Cyberspace and International Relations: Theory, Prospects and Challenges

302 Pages·2014·2.84 MB·English

by  Roxana Radu (auth.), Jan-Frederik Kremer, Benedikt Müller (eds.)

Jan-Frederik Kremer
Benedikt Müller Editors
Cyberspace
and International
Relations
Theory, Prospects and Challenges
Cyberspace and International Relations
Jan-Frederik Kremer · Benedikt Müller
Editors
Cyberspace and
International Relations
Theory, Prospects and Challenges
1 3
Editors
Jan-Frederik Kremer Benedikt Müller
Center for Global Studies (CGS) IBM
University of Bonn Düsseldorf
Bonn Germany
Germany
Friedrich Naumann Foundation
for Freedom
Berlin
Germany
ISBN 978-3-642-37480-7 ISBN 978-3-642-37481-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-37481-4
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Foreword
Today we are on the cusp of a “Cybered Conflict” 1 age in which war as we knew it
is likely to be difficult to bound, longer, more covert, more surprising in its scale,
targets, and tempo, and ultimately more difficult to discern its beginning, end,
adversaries, and motivations. All future conflicts will be ‘cybered’ in that seminal
events will need cyber mechanisms in order to occur. In this emergent form of
struggle, ‘cybered’ adversaries will be using cyberspace to undermine the systemic
resilience of a variety of other state and non-state actors long before any overt cri-
sis, public declaration of hostilities, or direct efforts to disable key internal ele-
ments of a state. The more open the international cyberspace—best viewed as an
increasingly universal ‘substrate’ to all societies, the more layers of opponents
enabled by the global web will be involved in any conflict. It will be difficult to
determine who is doing what in the myriad of operations ranging from those
directly involved, to fellow travelers and proxies, to those merely opportunistically
engaged because they can do so easily in the global digitally connected world.
National sovereignty will be routinely challenged along a host of avenues into crit-
ical systems, perceptions of reality, and, importantly, economic resources includ-
ing knowledge processes.
As state leaders respond to the overwhelming insecurities posed by this glob-
ally open and unregulated ‘substrate,’ the international system’s topology will be
changing as well. A rising “Cyber Westphalian” 2 process likely to take 20 years to
solidify will define the accepted characteristics of national jurisdictions in cybered
terms. Decisions taken over this transitional generation will establish what is rec-
ognized as ‘responsible’ state cybered behaviors, what constitutes ‘cyber power’ in
terms of institutionalized “systemic resilience and disruption” capabilities of indi-
vidual states, and where along the ‘cybered conflict spectrum’ the traditional
kinetic war is perceived to initiate. We are at the end of the frontier period in the
evolution of cyberspace during which it spread openly and globally as substrate
underpinning most critical processes of modern civil society. Now, we are moving
into the transitional conflict era in which the nations struggle over control of the
1 Demchak (2011)
2 Demchak and Peter (2011)
v
vi Foreword
wealth formed in and through the frontier. At the end of this turbulence, as has
always happened, the international system will regularize the rights and holdings
of winners and losers. Nations in the coming cyber-bordered international system
will have made informed ‘systemic’ decisions that developed and nurtured their
‘security resilience’ and wellbeing over this era, or will have poorly perceived the
calls to action. Only the former will be considered secure ‘cyber powers,’ and they
will in turn heavily influence what dominates the next ‘socio-cyber-economic sys-
tems’ evolution of our global system 3.
In directly addressing many of these pressing issues, this book contributes to
the field of international relations which is currently lagging behind enormous
evolutions in the reality of conflict and competitive relations among major actors
of the changing international system. Across the policymaking, military, and
scholarly communities, only the latter has resisted adapting to the new characteris-
tics of this emergent cybered conflict age. Increasingly, the policymakers and
security communities of modern democratic civil societies have recognized and
reacted to the global spread of a cyberspace substrate and its changes to the inter-
national environment. The militaries of the digitizing democratic and nondemo-
cratic world have already recognized the globally open cyberspace’s mutagenic
effects on the established forms of conflict. In what many have called the ‘cyberi-
zation of the military,’ we are now seeing the formation of national cyber com-
mands or their equivalents 4. Policymakers in Europe, North America, and
elsewhere have already issued or are writing national cyber security policies and
laws. Yet the seminal thinkers of international relations seem bound to their theo-
ries developed during a much different, western norms-dominated liberal interna-
tional system. Such legacy analyses do not capture the emerging world nor
adequately explain major events such as the unprecedented rise of China in a sin-
gle decade given the enormous scale of its poverty. Even the sudden economic col-
lapse of otherwise wealthy western economies due to a cascade across a tightly
integrated international financial system in 2008 has not spawned reconsideration
of legacy presumptions across the field of international relations.
