PSCI 326
The Cyber Revolution Spring 2025
Division II W Writing Skills

This is a course about how the advent of digital technologies, and especially those related to cybersecurity, have reshaped international politics, as well as how they might affect the world order in the future. At its most basic level, it addresses a question that is of fundamental importance to both scholars and policymakers alike: Have cyberweapons and digital technologies revolutionized the way that international politics works, in a manner similar to the impact that nuclear weapons have had on the international system since 1945? Specifically, the course will focus on what is known as the “theory of the cyber revolution”; threats to critical infrastructure; the most significant cyberattacks that have occurred to date, namely, the US-Israeli Stuxnet attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities in 2006-2010 and Russia’s NotPetya attack on Ukraine in 2017; zero-day markets; information warfare and its effects on, respectively, authoritarian and democratic political systems; and the role that critical information technologies–such as advanced semiconductors, quantum computing, and artificial intelligence systems–might play in the evolution of international security competition in future decades.