Cyber strategy: The evolving character of power and coercion

Abstract

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.