Draft:Lucas Kello

• Comment: In accordance with Wikipedia's Conflict of interest guideline, I disclose that I have a conflict of interest regarding the subject of this article. Saberrattler (talk) 18:12, 29 September 2026 (UTC)

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Lucas Kello

Discipline	Political science
Fields	International relations; technology innovation
Institution	University of Oxford
Education	Harvard University University of Oxford
Books	The Virtual Weapon and International Order; Striking Back: The End of Peace in Cyberspace and How to Restore It
Website	https://www.politics.ox.ac.uk/person/lucas-kello

Lucas Kello is a political scientist and Professor of Technology and Geopolitics at the University of Oxford.

He is recognized for his work on the implications of technological change for international affairs. He contributed foundational concepts and frameworks on how new technologies affect state power and rivalry among nations.

According to The New York Times, he is “a leading proponent of the idea that cyberweapons might be groundbreaking” and that “they could be as transformational for the international order this century as nuclear weapons were last century.”

He is the author of The Virtual Weapon and International Order (2017) and Striking Back: The End of Peace in Cyberspace and How to Restore It (2022) (both published by Yale University Press).

Education and academic career

Kello received an AB in government from Harvard University followed by an MPhil and a DPhil in international relations from the University of Oxford, where he studied at Magdalen College. He was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.

He joined the faculty at Oxford’s Department of Politics and International Relations (DPIR) in 2014, where he served as director of the Centre for Technology and Global Affairs and director of the Cyber Studies Programme (funded by the European Social Fund). He was also co-director of the Centre for Doctoral Training in Cyber Security in the Department of Computer Science.

He is now the director of the university-wide Academic Centre of Excellence in Cyber Security Research sponsored by the UK National Cyber Security Centre and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.

Research and writing

Kello is known for his work on technological revolution in the international system and relations between governments and private industry in developing advanced technologies.

Observers have identified him as a “realist” thinker for emphasizing the challenges of international anarchy and for predicting “chaotic and destabilizing interactions” between states in technological arenas. He has also discussed the importance of ideology and non-state actors in the historical phenomenon of technological revolution.

His writings have been reviewed or discussed in numerous outlets, including The Economist, Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Times , The New York Review of Books, Nature, Foreign Affairs, and The Japan Times.

Technological revolution and unpeace

Kello’s lead article in International Security (2013) on “The Meaning of the Cyber Revolution: Perils to Theory and Statecraft” challenges the skeptical view that cyberspace is either too technically complex or insufficiently relevant for international relations specialists to take seriously. He argues that cyberspace expands forms of interstate rivalry between war and peace, which challenges traditional theories of security, deterrence and strategic stability. The article prompted enduring scholarly debate about the implications of cyberspace for international security.

In The Virtual Weapon (2017), Kello develops a framework to understand technological revolution in the international system. It distinguishes three “orders” of revolution: disruption of established interactions and power structures between states (systemic disruption); empowerment of challenger states that seek to revise the international order’s established rules and purposes (systemic revision); and changes in the structure of actors comprising the international system, such as the growing role of private companies (systems change).

The book coined the term “unpeace” to describe damaging rivalry falling below the threshold of armed conflict but exceeding ordinary peacetime competition (such as economic sanctions). Kello argues that virtual weapons have changed patterns of interstate rivalry: it has become more spectral rather than fitting a war-peace binary. This evolution in the nature of force and conflict, he argues, challenges traditional Western security doctrine, which remains largely wedded to Carl von Clausewitz’s traditional war theory. The concept was later picked up by Mark Leonard in his book, The Age of Unpeace (2021). Christopher Coker analyzed “unpeace” in The Spectator. William C. Banks used it to frame his legal analysis of cyber attribution.

Reviewing the work in The Wall Street Journal, Graham Allison supported its call for strategic thinking to keep pace with technological change but challenged Kello’s claim that cyberspace was a more disruptive technology than nuclear weapons. According to Francis Fukuyama, the book presented “a powerful case that the nature of global power has been fundamentally altered.”

The book has been translated into Korean, Arabic and Greek.

Strategy and punctuated deterrence

Kello’s second book, Striking Back (2022), reviews historical technological revolutions (such as mechanized warfare and strategic air bombing) and examines Western responses to foreign cyber activity, particularly ones associated with state actors from Russia, China, and North Korea. It develops his strategy of “punctuated deterrence” based on “the accretional principle,” whereby states respond to campaigns of cyber activity and their cumulative effects, rather than responding to individual actions, as classical or “total” deterrence prescribes.

The work advocates coordinated responses among NATO allied states, or “collective punctuation,” and the use of “data embassies” to preserve essential government data and digital systems during a geopolitical disruption.

It argues that Chinese state actors enjoy a comparative advantage in training and weaponizing artificial intelligence: decades of hacking campaigns have yielded vast quantities of economic, industrial, government, and military data, giving them a superior “base knowledge of society” in other nations.

