9 The Digital Battlefield: Cyber Operations, Information Manipulation, and Geoeconomic Rivalry

The digital domain has become a constitutive arena of contemporary power. Cyber operations and information manipulation no longer sit at the margins of diplomacy or conflict; they shape market access, technological advantage, coercive capacity, and domestic political stability. As states, firms, and households rely on networked infrastructures for finance, energy, logistics, communications, and public administration, the digital layer functions simultaneously as a productivity multiplier and as a systemic vulnerability. In geoeconomic terms, the central point is not that “cyber” is new, but that it has become an instrument through which interdependence can be exploited: the same connectivity that enables cross-border production and coordination also creates attack surfaces that can be activated for strategic effect (Segal (2016); Farrell and Newman (2019)).

This chapter develops a geoeconomic interpretation of the “digital battlefield” by distinguishing three intertwined mechanisms. The first is disruption, where cyber operations degrade, delay, or disable critical services and thereby impose economic costs on an adversary. The second is appropriation, where cyber espionage and intellectual property theft accelerate catch-up or sustain competitive advantage in strategic sectors. The third is manipulation, where information operations alter beliefs, polarize publics, and undermine institutional trust, thereby affecting regime stability and the credibility of commitments. These mechanisms are not mutually exclusive; the most consequential campaigns often combine them across time, using technical intrusion to enable data extraction, coercive signaling, or narrative amplification.

9.1 Cyber operations as non-kinetic coercion

Cyber operations are frequently described as “below the threshold” alternatives to conventional force. From a geoeconomic perspective, this characterization is incomplete. The relevant question is how cyber capabilities change bargaining positions in a world where coercion can be exercised through finance, trade, technology controls, and infrastructural chokepoints. Cyber operations can impose costs without physical occupation, but they often aim at economic and institutional targets whose disruption produces strategic leverage. The operational object is therefore not only military communications, but also payment rails, port operations, hospital systems, industrial control systems, and the data architectures that coordinate production and distribution.

The global spread of ransomware illustrates this logic in a stylized way. Even when campaigns are not state-directed, they reveal how technical vulnerability translates into economic disruption, and how defense depends on organizational practices as much as on technical solutions. Research in security studies and computer security has emphasized that ransomware is effective precisely because it exploits predictable organizational weaknesses—patching gaps, segmented access failures, and inadequate recovery planning—rather than requiring exceptional technical sophistication in each case (Kharraz et al. (2016); McIntosh et al. (2021)). The strategic implication is that digital resilience is now part of national competitiveness: systemic insecurity functions as an implicit tax on production, investment, and public service delivery.

At the state level, cyber operations can also serve as instruments of strategic signaling and coercion. They may be used to demonstrate reach, to induce self-deterrence by highlighting vulnerability, or to generate uncertainty about the reliability of critical infrastructures. The difficulty of attribution does not eliminate these functions; rather, it changes the calibration of escalation, making ambiguity a strategic resource.

9.2 Digital sovereignty, standards, and the re-bordering of cyberspace

The increasing salience of cyber risk has strengthened a policy impulse toward digital sovereignty. In its most general form, digital sovereignty refers to the capacity to control the infrastructures, data flows, and standards regimes that underpin national autonomy. This includes not only domestic regulation, but also the ability to reduce dependence on foreign-controlled platforms, hardware supply chains, cloud infrastructures, and undersea cable routes. The strategic logic is analogous to energy security: dependence is manageable when governance is stable and rules are credible, but it becomes a vulnerability when rivalry intensifies.

This impulse is visible in efforts to build redundant payment and messaging infrastructures, to localize sensitive data, and to shape global technical standards. Such strategies have ambiguous welfare effects. On one hand, they can reduce exposure to coercive leverage. On the other hand, they can fragment markets and raise coordination costs, reducing the gains from scale that digital infrastructures typically generate. The resulting trade-off is a core geoeconomic dilemma: how to preserve the productivity of openness while managing the strategic risks of dependence (Segal (2016); Farrell and Newman (2019)).

