No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
What's in a Name? Metaphors and Cybersecurity
Abstract
For more than a decade, the United States military has conceptualized and discussed the Internet and related systems as “cyberspace,” understood as a “domain” of conflict like land, sea, air, and outer space. How and why did this concept become entrenched in US doctrine? What are its effects? Focusing on the emergence and consolidation of this terminology, I make three arguments about the role of language in cybersecurity policy. First, I propose a new, politically consequential category of metaphor: foundational metaphors, implied by using particular labels rather than stated outright. These metaphors support specific ways to understand complex issues, provide discursive resources to some arguments over others, and shape policy contestation and outcomes. Second, I present a detailed empirical study of US military strategy and doctrine that traces the emergence and consolidation of terminology built on the “cyberspace domain.” This concept supported implicit metaphorical correspondences between the Internet and physical space, yielding specific analogies and arguments for understanding the Internet and its effects. Third, I focus on the rhetorical effects of this terminology to reveal two important institutional consequences: this language has been essential to expanding the military's role in cybersecurity, and specific interests within the Department of Defense have used this framework to support the creation of US Cyber Command. These linguistic effects in the United States also have implications for how other states approach cybersecurity, for how international law is applied to cyber operations, and for how International Relations understands language and technological change.
... Адже суспільство стає все більш залежним від комп'ютерів та Інтернет-мережі у роботі та проведенні дозвілля. Зростає і значимість наявності вразливостей в комп'ютерних системах, що привертають увагу зловмисників, які використовують їх як можливість отримати гроші або заподіяти шкоду [1,2]. Також вражливості комп'ютерних систем можуть використовуватися протиборчими сторонами для здобуття переваги під час інформаційних протиборств та війн [2]. ...
... Зростає і значимість наявності вразливостей в комп'ютерних системах, що привертають увагу зловмисників, які використовують їх як можливість отримати гроші або заподіяти шкоду [1,2]. Також вражливості комп'ютерних систем можуть використовуватися протиборчими сторонами для здобуття переваги під час інформаційних протиборств та війн [2]. Тому вкрай важливо захищати комп'ютерні системи та веб-ресурси від кібератак, а також розпізнавати такі атаки для їх своєчасного усунення, якщо методи превентивного захисту не спрацювали. ...
Метою даної роботи є створення системи виявлення кіберзагроз на основі аналізу даних мережевого трафіку веб-ресурсів засобами мови програмування Python та з використанням методів машинного навчання. Об’єктом дослідження є процес аналізу даних з веб-ресурсів у системах кібербезпеки. Предметом дослідження є методи та алгоритми машинного навчання для аналізу даних з веб-ресурсів. Для навчання розробленої моделі виявлення кібератак було обрано відкритий набір даних CSE-CIC-IDS2017, що містить найсучасніші поширені інформаційні атаки, що відповідають вигляду справжніх даних з реального світу, основні реалізовані атаки включають брутфорс FTP, брутфорс SSH, DoS, Heartbleed, веб-атаку, інфільтрацію, ботнет та DDoS. Розроблене програмне забезпечення виявлення кібератак на веб-сайти складається з декількох модулів, а саме: модуля попередньої обробки даних датасету, модуля дослідження ознакового простору мережевого трафіку та модуля використання алгоритмів машинного навчання для пошуку кібератак. Для вирішення завдання з відбору ознак у рамках реалізації даного програмного забезпечення було вирішено обрати стратегію відбір на основі моделі за допомогою одного з ансамблевих методів машинного навчання випадковий ліс. Відбір ознак на основі моделі використовує алгоритм машинного навчання з учителем, щоб обчислити важливість кожної ознаки, і залишає лише найважливіші з них. Для тренування моделі були вибрані наступні алгоритми машинного навчання: наївний баєсів класифікатор, k-найближчих сусідів, дерева рішень, метод опорних векторів (SVM) з використанням гауссівського ядра, адаптивний бустинг, дерева рішень з прискоренням (бустинг градієнта). Разом з тренуванням одразу виконувалася перехресна перевірка (з контролем) по семи блоках, для отримання більш точної оцінки узагальнюючої здатності моделі. Результат роботи – програмна реалізація методів машинного навчання для виявлення кібератак на веб-сайти за допомогою розпізнавання їх ознак у мережевому трафіку, а також проведення порівняння їх ефективності.
... In 1982, William Gibson first coined the word "cyberspace" in his famous science fiction short story "Burning Chrome," where he discusses the hacker group "Cyberspace Seven" (1982( , as cited in Wall, 2008. The term "cyberspace" was originally used to illustrate the "mass consensual hallucination" of computer networks, and the term was later adopted by technology companies in the 1990s (Branch, 2021). ...
Placeholder Dedication Placeholder
... However, as cybersecurity concerns grew, it quickly expanded and eventually became a major issue in every country. According to Branch (2021), cybersecurity terminology began to be addressed throughout the world in the mid-1990s, when there was a "information war." The word refers to an assault and defense operation on computer networks that targets classified material. ...
This paper seeks to explain the problem of widespread consumer data theft and the significance of online consumer data privacy in a review of Islamic values-based digital ethics. This research employs a qualitative approach by reviewing a variety of books, journals, papers, and other reputable sources, which are then examined using content analytic tools. The findings of this research indicate that first and foremost, effective cybersecurity will secure customer data. Second, ethical conduct derived from Islamic beliefs will be able to deter criminal activity and data breaches against consumers. Data privacy is a fundamental right that must be maintained collectively, according to Islam. The key to combating crime and breaches in the digital environment is hence the precautionary principle of stakeholders.==========================================================================================================ABSTRAK – Etika Digital Berbasis Islam: Fenomena Keamanan Data Konsumen Online. Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk menjelaskan fenomena maraknya pencurian data konsumen serta melihat posisi penting privasi data konsumen online dalam tinjauan etika digital berbasis nilai Islam. Penelitian ini menggunakan metode kualitatif, dengan menelaah berbagai literatur baik buku, jurnal, laporan dan sumber reliable lainnya yang kemudian dianalisis menggunakan teknik content analysis. Hasil penelitian ini menemukan bahwa, pertama, keamanan siber yang baik akan mampu melindungi data konsumen. kedua, perilaku etis yang bersumber dari nilai Islam akan mampu mencegah kejahatan dan pelanggaran data konsumen. Ketiga, dalam Islam data privasi merupakan hak dasar yang harus dihormati secara bersama-sama. Untuk itu prinsip kehati-hatian daripara stakeholder menjadi kunci melawan kajahatan dan pelanggaran diruang digital.
