Abstract
The last century witnessed sweeping changes in the technologies of destruction and the abilities of states to suppress dissent. States now wield unprecedented capabilities to detect and target those who would concentrate force against them, whether on a battlefield or even in private spaces. Digital information processing accelerated these developments, to the point where the term “cyber war” now seems redundant. Such developments promise to continue as ideological regimes crave external threats to justify mobilization of their citizens. Anti-liberal rulers cannot tolerate open borders with liberal democracies; thus, they seek to keep those borders closed, or those neighbors less free. The boundaries around repressive regimes are now the tectonic plates of conflict, and of modern warfare. Technology has progressed to the point that these fault lines now extend into cyberspace, the newest domain of conflict.
Michael Warner serves as a historian in the US Department of Defense, which reviewed the foregoing and found no sensitive or classified information. The views expressed in this essay are his alone and do not necessarily reflect official positions of the Department or any US government entity.
The ideas in the essay emerged from my recent book The Rise and Fall of Intelligence: An International Security History (Washington: Georgetown University Press, 2014).
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Notes
- 1.
Surveillance, after the French term (versus its English cognate), appears “not in the narrow sense of ‘spying,’ explains Christopher Dandeker, but rather “to refer to the gathering of information about and the supervision of subject populations in organizations” (Dandeker, 1991, p. vii).
- 2.
Book 9 of Kautilya’s Arthasastra, for instance, has much to say about detecting plots and suppressing rebellions.
- 3.
After all, “political conflict is not like an intercollegiate debate in which the opponents agree in advance on a definition of the issues. As a matter of fact, the definition of the alternatives is the supreme instrument of power.…He who determines what politics is about runs the country” (Schattschneider, 1960, p. 66).
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Warner, M. (2017). Invisible Battlegrounds: On Force and Revolutions, Military and Otherwise. In: Dover, R., Dylan, H., Goodman, M. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Security, Risk and Intelligence. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53675-4_14
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