Strategy and defense

The first axis of Hermínio Cerqueira’s work is also its center of gravity: a body of strategic-analysis books, written over a short but unusually intense period, whose subject is the transition of the international system from the end of the unipolar moment to the competitive multipolarity of the 2026–2050 horizon. The reader who follows this axis in the order proposed here will soon recognize that this is not a collection of stand-alone titles but a coherent intellectual project, with its own vocabulary, a declared method, and a recurring geography: the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf, the Taiwan Strait and the Indo-Pacific, the Ukrainian front and NATO’s eastern flank, the Eastern Mediterranean — and, running through all of it, Portugal, conceived not as a spectator but as a small Atlantic state that absorbs, redistributes, and occasionally amplifies the shocks of the system. The method is constant: verifiable open sources, explicit dialogue with the international strategic literature (from Mahan and Clausewitz to Waltz, Keohane, Nye, Taleb, or Havel), a disciplined distinction between fact, interpretation, and foresight, and a deliberate choice of the Portuguese spelling that predates the 1990 Orthographic Agreement. The tone, for its part, deliberately oscillates between the treatise and the civic essay: the author writes, as he confesses in one of these books, with rigor but without coldness, convinced that thinking about geopolitics as an abstract game between powers would betray what is truly at stake. The entries that follow comment on each book in its individuality, without losing sight of the edifice they form together.

The four books of this axis form, within Hermínio Cerqueira’s work, a coherent and progressive doctrinal system on contemporary digital conflict: from the geopolitics of the fifth dimension (Guerra Cibernética) to the strategic thesis on the qubit as the new axis of power (Cyberwar Quântica), from there to the operational manual for post-quantum migration (Manual de Cibersegurança Quântica) and, finally, to the turn of attention toward the inside of organizations (Ameaça Interna). Written and completed between May and June 2026, they share a recognizable method — systematic anchoring in primary sources (NIST, ENISA, CISA, EUR-Lex, CCDCOE), explicit calibration of the robustness of each statement, constant attention to the Portuguese case within the European and Atlantic framework — and a common conviction: that digital security has ceased to be a sectoral technical matter and has become a condition of sovereignty, social trust, and civilizational continuity. Read together, they probably constitute the most extensive body of work published in Portuguese on cyber defense and the post-quantum transition.