Cyber Force and the Role of Sovereign States in Informational Warfare

Abstract

The use of cyber force can be as severe and disruptive as traditional armed attacks are. Cyber attacks may neither provoke physical injuries nor cause property damages and still, they can affect essential functions of today's societies, such as governmental services, business processes or communication systems that progressively depend on information as a vital resource. Whereas several scholars claim that an international treaty, much as new forms of international cooperation, are necessary, a further challenge should be stressed: authors of cyber attacks can be non-state actors, and identifying the party responsible for such a use of force, whether non-state actors or national sovereign states, is often impossible. Accordingly, several programmes on online security and national defence have been developed by sovereign states to tackle this menace and yet, the endurance of Western democracies and their aim to protect basic rights have already been tested by such programmes over the past years. The new scenarios of cyber force do not only concern the field of international law, since they may represent the main threat in the fields of national and constitutional law as well.

Disinformation Operations Aimed at (Democratic) Elections in the Context of Public International Law: The Conduct of the Internet Research Agency During the 2016 US Presidential Election

“…US, Russia, and China) will hesitate to agree on such a treaty, or at least will do so only on their own terms. 281 If a State thinks that the threat of a certain cyber and/or information activity falls asymmetrically on its adversaries, it might choose not to cooperate and rather take the risk of the threat. This "relative gains" problem is a frequent hurdle in arms control and security agreements.…”

International relations in the digital age: governance and security in cyberspace

“…So, what types of data can be utilized to conduct an analysis of cyber governance? Much of the existing literature on cyber governance is theoretical in nature and there are some attempts to synthesize international law, cyber technologies as well as IR theory (Kadlecova, 2018) (Pagallo, 2015) (Yi, 2016), but few have attempted to examine the relevance of IR theory in the digital age and determine its prescriptive and predictive powers, and no one to my knowledge has attempted to formulate an original cyber-based theoretical framework for application in the field of international relations.…”