The End of the Utopic Internet: The Accession of Conflicts to Cyberspace

Athina Karatzogianni, The Politics of Cyberconflict (New York: Routledge, 2006).

Athina Karatzogianni, ed., Cyber Conflict and Global Politics (New York: Routledge,

2009).

Reviewer: Adela Fofiu [email protected]

“In my wretchedness, like a rabid dog, I mocked the hero of the 1848 Revolution, Avram Iancu. I know I will pay a big price for my deeds. I don’t deserve to be endured on the Romanian earth of Harghita.”1

After Csibi Barna, a Hungarian nationalist from Romania, staged a symbolic public hanging of the Romanian national hero Avram Iancu,2 on the occasion of the national day of

Hungary,3 the Romanian National Security organization hacked his blog in two steps. After the first hack, the site displayed the message that “The blog has been eliminated. The blog at csibibarna.blogspot.com has been eliminated.” After the second hack, the blog displayed its usual template, but under its title, Csibi Barna Blogja,4 there was a short biographical note on

Avram Iancu, and the About section displayed the message above, as if it would come from

Csibi Barna. The most powerful visual message on the hacked site was a picture of a statue of

Avram Iancu riding a horse, which covered more than 50% of the screen.

In the historical multiculturalism of the Balkans, inter-ethnic conflicts and co- inhabitance are intertwined and, as some social scientists have suggested, they have sustained intensely politicized emotions and passion in this cultural and geographical area.5 But the accession of ethnic conflicts to cyberspace is a first-time phenomenon. Nationalist feelings and discourses have mounted on-line, as the example above illustrates in Romania. The endemic national(ist) feeling of Romanians and Hungarians in Transylvania constructed on- line is oftentimes tinged with paranoia and almost pathological attention to the Other.

Journal of Religion, Media and Digital Culture Volume 1, Issue 1 (March 2012) www.jrmdc.com

Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 08:20:23AM via free access This new societal dynamic—I prefer to label it societal, rather than just ethnic—puts into stark relief the critical eye and the ground-breaking contributions of Athina

Karatzogianni to the social sciences. Karatzogianni’s research on how new media can be used to inspire conflict has shown that the Internet have become a logical environment for socio- political and ethno-religious conflicts. One of her arguments is that informational societies characterized by globalizing trends have also led to the globalization of conflict. Digital technologies have overcome every dimension of historical and cultural models of contact between individuals and at the same time they function on very familiar patterns of interaction. The Internet is human-crafted, and as follows, the forms, the content, the purposes, and the results get to be all too human themselves. If conflict is a cultural and social construct, and if the Internet is a cultural and social asset, combining the two is merely the result of a mathematical equation. The unexplored aspect of this relation is whether the dynamics are different in every matter on-line. Researchers have already begun to cope with—to analyze—the unknown territory of digital interactions, and Karatzogianni is one of them.

Lisa Nakamura has researched how the graphics on the Internet reproduce the racial structure that defines the off-line society. She proved that the Internet is another environment where cultural definitions of race can develop and mirror the structural racial relations in western society. Digitizing Race is a strong argument for the Internet as a digital cultural device that is built on already known and familiar structures and patterns of interaction and relations.6 “Race matters in cyberspace precisely because all of us who spend time online are already shaped by the ways in which race matters offline, and we can’t help but bring our own knowledge, experiences, and values with us when we log on.”7 The research on race in cyberspace was and still is ground breaking, given that the digital networks of the information age have been theorized as bias-free, as new territories where differences have no

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Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 08:20:23AM via free access value. Karatzogianni’s assertion that “[the] users of the Internet are colour-, class- and gender-blind, in contradiction to face-to-face interaction”8 is no longer valid when the

Internet can replicate differences and behavioral reactions to these differences. She adopts an optimistic view on the role of the Internet when she states that with the increasing access of populations to the Internet, it is to become the most powerful tool for democratization and the free exchange of information.9 That will become more probable, if the Internet is intentionally put into service of that vision. In analyzing ethno-religious cyberconflicts, the author admits at a certain point, though, that the Internet is a potent tool for propaganda.10

The techniques used in digital propaganda might be similar to those used throughout western cultural history, but they also might be more powerful and more readily and quickly disseminated.

In this frame, the work of Karatzogianni and her collaborators brings to the reader’s attention the importance of the Internet, not only in redefining the social/societal space and in constructing new meanings of living in the world, but also in shaping, transforming, and propagating forms of human conflict. In this line of thought, the concept of cyberconflict is theoretically constructed, empirically analyzed, and further developed, with a high relevance for conflict studies, new media studies, political studies, and sociology.

