知识、技术、地理、军事等要素与智缘政治和地缘政治的关系

国际关系学界关于人工智能的研究已拉开序幕，但既有论述难以跳出探讨历次工业和科技革命时的悲观逻辑。为此以建构主义理论作为研究框架，本文分析并展望人工智能对于国际关系中观念和文化变革的意义，并引出对人工智能时代公共外交的迷思：在未来，跨国行为体将是公共外交的重点对象，公共外交必须积极培育并迎合人工智能发展的建构优势；人工智能时代的数据决策和媒介化社会带来团体施动性的异化，将挑战公共外交的可行性和效用；在人工智能对于国际体系文化的冲击中，传递以互助共享为核心的人工智能观、推动康德文化的演进将是公共外交的新使命。迷思的价值取决于分析视野和具体实践，学界应重点考量人工智能的哲学与文化内涵，发掘其中显在或潜在的和平学价值。

鸦片战争期间，中国出现了边疆危机，桐城派学人走出书斋，倡导经世之学，对经学、史学、教育学和边疆史地学等诸多领域进行探索，并取得了显著成果。桐城派学人的世界史观由“天下”演变成“万国”，尤以姚莹的边疆史三部曲和王树楠的史学编纂为代表。桐城派学人关注时政，强调学以致用，力求为民安邦，通几质测，迁都建藩，皆有论撰，呼吁人民认清鸦片的危害，严禁鸦片贸易。桐城派学人的边疆史地学和世界史观主要有三个特征，一是因势而变的历史观；二是治史以致用的务实性；三是中西汇通的学术思想。桐城派学人对边疆史地研究和其进化的世界史观中富含生命活力的珍贵因素。

本文回顾了人类文明从原始社会、农业社会、工业社会、信息社会直至智能社会的发展历史，指出科技进步在文明提升中的决定性作用，从能源、食品、健康、制造、信息、交通、环境七大维度讨论了科技的发展趋势并确定文明等级划分的标准。在能源维度上，采用能量利用形式的划分标准可以补充卡尔达舍夫等级划分标准的不足。协作维度是文明的核心和底座，是科技进步的源泉和动力。从人人和谐到人机和谐再到生态和谐，构建现代化的生态文明是人类文明发展的必经途径，也是达成人与自然和谐共生的可持续发展的必然要求。

截至2020年1月底，中国已同140个国家(地区)和30个国际组织签署200份共建“一带一路”合作文件，多个国际合作项目落地，在肯定“一带一路”战略受到国际认同和取得一定成果的同时，也要意识到当前“一带一路”战略面临外部性、结构性和波动性风险。如何选取“一带一路”沿线战略支点实现战略资源精准投放和有效对接，确保支点国家和重点项目优先发展，是当前头等大事。现阶段学术界对“支点国家”的讨论取得了相应的进展，然而对“支点国家”做严格学术分析定义和制定判别标准的研究仍较为缺失。以上问题，本文试图从全新的视角，通过具体的理论，分析支点国家的概念；并根据新的界定方法，综合选取、甄别、筛选出“一带一路”沿线支点国家指标体系，并提出双边未来重点合作方向，期待在这一新框架下，展开更深入的关于支点国家的理论与实证研究。

我国周边地缘结构复杂。我国西北部毗邻广阔的中亚地区。中亚地区多民族、多文化交叠，对我国国家安全构成一定威胁；同时，中亚地区对保障我国能源供给起着十分重要的作用。近年来，美国中亚南亚政策的调整、大国在这一地区的“博弈”、经济领域的侵害、文化领域的渗透、“三股势力”的活动等，严重影响我国的国家安全。为了应对这一局势，我国要借助“上海合作组织”这一多边合作平台，加强与各相关国家的合作，防止“东突”势力与国际反华势力、“三股势力”暗中勾结，破坏中国与中亚国家的关系。防止大国在中亚的军事争夺演化成对中国的直接安全威胁。积极参与中亚石油生产和经营活动，避免中亚形势发展对中国能源安全造成重大冲击。发挥新丝绸之路的地缘战略价值，坚持中国的西部开发、开放和发展，辐射带动中亚地区的振兴和繁荣。加强与俄罗斯的睦邻友好关系，利用两国地缘上毗邻的有利条件，背靠对方，形成地缘政治合力，以对付共同面临的各种问题和威胁，争取最大的战略回旋余地和安全利益。加强与邻国的和平地缘外交，维护邻国的稳定，构筑中国的和平安全环境。

