Actions in cyberspace by governments, businesses, NGOs and other players have become part of international relations and international security. Those actions reflect countries’ national interests and affect their bilateral and multilateral diplomatic relationships. This has led to the rise of cyber diplomacy, the activity of deploying international cooperation in cyberspace and using actions in cyberspace to achieve foreign-policy goals. The main focus of cyber diplomacy in its early stages is trying to forge a way to regulate state behavior and prevent and regulate conflict in cyberspace. Some governments have extended their cyber diplomacy portfolios to include the foreign-policy implications of new technologies. Both traditional tools from the diplomacy toolbox and new technologies are needed to build and maintain international cooperation in cyberspace. Cyber diplomacy is not the activity of using digital tools to accomplish traditional foreign-policy objectives–that is the definition of digital diplomacy.

Analysis is offered the UN Charter articles, notably Art. 2:4, that relate to the use of force. The Friendly Relations Declaration adopted by the General Assembly in 1970 is a useful tool of interpretation. The forcible seizure of territory is found to be a primary objective of the ban on the use of force. Post WWII, such seizures have been uncommon, but a few are cited. Interventions are of different kinds and many – that contain elements of force – fall under the prohibition in Art. 2:4. The term ‘force ‘does not cover ‘economic pressures’ but may cover various kinds of cyber-attacks. What the ban on ‘threat’ of force covers has not yet been authoritatively clarified. As only force ‘in international relations’ are covered, the article does not restrict governments’ use of force inside their own territories but it does prohibit foreign interventions supporting rebels. The case of the civil war in Syria and the interventions in it is discussed.

Chapter 9 focuses on an Article 36 review of (autonomous) cyber capabilities. As in the case of autonomous weapons systems, the most burning questions for a weapons review in the cyber context remain: How to meaningfully incorporate advice on the law of targeting as part of the weapons review? How to determine when a given capability is ‘new’ for review purposes and when to initiate a review? How and when can testing and evaluation processes meaningfully inform the review outcome? Furthermore, some challenges distinct to cyber capabilities also exist. Most importantly, cyber capabilities test the underlying assumptions of the law of armed conflict. The effects of their use may be more deleterious than the consequences produced by traditional weaponry, and yet they may fall outside the legal review requirement because the effects produced do not constitute an ‘attack’ in its conventional interpretation. [142 words]

This chapter introduces the debates regarding the development of jus ad bellum, with a particular focus on the development of the definition of force and the right to self-defence. It discusses the relationship between the rules of the UN Charter and customary international law, and the way in which development of custom, as well as debates amongst other international actors, contribute to the dynamic interpretation of the Charter rules.

This chapter demonstrates how covert operations differ significantly in their level of publicity, and range from acts that remain secret, to acts that are the object of debates amongst states, legal scholars, and civil society, in and outside the settings of international organisations. It is demonstrated that unacknowledged acts can affect the law in different ways depending on their level of publicity and covertness. It will also be shown that the necessity of the involvement of states in a debate around an operation can vary depending on the rule that it is informing. An unacknowledged act leading to extensive academic debate might prove very informative and play an important role in updating the already vague definition of ‘force’ in light of technological developments, but it would not have the same effect if arguing for a right to preventive self-defence against non-imminent threats, where states have been more active in the debate. It is further argued that the absence of states from certain events and debates opens up more influential participation by other international actors, such as legal scholars and other groups of experts.

This introductory chapter intsroduces the themes, context, and structures of the book.

This chapter tracks the evolution of the climate change regime, discussing both top-down multilateral agreements (such as the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change) as well as bottom-up polycentric efforts with a particular focus on the period from the 2009 Copenhagen Accord to the 2015 Paris Agreement. It then compares and contrasts these findings with the history of Internet governance from its birth in the late 1970s to the last major meetings in 2017 that occurred prior to publication of this book. Finally, the potential of polycentric governance to mitigate the two global collective action problems of climate change and cyber attacks is assessed using a regime effectiveness study.

This chapter examines the evolution of the legal regime governing outer space and how resurgent national interests are challenging the peaceful use of the final frontier, including the expanding capacity to launch cyber attacks on satellite infrastructure and the potential environmental and security effects of such attacks. Using the same approach as Chapters 3 and 4, this chapter begins by briefly investigating the impact of advancing technology (that in some cases has been accelerated by cyberspace), multipolar politics, and resource scarcity on space governance. It then discusses the evolution of space law from the Outer Space Treaty to the present, and analyzes the extent to which the governance structure of space is changing due to increasing national regulation and private activity, as well as to the expansion of Internet access and its associated demands. Next, this chapter investigates whether the emerging space regime complex is mitigating the collective action problems of space weaponization and junk proliferation, and how the international community may perform better by using regime effectiveness findings from the literature on institutional analysis. Finally, governance best practices, such as those stemming from the International Code of Conduct for Outer Space Activities, are applied to cybersecurity and Internet governance.

This chapter opens with a brief typology of cyber conflict encapsulating cybercrime, espionage, war, and terrorism. The examination then moves on to investigate first how and why these categories are breaking down in the Information Age, and second what comparative approaches to regulating cyberspace and managing cyber conflict exist as juxtaposed against other global collective action problems. The tragedy of the unmanaged commons scenario, from which many collective action problems derive, predicts the overexploitation of common pool resources and has, traditionally, been moderated by three management solutions: privatization, nationalization, and common property legal regimes. Accordingly, this chapter introduces each of these concepts and reflects on the potential and limits of these approaches, including the CHM concept that was introduced to govern the deep seabed and the Moon as applied to cyberspace. The debate is then viewed through the lens of polycentric governance generally as well as through an introduction to a range of leading institutional design frameworks, including the Ostrom Design Principles, which are in turn applied to the case studies in Part II.