Defining CyberWarfare

Almost any form of activity can be given a new lease of public and academic attention by prepending the five letters CYBER. Hence among bad behaviour cyberbullying, cybercrime, cyberattack, cyberwar and many others. But too often the new nomenclature, far from enriching knowledge about the underlying phenomena turns out to create confusion. Peter Sommer will illustrate this from the worlds of statistics, taxonomy, anecdote, commentary and analysis. The result of the muddled analysis is often muddled policy: a failure to understand the problem results in a failure to identify workable solutions.

An academic argument would say that the main route out of this confusion is the adoption of the techniques of Austin and Ryle in examining the way the words are used and mapping words and phrases within particular contexts. More practically how far should we be considering bullying, crime, attack war and so on as our root determinants and simply seeing "cyber" as a modus?

The main "case study" will be on the notion of cyberwar and is based partly on work carried out, with Ian Brown of OII, for the OECD.