地缘政治学在西方发展历经百年，经世致用的学科特征带来这一学科的快速发展。新世纪以来国际格局变迁加快地缘政治在中国快速发展。文章运用Citespace软件定量分析中国新世纪以来地缘政治学研究进展。结果表明：新世纪以来中国地缘政治研究主要集中在国际关系与国际格局、能源安全与资源争夺、区域经济合作与地缘经济、国家主权维护和边疆治理、地缘政治理论构建几个方面；“一带一路倡议”成为当前地缘政治研究的重要发展趋势。

本文的研究问题是：面对遏制风险，历史上德意志第二帝国在前期崛起过程中靠着俾斯麦独创的大陆联盟政策取得了成功，凭借哪些因素塑造了这一成功的对外政策？本文结合新古典现实主义大战略的整体框架，基于地缘政治学的相关理论学说，在首次提出战略主权理论，解释变量包括：技术变革与大国间战略关系所深刻影响下的战略自主性：战略主权(自变量)，领导人对战略自主性的整体认知：主权知觉(中介变量)，以及国家的战略选择：国家对外政策(因变量)。通过过程追踪法基于“基辛根口述备忘录” (1877)为线索对大陆联盟政策进行案例验证。得出相关结论即：大陆联盟政策的目的就是帮助德意志第二帝国追求战略主权，之所以成功是因为俾斯麦对于德国既有战略主权的清晰认知。该历史经验对当今中国有巨大的启示。

地缘环境研究是中国地缘政治学近十余年来取得实质较大发展的一个重要研究领域，被认为是复兴中国地缘政治学，开展中国独立自主研究地缘政治学的重要标志。本文在已有理论与案例研究基础上总结分析地缘环境研究的本体论、认识论和方法论，并得出以下结论：(1) 地缘环境是行为体所在地理环境及其所决定的地缘关系和地缘结构的集合，它由地理环境、地缘关系和地缘结构组成。它的学理基础包括地缘政治学、国际关系学、地理学、历史学、社会学和经济学等。(2) 国内学者对于地缘环境已开展过较为丰富的研究，包括国别、地区地缘环境解析，海洋地缘环境解析，以及以地缘环境为视角解析国内外地缘政治问题等。(3) 地缘环境分析路径为跨尺度耦合、跨领域互动和多元地缘体博弈分析。

蒙古国所处的地理位置使其极具地缘战略价值。2015年蒙古国总统在联大宣布实施“永久中立”政策，旨在不冒犯中俄两国的基础上，最大程度地保留与“第三邻国”的关系，获取他国对其安全与战略利益的承诺与保障。然而，该政策很快遭到废除，中立战略被搁置。本文试图以前景理论为分析框架，考察蒙古国选择中立战略的动因，从风险预警下的“历史包袱”、框架效应下的威胁感知、沉没成本效应中的国内政治三方面解读国家的心理因素，并通过分析中立面临的国外大国博弈、国内政治斗争、综合实力不足的三重困境，得出蒙古国难成地缘战略调节点的观点，进而推导出应首先确保国内政策连贯性，并以建设中俄国际运输通道、发展生态旅游业为基点，着力进行经济与民生建设等发展出路。

印度越来越重视印度洋的地位和作用，南下政策作为其海洋战略的重要部分，一直在积极推进当中。而印度洋小岛国战略地位重要，被印度视为其南下政策的重要支点，因此积极发展与其关系。印度希望实现其主导印度洋的雄心，增强在本地区的存在，为此通过政治、经济、军事和文化等多重手段发展与其关系，试图增强印度的影响力，助力其大国雄心的实现。这将对我国的安全和政策产生一系列影响。

