2011 IAP Seminar: Explorations in Cyber International Relations
2011 IAP Seminar: Explorations in Cyber International Relations
Seminar: Explorations in Cyber International Relations
Nazli Choucri, David Clark, & Daniel Goldsmith
Wednesday, January 12 - Thursday, January 13
Level: 3 units
This class explores the near- and long-term threats and opportunities in cyberspace for national security, welfare, and influence. In international relations, the traditional approaches to theory and research, practice, and policy were derived from experiences in the 19th and 20th centuries. But cyberspace, shaped by human ingenuity, is a venue for social interaction, an environment for social communication, and an enabler of new mechanisms for power and leverage. In short, cyberspace creates new conditions-problems and opportunities-for which there are no clear precedents in human history.
This class will explore new challenges to theory and policy from the emergence of cyberspace. Class highlights include: interaction with new tools and simulators for understanding cyber data and dynamics, lectures on the future of communication technologies and internet policy, and background on emerging cyber politics.
Suggested readings:
"Introduction: CyberPolitics in International Relations"
Nazli Choucri
International Political Science Review 2000 21: 243
This issue of the International Political Science Review is devoted to new challenges and opportunities-as well as attendant problems-created by new information and communication technologies and applications in political science, with special attention to implications for international relations. The challenges are shaped in large part by the convergence of three trends: globalization, world-wide electronic connectivity, and emergent practices in knowledge networking. Increasingly, this convergence is reinforcing the role of knowledge in the global economy and in power politics. While each of these trends, individually, is having an impact on social discourse and modes of interaction, jointly they may be shaping powerful new parameters of politics, both nationally and internationally. They may also affect our ways of generating and managing knowledge, creating new knowledge, and even framing or re-framing the core concepts in political science. Central among these concepts,!
of course, are power, politics, representation, accountability, conflict, contention, and a host of others. In the context of the broader social sciences, these trends are also transforming traditional knowledge practices, creating new research modes, and accelerating "new knowledge." It would certainly be misleading, if not dangerous, to overestimate the meaning or impact of these developments; it would be also unwise to err in the opposite direction, by underestimating the matters at hand. In the absence of a clear precedent-and established methods for dealing with such uncertainties-the most reasonable course is to sample the nature of these developments, establish baselines to the extent possible, and record some key milestones in both the scholarly and the policy communities as they manage adjustments to these convergent trends.
Link: http://ips.sagepub.com/content/21/3/243.full.pdf+html
"Tussle in Cyberspace: Defining Tomorrow's Internet"
David D. Clark, John Wroclawski, Karen R. Sollins and Robert Braden IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking. Vol. 13, No. 3, June 2005
The architecture of the Internet is based on a number of principles, including the self-describing datagram packet, the end-to-end arguments, diversity in technology and global addressing. As the Internet has moved from a research curiosity to a recognized component of mainstream society, new requirements have emerged that suggest new design principles, and perhaps suggest that we revisit some old ones. This paper explores one important reality that surrounds the Internet today: different stakeholders that are part of the Internet milieu have interests that may be adverse to each other, and these parties each vie to favor their particular interests. We call this process "the tussle." Our position is that accommodating this tussle is crucial to the evolution of the network's technical architecture. We discuss some examples of tussle, and offer some technical design principles that take it into account.
"Institutional Foundations for Cyber Security: Current Responses and New Challenges"
Jeremy Ferwerda, Nazli Choucri, Stuart Madnick Working Paper CISL# 2009-03. September 2010
This paper profiles institutions that are responsible for addressing threats to cyber security. Rather than focusing primarily on the private sector, we analyze key organizations at the national, international, and intergovernmental level. Our purpose is to highlight emerging responses and challenges, while simultaneously evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of the current institutional framework. A secondary goal is to investigate the feasibility of using quantitative data to evaluate cyber security performance.
Link: https://projects.csail.mit.edu/ecir/wiki/images/a/a9/Madnick_2010-03(2).pdf
"Cyber Power" <https://projects.csail.mit.edu/ecir/wiki/images/d/da/Nye_Cyber_Powe1.pdf>
Joseph S. Nye, Jr.
February 15, 2010
Power depends upon context, and the rapid growth of cyber space is an important new context in world politics. The low price of entry, anonymity, and asymmetries in vulnerability means that smaller actors have more capacity to exercise hard and soft power in cyberspace than in many more traditional domains of world politics. Changes in information have always had an important impact on power, but the cyber domain is both a new and a volatile manmade environment. The characteristics of cyberspace reduce some of the power differentials among actors, and thus provide a good example of the diffusion of power that typifies global politics in this century. The largest powers are unlikely to be able to dominate this domain as much as they have others like sea or air. But cyberspace also illustrates the point that diffusion of power does not mean equality of power or the replacement of governments as the most powerful actors in world politics.
Link: https://projects.csail.mit.edu/ecir/wiki/images/d/da/Nye_Cyber_Powe1.pdf
"Characterizing cyberspace: past, present and future"
David Clark
Version 1.2: March 12, 2010
In general terms, most practitioners share a working concept of cyberspace-it is the collection of computing devices connected by networks in which electronic information is stored and utilized, and communication takes place. Another way to understand the nature of cyberspace is to articulate its purpose, which I will describe as the processing, manipulation and exploitation of information, the facilitation and augmentation of communication among people, and the interaction of people and information. Both information and people are central to the power of cyberspace. If we seek a better understanding of what cyberspace might be, one approach is to identify its salient characteristics: a catalog of its characteristics may be more useful than a list of competing definitions.
