De Gruyter Handbook of Cyber Conflict and Warfare

The De Gruyter Handbook of Cyber Conflict and Warfare arrives at a moment when the field has accumulated enough operational experience — from Stuxnet through NotPetya to the sustained cyber dimensions of the war in Ukraine — to support systematic, empirically grounded analysis rather than speculation. Sambaluk has assembled contributors from across disciplines and national contexts, both scholars and practitioners, to address the questions that actually matter: whether cyber operations constitute acts of war, how they interact with conventional force, and what they reveal about the evolving nature of sovereignty and territorial control in a networked environment. The five-section structure — Warfighting, Sovereignty, Information Operations, Hybrid, Future — is a defensible architecture that reflects how the field has matured beyond the early “is cyber war real?” debates.

The Information Operations and Hybrid sections are of particular relevance to FIMI practitioners. Cyber operations and information influence operations are analytically distinct but operationally entangled — state actors routinely combine technical intrusion, data exfiltration, and narrative manipulation within the same campaign. A handbook that takes warfighting seriously as its organising frame, rather than cybersecurity or platform governance, brings different analytical tools to that entanglement and is a useful counterpart to the more policy-focused FIMI literature. The breadth of contributor perspectives also means this is one of the few recent handbooks that avoids the implicit assumption that the field is primarily an American or Western European research enterprise.