What this volume offers is a corrective to help the international relations efi ld
to recognize the systemic effects of the depth and rapidity of the global and largely
unmonitored spread of the cyberspace substrate throughout the critical systems of
modern and modernizing nations. It is also a call for more research among scholars
who view the world as a system. Cyberizing the thinking of international relations
scholars requires published works that challenge them to think beyond state–state
coniflcts of the past, beyond game or power theories that rest largely on isolating
events from the new reality of a host of interrelated and ever more deeply integrated
substate systems. The international system now is being shaped by the huge scale of
institutional state and non-state players making individual decisions that alter critical
oil ofl ws, the magnitude in losses in critical economic knowledge investments from
3 Demchak (2012)
4 Demchak (2013)
Foreword vii
cybercrime, to tumultuous transnational nfi ancial ofl ws driven by computers, and
to the slow, steady degradation of future options due to turbulent weather and cli-
mate change. The cumulative result is unprecedented for human societies in which
distant, unexpected bad outcomes harming one nation or part of the world can rip-
ple through the connections to unrelated communities and harm them. Yet interna-
tional relations scholars have been slow to widen their view of relevant systems. The
lag is in part due to how the civil society democracies emerged within geographic
boundaries and were able to move their coniflcts largely to outside their own bor -
ders. In the pre-cybered eras, largely western communities could establish effective
governments able to enforce contracts and ensure value in currency, while discon-
necting issues of militaries and war from the normalcy of the rest of the national
wellbeing. The vast majority of scholars of international relations in western civil
society democracies grew up in this rather well parsed international world. The lit-
erature reefl cts this cognitive habit of speculating profoundly on foreign affairs and
war without having to accommodate the rest of their national systems. The efi ld thus
became puriefi d and unable to address emergent events with clearly systemic impli-
cations. A book such as this is needed to help the willing, but the unwilling, among
the efi ld of international relations scholars to see the need to update their worldviews
and adopt a more inclusive ‘systemic’ weltanschauung across the efi ld.
The scope of this foreword does not allow comments on all the authors and their
contributions. However, several chapters are worthy of note due to their attempt to
contribute terms of art and thus the analytical frameworks useful for scholars and
future leaders in evolving the efi ld of international relations for a deeply cybered
world. One learns across this book that the global cyberspace substrate has under-
mined the older distinctions between international and domestic, between peace
and war, between state and non-state actors, and between technology, politics, and
economics. Today the world is increasingly existentially dependent on the global
cyberspace substrate that is beset by actors able to use cyberspace’s “connectivity,
content, and cognition5” against peace, prosperity, and stability. Hanna Kassab (“In
Search of Cyber Stability International Relations, Mutually Assured Destruction
and the Age of Cyber Warfare”) makes an argument similar to John Mallery’s
“work factors” strategy 6 and my own ‘security resilience’ strategy as essential ele-
ments of deterrence theory. Even what she terms a “virus wall” furthers stability
among nations by increasing the costs of successful offense and thereby make
defense less expensive for nations effectively defending their emergent cyber juris-
dictions. Moving beyond the concrete, Katherina Below (“The Utility of Timeless
Thoughts Hannah Arendt’s Conceptions of Power and Violence in the Age of
Cyberization”) argues for consideration of how states conceptualize the threats and
their responses. This application of Arendt’s allows international scholars to look
across efi lds, and consider domestic decisions with international cybered coniflct
5 Kuehl (2007)
6 Mallery (2011) published in summary form in Demchak, "Resilience, Disruption, and a 'Cyber
Westphalia': Options for National Security in a Cybered Conflict World."
viii Foreword
implications. For example, one could consider the evolution and relative successes
of a nation’s cyber power’ expressed in the establishment of national resilience and
disruption capabilities across institutions, policies, and strategies in terms of
achieving “power to” impede or “power over key elements of the society.”
Moving even further into new perspectives on traditional issues, John Karlsrud
(“Peacekeeping 4.0 Harnessing the Potential of Big Data, Social Media, and Cyber
Technologies”) offers one of the more forward looking proposals by engaging the
technologically lagging but much loved peacekeeping activities of the collective
international community with possible alternative and more effective futures using
big data, including social media, and the myriad of other new cybered developments.
