I am very happy to see that our special issue about “Measurement and Meaning in the Study of Cyber Conflict” is finally out!
This special issue resulted from a conscious effort to address a longstanding weakness in cyber conflict research: the disconnect between theory, data, and practical policy relevance.
Our introduction lays the foundation for a special issue of International Interactions focused on improving how scholars evaluate, interpret, and infer about state behavior in cyberspace.
Instead of debating whether cyber conflict “counts” as war, the project addresses a more fundamental question: how do we know what we think we know about cyber operations?
The papers in the special issue were created through two intensive workshops designed to connect policy, theory, and empirical methods. The first workshop, “Cyber Escalation in Conflict: Bridging Policy, Data, and Theory,” was held at the University of California, San Diego, in February 2023, and was sponsored by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
A follow-up workshop took place in Los Angeles in August 2023 and was also generously supported by funding from Jon Lindsay of the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy at Georgia Institute of Technology.
Each article in the special issue was refined through this process, benefiting from collective critique and iterative feedback.
The result is a research agenda that does three things:
1. Treats measurement as a strategic problem, not a technical afterthought, highlighting how selection bias and missing data distort conclusions about cyber conflict.
2. Moves beyond anecdote by using experiments, wargaming, surveys, and statistical correction techniques to extract empirical insight from an opaque domain.
3. Connects scholarship to policy, showing how perceptions, alliances, organizational design, and technological novelty shape escalation, deterrence, and restraint in cyberspace.
This was a team effort, with my superstar co-authors Jelena Vićić and Erik Gartzke, and the great support we received from the @journal of International Interactions.
Many thanks to all the authors that joined us in this (long) journey: Nadiya Kostyuk, Andrew W. Reddie Miguel Alberto Gomez, Gregory Winger, @ryan shandler Marcelo Leal, @Christopher
