ABSTRACT
According to the World Economic Forum’s 2015 report Global Risks (World Economic Forum 2015, 14–15), cyber attacks are one of the most likely high-impact threats in the modern world just behind water crises, interstate conflict, and failure of climate change adaptation. That puts the cyber phenomenon—be it cyber world, cyber space, cyber domain, or any other way of describing cyberspace—beyond the realm of William Gibson’s science-fiction novels. Quite simply, digital technologies are part and parcel of our daily life and our planet is getting connected at an unprecedented speed. Traditionally, specialists of inter-state conflicts identify four dimensions of warfare: land, sea, air, and space. This chapter discusses how cyber conflicts both confirm and considerably nuance the traditional realist paradigm because they transcend national physical groundings, deterritorialize state action by projecting it into the fifth dimension of warfare, force states to cooperate with private industry in much deeper ways, empower countless non-state actors, and render state action much more muddled and indirect.