One can easily foresee a more positive international system in which destructive
forces are on the backfoot in many areas due to novel uses of cyberspace. Other inter-
national conundrums could benetfi from considering his challenge to update such as
development studies laud the widespread use of cell phones as bank equivalents in
the developing world, but pay little attention to the consequences of loss of security
in cell phone companies holding the resources of whole segments of poor popula-
tions. One could ask what international disputes may be dampened if environmental-
ists and the UN worked to use UAVs to conduct real-time protection for the unarmed
animals against heavily armed poachers who routinely overwhelm and kill brave park
rangers. Peacekeeping in the emergent cybered coniflct age has many tools already
available for use or repurposing, but so far unexplored fully. Karlsrud has very help-
fully opened up a debate that should be critically and immediately engaged.
In one further area of note, this book captures several debates as they stand
today, as well as possibly new elements of an emergent lexicon. The chapters with
calls for “norms” to be developed and, by inference, imposed by the senior nations
of the global deeply cybered community of nations such as the US are part of a
widely circulating variety of arguments about how and who might best nurture a
less conflictual cybered international system. It is to be expected that this book
would reflect those discussions. Several interesting chapters, however, offer new
terms useful in decomposing the cognitive and structural complexity of cybered
conflict. If the terms capture a complex process in a short form or image such as
“lawfare7” or “cyber Westphalia,8” then a form of ‘semantic infiltration’ slowly
alters the perceptions of scholars and activists alike and open up cognitive oppor-
tunities for new theorization and new strategic discussions. In particular, Matthew
Crosston (“Phreak the Speak: the Flawed Communications within Cyber
Intelligentsia”) offers the term, a “Chinese knowledge wall,” to capture the endur-
ing dichotomy between the technically literate and the political systems focused
scholars and practitioners long noted by the scholars of the large-scale socio-tech-
nical systems (LTS) literature such as Mayntz and Hughes, Comfort, and LaPorte,
among others9. Crosston argues that this dichotomy is particularly influential in an
7 Dunlap (2003)
8 Demchak and Dombrowski (2011)
9 Mayntz and Hughes (2010)
Foreword ix
increasingly conflictual cybered international system because the intellectual and
cognitive barriers also inhibit progressive cooperation between domestic commu-
nities, and inevitably between nations.
In applying her phrase, the “cyberization of global governance,” Roxana Radu
(‘”Power Technology and Powerful Technologies Global Governmentality and
Security in the Cyberspace”) links the technological choices previously seen as irrele-
vant to international politics to the topology changing ‘glocalization’10 and
‘Westphalian’ processes of a cybered world. Radu then makes a solid observation that
missing is a robust inclusive and dialectical approach to cyber security within and
among nations that could offer ways to shape this process to a less contentious future.
Oliver Read (“How the 2010 Attack on Google Changed the US Government’s
Threat Perception of Economic Cyber Espionage”) uses the 2010 STUXNET attack
case in order to provide an analytical framework labeled “threat politics.” The chapter
uses a modern case to capture and update the age-old process by which inufl ential
actors in deeply bureaucratic, civil society democracies use ‘scare-analytics’11 to
reframe the perceptions of key policymakers and thus their response to threats.
Scholars of both social and technological sciences interested in how their
cybered world is likely to evolve over the next 20 years need this volume among
others now emerging to update, broaden, or challenge their perspectives and
understandings. Practitioners need to consider future counterfactuals raised by
the issues discussed here. Will the collective global community be able to use
peacekeeping effectively if the theories of conflict, the institutions making deci-
sions and those implementing them, and the tools given to peacekeepers remain
mired in a pre-cybered perspective, while adversaries do not? Can the wellbeing
of many societies be maintained without breaking into destructive conflict if major
state and non-state actors use with impunity the ambiguities of an open cyber-
space or the masking benefits of a closed cybered jurisdiction to deprive major
populations of their resources, access to knowledge, or future? If major conflicts
can occur over years that deliberately degrade the resilience of large populations,
slowly denying them services and wellbeing, and yet no action directly triggers the
law of armed conflict, how is the international relations theory focused on inter -
state kinetic war to have meaning for this emergent age of cybered conflict and for
the coming cyber Westphalian international system? This book places a marker in
dealing with these kinds of critical questions at a pivotal point in time.
Chris C. Demchak
Codirector, Center for Cyber Conflict Studies (C3S)
United States Naval War College
Newport, RI, USA
10 Robertson (1995)
11 John Mallery of MIT, Cambridge, MA, is credited with innovating this term in multiple brief-
ings beginning in 2009.
x Foreword
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