This book examines how states integrate cyber capabilities with other instruments of power to achieve foreign policy outcomes. Given North Korea’s use of cyber intrusions to threaten the international community and extort funds for its elites, Chinese espionage and the theft of government records through the Office of Personal Management (OPM) hack, and the Russian hack on the 2016 US election, this book is a timely contribution to debates about power and influence in the 21st century. Its goal is to understand how states apply cyber means to achieve political ends, a topic speculated and imagined, but investigated with very little analytical rigor. Following on Valeriano and Maness’s (2015) book, Cyber War versus Cyber Realities: Cyber Conflict in the International System, this new study explores how states apply cyber strategies, using empirical evidence and key theoretical insights largely missed by the academic and strategy community. It investigates cyber strategies in their integrated and isolated contexts, demonstrating that they are useful to managing escalation and sending ambiguous signals, but generally they fail to achieve coercive effect.

Much discussion of the concept of cyberwar, cyber conflict, and the changing dynamic of future security interactions is founded upon the study of what could be, conjured through spectacular flights of the imagination. The goal of this research article is to exhaustively collect information on cyber interactions between rival states in the last decade so that we can delineate the patterns of cyber conflict as reflected by evidence at the international level. The field of cyber security needs a clear return to social science in order to be able to definitively engage the cyber debate with facts, figures, and theory. To that end we provide a dataset of cyber incidents and cyber disputes that spans from 2001 to 2011. Our data include 110 cyber incidents and 45 cyber disputes. Further, we test our theory of cyber conflict which argues that restraint and regionalism should be expected, counter-intuitive to conventional wisdom. We find here that the actual magnitude and pace of cyber disputes among rivals does not match with popular perception; 20 of 126 active rivals engaged in cyber conflict. The interactions that are uncovered are limited in terms of magnitude and frequency suggesting cyber restraint. Further, most of the cyber disputes that are uncovered are regional in tone, defying the unbounded nature of cyberpower. The coming era of cyber conflict may continue to exhibit these patterns despite fears mentioned in the discourse by the media and cyber security professionals.

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Moderate and measured takes on cyber security threats are swamped by the recent flood of research and policy positions in the cyber research field offering hyperbolic perspectives based on limited observations. This skewed perspective suggests constant cyber disasters that are confronting humanity constantly. The general tone of the debate argues that cyber war is already upon us and our future will only witness more cyber doom. However, these hyperbolic perspectives are being countered by empirical investigations that produce the opposite of what is to be expected. It is generally observed that limited cyber engagements throughout the geopolitical system are the dominant form of interaction. Our task here is to offer a different path forward. We first posit what can be known about cyber security interactions with data as well as what cannot. Where is the water's edge in cyber security research? We then examine the known works in the field that utilize data and evidence to examine cyber security processes. Finally, we conclude with an offering of what types of studies need to be done in the future to move the field forward, away from the prognostication and generalizations so typical in the discourse in this constantly changing and growing field.

This paper focuses on NKRI (Negara Kesatuan Republik Indonesia/ The Unitary State of the Republic of Indonesia) versus Khilafah issues in Indonesian cyber media. It was represented by hizbut-tahrir.or. id (representing HTI and other radical groups), nu.or.id (representing NU and moderate groups), and islamlib.com (representing JIL and other liberal groups). The study aims to examine tendency, intensity, discourse functions, and language styles on news and articles in the sites. Discourse Analysis and Content Analysis will be used to dismantle the contents of all sites on the issue of NKRI and Khilafah. It is known that NU (Nahdlatul Ulama, the biggest Islamic organizations in Indonesia) and HTI (Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia) sites have a tendency to always differ on the issue of Khilafah ideology. JIL (Jaringan Islam Liberal; Islam Liberal Network) site was not the main source for news and articles of Khilafah. HTI site is more numerous and more diverse in developing the ideology of Khilafah. This is natural because HTI site has a primary mission to campaign for Khilafah ideology and counteract all different views. It is also known in discourse functions that the sites commonly use directive function and referential function. In the language style, the sites use persuasive more than narrative. Denotative meaning is more condensed than connotative meaning. The titles in some of the articles look more straightforward and provocative.