Do Cyber Capabilities and Cyber Power Incentivize International Cooperation?

Abstract

This paper explores a research question about whether defensive and offensive cyber security power and the capabilities to exercise the power influence the incentives of nation-states to participate in bilateral and multilateral cooperation (BMC) through formal and informal agreements, alliances, and norms. Drawing from international relations in general and structural realism in particular, three hypotheses are presented for assessing the research question empirically: (i) increasing cyber capability lessens the incentives for BMC; (ii) actively demonstrating and exerting cyber power decreases the willingness for BMC; and (iii) small states prefer BMC for cyber security and politics thereto. According to a cross-country dataset of 29 countries, all three hypotheses are rejected. Although presenting a "negative result" with respect to the research question, the accompanying discussion contributes to the statecentric cyber security research in international relations and political science.

Reassessing Measures for Press Freedom

“…The overall methodological research designs follows a conventional state-centric approach in comparative communication research and comparative research in general; countries are the units of analysis and the evaluative comparison is carried horizontally across countries (Ebbinghaus 1998, Livingstone 2003, Ruohonen 2020. This approach also leads to a conventional problem; the lack of statistical variance is a notable concern with all datasets.…”

“…On occasion, for instance, the civil liberties data from the Freedom House has been accused of subjectivity and Western biases (Okulicz-Kozaryn 2014). To some extent, however, such criticism is lightweight-if not frivolous; the question about Western tenets behind press freedom has been debated for decades-if not centuries (Chu 1987), and the elementary methodological criticism can be generalized practically to all cross-country comparative research (Ruohonen 2020). Nevertheless, the more nuanced academic criticism should still be acknowledged (see, in particular, Crasnow 2020).…”