Dr. Amit Sheniak, Dr. Daniel Sobelman, Dr. Yehonatan Abramson
Governments around the world—whether in Western democratic countries or otherwise—are today coming to grips with the manner in which cyber-attacks are impacting their national security and vital interests. Cyber-related abilities are associated with a number of core security issues, including in areas of direct relevance to the conflict in the Middle East and the research agendas surrounding it. These include such topics as the competition for regional dominance and hegemony, and the stability of local autocratic regimes. However, cyber-conflicts in the Middle East have yet to receive proper attention in the social sciences. To date, no substantial academic attempts have been made to analyze the normative dimensions, the local discourses or the motivations of the primary Middle Eastern actors in the cyber domain. Moreover, no academic or scientific database currently exists, which records the policy decisions, laws, statements and actions that were made in the Middle East with respect to the cyber domain. Similarly absent are any studies of local statements, interviews and publications regarding cyber conflicts in the Middle East. Whatever research does exist tends to analyze the regional cyber conflict from a Western perspective.
Against this background, in May 2018, we established a research group whose aim is to explore the effects that cyber conflicts and cyber weapons have had on the forging of national security policy and politics in the Middle East. The group seeks to highlight the different effects of cyber conflicts in various regional settings. The researchers in the group bring to the table a range of relevant expertise, from cyber-attacks and the effect of cybersecurity on national security policy in general, to experts of different Middle-Eastern test-cases equipped with the necessary local language proficiencies (Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew, and Turkish).
The group’s overarching goal is to establish a database, comprised of qualitative analyses with the capacity to identify trends that would add to the emerging study of cyber-conflicts in general, and shed light on cyber-conflicts in the Middle East, including their regional and international ramifications. We believe that the study of cyber-conflicts holds the potential to improve our understanding of recent regional instability and its implications for deterrence, national coercion abilities, international involvement and security regimes. This database would enable us to narrow the gap between the existing research on cyber-security and the academic research on the regional implications of cyber-conflicts in the Middle East.
