ABSTRACT
Since RAND researchers John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt suggested that ‘Cyberwar is coming!’ in 1993, 1 the jinni has been out of the bottle: Cyberwar has become the most prominent buzzword in the debate surrounding computers, national security and cyberspace. Indeed, if there is any major hacker intrusion nowadays, it is certain to be labelled as an instance of cyberwar by the media and government officials alike. Such usage is far removed from the one intended by Arquilla and Ronfeldt, but such mislabelling is not uncommon; the term ‘cyberwar’ shares this fate with all the other expressions from the information age arsenal, all of which have been created by simply placing prefixes such as ‘cyber-’, ‘information’, ‘e-’, or ‘digital’ before another word. 2 Under-defined and under-contextualized, these terms have acquired so many meanings and nuances over the years that they have become confusing or have even lost their meaning altogether. 3