能源安全是国家总体安全观的重要组成部分。基于战略考虑，中国在加强海上能源通道安全保障的同时，也着力规划和构建陆上能源通道，西部地区则是国家的重点布局方向。本文在风险计量表达式的基础上，从微观和宏观视角选取安全风险指标，基于AHP-PCA加权模型进行系统评估。结果表明中哈原油管道安全风险概率最低，中巴伊管道安全风险概率最高。再将能源设计输送量记为损失，得到中国–中亚天然气管道A/B/C段安全风险最大，中哈原油管道安全风险最小。建议完善国家能源数据库建设，加强对沿线国家风险概率系统评估，计算国家可承受风险，以此规划各线路的设计输送量。

冷战结束后，印度适时调整对缅甸的外交政策，两国开启了能源外交的历程。此后两国不断加强能源领域的交流与合作。在这场能源外交中，双方均有各自的利益诉求，并通过切实的合作部分地满足了自身的需求。印度与缅甸的能源交流与合作对保障两国能源安全、推动经济社会发展以及维护国家利益等方面以及地区局势均产生了重要影响，并且还波及到了中国，可能加剧中国与印度在本地区的经济博弈与竞争。

中国参与北极事务的法律依据包括国际国内两个层面。一方面，中国在国际上积极参与北极法律体系的构建，不断推动北极治理机制的完善；另一方面，国内的北极立法进程已经起步，但相对不断丰富的北极活动而言稍显滞后。2018年出台的《中国北极政策白皮书》既阐明了中国在北极问题上的立场，也提出了具有中国特色的北极政策。同时，北极地缘冲突不断加剧，北极地区呈现出新态势。作为北极利益攸关方的中国应秉持“尊重、合作、共赢、可持续”的基本原则，立足本国，以政策促法律，加快北极问题的法治建设，积极应对北极变化带来的挑战，为北极地区的和平发展做出贡献。

日本对外发动的侵略战争是利用武力推行强权地缘政治，实质上是利用武力强行和欧美俄等列强争夺势力范围，瓜分世界各国宝贵的矿产资源。二战后，日本经济遭受了毁灭性的打击 ...

数据作为当前全球经济的关键驱动力正变得越来越重要。数据治理和全球数据的跨境流动给全球治理带来了重大挑战。国际数据协议必须嵌入到二战后布雷顿森林体系所强调的“基于规则”的国际秩序中，以便于管理全球经济的发展。然而，全球跨境数据流动的治理规则却变得越来越复杂，国家和国际组织作为全球数据治理中的主要行为体，在不同利益和国际规则下对跨境数据流动的管理表现出了巨大的差异性，这使得全球数据的跨境流动受到不同情况的阻碍。

自罗伯特•基欧汉与约瑟夫•奈阐明“我们在一个相互依赖的时代”以来，相互依赖成为学术界非常流行的术语(buzzword)，关于相互依赖的讨论也如火如荼，复合相互依赖也成为论述国家间关系和超国家(supranational)关系的主体理论之一。随着全球化和相互依赖加深的21世纪的到来，许多学者曾做出预测，认为全球化与复合相互依赖状态的加深将会促使国际体系更加稳定，但随着以5G技术与人工智能领域为代表的新一轮科技革命以及新冠疫情的到来，世界政治仿佛重现了新现实主义所认为的冲突性特征。由欧盟出台的数字税提案引发的美欧在数字产业领域产生的战略博弈，体现了美欧在紧密相互依赖的状态下依然会在某一问题领域产生冲突和分歧。在这样的背景下，本文以国际政治经济学理论的视角，对相互依赖的产生与发展机制，美欧在紧密相互依赖状态下为什么会出现数字税博弈以及在非对称相互依赖下美欧数字税博弈的特征与发展趋势进行分析。

