Just War, Cyber War, and the Concept of Violence

Abstract

Recent debate on the relationship between cyber threats, on the one hand, and both strategy and ethics on the other focus on the extent to which 'cyber war' is possible, both as a conceptual question and an empirical one. Whether it can is an important question for just war theorists. From this perspective, it is necessary to evaluate cyber measures both as a means of responding to threats and as a possible just cause for using armed kinetic force. In this paper, I shift the focus away from 'war' as such in order to ask whether some cyber threats might justifiably be characterized as a form of 'violence.' Some theorists argue that the term violence ought to be defined so as to encompass things like 'structural' harm or harm by neglect and thereby question implicitly the focus of just war theorists on armed force. This paper draws on a theory of violence I developed elsewhere as a defence of just war theory's narrow understanding of violence. According to the 'Double-Intent' theory, a distinctive form of 'Violent Agency' is the factor uniting the category of violence while partly accounting for the peculiar moral connotations of the term. Here, I argue that the resulting definition of violence reshapes the category in a way that includes some forms of cyber-attack. This may help us to see where cyber might fit in relation to just war theory and the ethics of kinetic attack.

Effects of Information Overload, Communication Overload, and Inequality on Digital Distrust: A Cyber-Violence Behavior Mechanism

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Defining cyberwar: towards a definitional framework

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Politik in der digitalen Gesellschaft

“…Ein starker militärischer Fokus findet sich daneben auch in Publikationen, die aus (völker-)rechtlicher oder ethischer Perspektive bspw. die Zulässigkeit von Cyberangriffen evaluieren oder die Übertragbarkeit des Konzepts des Gerechten Krieges auf den Cyberspace prüfen und Cyberangriffe mit kinetischen Angriffen vergleichen (Barrett 2015;Finlay 2018;Durante 2015;Goldsmith 2013).…”