... A comprehensive review is impossible. The Element concentrates on liberal democracies and, therefore, does not consider explicitly consequential questions such as censorship (e.g., King et al., 2013;Roberts, 2018;Pan and Siegel, 2020), human rights (e.g., Dragu and Lupu, 2021), interstate or intrastate conflicts (e.g., Zeitzoff, 2017), state repression (e.g., Weidmann and Rød, 2019;Gohdes, 2020), and cybersecurity (e.g., Branch, 2020). These are obviously very important topics, but they are outside of the scope of this Element. ...
This element shows, based on a review of the literature, how digital technology has affected liberal democracies with a focus on three key aspects of democratic politics: political communication, political participation, and policy-making. The impact of digital technology permeates the entire political process, affecting the flow of information among citizen and political actors, the connection between the mass public and political elites, and the development of policy responses to societal problems. This element discusses how digital technology has shaped these different domains, identifies areas of research consensus as well as unresolved questions, and argues that a key perspective involves issue definition, that is, how the nature of the problems raised by digital technology is subject to political contestation.
... Definitions, Scope of Analysis, and the Literature I start with definitions because the underlying language used to express related terms has important ramifications on the meaning and policy [5]. I define cyber and military domains as follows. ...
This article investigates why states have launched so few cross-domain operations—in this case, operations between cyber and military domains—when they have launched so many cyberattacks. I explore a set of five hypotheses for why most cyberattacks do not occur at the same time as military strikes. My analysis reveals that of the five, two are compelling. First, state attackers make strategic decisions not to “cross the domain” for organizational reasons that are based on the internal division of labor. Second, many cyberattackers face significant technical challenges with cross-domain operations even if their cyber and military forces are integrated. The other three reasons are not as persuasive, including fear of conflict escalation, international law applied to cyberspace, and norms of cyberspace behavior.
... For these and other reasons, several fields have turned away from the term. Cyber anthropology and cyber sociology have been supplanted by digital anthropology (Horst and Miller 2020) and digital sociology (Lupton 2015; Marres 2017), and scholars in security studies have argued that it is time to retire the cyber prefix from their disciplines (Branch 2021;Futter 2018). In this special issue, we similarly contemplate the utility of the cyber prefix for criminologists as we reflect on its place in our contemporary technoscape. ...
This special issue comprises 10 journal articles and one book review. Collectively, the contributions broaden our theoretical and conceptual understandings of the technology–harm nexus and provide criminologists with new ways of moving beyond cybercrime. The issue consists of two parts. The first part of the issue, entitled ‘Digital (in)Justices’, contains five manuscripts, each examining a particular intersection between digital technology and criminal justice agencies. The second part of the special issue—‘Rethinking the Technology–Harm Nexus’—includes five manuscripts that engage with a range of techno-social harms. The authors provide novel theoretical contributions that explore how the intersection of technology and harm can be problematised and reconceptualised.
... Unlike in the conventional domains of land, sea, air, and space, assessing the relative power of states is highly subjective and subject to changes that have less to do with material or financial capabilities than educational, infrastructural, or other attributes often ignored in conventional analyses of power. The term domain itself implies the importance and frames the metaphorical space in which a new typology of activities involving code and internetworked computers that facilitate military and civilian activities take place [31]. Defining the space (cyberspace) of operation is useful insofar as it helps delineate and differentiate it from activities occurring in other domains. ...
Perceptions of risk and uncertainty are pervasive in all international interactions. How states perceive risk and uncertainty and how they respond to these conditions impacts their policies and diplomatic behaviors. Despite a robust literature encompassing of risk and uncertainty within conventional state to state interactions including conflict, state interactions in cyberspace have received less attention. How states perceive and interpret risk and uncertainty in cyberspace varies widely by state. Very often, these perceptions are mutually incompatible and lead to a sub-optimal status quo that fosters increased risk and uncertainty. While the prospects of uncontrolled escalation or worries about a “Cyber Pearl Harbor” might be hyperbole, the reality remains that for decision-makers within states assessing the conditions of and the actions undertaken in cyberspace at present foster instability and encourages risk-seeking behaviors. This work analyzes the formulation of state perceptions of risk and uncertainty and seeks to establish a heuristic within which risk and uncertainty can be analyzed.
... One of the key tensions in defining cybersecurity is in whether it concerns only technological intrusions into networks, preserving technical properties of confidentiality, integrity, and availability of data, or whether it also involves the management and control of content moving through those networks: in short, whether it protects the medium or the message [56]. More broadly, cybersecurity concerns simultaneously unarguable yet difficult to define risks, changing rapidly with technological developments [57][58][59]. This flexibility means that policies and technologies bearing the label of "cybersecurity" are ideal candidates for political strategies aimed at manipulating uncertainty. ...
Cybersecurity, defined as the prevention and mitigation of malicious interference with digital devices and networks, is a key area of contest for digitalized politics, especially in uncertain and turbulent situations. Nowhere is this more starkly illustrated than in states such as Egypt, where the period since the January 2011 revolution has seen several changes of government and the subsequent consolidation of executive power, increasingly strict limits on free speech, and extensive violence by Islamist groups against the state and civilian targets and by the state against protesters and dissidents. How, then, are cybersecurity policies, practices, and technologies deployed and contested in uncertain political environments? The article argues that cybersecurity provides a way for the Egyptian government and opposition activists to “manipulate uncertainty” to their advantage. Each side uses cybersecurity policies, practices, and technologies to restrict their adversary’s scope for action, seeking to make the other more predictable while retaining or increasing their own freedom of action. In addition to providing extensive empirical data on cybersecurity developments in Egypt, the article makes two theoretical contributions. First, it shows how political struggles between state and opposition movements assimilate the influential language and content of cybersecurity, generating distinct cybersecurity politics. Second, it highlights the role of uncertainty as a driver—among others—of cycles of innovation and response in contentious politics, including those that center on cybersecurity.
