Understanding Cyber-Warfare

by Christopher Whyte, Brian Mazanec

This textbook offers an accessible introduction to the historical, technical, and strategic context of global cyber conflict. The 2nd edition has been revised and updated throughout, with three new chapters.

Cyber warfare involves issues of doctrine, strategy, policy, international relations and operational practice associated with computer network attack, computer network exploitation, and computer network defense. However, it is conducted within complex sociopolitical settings alongside related forms of digital contestation. This book provides students with a comprehensive perspective on the technical, strategic and policy issues associated with cyber conflict, as well as an introduction to key state and non-state actors.

Specifically, the book provides a comprehensive overview of several key issue areas:



The historical context of the emergence and evolution of cyber warfare, including the basic characteristics and methods of computer network attack, exploitation, and defense;



An interdisciplinary set of theoretical perspectives on conflict in the digital age from the point of view of the fields of international relations (IR), security studies, psychology and Science, Technology and Society (STS) studies;



Current national perspectives, policies, doctrines, and strategies relevant to cyber warfare;



An examination of key challenges in international law, norm development and deterrence; and



The role of emerging information technologies like artificial intelligence and quantum computing in shaping the dynamics of global cyber conflict.

This textbook will be essential reading for students of cybersecurity/cyber conflict and information warfare, and highly recommended for students of intelligence studies, security and strategic studies, defense policy, and International Relations in general.

340 pages, Paperback

Published April 19, 2023

About the author

Christopher Whyte (Crìsdean MacIlleBhàin) is a Scottish poet, novelist, translator and critic. He is a novelist in English, a poet in Scottish Gaelic, the translator into English of Marina Tsvetaeva, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Rainer Maria Rilke, and an innovative and controversial critic of Scottish and international literature. His work in Gaelic also appears under the name Crìsdean MacIlleBhàin.

Whyte was born in Glasgow, Scotland, in October 1952, educated there by Jesuits at St Aloysius College, and took the English studies tripos at Pembroke College, Cambridge between 1970 and 1973. He spent most of the next 12 years in Italy, teaching under Agostino Lombardo in the Department of English and American Studies at Rome's La Sapienza university from 1977 to 1985.

Whyte first published some translations of modern poetry into Gaelic, including poems by Konstantinos Kavafis, Yannis Ritsos and Anna Akhmatova. He then published two collections of original poetry in Gaelic, Uirsgeul (Myth), 1991 and An Tràth Duilich (The Difficult Time), 2002. In the meantime he started to write prose in English and has published four novels, Euphemia MacFarrigle and The Laughing Virgin (1995), The Warlock of Strathearn (1997), The Gay Decameron (1998) and The Cloud Machinery (2000).

In 2002, Whyte won a Scottish Research Book of the Year award for his edition of Sorley Maclean's Dàin do Eimhir (Poems to Eimhir), published by the Association for Scottish Literary Studies. He has also compiled some anthologies of present-day Gaelic poetry and written critical articles and essays.