Digital Warfare: Effectively learning to contextualise current affairs

Thijs Rebel, student assistent and one of the developers of the Digital Warfare course In November 2020, Thijs Rebel and Matthijs de Gooijer won the UvA Create a Course Challenge with their idea for an interdisciplinary course on digital warfare, now and in the future. In February this year, 'Digital Warfare: The Future of Cyberthreats in the Twenty-first Century' was launched with Prof. Paul Ducheine, with whom the students have further developed the course together with the educational developers of the IIS, as the core lecturer. A course in which students learn to give context to everything that is occurring in the digital world, such as the hacking of encrypted networks by the police, Brexit, the manipulation of the American elections, the sabotage of the uranium enrichment plant in Iran and the current war in Ukraine. Thijs Rebel talks about the origin of the idea for Digital Warfare : "In the second year of my law degree programme, the elections in the United States took place. There was a lot of conversation about Russian interference by spreading fake news on social media and shutting down systems. Although there were many analytics in the news, the background articles on digital warfare in the newspapers were still too superficial for me. I wanted to learn more about this topic at the UvA, but it turned out there was no course to go into this in-depth.