随着数字技术的快速发展，数字贸易已成为全球经济增长的重要引擎。美国和欧盟通过自由贸易协定(FTA)构建了高标准的数字贸易规则体系，分别形成了以自由化为核心的“美式模板”和以隐私保护与文化多样性为重点的“欧式模板”。美国数字贸易规则强调数据自由流动和数字产品非歧视待遇，而欧盟数字贸易规则注重隐私保护和文化例外，双方在核心理念和具体条款上存在显著分歧。基于此，中国在构建数字贸易规则时应坚持“发展与安全并重”，平衡数据流动自由与数据安全，借鉴文化例外条款维护文化多样性，并采取灵活的关税政策支持数字产业升级。同时，中国应积极参与全球数字贸易规则制定，推动建立更加公平、包容的国际数字贸易秩序。

2022年俄乌冲突之后，美国将美元武器化的行为进一步削弱了其国际信用，去美元浪潮在全球兴起，国际货币体系朝向多极化发展，同时，各国的央行数字货币的研究进程稳步向前。从国际货币竞争的角度分析央行数字货币的出现对货币国际化的影响，得出央行数字货币将加剧未来国际货币竞争和导致货币竞争空间变化的结论，进而在国际法层面探求通过数字人民币推进人民币国际化的路径，例如可以《区域全面经济伙伴关系协定》(RCEP)新金融条款作为依托，加强与RCEP成员马来西亚、新加坡、泰国的央行数字货币合作等。

国际金融体系以美元为核心，美元主导的SWIFT系统是全球最重要的金融结算网络系统。国际社会对此已形成路径依赖，该系统也因此成为美国手中的“金融核弹”，成为对别国实施经济制裁最严厉的选项。2015年，中国正式启动人民币跨境支付系统，以此支持实体经济和“走出去”战略的实施，助推人民币国际化进程，该现象因此成为“霸权稳定论”之逆流。故此，本文试将金融学与国际关系学科进行一定程度的结合，核心研究目的在于探究中国建立CIPS系统背后深层次的理论动因，由此提出以“去合法化”为核心理念，以缓解崛起困境为外向型动因，自身体量大、推行CIPS的收益大为内向型动因，金砖国家拥有集体金融治略为环境动因的理论分析框架，以此为世界理解中国推进新的支付体系提供相关理论视角，在现象的基础上加深学理性，并提出具有一定参考价值的政策建议。

The 16 virtues of Dharma, as articulated by Valmiki, are the essence of Lord Rama’s journey in Ramayana. The qualities are of being Virtuous, Righteous, Self-determined, Adept, Brilliant, Civilized, Knowledgeable, Grateful, Non-envious, Competent, Truthful, Equanimous, Benevolent, Aesthetic, Courageous, and Deterrent. These 16 virtues form the core of Lord Rama’s personality and by extension translate into the civilizational character of India, subconsciously reflecting in India’s strategic decision making. The research investigates, how these 16 virtues have historically translated into the SocioEthical base of India’s Strategic decision-making and Foreign Policy. Ranging from India’s policies of Non-alignment, Nuclear doctrine, techno-economic and military prowess to India’s role in humanitarian missions, environment, and as a leader of the global south, the research highlights key areas in which India has successfully manifested these virtues. The research however also acknowledges the challenges of embodying Lord Rama's 16 qualities in contemporary geopolitics. Despite potential contradictions and criticisms, India's attempt to follow this path distinguishes it as a unique, principled, and rooted rising global power, garnering global acclaim and support, catering to the socio-cultural essence of following the path of Lord Rama.

This paper is driven by the following questions: What role did U.S. policy play in establishing the ground for the acts of torture at Abu Ghraib? What are the codes, conventions, technologies, aesthetics and visual archives that enable both acts of torture and their visual representation and consumption? How can one begin to describe those points of intersection between the genealogies of techno-politico-military power, race and visual regimes of subjugation, violence and torture? In order to address these questions, I propose to situate the racial category of whiteness along a number of intersecting axes: as instrumentalising technology; as mediating prosthetic within the field of vision; as shadow archive actively inflecting relations of power across contemporary media, subjects and institutions; and as racial category that is constitutive of geocorpographies of torture. In coining this term, my aim is to bring into focus the violent enmeshment of the flesh and blood of the body within the geopolitics of race, war and empire.

