Saving Face after Defacing: Responses to Public Cyber Intrusions in the Arab World

How do Arab Gulf states react to cyber intrusions? Recent scholarship demonstrates that the covert nature of cyber intrusions allows states to respond with restraint, avoiding escalation. But what happens when cyber intrusions become public and are highly visible? This article examines the rhetorical strategies employed by authoritarian Arab-speaking states in the Middle East to mitigate the image-related costs associated with a public cyber intrusion. Drawing on the conceptual language of image-repair and crisis communication theories and on an original discourse analysis in Arabic, we identify diminishing, self-complimenting, and accusing strategies used by states to “save face.” Further, the findings indicate that intrusions involving leaking or faking information bring about unique “face-saving” strategies that do not only deal with the intrusion itself but also with the subsequent information crisis. Overall, the article advances two main contributions. Theoretically, in contrast to existing IR literature, that focuses on “saving face” strategies following normative transgressions (“naming and shaming”), this analysis examines such strategies in the context of victimhood, after being cyber attacked. Politically, by focusing on the symbolic and image-related responses to cyber intrusion, this analysis explains an important mechanism through which cyber warfare is kept contained.