Securing cyberspace: How states design governance arrangements

Abstract

The functioning of modern societies increasingly depends on secure cyberspace. Given states' lacking capacities to protect this novel domain, governments draw on a variety of third parties for support. Yet, they face a challenge. While imposed control may limit third parties' competence, the abandonment of hierarchical control contradicts the widespread notion of national security. How do states navigate between these functional and national security imperatives to design governance arrangements? We develop a typology that combines cybersecurity problems (risks vs. threats) with governance modes (delegation vs. orchestration). This helps us to explore more than 100 cybersecurity policies across 15 different states. We find one predominant pattern. Governments delegate authority but maintain elements of hierarchical control, when they respond to threatening attacks. In contrast, governments orchestrate intermediaries by soft inducements to address risks and diffuse vulnerabilities in cyberspace. This contributes to both indirect governance scholarship and the debate on cybersecurity.

Disarmed principals: institutional resilience and the non-enforcement of delegation

“…Our paper contributes to wider scholarship on indirect governance (Tallberg, 2002a;Hawkins et al, 2006;Büthe and Mattli, 2011;Abbott et al, 2017;Weiss and Jankauskas, 2019), particularly to research on why principals tolerate agents' noncompliance with a delegation contract (Miller, 2005;de Bièvre et al, 2013;Kruck, 2016;Slayton and Clark-Ginsberg, 2018;Abbott et al, 2019). In addition, our argument on how the combination of institutional misfit and asymmetric interdependence produces resilience yields two broader contributions to historical-institutionalist theorizing.…”

Steering the governance of artificial intelligence: national strategies in perspective

“…Second, the selected strategies were included in the qualitative content analysis on the dimensions of interest here. Cybersecurity scholars such as Carr (2016) and Weiss and Jankauskas (2018) have drawn attention to how national interest and various understandings of security shape the relationship between government and private actors, providing a useful starting point for grasping a state's general position in contested issue areas. An initial search by keywords pointed to relevant sections in the documents analysed.…”

Who Should Be in Charge of Cyberspace? The European Union, Member States and the Constitution of Structural Power

“…For instance, a pattern of routinized interactions in the governance of cyberspace was that the more challenges were conceptualized as a threat to national security, the more states established hierarchical control. By contrast, the more governments conceptualized challenges as societal vulnerabilities or even positive opportunities, the less hierarchical control and the more indirect modes of governance were employed (Weiss and Jankauskas, 2019). I therefore theorize that the routinized conceptualization of cyberspace has historically constituted the structural power context (see also, Mueller, 2019: 4).…”

“…Before I theorize this constitution of structural power positions, however, I need to introduce the most important stakeholders who are currently in charge of protecting cyberspace. Although the state, as the manager of political authority (Genschel and Zangl, 2014), is increasingly committed to making decisions on cybersecurity and has recently enhanced its capacities to do so (Weiss and Jankauskas, 2019), the actor constellation within cyberspace is populated by two further powerful groups (Weiss and Biermann, 2019).…”

“…The paper seeks to contribute to recent debates on overlapping authorities in global politics and the EU's governance of cyberspace by investigating the historical prerequisites of today's political dispute over who should be in charge (Weiss and Jankauskas, 2019; see also, Krotz and Schild, 2013). That allows developing a conceptual bridge between securitization scholarship, on the one hand, and the analysis of structural power, on the other.…”