The UK House of Lords International Relations Committee has published a report on the implications of major shifts in world order for the UK's national security, prosperity, and global influence.
Dr Lucas Kello, Director of the Centre for Technology and Global Affairs, appeared before the Committee in January 2018 at the start of its year-long inquiry into 'UK Foreign Policy in Changed World Conditions'. At the hearing, he explained that traditional concepts of security strategy - in particular the binary notions of "war" and "peace" - mostly fail to provide adequate frameworks to guide responses to technological threats, such as cyberattacks and cyberespionage. Instead, the advent of new technologies has given impetus to a distinct category of technological aggression that lies between war and peace and which he termed “unpeace".
In the report, Dr Kello claims that it is now possible to inflict “significant harm to a nation’s political, economic and social life without firing a single gun".