Lukas Kello offers a bold and ambitious thesis regarding the ways in which cyberweapons can destabilize the existing international system. Although the technologies that eventually led to the rise of cyberspace have been around for nearly 70 years, as Kello acknowledges, there have been thus far few systematic attempts to integrate cybersecurity studies into both security studies and international relations theory in a rigorous and thorough fashion. Thus far, most academic efforts at understanding cyberspace have focused on specific problems, such as understanding the nature of cyber power or considering what the rise of cyberweapons means for traditional theories of deterrence. Kello instead asks these questions. What are the implications of cyberspace for international order and international anarchy? And how and in what ways does this technology’s rise destabilize the international system and require a radical rethinking of our existing theories of international security?

Kello suggests moving past (or abandoning) the traditional Clausewitzian view of technology, which assumes that states most often control new technologies, limiting who may enjoy their strategic and tactical benefits. But with the advent of cyberweapons, Kello suggests that disruption may come both from within and from outside the state system, because this technology empowers new players who are able to “subvert” the existing system (p. 83). In explaining cyberweapons’ effect on the international system, he develops a typology of three types of technologically fueled revolutionary change. A third-order revolutionary change (systemic disruption) occurs when a new technology disrupts the interactions of existing states (because of the changing balance between offensive and defensive forces). A second-order revolutionary change (systemic revision) occurs when a new invention empowers revolutionary states within the system, “causing a rupture in the social order” (p. 13). Finally, the first-order revolution occurs when new players challenge the supremacy or primacy of states, “thus altering the system’s very building blocks” (p. 13). Here, Kello claims that the rise of the internet has fueled a first-order revolutionary change, which has the potential to alter the Westphalian system (p. 95).

Throughout the work, Kello draws parallels with other types of technologically fueled revolutionary changes, such as the rise of nuclear weapons, to guide the reader to think about what is and is not unique about the rise of cyberweapons. In doing so, he suggests that the rise of cyberweapons presents significantly larger and more difficult challenges to the stability of the international order, making conflict more likely, in part because of issues related to establishing responsibility for cyberattacks and developing effective regimes to limit their stockpiling and use.

Kello should be commended for his ambitious attempt to create a theory of cybersecurity that addresses the fundamental question of how this technology will and will not reshape the international system. This work will surely become a classic and a jumping-off point for future discussions about the role of cyberweapons in disrupting and shaping the international system. As the first attempt of its kind to build a grand theory about the utility and disutility, as well as the effects, of cyberweapons, it will not, of course, be all things to all readers. Rather, it is likely to serve as a touchstone, allowing others to build on its insights, in part through critiquing its assumptions and its logic. Toward that end, one can identify a number of ways in which the work could be improved or built on by future scholars.

First, some readers may take issue with the realist assumptions about the utility and desirability of stability within the international system embedded in the analysis. Kello assumes that the stability provided by the existing global order is valuable and worthy of preserving, even referring to the “moral” order. Thus, he views the fact that technologies like the internet empower those who may seek to undermine or threaten the political order as a negative development. Critical and postcolonial theorists, in contrast, may view tech’s ability to destabilize existing orders as having emancipatory potential for the system as a whole. Kello’s stance may also be disputed by constructivists, who are more willing to concede that technology, among other factors, reshapes both our international system and our understandings of it in both positive and negative ways. Some analysts might also critique his positivist methodological stance, which applies labels and categories in a top-down fashion, rather than adopting a more reflexivist approach in considering how they have been understood thus far.

Next, Kello claims that he desires a truly interdisciplinary conversation about cybersecurity that would draw on the work of various other fields of scholarship. However, he fails to mine or to acknowledge work that scholars in fields like philosophy of technology and technology studies have carried out in relation to questions involving technology, agency, and technological change. Like many political scientists who attempt to write about cyber technology, Kello adopts positions and assumptions about what technology does (i.e., technology serves as a force multiplier for conventional military force) without acknowledging that these questions are in fact the subject of rich dispute among those in technology studies.

Indeed, Kello’s view on the agency that cyberweapons themselves have is contradictory. At times, he describes cyber technology as a “driver of systemic disruption” (p. 15), suggesting that agency resides in the weapons through a process of technological determinism. However, Kello also admits that designers have agency, through building in and leaving out certain technological capabilities, thus helping shape an environment (i.e., through creating the attribution problem). Finally, in his chapter on Russia’s use of information weapons, he implies that Russia’s military and political decision makers have made choices about how to use and deploy such weapons. However, it is not clear how the three types of agency (agency belonging to the weapons, to the designers, and to the decision makers) intersect or when one type of agency is primary over another. Furthermore, Kello only seems to consider weapons as acting agentically when they affect the international system (environment) or the decision sets available to actors within the international system: he does not consider the ways in which the relationship between tools and users may be reciprocal, as when a user may find that his or her perception of the environment and decision-set are altered through the use of a particular tool.

Here, Kello’s overall argument could be improved through acknowledging and integrating the contributions of theorists like Bruno Latour (Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, 2005), who has long argued that “technology has a politics.” Furthermore, it would be useful for future scholars to consider the social construction of technology (SCOT) paradigm, as well as the notion of technological materialism. Finally, a nod to the important work of Paul Verbeek (What Things Do, 2005)—who writes about “technological mediation” and the ways in which technology can shape ontology—would do much to further and deepen Kello’s pioneering argument, which ought to become the jumping-off point for a broad range of future research on this important topic.