cyber enterprise and are in danger of being trampled by the proliferation of tools and applications that threaten economic systems, critical infrastructure and those vulnerable sanctums, hearts and minds. The Middle East is an open marketplace for this race, where legal restrictions, defensive platforms, and privacy rights are neglected in pursuit of offensive capabilities with unknown second order effects. Policymakers owe thanks to the authors of "Cyber War and Cyber Peace in the Middle East" for distilling the urgent questions about international law, authorities, and comparative partner and adversarial capabilities into an explainer that ends with actionable, real world recommendations for international regulations and agreements to prevent interstate cyber conflict going forward, even as the field continues to accelerate. We've spent a lot of cycles looking at the macro-level dynamics of cyberconflict or focused on the implications for a single nation. This book examines the issue in the context of a region whose history, geopolitics, and potential is as complex as cyberconflict itself. Cyber War & Cyber Peace' raises important issues of the war that is not on the battlefield: sabotage of critical infrastructures, "lone-wolf terrorism" embodied in hacktivism, informational warfare between state actors, and the clash between technology and religion; all these are incorporated and addressed through real-life events which took place in the recent years in the Middle East, providing a riveting sneak peek into a new age in the Middle East - the digital age. A searing and multi-layered exploration into the manipulation of information in cyberspace as it pertains to the MENA region. Convincingly identifying the destabilizing consequences of a panoply of disinformation, distortion, and influence operations, the authors paint a vivid portrait of the use of cyberspace to undermine safety, institutions, economies and the rule of law. The volume's proposed solutions for establishing international norms to tackle the threats in cyberspace are a welcome and much needed addition to the literature. A must-read for those concerned not only with fortifying the cyber realm but with the broad questions of international peace and security in the 21st century.