... In one recent analysis of the cognitive influence by cyber operations, Gomez and Villar (2018) found that cyberattacks cause apprehension among the public and that cyber decision makers often base their responses to cyberattacks on false assumptions influenced by narratives and the framing of cyber events, such as 'digital pearl harbour'. As Branch (2020) has recently argued, the use of these types of metaphorsincluding recent references to cyber as a 'domain' of war fightinghas been consistent throughout the post-Cold War period and influential in policy processes, including shaping the formation of the US Cyber Command and subsequent efforts to replicate the US approach to cyberwarfare by other states. In this way, metaphors become part of mental maps or cognitive schemas (Bloomfield 2012, 452), which influence policy. ...
Cybersecurity is often treated as a national security issue with responses to attacks implemented by military and intelligence agencies. This has created path dependencies in which tensions between the private sector and government have continued, where over-classification of cyberthreats has occurred, and where the broader societal impacts of malicious use of the internet have been underestimated. Drawing on the societal security concept established by the Copenhagen School of International Relations, we seek to reframe cybersecurity theory and policy. In the first section of the article we establish a theoretical approach to cybersecurity that emphasises the impact of cyberattacks on society, including on the health, energy and transport sectors. The second section draws on the history of cyberconflict to assess the ways the internet has been used to exacerbate societal tensions between identity groups and to create incohesion and societal security dilemmas. This section reinterprets the way the Kosovo War, Millennium (Y2 K) Bug, 9/11 and the WannaCry incident shaped and reflected cyber policy. The final section explores how a process of cyber desecuritisation might be achieved, including through discursive change and an enhanced role for the societal sector in the event of major cyberattacks.
This article explores the fashion/popularity of the idea that the exercise of cyber power is a form of warfare. Specifically, the article explains the recent decline of the cyber warfare fashion in academia and discusses its implications for strategic studies. To achieve this, we synthesize observations from previous studies with new quantitative and qualitative data. The article contributes to a growing body of literature by tracing and explaining the history of a particular theme within strategic studies.
Faced with ongoing large-scale cyber espionage and the rising prominence of information operations targeting social media, the cyber conflict scholarship has entered into a renewed debate over how to characterise the role and place of cyberspace conflict in broader patterns of international security. In response to these empirical challenges, this paper argues that the current scholarship is limited because it uses the ‘cyberspace domain’ – a doctrinal concept originating in the U.S. military – as a conceptual foundation. This paper argues that the cyberspace domain should be replaced with a holistic conception of "information competition" of which there are three paradigms: cyberspace domain, mixed, and information. All states seek to intervene in the flow and storage of information across domestic and international contexts; information competition is better able to capture information-related interactions between states and observed empirical variation in how states approach information technology and conflict. For example, China and Russia centre ‘information’ as the core organising framework for their approach to information technology and conflict. This paper also demonstrates how an information competition framework better clarifies the role that the U.S. has played in shaping Russian and Chinese approaches to information competition.
How do interactions in the cyber domain affect states’ ontological security and how do states respond to these challenges? These are pertinent questions given the increasing influence of cyber technologies on daily life, politics, and International Relations. Over the years, state actors have faced challenges in various spheres, including security, politics, economics, and culture. However, nowadays, cyber technologies enable the emergence of effective, efficient, and powerful alternatives to the current state-system practices. This creates fundamental challenges to states’ sense of self, identity, and home, calling into question states’ dominant and ingrained narratives regarding their roles in the international arena. I suggest that the scholarship of ontological security, although rarely used in this context, provides intriguing analytical tools to explore these questions. This scholarship focuses on the actors’ ability to maintain their sense of self, allowing researchers to explore how interactions in the cyber domain challenge states’ routines, narratives, and sense of home. Furthermore, using the scholarship of ontological security to study cyber technologies can also account for states’ responses, illuminating puzzling behavior that cannot be explained fully through other perspectives.
The long-held U.S. leadership in cyberspace seems to be waning. The return of great power competition on the international stage demonstrates a crisis of legitimacy and resources for the United States in cyberspace. But it also reflects an identity crisis concerning the capacity of the United States to ensure the stability of the “global commons” as well as to deter potential aggressors. Against this backdrop, the Biden administration has chosen to integrate the external and domestic dimensions of its cybersecurity strategies, while stepping up the technological competition with China. As a result, U.S. leadership in cyberspace now rests upon three pillars: peace through strength, embodied in a rather offensive doctrine and the constant expansion of cyber capabilities; strength through resilience, with a strong federal focus on building up the cybersecurity of domestic infrastructure; resilience through techno-nationalism, driven by the systemic rivalry with China. Yet, there is no guarantee that these choices will, in the long run, lead to greater security.
This element shows, based on a review of the literature, how digital technology has affected liberal democracies with a focus on three key aspects of democratic politics: political communication, political participation, and policy-making. The impact of digital technology permeates the entire political process, affecting the flow of information among citizen and political actors, the connection between the mass public and political elites, and the development of policy responses to societal problems. This element discusses how digital technology has shaped these different domains, identifies areas of research consensus as well as unresolved questions, and argues that a key perspective involves issue definition, that is, how the nature of the problems raised by digital technology is subject to political contestation.
Analyzing safety and security of modern integrated enterprises, one can realize that for industrial control systems, availability is much more critical than other properties composing the classic security triad. However, it is not availability but confidentiality and integrity that are usually more concerned and adequately described in security policies. Furthermore, for assessing and maintaining system security, a number of formal models are utilized, but none of them corresponds directly to availability. The article considers the property of availability of industrial control systems, suggests adopting the IEC 62443 availability interpretation, and reveals a delay of the signal transmission to be a useful measure of the quantitative availability assessment. Investigating the software level of industrial control systems, the article presents a scheme of domains affecting availability and advocates utilizing a system dependency for making availability assessment more accurate and universal. As a result of the research, the article proposes a metric based on delay and dependency, which is helpful for the safety and risk engineering at both the design and operational stages.
This paper presents a conceptual critique of “remote warfare.” It argues that “remote warfare” is more of a trendy term than a robust concept. In support of this assessment, this paper makes two arguments. First, that there is a lack of clarity in the debate over what “remote warfare” is: namely, the literature is yet to explain what it entails. Second, that because of this lack of definitional specificity, we also lack an account of its analytical value: what intellectual leverage does it hold over existing terms making similar claims? The article discusses these points by expanding on the notion of “semantic field,” which it uses to assess how “remote warfare” contributes and is shaped by the broader conceptual confusion in the study of contemporary war and warfare.