9.3 Information warfare as a contest over legitimacy and governance

Information warfare constitutes the second pillar of the digital battlefield. Its strategic objective is not primarily to destroy assets, but to degrade the epistemic foundations of collective choice: trust in institutions, agreement on facts, and the perceived legitimacy of outcomes. The economic consequences are indirect but substantial. When trust erodes, transaction costs rise; when polarization intensifies, policy becomes less predictable; when democratic procedures are discredited, international credibility and alliance cohesion weaken.

Empirical research on computational propaganda has documented how influence campaigns exploit platform affordances to amplify divisive narratives and microtarget publics. The Oxford Internet Institute report on the Internet Research Agency’s activity surrounding the United States provides a detailed account of how coordinated campaigns used multiple platforms to polarize discourse and to reach targeted audiences (Howard et al. (2018)). Such campaigns are geoeconomically relevant not only because they influence elections, but because they can alter the trajectory of regulation, trade policy, sanction coalitions, and alliance commitments by reshaping domestic political constraints.

The conceptual vocabulary of “sharp power” is helpful here. It distinguishes influence strategies based on manipulation and information control from the attraction-based mechanisms typically associated with soft power. Authoritarian influence operations often combine state media, covert amplification, and narrative laundering through intermediaries, exploiting the openness of democratic information environments (Walker (2018); Walker and Ludwig (2017)). This is not merely a communications phenomenon. It is a strategic practice that aims to shape the policy space of adversaries by altering the informational conditions under which democratic contestation occurs.

9.4 Synthetic media and the acceleration of credibility crises

The rapid diffusion of synthetic media technologies intensifies the information warfare challenge by lowering the cost of plausibly deniable fabrication. “Deepfakes” are strategically significant less because any single fake persuades everyone, and more because they increase ambient uncertainty, making verification slower and denial easier. Chesney and Citron argue that synthetic media can undermine trust and complicate democratic accountability by enabling persuasive falsifications and by creating a generalized “liar’s dividend,” where real evidence can be dismissed as fake (Chesney and Citron (2019)). In geoeconomic terms, these dynamics matter because credibility is a strategic asset: it underpins contractual enforcement, the stability of financial expectations, and the legitimacy of crisis responses.

9.5 Implications for geoeconomic strategy

The digital battlefield reshapes geoeconomic competition in four ways. First, it introduces a new layer of systemic risk into global production and finance, where disruption can be triggered without kinetic engagement and where recovery depends on institutional preparedness. Second, it expands the toolkit of coercion by enabling interference with infrastructural coordination, from logistics to payments. Third, it accelerates rivalry over standards, platforms, and data governance, because control over digital architectures can translate into leverage. Fourth, it destabilizes domestic political foundations by weaponizing narratives, thereby altering the feasibility of consistent external strategy.

In this context, national and corporate resilience strategies converge around a shared set of priorities: redundancy and segmentation in critical infrastructures; credible recovery and continuity planning; governance frameworks that enable rapid information sharing during crises without creating excessive surveillance externalities; and institutional arrangements that limit the strategic exploitation of chokepoints. These are not purely technical matters. They are questions of political economy, because they involve distributional conflicts, regulatory authority, and the international allocation of risk.

9.6 Conclusion

Cyber operations and information manipulation have become durable instruments of geopolitical and geoeconomic competition. They operate through disruption, appropriation, and manipulation, exploiting the dependence of modern societies on networked infrastructures and the vulnerability of open information ecosystems. The strategic challenge is not to eliminate connectivity, which would sacrifice productivity and innovation, but to govern it in ways that reduce exploitability under rivalry. The digital battlefield is therefore best understood as a contest over the infrastructures and informational conditions of interdependence, where security, competitiveness, and legitimacy are increasingly inseparable.

Our own analysis of disinformation’s institutional consequences provides a useful bridge between the empirical study of campaigns and the policy question of democratic resilience, particularly in the context of generative technologies and rapidly shifting informational ecosystems (Warin (2024)).