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Abstract This essay addresses two questions. It first asks what happens to security practices when they take species life as their referent object. It then asks what happens to security practices which take species life as their referent object when the very understanding of species life undergoes transformation and change. In the process of addressing these two questions the essay provides an exegesis of Michel Foucault’s analytic of biopolitics as a dispositif de sécurit é and contrasts this account of security with that given by traditional geopolitical security discourses. The essay also theorises beyond Foucault when it interrogates the impact in the twentieth century of the compression of morbidity on populations and the molecular revolution on what we now understand life to be. It concludes that ‘population’, which was the empirical referent of early biopolitics, is being superseded by ‘heterogenesis’. This serves as the empirical referent for the recombinant biopolitics of security in the molecular age.

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The Arab Uprisings of 2011 can be seen as a turning point for media and information studies scholars, many of whom newly discovered the region as a site for theories of digital media and social transformation. This work has argued that digital media technologies fuel or transform political change through new networked publics, new forms of connective action cultivating liberal democratic values. These works have, surprisingly, little to say about the United States and other Western colonial powers’ legacy of occupation, ongoing violence and strategic interests in the region. It is as if the Arab Spring was a vindication for the universal appeal of Western liberal democracy delivered through the gift of the Internet, social media as manifestation of the ‘technologies of freedom’ long promised by Cold War. We propose an alternate trajectory in terms of reorienting discussions of media and information infrastructures as embedded within the resurgence of idealized liberal democratic norms in the wake of the end of the Cold War. We look at the demise of the media and empire debates and ‘the rise of the BRICS’ (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) as modes of intra-imperial competition that complicate earlier Eurocentric narratives media and empire. We then outline the individual contributions for the special collection of essays.

The Chinese government promotes the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as a global strategy for regional integration and infrastructure investment. With a projected US$1 trillion commitment from Chinese financial institutions, and at least 138 countries participating, the BRI is attracting intense debate. Yet most analysis to date focuses on broad drivers, risks, and opportunities, largely considered to be emanating from a coherent policy imposed by Beijing. In this special issue, we instead examine the BRI as a <i>relational, contested process</i> - a bundle of intertwined discourses, policies, and projects that sometimes align but are sometimes contradictory. We move beyond policy-level, macro-economic, and classic geopolitical analysis to study China's global investments "from the ground". Our case studies reveal the BRI to be dynamic and unstable, rhetorically appropriated for different purposes that sometimes but do not always coalesce as a coherent geopolitical and geoeconomic strategy. The papers in this special issue provide one of the first collections of deep empirical work on the BRI and a useful approach for grounding China's role in globalization in the critical contexts of complex local realities.

Relations between the US and China have deteriorated to their lowest point since their rapprochement in the 1970s. To make sense of contemporary geopolitics, our objective in this article is two-fold. First, we historically situate contemporary US-China rivalry to conceptualise the Second Cold War (SCW). We argue that in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, both the US and China launched ‘restorative’ political projects that harked back to imagined pasts. These projects are mutually exclusive and animate contemporary geopolitics. Second, we conceptualise the spatial logic of great power rivalry in the Second Cold War. In contrast to the first Cold War, when great powers sought to incorporate territory into blocs, the US and China currently compete on a global scale for centrality in four interrelated networks that they anticipate will underpin hegemony in the 21st century: infrastructure (e.g. logistics and energy), digital, production and finance. We review the state of competition in each network and draw two broad conclusions: (1) this mode of competition makes it difficult for either side to conclusively ‘win’ the Second Cold War, and (2) many countries are likely to remain integrated with both the US and China.