The objective of the study is to identify the key factors of the stability of state information in the face of terrorist threats based on the review of existing research in this area, and to identify the main approaches to ensure the stability of state information in the face of terrorist threats. Based on the analysis of scientific works, the factors of the state’s resistance to cyberterrorism are identified and the main approaches are organized to ensure the stability of state information in the face of terrorist threats. The results of the study provide an understanding of the key factors needed to achieve the legal, technical, organizational, and operational areas of state resilience to cyber threats. Further research may aim to perform empirical calculations of indicators from around the world to determine certain dependencies in the field of cybersecurity. It is concluded that factors such as the growing impact of information and communication technologies on public relations, production activities, the operation of infrastructure facilities and the activities of public authorities, indicate that the issue of security as a line of scientific research is urgent.
Is cyber conflict more like war, intelligence, or something else? The stakes of this debate are not simply conceptual but institutional. United States Cyber Command emerged from the American intelligence community, but it has strong legal and organizational imperatives to explain its operations in military terms. Even though cyber operations are essentially a digital manifestation of classic intelligence practice, or secret statecraft, CYBERCOM is emphatically not an intelligence organization. This contradiction between the nature of the problem and the bureaucratic solution has the potential to complicate both intelligence and cybersecurity.
The land, sea, air, space, and cyber domains have distinct operational characteristics. Specialization in the means of using or threatening force is not just a technical issue because choices to use different kinds of military instruments have political consequences. Conventional and nuclear capabilities in these domains have comparative advantages and disadvantages for three general types of strategy – coercion, warfighting, and deception. More complex strategies that cross or combine domains may achieve force-multiplying synergies or create significant trade-offs that affect military and political performance. This article describes the strategic constraints and opportunities posed by specialized force structures.
Despite the growing literature on cyber security, most studies have sidestepped important questions of how conflict escalates in the cyber domain. To better understand this dynamic, we advance two main theoretical pathways of escalation, one in which actors respond with increasing intensity based on the effect of an attack, irrespective of how it is conducted (through cyber, conventional, or nuclear) and another in which the means of attack determines the actor’s willingness to escalate. We then test those effects- and means-based pathways with an original experiment that probes support for escalation, focusing on the American public, a key actor in debates about nuclear escalation and deterrence. Our study suggests that cyberattacks create a threshold that restrains the escalation of conflict. Americans are less likely to support retaliation with force when the scenario involves a cyberattack even when they perceive the magnitude of attacks across domains to be comparable. Our findings provide support for cyber strategies based on assumptions of cyber thresholds, while also casting doubt on the credibility of cyber deterrence by punishment. More broadly, our research suggests effects-based theories of escalation may not help understand the impact of emerging technologies on strategic stability.
In liberal democratic countries, the role of the state in cybersecurity is a politically contested space. We investigate that role along three dimensions: the first is theoretical and we look at existing cybersecurity literature, showing that international affairs literature is almost exclusively highlighting the role of the state as a security actor. We argue that this view is too narrow and risks limiting the discussion to only a few aspects of what cybersecurity entails. The second is empirical and we analyse policy development, showing the diversity of the roles the state imagines for itself. The state occupies six different roles in cybersecurity: (1) security guarantor, (2) legislator and regulator, (3) supporter and representative of the whole of society, (4) security partner, (5) knowledge generator and distributor, and (6) threat actor. The third dimension is normative and we investigate what the role of the state should be. To do that, we outline three main areas of tension between the state, the economy, and society in which cybersecurity policies are situated. Diverse coalitions of interests, spanning across the three social fields, support or challenge the six roles. Thus, two types of questions occupy the centre stage of cybersecurity policy: a question regarding the boundaries of responsibility (i.e., where does the responsibility of the state, economic, and societal actors start and end?) and a question regarding the concrete assumption of responsibilities (i.e., which means is an actor allowed to use to assume the responsibilities of his/her roles?). In sum, our conceptualisation enhances the understanding of cybersecurity as a diverse and crosscutting policy field. The result is a more comprehensive understanding of different roles of the state, which will help researchers with finding innovative research questions in the future.
In 2013, despite deteriorating relations between Russia and the United States and increased global contention over cybersecurity issues, participating states in the First Committee of the United Nations General Assembly agreed on a landmark report endorsing the applicability of existing international law to state military use of information technology. Given these conditions, the timing of this agreement was surprising. I argue that state representatives engaged in a rule-governed social practice of applying old rules to new cases, and that the procedural rules governing this practice help to explain the existence, timing and form of the agreement. They also help to explain further agreements expressed in a follow-on report issued in 2015. The case study findings presented here demonstrate that social practices of rule-making are simultaneously rule-governed and politically contested, and that outcomes of these processes have been shaped by specialized rules for making, interpreting and applying rules. The effectiveness of procedural rules in shaping the outcome of a contentious, complex global security issue suggests that such rules are likely to matter even more in simpler cases dealing with less contentious issues.
There are widespread worries about the impending fragmentation of the internet. Reviewing the IR literature on cyberspace and internet governance, this paper demonstrates that these debates rest on very traditional understandings of territory and the state, focusing on ways that hard-shelled “power containers” are recreated in cyberspace. Using a practice-oriented conceptual framework drawing on insights from critical geography, the paper highlights how state, corporate, and private actors deterritorialize and reterritorialize cyberspace. Results indicate that there are multiple ways to territorialize cyberspace beyond the reconstruction of the “national territory” and that a multitude of actors engage in territorializing practices. This allows for a more nuanced reevaluation of the “internet fragmentation” discourse.
In June 2017, the fifth and so far last of the UN Group of Governmental Experts (UN GGE) were unable to agree on a consensus report that would have brought additional clarity to how international law regulates cyberspace. The article discusses why the UN GGE process seemed to have now reached a dead-end. It argues that the discussion about how Information and Communication Technology (ICT) should be regulated is as much about strategy, politics and ideological differences as it is about law. For the time being, states have too diverging interests and normative preferences for consensus on anything but the most basic of legal findings to arise. The article also offers some suggestions about what the future holds with regard to the regulation of cyberspace. It argues that the collapse of the UN GGE process is likely to lead to a shift away from ambitious global initiatives and towards regional agreements between “like-minded states”. In turn, we may well see the gradual emergence of a fragmented international normative structure for ICT. It is also likely that nonstate actors will begin to play a more central role in the efforts to bring legal clarity to the governance of ICT.