# The Digital Battlefield: Cyber Operations, Information Manipulation, and Geoeconomic Rivalry The digital domain has become a constitutive arena of contemporary power. Cyber operations and information manipulation no longer sit at the margins of diplomacy or conflict; they shape market access, technological advantage, coercive capacity, and domestic political stability. As states, firms, and households rely on networked infrastructures for finance, energy, logistics, communications, and public administration, the digital layer functions simultaneously as a productivity multiplier and as a systemic vulnerability. In geoeconomic terms, the central point is not that “cyber” is new, but that it has become an instrument through which interdependence can be exploited: the same connectivity that enables cross-border production and coordination also creates attack surfaces that can be activated for strategic effect (@segal2016; @farrell_newman2019). This chapter develops a geoeconomic interpretation of the “digital battlefield” by distinguishing three intertwined mechanisms. The first is disruption, where cyber operations degrade, delay, or disable critical services and thereby impose economic costs on an adversary. The second is appropriation, where cyber espionage and intellectual property theft accelerate catch-up or sustain competitive advantage in strategic sectors. The third is manipulation, where information operations alter beliefs, polarize publics, and undermine institutional trust, thereby affecting regime stability and the credibility of commitments. These mechanisms are not mutually exclusive; the most consequential campaigns often combine them across time, using technical intrusion to enable data extraction, coercive signaling, or narrative amplification. ## Cyber operations as non-kinetic coercion Cyber operations are frequently described as “below the threshold” alternatives to conventional force. From a geoeconomic perspective, this characterization is incomplete. The relevant question is how cyber capabilities change bargaining positions in a world where coercion can be exercised through finance, trade, technology controls, and infrastructural chokepoints. Cyber operations can impose costs without physical occupation, but they often aim at economic and institutional targets whose disruption produces strategic leverage. The operational object is therefore not only military communications, but also payment rails, port operations, hospital systems, industrial control systems, and the data architectures that coordinate production and distribution. The global spread of ransomware illustrates this logic in a stylized way. Even when campaigns are not state-directed, they reveal how technical vulnerability translates into economic disruption, and how defense depends on organizational practices as much as on technical solutions. Research in security studies and computer security has emphasized that ransomware is effective precisely because it exploits predictable organizational weaknesses—patching gaps, segmented access failures, and inadequate recovery planning—rather than requiring exceptional technical sophistication in each case (@kharraz_arshad_mulliner_robertson_kirda2016; @mcintosh_chae_jaeger_hsu2021). The strategic implication is that digital resilience is now part of national competitiveness: systemic insecurity functions as an implicit tax on production, investment, and public service delivery. At the state level, cyber operations can also serve as instruments of strategic signaling and coercion. They may be used to demonstrate reach, to induce self-deterrence by highlighting vulnerability, or to generate uncertainty about the reliability of critical infrastructures. The difficulty of attribution does not eliminate these functions; rather, it changes the calibration of escalation, making ambiguity a strategic resource. ## Digital sovereignty, standards, and the re-bordering of cyberspace The increasing salience of cyber risk has strengthened a policy impulse toward digital sovereignty. In its most general form, digital sovereignty refers to the capacity to control the infrastructures, data flows, and standards regimes that underpin national autonomy. This includes not only domestic regulation, but also the ability to reduce dependence on foreign-controlled platforms, hardware supply chains, cloud infrastructures, and undersea cable routes. The strategic logic is analogous to energy security: dependence is manageable when governance is stable and rules are credible, but it becomes a vulnerability when rivalry intensifies. This impulse is visible in efforts to build redundant payment and messaging infrastructures, to localize sensitive data, and to shape global technical standards. Such strategies have ambiguous welfare effects. On one hand, they can reduce exposure to coercive leverage. On the other hand, they can fragment markets and raise coordination costs, reducing the gains from scale that digital infrastructures typically generate. The resulting trade-off is a core geoeconomic dilemma: how to preserve the productivity of openness while managing the strategic risks of dependence (@segal2016; @farrell_newman2019). ## Information