CYBERPOLITICS, a recently coined term, refers to the conjunction of two processes or realities those pertaining to traditional human contentions for power and influence (politics) surrounding the determination of who gets what, when, and how, and those enabled by a constructed domain (cyber) as a new arena of human interaction with its own modalities, realities, and contentions.

            Created with the Internet at its core, cyberspace is a fact of daily life. Until recently, this arena of virtual interaction was considered largely a matter of low politics the routine, background, and relatively non-contentious. Today cyberspace and its uses have vaulted into the highest realm of high politics. It has become a venue of unprecedented opportunity, a source of vulnerability, a disturbance in the familiar international order, and a venue of potential threat to national security.

            Individually, each feature is at variance with our common understanding of social reality. Jointly, they create powerful disconnects that impinge upon, if not contradict, the concept of sovereignty and the vertical structures of power and influence. So too, the traditional systems of international relations generally framed in hierarchical power relations bipolar, multipolar, or unipolar structures may not be congruent with these new cyber features with the increasing diversity of individual, groups, and non-state voices and influence in an international context characterized by decentralization, localization, and diverse asymmetries in modes of leverages, power, and influence.

In short, the dramatic expansion of cyber access worldwide, the growth in voicing, global civil society, and the new economic and political opportunities afforded by cyberspace are critical drivers of the ongoing realignments. And, most important of all, they have already assumed constitutive features of their own. At the same time, however, some of the emergent features of the 21st century state system are reflected in the cyber domain as well.

   international relations

The expansion of cyber access has already influenced the Westphalian state-based international system in powerful ways. Among the notable impacts are the following:

New challenges to national security, from sources of vulnerability without precedent (cyber threats), new dimensions of national security (cyber security) coupled with uncertainty, fear, and threat from unknown sources (attribution problem).

 Novel types of asymmetries shift traditional power relations and create new opportunities for weaker actors to threaten stronger ones, for various uses of cyber-anonymity, for new cyber venues of political, industrial or military activity, and for expansion of criminal activities to note only a few examples.

 Diverse forms of cyber conflicts and contentions create new challenges to the stability and security of the state system, such as the militarization of cyberspace, the conduct of cyber warfare, threats to critical infrastructures, undetected cyber espionage and so on.

Empowerment of new actors some with clear identities and others without but all with opportunities for growth. Among these are national entities that exercise access control or denial, non-state commercial entities with new products and processes, agents operating as proxies for state actors, new novel criminal groups often too varied to track and too anonymous to identify—over and above the emergence of new and unregulated markets.

 Unprecedented and unexpected power of institutions for cyber management, largely private entities created specifically to enable and manage cyber interactions (such as Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers and Internet Engineering Task Force), or to help support cyber security (such as Consortium for Electric Reliability Technology Solutions).

 Significant push back by traditional international institutions (such as the International Telecommunications Union) that question the legitimacy of the new institutions for management of cyberspace.

New demand for cyber cooperation to contain the growth of cyber conflicts further reinforced by a growing push for framing global cyber norms.

 Increased density of decision makers for cyber domain with unclear mandates and overlapping job descriptions create new ambiguities that obscure responsibility, question legitimacy, and enhance uncertainty.

The new coupling of politics in the traditional and cyber domains shape new strategies based for cross-domain leverage and bargaining that are seldom consistent with conventional practice.

             The transformative effects of cyber access permeate all levels of analysis in international relations the individual, the state, the international system, and the global system including transnational and non-state actors, for profit and not for profit.

BY MADELEMO HARDSON -BAPRM 42694