The Politics of Cyberconflict, published in 2006, “focuses on the phenomenon of

‘cyberconflict’ [. . .] and looks at the way it has impacted on politics, society and culture,”11 and does so in six elaborated chapters. Cyber Conflict and Global Politics, published in 2009, draws on the earlier title, as it “examines theoretical and empirical issues relating to cyberconflict and its implications for global security and politics.”12 As a collective work dedicated to this exciting avenue of inquiry, illustrating burgeoning scholarly interest, it embodies an echo of the 2006 issue on cyberconflict that Karatzogianni successfully created in the scientific field. Fourteen chapters are compiled into a complex development of the

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Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 08:20:23AM via free access theoretical frame that Karatzogianni proposed earlier for the analysis of empirical evidence that constitutes a new and progressive form of conflict.

Cyberconflict is defined as conflict in computer-mediated environments and on the

Internet and it suggests that politics confront new and challenging issues, resulting from new communication and information technologies. The novel character of the approached phenomenon is transparent throughout the two books.

The Politics of Cyberconflict

In line with similar works on the relation between the Internet and politics, which have suggested that a single theory on the Internet is not possible—because “it is a multipurpose tool used by big and small businesses, the Left and Right, and governments”13

—Karatzogianni builds a model that combines three main theories—media theory, social movement theory, and conflict theory—used in analyzing and understanding the empirical evidence on cyberconflicts.

Media theory has been most useful in providing insights on how much censorship is being practiced in the information age and how much information is released to the general public. This section relies on De Fleur Ball-Rokeach’s distinctions between the effects of media: “cognitive effects (the creation and resolution of ambiguity, attitude formation, agenda-setting, expansion of people’s systems of beliefs, impact on values); affective effects

(desensitization, anxiety, morale and alienation); and behavioural effects (activation, deactivation)”14, with most of its focus on agenda-setting mechanisms. Karatzogianni uses the later theoretical tool to show how the Internet can be a more efficient medium than the traditional media for sending and receiving fresh information. Common individuals or protagonists of real life conflicts can record and instantly send information through the

Internet, competing and even overcoming the role of journalists and classical media like TV and radio. Journal of Religion, Media and Digital Culture Volume 1, Issue 1 (March 2012) www.jrmdc.com

Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 08:20:23AM via free access The Gulf War is discussed as a proper illustration of how the media has transgressed diplomatic boundaries of information disclosure. The covering of the story on classical and new media as well is what led to the press losing its power over depicting events, in favor of the dynamic, grassroots-like cyberspace. With this antecedent, the potential of strategic information disclosure that the Internet provides is marked as being of greater importance than governments and other authoritative actors acknowledge. Further on in the text an example of the ways that Western media constructed reality in the Balkan conflicts helps to flesh out further this theory of the Internet and its role in conflict. Western media portrayed the Kosovo conflict as “ethnic cleansing,” ordered by the political leader Milosevic, with the single purpose of profit. This section of the text demonstrates the problematic power of media to reconstruct realities through propaganda techniques, according to specific, ideological goals. Another issue of interest raised is the relationship between the media and humanitarian intervention, which is criticized for the often-ethnocentric and biased reports that media delivers, especially when the protagonists of the news are non-white. This same controversial aspect is highlighted four years later by Zizek: “When we are shown scenes of starving children in Africa, with a call for us to do something to help them, the underlying ideological message is something like: ‘Don't think, don't politicize, forget about the true causes of their poverty, just act, contribute money, so that you will not have to think!’”15

Social movement theory draws on the classical resource mobilization model of mobilizing structures. This section brings up the idea of new social movements (NSMs) and the author draws on extensive literature to discuss whether they represent a new historical era, or another stage in the development of social movements as a broader phenomenon. In part constituted by the Internet, NSMs are open, decentralized, and non-hierarchical and by using the Internet, they reach a far broader audience, avoid censorship, and also make the best out of the grassroots coverage to which individuals contribute. This perspective is embedded

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Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 08:20:23AM via free access in Deleuze and Guattari’s theories of the rhizomatic structures specific to post-modern environments, as opposed to the arborescent, vertical, and hierarchical structures of the nation-states.

