Bring the State Back In: Conflict and Cooperation Among States in Cybersecurity

This article analyzes the limitation of cooperation and the expansion of conflict between states in cyberspace. Like traditional security spaces around the world, global cyberspace is also an anarchy system with no absolute authority or institutional status. In such a situation, based on cyber sovereignty and cyber power, the state tries to create an institution applicable to domestic and international cyberspace to make a cyber system favorable to the state itself. Since, unlike traditional power, cyber power has both material and non-material elements, a state cannot know the level of another state's cyber power. For this reason, conflicts among states in the cyber domain are intensifying. The most active states competing for the upper hand in cyberspace are the United States and China. They lead to different levels of recognition and strategies concerning the cyber domain. While the competition between the United States and China invites conflict, it also triggers temporary cooperation among states. The UN's cybersecurity activities are also fragmented by various inter-government institutions and management organizations. However, the differences in strategy between the United States and China affect other states. Ultimately, although the direction of discussions on cybersecurity has been set based on the Group of Government Experts activities in the UN and the need for inter-state cooperation has been acknowledged, such cooperation would be only temporary because states consider domestic policy and strategy to be more important than international or regional cooperative organizations.