ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how digital technologies modulate and mediate the contemporary geopolitics of war and peace, with a specific focus on internet-based warfare. It argues that the deep situatedness of digital technology in contemporary politics, society, economy and daily life means that internet-based warfare is a materially real form of digital violence that works through physical networks and infrastructures, rather than an abstracted means of resistance directed at a somehow less real virtual domain of cyberspace. In keeping with the volume’s wider theme of the non-dichotomous fluidity between war and peace in geopolitics, digital violence is often ambiguous, is hard to attribute to particular actors, and elides neat thresholds between war and peace. This in turn makes internet warfare hard to police and mitigate through conventional state-centric geopolitical practices such as diplomacy or conventional warfare. Therefore, peacebuilding and security approaches to managing digital warfare must attend to the complex assemblage of human and non-human agencies at work in such violence, and the ontological vulnerabilities that make such violence harmful at the scale of the everyday.