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Abstract. Camera-fitted drones are now easily affordable to the public. The resulting proliferation of the aerial gaze raises a series of critical issues, ranging from the changing regimes of visibility across urban and rural space to the novel risks and dynamics of control implied by current drone developments. The paper argues that a distinct "spatial curiosity" and "power sensitivity" are required if we are to grasp and explore these issues. On this basis, and grounded in an extensive literature review, the paper outlines a politico-geographical research agenda for the investigation of the making, functioning and implications of drone systems. Such an agenda, it is claimed, could afford deepened insight into the driving forces that are behind current drone developments, would show how drones work in different institutional contexts, and could highlight how drones impact on the envisioned reality. This in turn would provide a deepened understanding of the "politics of visibility", "politics of the air" and "politics of the ground" conveyed by drones, and open up a wider conceptual reflection on the role of the aerial dimension in the projection of power across and within space.

This essay examines the militarization of extraterrestrial and extraterritorial spaces such as the high seas, outer space, and Antarctica since the onset of the Cold War. While environmental studies has generally focused on national topographies, this essay instead imagines the earth through visual tropes of the extraterrestrial. Mapping these “outer spaces”—terrae incognitae—within and outside the earth has been key to our modern understanding of the planet and to visualizing the global environment, including climate change. Turning to the militarization of outer space and Antarctica, the essay examines satellite vision produced by the Cold War systems of surveillance, particularly as inscribed by New Zealand author James George. The conclusion of the essay turns to ways these technologies are constitutive of visions of the global in the Anthropocene.

The slow, uneven decline of these interlinked certainties, first in Western Europe, later elsewhere, under the impact of economic change, "discourses" (social and scientific), and the development of increasingly rapid communications, drove a harsh wedge between cosmology and history.No surprise then that the search was, so to speak, for a new way of linking fraternity, power, and time meaningfully together.Nothing perhaps more precipitated this search, nor made it more fruitful, than print-capitalism, which made it possible for rapidly growing numbers of people to think about themselves, and to relate themselves to others, in profoundly new ways (Anderson, 1983, 36). Defining GISDefining geographic information systems (GIS) is not a straightforward matter.Even the use of the term "GIS" can be problematic."GIS" refers to geographic information systems in the plural, yet "GIS" is often used as an acronym for a single system.Some writers choose to refer to "GIS systems," as a system of systems, while others have resorted to terms like "GISers" to refer to those with some strong commitment to GIS as a disciplinary enterprise.

This article traces the emergence of a ‘decolonial turn’ in critical technology and data studies that analyzes the transformation of society through data extraction for profit. First, we offer a genealogy of concepts over the last decade from different fields related to this decolonial turn, including work that explores the connection between racism and data. Second, we discuss the commonalities and differences between these approaches and our own proposal, the data colonialism thesis (Couldry & Mejias, 2018, 2019) to clarify how, together, they provide a distinctive take on data and technology. Third, we summarize the most important advantages of the decolonial turn as a transhistorical tool to understand the continuities between colonialism and capitalism. Finally, some wider implications of a decolonial approach to data are explored, and broad theoretical and practical opportunities for resistance are identified.

The last two decades have seen a “volumetric turn” within Anglophone social sciences and humanities scholarship. This turn is premised on the idea that space may be better understood in three‐dimensional terms – with complex heights and depths – rather than as a series of two‐dimensional areas or surfaces. While there is an increasingly diverse and rich set of scholarship accounting for voluminous complexities in the air, oceans, ice, mountains, and undergrounds, all too often this work foregrounds state and military‐led approaches to volume. This has resulted in a limited methodological toolkit through which to explore voluminous complexities as they emerge and extend beyond military and state contexts. Often reliant on elite interviews, archives, and cartographies, there has been little critical discussion of both methodological practice and the “flatness” of research outputs articulating three‐dimensional worlds. In this paper we address this by foregrounding the role of immersive and multisensory methodologies (sounding volumes, seeing‐sensing drone volumes, and object volumes). To conclude, we offer avenues for further inquiry, including attending to shifting everyday voluminous experiences in the Anthropocene, and the need to diversify the communication of “volume” research.