Conflict theory challenges formal political structures because of their obsolete and confused reaction to the novel dynamics new media generate. Globalization provides a counter-hegemonic force and imbalances the structures of power. Governments and other authorities must thus face new social movements in a dynamic, horizontal network, to which they react improperly by using hierarchical forms of organization.

This complex theoretical frame proves most useful when the author classifies the vast empirical evidence in two categories: socio-political cyberconflicts and ethno-religious cyberconflicts. By looking at the environment of the conflict and how real and virtual conflicts relate, Karatzogianni points to a dual modality of cyberconflicts: rhizomatic and hierarchical. Socio-political cyberconflicts are mainly rhizomatic and rely almost entirely on the netted structure of cyberspace, exploiting the new dynamics in order to undermine hierarchical forms of counter-strike. Socio-political movements tend to behave in an opportunistic manner, by exploiting the weaknesses of the formal system like cyberpunk activity, distribution of email petitions, or virtual sit-ins. This chapter gives further account of anti-globalization movements, the Chinese and international cyberdissidents, the Chinese government cyberstrategies, and Internet censorship.

In contrast, ethno-religious cyberconflicts tend to use a hierarchical structure, by having a leader, a power hierarchy, and more formal dynamics, and by being embedded in horizontal cyberspace, and adapting to the novel environment. This characteristic is the result of the real life origins of ethno-religious conflicts. The Internet becomes a weapon for the conflicting groups, an extension of an offline confrontation. Readers interested in the Israeli–

Palestinian conflict, the Kosovo conflict, the Kashmir issue, the Sino-American incident, and

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Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 08:20:23AM via free access al-Qaeda in cyberspace can find extensive information here. An interesting contribution is that this section highlights the versatility of the Internet, by showing how it could be used not only as a weapon, but also as a medium for ethno-religious conflict resolution, by accounting for academic social experiments aimed at improving Israeli-Palestinian relations.

Cyber Conflict and Global Politics

The 2009 volume draws on the analytical model that Karatzogianni proposed earlier and is divided into four consistent parts that gather contributions from fifteen specialists:

“Transforming media and global conflict,” “Global security and information warfare,”

“Ethno/religio/cultural cyberconflicts,” and “Socio/politico/economic cyberconflicts.”

The first section describes how new media alter the way societies and individuals interact and behave. The Internet may actually not serve conflict resolution automatically, but rather be a potential source of conflict and a means to perpetuate and nourish conflicts, as technological advancements have actually expanded the war zones into cosmic space— through satellites—and under water—through optic fibres and increasing electronic commerce that entail global transport routes. Nexus analysis, multi-modal analysis, and examinations of legitimacy and justification in political theory create a framework for studying Jihadist acts of violence and discourses in cyberspace, which is transformed into a weapon of war. Going one step further in contextualizing the role of the Internet in human conflicts, the text offers analyses on how blogs empower citizens to participate in conflicts and determine a decrease in the power of political leaders, who lose control over the new environment. Blogs diffuse first-hand information, thus creating a more open communication landscape, and through mobilizing individuals and resources, blogs can contribute to conflict resolution.

The second part of the volume sheds light on information and communication technologies as tools for small, non-state actors to make their voices heard. “IT functions as a Journal of Religion, Media and Digital Culture Volume 1, Issue 1 (March 2012) www.jrmdc.com

Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 08:20:23AM via free access messenger that shapes perceptions by introducing values, ideas and identities that transform the notions of self and safety that are at the heart of security.”16 Information and analysis on the hacktivism of the Peruvian Tupac Amaru (MRTA), the Revolutionary Association of the

Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), the Irish Republican Socialist Movement (IRSM), and an

Islamic extremist multimedia online file, the du’a (prayer) of Sheikh Mohammed al

Mohaisany, are provided. The Chinese information warfare strategies in direct relation to the

Taiwan Strait, a highly dangerous political and military left-over of the Cold War is discussed, showing how computer information warfare can be a more efficient tool of propaganda than classical media channels, but most importantly that it is a more effective form of propaganda. The issue of international peace and security uncertainties in the currently unstable world environment is discussed and, through a complex analysis, it is shown that information warfare is evolving to a point where the necessity of a regulatory framework will become urgent. Why? Today, international actors simply do not know how to cope with information warfare threats.

The following section of the book focuses on ethno/religio/cultural cyberconflicts.