warfare as a contest over legitimacy and governance Information warfare constitutes the second pillar of the digital battlefield. Its strategic objective is not primarily to destroy assets, but to degrade the epistemic foundations of collective choice: trust in institutions, agreement on facts, and the perceived legitimacy of outcomes. The economic consequences are indirect but substantial. When trust erodes, transaction costs rise; when polarization intensifies, policy becomes less predictable; when democratic procedures are discredited, international credibility and alliance cohesion weaken. Empirical research on computational propaganda has documented how influence campaigns exploit platform affordances to amplify divisive narratives and microtarget publics. The Oxford Internet Institute report on the Internet Research Agency’s activity surrounding the United States provides a detailed account of how coordinated campaigns used multiple platforms to polarize discourse and to reach targeted audiences (@howard_ganesh_liotsiou_kelly_francois2018). Such campaigns are geoeconomically relevant not only because they influence elections, but because they can alter the trajectory of regulation, trade policy, sanction coalitions, and alliance commitments by reshaping domestic political constraints. The conceptual vocabulary of “sharp power” is helpful here. It distinguishes influence strategies based on manipulation and information control from the attraction-based mechanisms typically associated with soft power. Authoritarian influence operations often combine state media, covert amplification, and narrative laundering through intermediaries, exploiting the openness of democratic information environments (@walker2018; @walker_ludwig2017_fa). This is not merely a communications phenomenon. It is a strategic practice that aims to shape the policy space of adversaries by altering the informational conditions under which democratic contestation occurs. ## Synthetic media and the acceleration of credibility crises The rapid diffusion of synthetic media technologies intensifies the information warfare challenge by lowering the cost of plausibly deniable fabrication. “Deepfakes” are strategically significant less because any single fake persuades everyone, and more because they increase ambient uncertainty, making verification slower and denial easier. Chesney and Citron argue that synthetic media can undermine trust and complicate democratic accountability by enabling persuasive falsifications and by creating a generalized “liar’s dividend,” where real evidence can be dismissed as fake (@chesney_citron2019). In geoeconomic terms, these dynamics matter because credibility is a strategic asset: it underpins contractual enforcement, the stability of financial expectations, and the legitimacy of crisis responses. ## Implications for geoeconomic strategy The digital battlefield reshapes geoeconomic competition in four ways. First, it introduces a new layer of systemic risk into global production and finance, where disruption can be triggered without kinetic engagement and where recovery depends on institutional preparedness. Second, it expands the toolkit of coercion by enabling interference with infrastructural coordination, from logistics to payments. Third, it accelerates rivalry over standards, platforms, and data governance, because control over digital architectures can translate into leverage. Fourth, it destabilizes domestic political foundations by weaponizing narratives, thereby altering the feasibility of consistent external strategy. In this context, national and corporate resilience strategies converge around a shared set of priorities: redundancy and segmentation in critical infrastructures; credible recovery and continuity planning; governance frameworks that enable rapid information sharing during crises without creating excessive surveillance externalities; and institutional arrangements that limit the strategic exploitation of chokepoints. These are not purely technical matters. They are questions of political economy, because they involve distributional conflicts, regulatory authority, and the international allocation of risk. ## Conclusion Cyber operations and information manipulation have become durable instruments of geopolitical and geoeconomic competition. They operate through disruption, appropriation, and manipulation, exploiting the dependence of modern societies on networked infrastructures and the vulnerability of open information ecosystems. The strategic challenge is not to eliminate connectivity, which would sacrifice productivity and innovation, but to govern it in ways that reduce exploitability under rivalry. The digital battlefield is therefore best understood as a contest over the infrastructures and informational conditions of interdependence, where security, competitiveness, and legitimacy are increasingly inseparable. Our own analysis of disinformation’s institutional consequences provides a useful bridge between the empirical study of campaigns and the policy question of democratic resilience, particularly in the context of generative technologies and rapidly shifting informational ecosystems (@warin2024pr03).