The Financial Times and Nature included the work in their selections of best new books. Sir David Omand observed that its “disturbing conclusion” challenged “Western complacency and doctrinal failure.” Gideon Rachman predicted in the Financial Times that the book “is sure to be closely studied in western capitals.” Former US Secretary of Defense and CIA director Leon Panetta also endorsed its account of cyber threats.

Cyber legalism

In “Cyber Legalism: Why It Fails and What to Do about It” (2021), Kello argues that Western states’ reliance on existing international law and norms has not provided an effective basis to prevent or reduce cyber campaigns below the war threshold.

He emphasized this point in his speech at US Cyber Command’s annual legal conference in 2022, predicting that attempts to reduce technological conflict by cultivating norms of restraint will continue falling short; in fact, they can aggravate the problem of recurring conflict because adversaries reject Western norms and values. He advocated instead for punctuated deterrence, which seeks to change state behavior by affecting material interests and power relations rather than norms and values.

Corporate geopolitics

In “Private Sector Cyberweapons: An Adequate Response to the Sovereignty Gap?” (2019), Kello introduces the concept of the “sovereignty gap” to describe governments’ inability to protect the private sector against all relevant cyber threats and, in turn, the government’s reliance on it for national and economic security. He calls for greater industry involvement in national security planning while also warning about the dangers of unsupervised offensive action by private companies.

He has publicly discussed the rise of “corporate geopolitics,” in which rivalry among states increasingly unfolds through private industry networks. In his view, the traditional stance of corporate neutrality towards political and geopolitical affairs is becoming harder to implement within enterprise risk strategies.

Policy engagement

He has not only become a reference point in academic debates but has also influenced policy and strategy thinking on new technology. In June 2014, Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves discussed Kello’s work in his opening speech at the International Conference on Cyber Conflict (CyCon). In November 2017, Kello was a keynote speaker at the inaugural Nordic Cyber Conference hosted by the Danish National Bank in cooperation with the other Nordic central banks. In January 2018, he gave evidence to the UK House of Lords International Relations Committee, whose chair, Lord Howell of Guildford, asked him to explain unpeace. In June 2021, he submitted written evidence to the UK House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee. His writings have served as the basis for the idea of systemic competition below the threshold of the use of force often referred to by then NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.

In recent public discourse, the notion of spectral conflict that Kello framed in his early writings has gained prominence, including a warning in December 2025 by MI6 chief Blaise Metreweli that “[the United Kingdom] is now operating in a space between peace and war.”

Selected publications

Books

• Kello, Lucas (2017). The Virtual Weapon and International Order. Yale University Press.
• Kello, Lucas (2022). Striking Back: The End of Peace in Cyberspace and How to Restore It. Yale University Press.

Articles and chapters

• Kello, Lucas (2013). “The Meaning of the Cyber Revolution: Perils to Theory and Statecraft”. International Security, 38(2), pp. 7–40. doi:10.1162/ISEC_a_00138
• Lindsay, Jon R., and Lucas Kello (2014). “Correspondence: A Cyber Disagreement”. International Security, 39(2), pp. 181–192. doi:10.1162/ISEC_c_00169
• Kello, Lucas (2014). “Les cyberarmes : dilemmes et futurs possibles” [“The Virtual Weapon: Dilemmas and Future Scenarios”]. Politique étrangère, 79(4), pp. 139–150. doi:10.3917/pe.144.0139
• Kello, Lucas (2017). “Cyber Security: Gridlock and Innovation”. In Thomas Hale and David Held (eds.), Beyond Gridlock. Polity, pp. 205–228. Oxford publication record
• Kello, Lucas (2018). “Cyber Defence”. In Hugo Meijer and Marco Wyss (eds.), The Handbook of European Defence Policies and Armed Forces. Oxford University Press, pp. 658–672. doi:10.1093/oso/9780198790501.003.0039
• Kello, Lucas (2019). “Private Sector Cyberweapons: An Adequate Response to the Sovereignty Gap?” In Herbert Lin and Amy Zegart (eds.), Bytes, Bombs, and Spies: The Strategic Dimensions of Offensive Cyber Operations. Brookings Institution Press. Oxford repository manuscript
• Kello, Lucas (2021). “Cyber Legalism: Why It Fails and What to Do about It”. Journal of Cybersecurity, 7(1), tyab014. doi:10.1093/cybsec/tyab014
• Wheeler, J.; Burgman, M.; Maroothynaden, J.; Ramirez, R.; Kello, L.; and Ali, T. (2023). “Space Conservation: A Plea for Urgency”. Astronomy & Geophysics, 64(2), pp. 2.14–2.18. doi:10.1093/astrogeo/atad011
• Kello, Lucas (2023). “The State in the Digital Era: Supreme or in Decline?” In Corneliu Bjola and Markus Kornprobst (eds.), Digital International Relations: Technology, Agency and Order. Routledge, pp. 51–72. doi:10.4324/9781003437963-4
• Kello, Lucas (2024). “Digital Diplomacy and Cyber Defence”. In Corneliu Bjola and Ilan Manor (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Digital Diplomacy. Oxford University Press, pp. 121–137. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780192859198.013.7

External links

• University of Oxford profile