The word ‘cyber’ has become one of the most ubiquitous and powerful concepts in contemporary security studies. Very few academic papers or workshops in the social sciences fail to touch upon the ‘cyber challenge’ in some way, and very few politicians fail to use the term when talking about the most pressing threats to national security. But surprisingly, little consensus exists about what the term includes, refers to, or how it is being used differently by different people in different contexts. Indeed, there is no single definition or research agenda that all adhere to. This in turn often drives hype and leads to misunderstanding and bad policy. The result is that formulating suitable policies to deal with and respond to threats to digital computers and networks, either domestically or internationally, has become disjointed and obfuscated, with straw-man arguments based on erroneous assumptions often prevailing. This paper unpacks and explains these problems, before making the case for jettisoning the word ‘cyber’ from the security studies lexicon and returning instead to the language first developed by computer science in the 1990s. Only by doing this can we properly begin to understand, manage and mitigate the security challenges of the latest information age.
This article sets out to show how different understandings of technology as suggested by Science and Technology Studies (STS) help reveal different political facets of cybersecurity. Using cybersecurity research as empirical site, it is shown that two separate ways of understanding cybertechnologies are prevalent in society. The primary one sees cybertechnologies as apolitical, flawed, material objects that need to be fixed in order to create more security; the other understands them as mere political tools in the hands of social actors without considering technological (im)possibilities. This article suggests a focus on a third understanding to bridge the uneasy gap between the two others: technology defined as an embodiment of societal knowledge. The article posits that in line with that, the study of cyberpolitics would benefit from two innovations: a focus on cybersecurity as social practice―enacted and stabilized through the circulation of knowledge about vulnerabilities―and a focus on the practices employed in the discovery, exploitation and removal of those vulnerabilities.
Cybersecurity sits at the intersection of public security concerns about critical infrastructure protection and private security concerns around the protection of property rights and civil liberties. Public-private partnerships have been embraced as the best way to meet the challenge of cybersecurity, enabling cooperation between private and public sectors to meet shared challenges. While the cybersecurity literature has focused on the practical dilemmas of providing a public good, it has been less effective in reflecting on the role of cybersecurity in the broader constitution of political order. Unpacking three accepted conceptual divisions between public and private, state and market, and the political and economic, it is possible to locate how this set of theoretical assumptions shortcut reflection on these larger issues. While public-private partnerships overstep boundaries between public authority and private right, in doing so they reconstitute these divisions at another level in the organization of political economy of liberal democratic societies.
Assumptions are made by government and technology providers about the power relationships that shape the use of technological security controls and the norms under which technology usage occurs. We present a case study carried out in the North East of England that examined how a community might work together using a digital information sharing platform to respond to the pressures of welfare policy change. We describe an inductive consideration of this highly local case study before reviewing it in the light of broader security theory. By taking this approach we problematise the tendency of the state to focus on the security of technology at the expense of the security of the citizen. From insights gained from the case study and the subsequent literature review, we conclude that there are three main absences not addressed by the current designs of cybersecurity architectures. These are absences of: consensus as to whose security is being addressed, evidence of equivalence between the mechanisms that control behaviour, and two-way legibility. We argue that by addressing these absences the foundations of trust and collaboration can be built which are necessary for effective cybersecurity. Our consideration of the case study within the context of sovereignty indicates that the design of the cybersecurity architecture and its concomitant service design has a significant bearing on the social contract between citizen and state. By taking this novel perspective new directions emerge for the understanding of the effectiveness of cybersecurity technologies.
An increasing number of scholars have begun to see science and technology as relevant issues in International Relations (IR), acknowledging the impact of material elements, technical instruments, and scientific practices on international security, statehood, and global governance. This two-volume collection brings the debate about science and technology to the center of International Relations. It shows how integrating science and technology translates into novel analytical frameworks, conceptual approaches and empirical puzzles, and thereby offers a state-of-the-art review of various methodological and theoretical ways in which sciences and technologies matter for the study of international affairs and world politics. The authors not only offer a set of practical examples of research frameworks for experts and students alike, but also propose a conceptual space for interdisciplinary learning in order to improve our understanding of the global politics of science and technology.
This first volume summarizes various time-tested approaches for studying the global politics of science and technology from an IR perspective. It also provides empirical, theoretical, and conceptual interventions from geography, history, innovation studies, and science and technology studies that indicate ways to enhance and rearticulate IR approaches. In addition, several interviews advance possibilities of multi-disciplinary collaboration.
Introduction to Symposium on Sovereignty, Cyberspace, and Tallinn Manual 2.0 - Volume 111 - Tom Ginsburg
Under Xi Jinping's leadership, China has actively promoted “Internet sovereignty” as a means to reshape the discourse and practices of global cyber governance. By analyzing Chinese-language literature, this article unpacks the Chinese discourse of Internet sovereignty. Despite significant interest in promoting it as China's normative position on cyberspace, we find that Chinese formulations of Internet sovereignty are fragmented, diverse, and underdeveloped. There are substantial disagreements and uncertainty over what Internet sovereignty is and how it can be put into practice. This is principally due to the evolving pattern of Chinese policy formation, whereby political ideas are often not clearly defined when first proposed by Chinese leaders. This article argues that an underdeveloped domestic discourse of Internet sovereignty has significantly restricted China's capacity to provide alternative norms in global cyberspace. Appreciating this ambiguity, diversity, and, sometimes, inconsistency is vital to accurate understanding of transformations in global cyber governance occasioned by China's rise.
The US approach to cybersecurity implicitly rests on an effects-based logic. That is, it presumes that the key question determining how the US and others will respond to attacks is what effects they have. Whether the effects come about as a result of cyber means or kinetic means is largely irrelevant. In this article, we explore this logic further, focusing on the question of when the US should deploy cyber responses and when kinetic. We find that under a simple effects-based logic, kinetic responses will often be more effective than cyber responses, although we explain that cyber attacks that 'leave something to chance’ may be an effective deterrent under some circumstances. We next develop a richer understandings of actors' expectations by employing the concepts of focal points and saliencies. In this framework, kinetic responses may be considered too escalatory, and therefore less attractive under many circumstances. If there are 'focal points' emerging, under which cyber attacks are seen as qualitatively distinct from kinetic attacks, then crossing a saliency may appear escalatory, even if the actual effects of the kinetic and cyber attackes are identifical. Finally, we examine nascent norms around cyber, suggesting that the US may wish to consider promoting a norm against large scale attacks on civilian infrastructure, and evaluating the prospects for a norm against cyber attacks on nuclear command and control systems.
