Accommodative Signaling in Cyberspace and the Role of Risk

Abstract

Do cyber operations fuel escalation in international crises, or do they provide states with a pathway to step back from the brink of conflict toward normal peacetime relations? This question has been hotly debated, including in the pages of Security Studies. Many cyber conflict scholars have pushed back against popular warnings that cyber operations could cause a crisis to ignite, citing a lack of empirical evidence that cyberattacks make escalation more likely. Engaging with this debate, Erica D. Lonergan and Shawn W. Lonergan posit that certain features of cyber operations make them better suited to “accommodative” signaling—signals of a desire to negotiate an end to the crisis—rather than signals of resolve to stand firm or escalate. They argue that “accommodative signaling is linked to crisis de-escalation because the former can enable the latter.” According to Lonergan and Lonergan, cyber operations intended to send accommodative signals have a distinctive logic. Their theory of accommodative signaling in cyberspace does not rely on the same theoretical logic that they and scholars have used to explain why cyber operations are