Abstract
There are numerous discussions on both the reality and impact of cyberwar. Most of the critics are based on the Clausewitzian perspective of war in which its political nature must exist, an act of war has to be characteristically violent and has instrumental purposefulness. Therefore cyberwar is generally regarded as a conduct of action that simply doesn’t match with these Clausewitzian criteria of war. However during the last two decades, with the advancement of information technology and widening connecters of the world, many incidents such as Estonian and Georgian cases of cyberattacks, Stuxnet worms, and many other politically motivated cyberattacks, show us that we need to think carefully about the terminology that being used by scholars, experts and policy makers. In this chapter, I aim to discuss about the term “cyberwar” within a broader theory of war in International Relations studies. In doing so, my aim is to bring together related International Relations Theories and the contemporary cyberwar discussion and discuss the issue within a theoretical perspective.
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Notes
- 1.
International Relations starting with uppercase letters refers to the academic study of the phenomena as a branch of Social Science and will be used as IR hereafter, while international relations starting with lowercase letters refers to the events under study.
- 2.
The Tallinn Manual on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Warfare, is a report written by an independent International Group of Experts, under NATO Cooperative Cyber Defense Centre of Excellence. This report is not published yet and only available as a draft and not an official document but is the result of a three-year effort to examine how extant international law norms apply to this new form of warfare.
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Mehmetcik, H. (2014). A New Way of Conducting War: Cyberwar, Is That Real?. In: Kremer, JF., Müller, B. (eds) Cyberspace and International Relations. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-37481-4_8
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