Tools of engagement: Mapping the tussles in cyberspace

Abstract

This paper has been prepared as part of the Explorations in Cyber International Relations project being carried out at MIT, Harvard and collaborating institutions. The goal of this paper is to lay the groundwork for the exploration of a fundamental thesis of the project: that the emergence of cyberspace as a phenomenon has shifted the motivations of the various actors that play on the international stage, it has added to the “tools of engagement” that these actors use as they interact, and it has created or empowered new sorts of actors that must now be taken into account in any theory of international relations. This paper, which should at this point be seen as a working draft, incomplete and anecdotal rather than scholarly and thorough, attempts to catalog by example the range of actors and the tools they use as they interact around and in cyberspace. Through these anecdotes, I illustrate classes of actors who either have a motivation to shape cyberspace, or who seem to have undergone a shift in power (up or down) by the emergence of cyberspace, and who are responding to or exploiting this situation. Using various examples, we can start to catalog some of the means by which different actors can exercise influence in cyberspace, and as well understand the new actors that seem to have significant power to influence. At a high level, we want to explore three related questions. 1.1 • • • What are the tools of influence, both direct and indirect, and to what extent does cyberspace create distinctive behavior? Is there anything new? Are there new actors that appear as players in the space of influence—actors that a traditional state actor would not regularly expect to deal with? When influence is exercises, what actors are the preferred targets of that influence?