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Short abstract

The article examines Palestinian cyberspace as an empirical case in which asymmetries in infrastructural control and platform governance shape the interface environments in which violence unfolds. By foregrounding interfaces, the article theorises the violence of cyber conflict.

Long abstract

Cyber conflict is commonly analysed through a martial gaze. As a result, scholarly and policy work focuses on operations that cause material disruption or physical harm, with a particular emphasis on technical infrastructure, malware, and state capabilities. Such an approach overlooks how contemporary cyber conflict unfolds within the everyday technological environments through which people interact with digital systems. This article introduces the concept of interfaces of cyber conflict to examine how agency and violence emerge at the socio-technical boundaries where humans, platforms, and computational systems (do not) interact. Drawing on science and technology studies and theories of violent conflict, the article conceptualises interfaces not simply as technical affordances mediating conflict through harm, but as enactors of such violence through denial. The article examines Palestinian cyberspace as an empirical case in which asymmetries in infrastructural control and platform governance shape the interface environments in which violence unfolds. By foregrounding interfaces, the article theorises the violence of cyber conflict beyond traditional embodied forms associated with military logics or technical-infrastructural affordances. Rather, it argues that such violence emerges through socio-technical arrangements that organise how agency unfolds in cyberspace.