"Nowhere does history indulge in repetitions so often or so uniformly as in Wall Street," observed legendary speculator Jesse Livermore. History tells us that periods of major technological innovation are typically accompanied by speculative bubbles as economic agents overreact to genuine advancements in productivity. Excessive run-ups in asset prices can have important consequences for the economy as firms and investors respond to the price signals, resulting in capital misallocation. On the one hand, speculation can magnify the volatility of economic and financial variables, thus harming the welfare of those who are averse to uncertainty and fluctuations. But on the other hand, speculation can increase investment in risky ventures, thus yielding benefits to a society that suffers from an underinvestment problem.
The Internet has transformed the manner in which information is exchanged and business is conducted, arguably more than any other communication development in the past century. Despite its wide reach and powerful global influence, it is a medium uncontrolled by any one centralized system, organization, or governing body, a reality that has given rise to all manner of free-speech issues and cybersecurity concerns. The conflicts surrounding Internet governance are the new spaces where political and economic power is unfolding in the twenty-first century. This book reveals the inner power structure already in place within the architectures and institutions of Internet governance. It provides a theoretical framework for Internet governance that takes into account the privatization of global power as well as the role of sovereign nations and international treaties. In addition, the book explores what is at stake in open global controversies and stresses the responsibility of the public to actively engage in these debates, because Internet governance will ultimately determine Internet freedom.
Do metaphors influence our information policy preferences? Professor Osenga thinks so, which makes it especially important to choose the right one, as a metaphor is often the primary tool the general public uses to understand information policy. Using a five-point rubric, she evaluates, among others, understanding the Internet as “tubes,” “highway,” “space (cyberspace),” “coffee shop/bar” and “cloud.” Osenga finds them all lacking in important ways. However, she believes the metaphor of the Internet as “ecosystem” is very promising and deserves to be further developed.
This chapter explores how the internet materializes in one of the most influential writings on cyberwar and international law, the Tallinn Manual on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Warfare. Based on the work of Molly Sauter, this chapter examines the metaphor used in the Manual to describe the internet, what effect this particular metaphor has, and at which points specific situations made possible by ‘cyberspace’ escape the confines of this particular metaphor.
This book assesses the impact of norms on decision-making. It argues that norms influence choices not by being causes for actions, but by providing reasons. Consequently it approaches the problem via an investigation of the reasoning process in which norms play a decisive role. Kratochwil argues that, depending upon the strictness the guidance norms provide in arriving at a decision, different styles of reasoning with norms can be distinguished. While the focus in this book is largely analytical, the argument is developed through the interpretation of the classic thinkers in international law (Grotius, Vattel, Pufendorf, Rousseau, Hume, Habermas).
This research applies a normative reading to 106 national cybersecurity strategies, most of them adopted after the cyberattacks against Estonia in 2007, an event that marked a strong shift toward securitisation of the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs). The paper identifies and discusses countries’ qualifications of afforded and expected standards of behaviour in the context of both national and international cybersecurity. The analysis is intended to contribute to the international debate around cybernorms and responsible behaviour in state use of ICTs.
In discussing the historical origins of sovereignty, Jens Bartelson (2018, 510) wrote, “Making sense of sovereignty . . . entails making sense of its component terms—supreme authority and territory—and how these terms were forged together into a concept.” The question of sovereignty in cyberspace, however, inverts this historical “forging together,” as territoriality and authority are sundered in cyberspace. This paper argues that attempts to apply sovereignty to cyberspace governance are inappropriate to the domain. It develops a technically grounded definition of “cyberspace” and examines its characteristics as a distinct domain for action, conflict, and governance, while clarifying its relationship to territoriality. It reviews the literature on cyberspace and sovereignty since the early 1990s, showing the emergence of explicitly pro-sovereigntist ideas and practices in the last ten years. The cyber-sovereignty debate is linked to IR research on the historical emergence of sovereignty, demonstrating how technologies routinely change the basis of international order and challenging the presumption that territorial sovereignty is a stable and uniform principle of international organization that can be presumptively applied to the internet. The paper also links the conceptual debate over cyber-sovereignty to the real-world geopolitical struggle over the governance of the internet, showing how different conceptions of sovereignty serve the interests of different powers, notably the United States, Russia, and China. The paper explores the relevance of an alternative governance model for cyberspace based on the global commons concept. It refutes the arguments made against that model and then explains what difference it might make to governance if we conceive of cyberspace in that way.
Norms for cyberspace remain highly contested internationally among governments and fragmented domestically within governments. Despite diplomatic activities at the United Nations over the past two decades, intersubjective agreement on norms governing coercive cyber power is still nascent. Agreed upon, explicitly stated norms are considered voluntary, defined vaguely, and internalized weakly. Implicit state practice is slowly emerging, yet poorly understood, and cloaked in secrecy. This raises the question: how do norms emerge for cyberspace? What has been the contribution of the UN process to the international community’s understanding of norms for cyberspace? Why did the process collapse in 2017, the very same year that two of the biggest cyber attacks to date—WannaCry and NotPetya—caused indiscriminate economic harm worldwide each with an estimated cost of several billion U.S. dollars? And why did member states, in an unprecedented move in the UN’s history, create two separate processes dedicated to the same issue in 2018? To answer these questions, this article analyses the various factors feeding into the dynamic process of norm contestation including an in-depth discussion of the process at the United Nations, the role of international law, and the main points of critiques.
Social Practices of Rule-Making in World Politics identifies a class of social practices of rule-making, interpretation, and application, demonstrating the causal importance of these practices (and the procedural rules that constitute and govern them) in explaining outcomes in world politics. The book utilizes rule-oriented and practice-turn constructivist approaches to argue that procedural rules about rule-making, or secondary rules, shape the way that actors present and evaluate proposals for change in the rules and institutions that structure international systems. The book examines four important international security cases: the social construction of great power management after the Napoleonic Wars; the creation of a rule against the use of force, except in cases of self-defense and collective security, enshrined in the Kellogg-Briand Pact; contestation of the international system by al-Qaeda in the period immediately following the 9/11 attacks; and United Nations efforts to establish norms for state conduct in the cyber domain. The book makes several contributions to International Relations theory. It provides insight into how actors know how and when to engage in specific forms of social construction. It extends the application of practice-turn constructivism to processes of making and interpreting rules. It improves upon existing tools to explain change in the rules and institutions of the international system. Finally, it demonstrates the utility of the book’s approach for the study of global governance, the international system, and for emerging efforts to identify forms and sites of authority and hierarchy in world politics.