Again, the militant Jihadism in the West is addressed through analyses on the role of the

Internet in moulding processes of identity construction. The reader is acquainted with the story of the small, but effective Hofstad jihadist group from the Netherlands, who killed Theo

Van Gogh, that organized group meetings and used the Internet to strengthen the small community and to connect to others. Appadurai’s geography of anger17 is used as a framework for understanding how mainstream media reiterates the hierarchical form of organization, as opposed to alternative, emerging media, that functions on a rhizomatic structure. These two examples help to develop a conception of small states, communities, and groups in global politics as victims of mainstream media mechanisms. Discussions on the cases of Pridnestrovie, Vanuatu, Papua, and Lebanon, in the context of media fluxes, local

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Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 08:20:23AM via free access conflicts, and cyberconflicts, are featured as well. Later on, the Sri Lanka Tamil diaspora that politically engages in cyberspace is described. The confrontation between the Sri Lankan state and the ethnic Tamil separatist rebel organization the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam

(LTTE), also known as the Tamil Tigers, develops into new forms, as the ethnic diaspora finds its political space online. Another case study is presented, this time on the Women in

Black, a worldwide anti-war movement that uses cyberspace in order to strengthen solidarity, gather new members, and promote their peaceful messages throughout the world. A combination of feminist ideals, anti-militarist discourse, and information technology has created a progressive global movement.

The final part of the book develops socio/politico/economic cyberconflicts. The interplay of electronic civil disobedience and symbolic power has two dimensions: practice and discourse. Virtual sit-ins and historical civil disobedience connect to hacktivism and netwar and to debates over the ownership of the ECD concept itself. The emailing activities of the European Social Forum are analyzed with the SPIN model (decentralized structures that are segmented, polycentric, and integrated), providing a complex empirical account of the interplay between communication technologies and decentralized forms of organization.

Some notes on the social antagonism in netarchical capitalism end the section and the volume. By accentuating the value of common capital, they make a case for the necessity of adopting new ways of thinking in order to exploit at its best the value of social creation, in the context of two competing logics: Web 2.0 and Linux-type sharing platforms.

***

As the Internet is constantly and very rapidly changing and evolving, developing a theory on any of its dynamics is exponentially difficult. Even so, Athina Karatzogianni proposes a dual model of cyberconflict—sociopolitical and ethnoreligious—that is echoed in elaborate empirical studies, analytical texts, and theoretical contributions. A very positive

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Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 08:20:23AM via free access aspect of these works is that the authors do not focus only on the Global North—where technologies are in a more developed stage and more individuals make use of them—but also show how relatively small political or social actors from the Global South have gained power and made their voices heard by using new media and new ICTs. A something-to-be-done message is subtly present throughout these volumes, as formal structures of power— governments and armies—need to adapt their hierarchical structures and procedures to the novel networked structure of cyberconflicts. Social change has probably never been as urgent and as alert as in the digital age.

1 A county in the middle of Romania, where the Hungarian ethnicity accounts for approximately three quarters of the population. There, as a result, Hungarian-Romanian relations are sensitive and the issue of Hungarian autonomy is very much debated in Romanian national politics. 2 Avram Iancu (1824-1872) was a Romanian revolutionary with an important role in the 1848 revolution in Transylvania. 3 March 15th. 4 Csibi Barna Blog, in Hungarian. 5 Thanasis Sfikas, “National movements and nation building in the Balkans, 1804-1322: Historic origins, contemporary misunderstandings,” in Ethnicity and nationalism in East Central Europe and the Balkans, ed. Thanasis Sfikas and Christopher Williams (Farnham, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 1999), 13-45. 6 Lisa Nakamura, Digitizing Race. Visual Cultures of the Internet (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). 7 Maria Fernández, “Book Review: Race in Cyberspace by Beth E. Kolko, Lisa Nakamura, Gilbert B. Rodman.” Callaloo Vol. 25, No. 2 (2002): 675-679. 8 Athina Karatzogianni, The Politics of Cyberconflict (New York: Routledge, 2006), 118-119. 9 Ibid., 143. 10 Ibid., 117. 11 Ibid., i. 12 Karatzogianni, Athina, ed., Cyber Conflict and Global Politics (New York: Routledge, 2009), i. 13 Carl Grafton, “Book Review: Internet Politics: States, Citizens, and New Communication Technologies by Andrew Chadwick.” Social Science Computer Review 25 (2007): 129. 14 Karatzogianni, Cyber Conflict, 79. 15 Slavoj Zizek, Living in the End Times (London: Verso, 2010), 4. 16 Karatzogianni, Cyber Conflict, 62. 17 Arjun Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).

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