ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews prior literature pertaining to state to state cyber conflict, characterizing its evolution as a dialectical process. It examines historical patterns of publicly known state-sponsored cyberattacks among rival state dyads from 2000 to 2014 to identify the correlates of cyber conflict and to consider their theoretical implications. The literature on cyber conflict reflects a dialectical process of thesis and antithesis, presenting many contradictory positions on the basic principles of cyber conflict and struggling to move toward synthesis. As the dialectical and contested framing of the cyber debate suggests, the literature specifically concerning the strategic logic of state-sponsored cyber conflict provides a tangle of contradictory hypotheses and counter-hypotheses. Historical patterns of state-sponsored cyber conflict may turn out to be a poor guide to the future, particularly in the dynamic cyber domain where sudden innovations in technology could rapidly alter distributions of offensive and defensive capabilities.