During the two and a half decades leading up to the Russian cyber attacks on the 2016 U.S. presidential election, public policy discourse about cybersecurity typically framed cybersecurity using metaphors and analogies to war and tended to focus on catastrophic doom scenarios involving cyber attacks against critical infrastructure. In this discourse, the so-called “cyber Pearl Harbor” attack was always supposedly just around the corner. Since 2016, however, many have argued that fixation on cyber Pearl Harbor-like scenarios was an inaccurate framing that left the United States looking in the wrong direction when Russia struck. This essay traces the use of the cyber Pearl Harbor analogy and metaphor over the 25-year period preceding the Russian cyber attacks of 2016. It argues that cyber Pearl Harbor has been a consistent feature of U.S. cybersecurity discourse with a largely stable meaning focused on catastrophic physical impacts. Government officials have been primarily responsible for driving these concerns with news media uncritically transmitting their claims. This is despite the fact that such claims were often ambiguous about just who might carry out such an attack and often lacked supporting evidence.
This book makes a significant contribution to sociolegal analysis and also represents a valuable contribution to conceptual metaphor theory. By utilising the case of copyright in a digital context it explains the role that metaphor plays when the law is dealing with technological change, displaying both ‘conceptual path dependence’, normative implications of reusing already established concepts for new phenomena, as well as what is called non-legislative developments in the law. The analysis draws from conceptual studies of ‘property’ in intellectual property, and shows how the property regime of copyright is the projection of an older regime of control onto a new set of digital social relations. Moreover, through an analysis of the concept of ‘copy’ in copyright as well as the Swedish court case against the founders of the BitTorrent site The Pirate Bay, the author shows the historical and embodied dependence of digital phenomena in law, and the significance of metaphorical framing (for example, was The Pirate Bay a ‘platform’, a ‘storage service’ or a ‘bulletin board’?). The contribution is thereby relevant for how to understand the conceptual and regulatory dynamics of a multitude of contemporary sociodigital phenomena in addition to copyright and file-sharing. On an overarching level, it is here argued that the conceptual battles to define the Internet, as well as the implications of digital development, are significant battles for the role of law in society. There are conceptions in, and underlying, both law and digital architecture-that is, in the code.
The subfield of civil–military relations has experienced a remarkable revitalization in recent years, yielding a wealth of intriguing insights. Yet, despite these auspicious developments, research remains unnecessarily divided across multiple dimensions: along the subdisciplinary boundaries of comparative, international, and American politics; within these subdisciplines by independent and dependent variables; by regional focus; by regime type analyzed (democratic, democratizing versus authoritarian); and by scholars’ emphasis on normative versus positive analysis. This article aims to bridge existing divides and reduce fragmentation. It proposes several pathways forward, including proposing innovations in deductive theorizing, developing new analytical frameworks, and synthesizing and adjudicating empirical findings. It also suggests ways of bridging to research beyond the study of civil–military relations, such as that on the global phenomenon of democratic backsliding, the efficacy of nonviolent strategies of political struggle, military effectiveness, and the causes and outcomes of interstate war. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Political Science Volume 22 is May 13, 2019. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
An examination of the ways cyberspace is changing both the theory and the practice of international relations. Cyberspace is widely acknowledged as a fundamental fact of daily life in today's world. Until recently, its political impact was thought to be a matter of low politics—background conditions and routine processes and decisions. Now, however, experts have begun to recognize its effect on high politics—national security, core institutions, and critical decision processes. In this book, Nazli Choucri investigates the implications of this new cyberpolitical reality for international relations theory, policy, and practice. The ubiquity, fluidity, and anonymity of cyberspace have already challenged such concepts as leverage and influence, national security and diplomacy, and borders and boundaries in the traditionally state-centric arena of international relations. Choucri grapples with fundamental questions of how we can take explicit account of cyberspace in the analysis of world politics and how we can integrate the traditional international system with its cyber venues. After establishing the theoretical and empirical terrain, Choucri examines modes of cyber conflict and cyber cooperation in international relations; the potential for the gradual convergence of cyberspace and sustainability, in both substantive and policy terms; and the emergent synergy of cyberspace and international efforts toward sustainable development. Choucri's discussion is theoretically driven and empirically grounded, drawing on recent data and analyzing the dynamics of cyberpolitics at individual, state, international, and global levels.
This essay explores the ethical and legal implications of prioritizing the militarization of cyberspace as part of a roundtable on “Competing Visions for Cyberspace.” Our essay uses an ideal type—a world that accepts warfighting as the prime directive for the construction and use of cyberspace—and examines the ethical and legal consequences that follow for (i) who will have authority to regulate cyberspace; (ii) what vehicles they will most likely use to do so; and (iii) what the rules of behavior for states and stakeholders will be. We envision a world where states would take on a greater role in governance but remain constrained by law, including jus ad bellum and jus in bello criteria, but also sovereignty, nonintervention, and self-determination. We ask if the net result would mean states causing less harm than they do in kinetic conflicts. Ultimately, our essay takes no position on whether cyberspace should be a militarized domain (let alone one where warfighting is the prime directive). Rather, our goal is to situate a warfighting cyber domain within the reality of a pluralist cyberspace, where ethical imperatives compete or coalesce to support specific governance mechanisms.
The cyber revolution is the revolution of our time. The rapid expansion of cyberspace in society brings both promise and peril. It promotes new modes of political cooperation, but it also disrupts interstate dealings and empowers subversive actors who may instigate diplomatic and military crises. Despite significant experience with cyber incidents, the conceptual apparatus to analyze, understand, and address their effects on international order remains primitive. Here, Lucas Kello adapts and applies international relations theory to create new ways of thinking about cyber strategy. Kello draws on a broad range of case studies — including the Stuxnet operation against Iran, the cyberattacks against Sony Pictures, and the disruption of the 2016 U.S. presidential election — to make sense of the contemporary technological revolution. Synthesizing data from government documents, forensic reports of major events, and interviews with senior decision-makers, this important work establishes new theoretical benchmarks to help security experts revise strategy and policy for the unprecedented challenges of our era.
