Marie-Gabrielle Bertran has just defended her thesis in geopolitics at the University of Paris 8 on Digital sovereignty in Russia: a geopolitical analysis of the challenges and limits of Russia’s cyber power strategy. She joins CIENS in January 2025 as a post-doctoral researcher where she will run the cyber unit and carry out a research project on the continuum between cyber security and cyber defence in current conflicts from the perspective of Russia’s cyber manoeuvres.
When did you first become interested in cyber and what prompted your interest?
I first became interested in computing at the beginning of my secondary school years. One of my friends gave up Windows and started using Linux. I followed his example. This gave me my first taste of the world of free and open-source distributions.
I became passionate about discovering new distributions and new development environments. I regularly installed, uninstalled and reinstalled on my first laptop.
The questions I asked myself soon led me to consider IT security issues.
As I attended conferences and events, my circle of friends grew around technicians and engineers in IT and IT security.
Certain films and books, such as the Matrix saga and a number of science fiction books, also helped to strengthen my interest in IT and the cyber domain. I’m thinking in particular of Frank Herbert’s ‘Cycle of the Consciousness Programme’, which had a profound effect on me.
How did you come up with the idea for your thesis? Why are you specifically interested in Russian cyber?
I developed my research between 2018 and the beginning of 2019, when the Russian authorities were preparing a draft law on the sovereign Internet.
I had already had the chance to start thinking about the strategic role of digital in Russia as part of my Master’s degree.
The choice of Russia is linked to the exchanges I had with Russian acquaintances in the early 2010s, who helped me see that digital and cyber were becoming buoyant economic sectors in the country. So much so that young entrepreneurs I knew who were living in France wanted to return to Russia to invest in the digital sector.
And why do you think it is important for cyber to be at the heart of the CIENS PSL Week theme of hybrid warfare?
As a military and strategic application and use of computer attacks, the cyber domain is an interesting way of entering into conflict without waging war, in other words of attacking and weakening an adversary while remaining ‘below the threshold’ of war.
During PSL Week, I will be working with the students on the concept of ‘hybrid warfare’ and the notion of ‘hybridity’, bearing in mind that they refer to practices that have long been described by historians of war, who trace their use back to at least Antiquity. I have in mind Jean-Vincent Holeindre’s book, la ruse et la force, published by Perrin, 2017. It will therefore be interesting to see what the use of cyber technology adds, or even changes, to these practices (of disinformation, deception and deceit, demoralising the adversary). The answer surely lies partly in the fact that it is a flexible tool, which makes it possible both to attack one’s adversaries while remaining in the grey zone of conflicts below the threshold of war, and to conduct operations in support of one’s armed forces in war, in particular by means of informational and psychological influence operations in cyberspace (the cyber field or datasphere).
