Rethinking Cyber Warfare: The International Relations of Digital Disruption

Fifteen years into the era of ＂cyber warfare,＂ are we any closer to understanding the role a major cyberattack would play in international relations - or to preventing one? Uniquely spanning disciplines and enriched by the insights of a leading practitioner, Rethinking Cyber Warfare provides a fresh understanding of the role that digital disruption plays in contemporary international security.

Focusing on the critical phenomenon of major cyberattacks against wired societies, the book reconsiders central tenets that shaped global powers’ policies and explains what forces in the international system might durably restrain their use. Arming the reader with the key technological and historical context to make sense of cyberattacks, it explores how deterrence, international law, and normative taboos operate today to shape whether and how states think about causing this kind of disruption - and how soon those forces might combine to rethink those decisions entirely.

The result is a comprehensive look at one of the most pressing issues in international security that also illuminates a new pathway for managing one of its greatest sources of instability.

R. David Edelman holds research appointments at MIT’s Internet Policy Research Initiative (IPRI) and Center for International Studies (CIS) and teaches in its Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science. He previously served in the United States Federal Government, including six years at the White House -as the first Director for International Cyber Policy on the National Security Council and later as Special Assistant to the President for Economic & Technology Policy on the National Economic Council. He began his career at the State Department, where he helped found its Office of Cyber Affairs. He holds a B.A. from Yale and an M.Phil and D.Phil in International Relations from Oxford, where he was a Clarendon Scholar.