What to Read: International Relations in Cyber Security

With the release of the much-anticipated Tallinn Manual 2.0, some additional attention is focused on the difficult questions of international law in cyberspace. In an effort to help untangle this dense and complex field, we’ve assembled a curated list of over 150 publications covering cyber security in the context of international relations for the Oxford University Press, available here.

The curated list includes over 150 publications, each with a short commentary explaining its focus and value, divided into the following categories each preceded by a short introductory text.

We have focused primarily on publications relating to international security and conflict and only included a couple of works focusing specifically on cybercrime and surveillance, for example (we recommended stand-alone articles on each to Oxford). We should also point out that because this list was complete in the summer of 2016, it list does not include publications that have been published since (for example, Ben Buchanan’s ‘The Cyber Security Dilemma’.) The following categories are covered:

• General Overviews
• Journals
• Online Resources and Blogs
• International-Relations Perspectives on Cybersecurity
• Cyberthreats and Cyberrisks
• Geopolitics of Cybersecurity
• Laws, Norms, and Response Mechanisms in Cybersecurity
• International Institutions

Our curated list differs from existing lists—such the Congressional Research Service’s list of authoritative reports or this list by CSIS published in July 2016—in two ways. First, we added a short description of each text to facilitate identifying which publication is of greatest interest to the individual user. Second, after compiling an initial list of 200+ publications, we reached out to a dozen experts from around the world—including scholars in China, India, France, Russia, and Switzerland—asking each for his or her Top Ten list of publications on cybersecurity in the context of international relations. This process served two objectives: it minimized selection bias by asking experts from around the globe for input and the Top Ten limitation to help prioritize and choose among our initial list. You can also find several publications by scholars in China, Russia, and Israel, for example, to also include perspectives from other countries (but limited to English-language texts).

Typically, articles included in Oxford Bibliographies are behind a paywall, but from February 13 through March 5, 2017, Oxford University Press has agreed to make our article available for free. Interest in the international dimension of cybersecurity has arguably never been greater, so we hope this resource will be useful to policy- and decision-makers alike, as well as scholars in academia and think tanks or members of the general public who dare to dive into the abyss of international cyber/information security.