Purpose
This paper has two goals: 1) to clarify the relationship between cybersecurity governance and internet governance and 2) to explore the effects of the current tendency for cybersecurity-related discourse to dominate and change the way we approach the established problems of Internet governance.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper demonstrates the centrality of internet connectivity to any definition of cyberspace and to cyber security, which clarifies the way internet governance and cybersecurity governance are interdependent. Drawing on classic notions of a security dilemma, the paper also argues for distinguishing between national cybersecurity and societal cybersecurity.
Findings
Major structural features of the governance problem in cybersecurity and Internet governance are analogous. Joint production of Internet services and cybersecurity make them heavily interdependent. This means that cybersecurity governance and internet governance models need to be compatible, and the approach we take to one will influence how we approach the other.
Originality/value
The interdependence of cybersecurity governance and Internet governance has not been carefully examined before, and the relationship is not well understood. These two strands of thinking about cyberspace governance have not been properly connected. This paper bridges the gap and makes policy makers more aware of the potential tensions between a cybersecurity perspective and an Internet governance perspective.
Purpose
The empirical record of cyberattacks features much computer crime, espionage and hacktivism, but none of the major damage feared in prevalent threat narratives. The purpose of this article is to explain the absence of serious adverse consequences to date and the durability of this trend.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper combines concepts from international relations theory and new institutional economics to understand cyberspace as a complex global institution with contracts embodied in both software code and human practice. Constitutive inefficiencies (market and regulatory failure) and incomplete contracts (generative features and unintended flaws) create the vulnerabilities that hackers exploit. Cyber conflict is a form of cheating within the rules, rather than an anarchic struggle, more like an intelligence-counterintelligence contest than traditional war.
Findings
Cyber conflict is restrained by the collective sociotechnical constitution of cyberspace, where actors must cooperate to compete. Maintenance of common protocols and open access is a condition for the possibility of attack, and successful deceptive exploitation of these connections becomes more difficult in politically sensitive situations as defense and deterrence become more feasible. The distribution of cyber conflict is, thus, bounded vertically in severity but unbounded horizontally in the potential for creative exploitation.
Originality/value
Cyber conflict can be understood with familiar political economic concepts applied in fresh ways. This application provides counterintuitive insights at odds with prevalent threat narratives about the likelihood and magnitude of cyber conflict. It also highlights the important advantages of strong states over the weaker non-state actors widely thought to be empowered by cyberspace.
The now-classic Metaphors We Live By changed our understanding of metaphor and its role in language and the mind. Metaphor, the authors explain, is a fundamental mechanism of mind, one that allows us to use what we know about our physical and social experience to provide understanding of countless other subjects. Because such metaphors structure our most basic understandings of our experience, they are "metaphors we live by"--metaphors that can shape our perceptions and actions without our ever noticing them.
In this updated edition of Lakoff and Johnson's influential book, the authors supply an afterword surveying how their theory of metaphor has developed within the cognitive sciences to become central to the contemporary understanding of how we think and how we express our thoughts in language.
On February 16, 2016, a U.S. court ordered Apple to circumvent the security features of an iPhone 5C used by one of the terrorists who committed the San Bernardino shootings. Apple refused. It argued that breaking encryption for one phone could not be done without undermining the security of encryption more generally. It made a public appeal for “everyone to step back and consider the implications” of having a “back door” key to unlock any phone—which governments (and others) could deploy to track users or access their data. The U.S. government eventually withdrew its suit after the F.B.I. hired an outside party to access the phone. But the incident sparked a wide-ranging debate over the appropriate standards of behavior for companies like Apple and for their customers in constructing and using information and communication technologies (ICTs). That debate, in turn, is part of a much larger conversation. Essential as the Internet is, “rules of the road” for cyberspace are often unclear and have become the focus of serious conflicts.
What are the dynamics of coercion in cyberspace? Can states use cyber means as independent tools of coercion to influence the behavior of adversaries? This article critically assesses traditional coercion theory in light of cyberspace's emergence as a domain in which states use force, or its threat, to achieve political objectives. First, we review the core tenets of coercion theory and identify the requisites of successful coercion: clearly communicated threats; a cost–benefit calculus; credibility; and reassurance. We subsequently explore the extent to which each of these is feasible for or applicable to the cyber domain, highlighting how the dynamics of coercion in cyberspace mimic versus diverge from traditional domains of warfare. We demonstrate that cyber power alone has limited effectiveness as a tool of coercion, although it has significant utility when coupled with other elements of national power. Second, this article assesses the viability and effectiveness of six prominent warfighting strategies in the traditional coercion literature as applied to the cyber domain: attrition, denial, decapitation, intimidation, punishment, and risk. We conclude that, based on the current technological state of the field, states are only likely to achieve desired objectives employing attrition, denial, or decapitation strategies. Our analysis also has unique implications for the conduct of warfare in cyberspace. Perhaps counterintuitively, the obstacles to coercion that our analysis identifies may prompt states to reevaluate norms against targeting civilian infrastructure.
Do metaphors influence our information policy preferences? Professor Osenga thinks so, which makes it especially important to choose the right one, as a metaphor is often the primary tool the general public uses to understand information policy. Using a five-point rubric, she evaluates, among others, understanding the Internet as “tubes,” “highway,” “space (cyberspace),” “coffee shop/bar” and “cloud.” Osenga finds them all lacking in important ways. However, she believes the metaphor of the Internet as “ecosystem” is very promising and deserves to be further developed.
Nicholas Onuf is a leading scholar in international relations and introduced constructivism to international relations, coining the term constructivism in his book World of Our Making (1989). He was featured as one of twelve scholars featured in Iver B. Neumann and Ole Wæver, eds., The Future of International Relations: Masters in the Making? (1996); and featured in Martin Griffiths, Steven C. Roach and M. Scott Solomon, Fifty Key Thinkers in International Relations, 2nd ed. (2009). This powerful collection of essays clarifies Onuf's approach to international relations and makes a decisive contribution to the debates in IR concerning theory. It embeds the theoretical project in the wider horizon of how we understand ourselves and the world. Onuf updates earlier themes and his general constructivist approach, and develops some newer lines of research, such as the work on metaphors and the re-grounding in much more Aristotle than before. A complement to the author's groundbreaking book of 1989, World of Our Making, this tightly argued book draws extensively from philosophy and social theory to advance constructivism in International Relations. Making Sense, Making Worlds will be vital reading for students and scholars of international relations, international relations theory, social theory and law.