Artificial Intelligence and International Conflict in Cyberspace

This edited volume explores how artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming international conflict in cyberspace. Over the past three decades, cyberspace developed into a crucial frontier and issue of international conflict. However, scholarly work on the relationship between AI and conflict in cyberspace has been produced along somewhat rigid disciplinary boundaries and an even more rigid sociotechnical divide – wherein technical and social scholarship are seldomly brought into a conversation. This is the first volume to address these themes through a comprehensive and cross-disciplinary approach. With the intent of exploring the question ‘what is at stake with the use of automation in international conflict in cyberspace through AI?’, the chapters in the volume focus on three broad themes, namely: (1) technical and operational, (2) strategic and geopolitical and (3) normative and legal. These also constitute the three parts in which the chapters of this volume are organised, although these thematic sections should not be considered as an analytical or a disciplinary demarcation

Artificial intelligence and international conflict in cyberspace: Exploring three sets of issues

What is at stake with the use of automation in international conflict in cyberspace through AI? This introductory chapter outlines the main themes, objectives, and rationale of the volume with the ambition of delineating a comprehensive perspective on the relationship between AI and international conflict in cyberspace. It does so by introducing the three sets of issues around which the volume has been organised: (1) technical and operational, (2) strategic and geopolitical, and (3) normative and legal. By highlighting the main debates for each of these issues, this chapter also contextualises the volume’s contributions into broader debates about challenges and opportunities brought by AI technology. In so doing, the chapter argues that only by understanding the relationship between AI and conflict in cyberspace as a comprehensive phenomenon and embedded in broader geopolitical conflicts, can the international community truly move forward with meaningful regulation. In its concluding part, this chapter also draws a state-of-the-art account of how the debate on emerging technologies, and AI specifically, has (not) evolved in the context of the recent multilateral processes at the United Nations (GGE and OEWG)

Droit international et normes pour le cyberespace : Ambiguïtés et instrumentalisation géopolitique

Le droit international et les normes de comportement responsable sont au coeur des discussions onusiennes sur les progrès de la téléinformatique dans le contexte de la sécurité internationale. L’objet du présent article est donc d’analyser la place du droit international, et de donner des pistes de réflexions à ce sujet, dans le cadre des deux processus en cours à l’Onu – le Groupe de travail à composition non limitée (gtcnl) et le Groupe d’experts gouvernementaux chargés d’examiner les progrès de la téléinformatique dans le contexte de la sécurité internationale (geg) –, et d’expliciter la façon dont le droit international est instrumentalisé dans les présentes négociations. Dans un premier temps, il expliquera dans quel contexte sont nés ces deux processus et quels sont leurs mandats respectifs. Dans un deuxième temps, il discutera de l’ambiguïté – voire de la confusion – sur le rôle des normes et du droit international dans la régulation du cyberespace et des motivations géopolitiques qui la sous-tendent.International law and norms of responsible behaviour play a central role in un-led processes on Developments in the Field of icts in the Context of International Security. The purpose of this article is therefore to analyse –and provide insights on– the place of international law in the context of the ungge and oewg, and to explain how international law is being instrumentalized in the present discussions. Firstly, it will explain the context in which these two processes were established and their respective mandates. Secondly, it will discuss the ambiguity –or even confusion– about the role of norms and international law in the regulation of cyberspace and the geopolitical motivations behind it

Contested Spatialities of Digital Sovereignty

“Digital sovereignty” has become a buzzword in digital policies. Contrary to the imaginary of digital transformation as preceding an era of limitless global networking in the 1990s, approaches to state regulation and delimitation of data flows as well as programmes for national digital infrastructures are justified with calls for digital sovereignty across very different contexts. This forum brings together contributions from political geography, law, computer science, and ethics that compare and analyse discourses and practices of digital sovereignty. The case studies on Russia and the EU reveal parallels as well as fundamental differences in the conception and implementation of digital sovereignty. Essays on the challenges posed by new forms of cross-border interaction (such as cloud computing) and new actors (such as digital platforms) illustrate that the traditional coupling of concepts of sovereignty, territoriality and the state, of jurisdiction and borders, must be rethought. The essays in this forum thus make it clear that the digital transformation is not simply a socio-technical modernisation process. It is rather shaped in specific ways and should be understood and analysed as (geo)-political discourses and practices. The forum contributes to the development of a political digital geography that analyses how the digital transformation is contested and produced in specific ways and unearths the politics and spatialities conceived and produced in these discourses and practices