Cyberwars in the Middle East.

• Author: Hajdarmataj, Flora

By Ahmed al-Rawi

Rutgers University Press, 2021, 192 pages, $120, ISBN: 9781978810112

Cyberwars can take place in many different contexts and are not limited to hacking: bots and trolls are also common elements of cyberwar today. In Cyberwars in the Middle East, Ahmed al-Rawi highlights some of these emerging digital phenomena in the Middle East. He discusses cyber conflict and cyberwar, including state-sponsored astroturfing, cyber armies, digital surveillance, spying tools, and the coordinated spamming and doxing operations often used to engage political opponents on social media. The author argues that hacking and other cyber operations are forms of online political disruption whose influence flows horizontally or vertically (top-bottom or bottom-up). Cyberoperations and politically motivated hacking are aggressive and militant forms of public communication used by tech-savvy individuals to affect politics and policies (p. 12). Using a form of vertical flow (top-bottom) online political disruption, nations such as the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain target their own citizens for their oppositional and activist political views by hacking and snooping on them. In contrast, hackers, who are often politically independent, practice bottom-up political disruption addressing issues related to the internal politics of their respective nations, as has been the case with Iraqi, Saudi, and Algerian hackers (p. 2). Another form of online political disruption is when hackers target ordinary citizens to express opposition to their political or ideological views.

National governments, terrorist organizations' hacking groups, and their affiliates constitute the hegemonic communication powers, employing hacking as a means of offense and defense against other nations and their citizens. As a part of the study of cyberwars in the Middle East, al-Rawi utilizes a model that examines the communications flows influencing our globalized world by using Kenneth Waltz's theory of structural realism in international relations and Manuel Castella's discussion of power and counterpower, in the sense that there are different types of communication flows that shape our networked society. This type of communication is considered a horizontal flow of online political disruption because these nation-states mostly use spy tools and surveillance inside their borders to target political activists and perceived opponents.

Cyberwars in the Middle East...