This paper argues that the utopia of a borderless and interconnected cyberspace loses its charm and the global cyber order is witnessing a territorial turn. The proliferation of the notion of cyber sovereignty and its variances is a symptom reflecting sovereign states' attempt to retain autonomy and control gradually eroded with the digitalisation of societies and economies. The sovereignty fever can be attributed to four reasons: political ambition, economic value, security concerns, and human rights. However, sovereignty is not the last word in debates concerning the future of digital society, for even liberal democracies have advanced ideas of technological or digital sovereignty, and data sovereignty, for their own very different purposes.

The fear of falling behind has been a driving force of European integration. Historically, Europe’s response to the looming angst of declining competitiveness has been more market-creation, not market-direction. Recently, however, Europe has – in the name of safeguarding Europe’s technological sovereignty – taken on a much more active role in directing economic activity towards sectors and technologies deemed geopolitically or geoeconomically important. In this paper, we attempt to explain this ‘geo-dirigiste’ turn. We reconstruct the evolution of EU industrial policy through the lens of Europe’s fear of falling behind, drawing not only on primary (including archival) and secondary sources, but also on original interviews and deep transfer learning applied to an original dataset of 66.548 documents. Focusing on Europe’s changing technological and geopolitical context, its coalitional underpinnings, and the role of ideational politics, we document and explain the historic shift away from market-creation and towards supranational market-direction in EU industrial policy.

This paper first traces the evolution of the Tech Cold War to multipolarization in the context of major developments in the global economy, i.e. the ascent of China in the 21st century, antagonistic rivalry for technological supremacy between the United States and China, and the impending bifurcation of the world economy and its consequences. The paper then discusses the implications of the aforementioned developments for international business (IB) research and practice. Research topics include the Global North-South divide, nonmarket influences, government-MNE relationships, industrial policy and techno-nationalism, innovation in a multipolar world economy, the rise of middle powers, and innovation under geopolitical pressure.

“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.

Solar geoengineering technologies intended to slow climate change by injecting sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere are gaining traction in climate policy. Solar geoengineering is considered "fast, cheap, and imperfect" in that it could rapidly reduce planetary temperatures with low cost technology, but potentially generate catastrophic consequences for climate, weather, and biodiversity. Governance has therefore been central to solar geoengineering debates, particularly the question of unilateral deployment, whereby a state or group of states could deploy the technology against the wishes of the international community. In this context, recent, influential scenarios posit that – given technological and political complexities – solar geoengineering deployment will likely be guided by a "logic of multilateralism." I challenge this assertion by arguing that solar geoengineering is defined by equally compelling 'logics of militarization.' I detail recent involvement in solar geoengineering development on the part of U.S. defense, intelligence, and foreign policy institutions, geoengineering scenarios that adopt militarized logics and expertise, and Realist international relations theories that undergird leading governance scenarios. I then demonstrate that the U.S. military has a strategic interest in solar geoengineering, as U.S. hegemony is predicated on expanding fossil fuels, but the military deems climate change a threat to national security. The unique spatio-temporal qualities of solar geoengineering can bridge the gap between these contradictory positions. In examining the militarization of solar geoengineering, I aim to ground recent conceptions of "planetary sovereignty" in the emergent field of "geopolitical ecology" through the latter's more granular approach to the world-making powers of key geopolitical-ecological actors.

Discusses the opportunities that may be raised by noopolitik—an emerging form of statecraft that emphasizes the importance of sharing ideas and values globally, principally through the exercise of persuasive soft power rather than traditional military hard power.

Abstract This article tracks how the US is adapting its public diplomacy architecture to suit the needs of the information age. The areas of public diplomacy used to influence foreign target audiences are media diplomacy, public information, internal broadcasting, education and cultural programs, and political action. The agencies involved are the State Department, the International Broadcasting Bureau and the National Endowment for Democracy. Key features are the use being made of the Internet as a major tool for information dissemination and interactive communication between US public diplomacy practitioners and their target publics and the 'deep coalitions' being fostered with civil society actors to shape the norms and values of the post Cold War. This strategy is described by Arquilla and Ronfeldt as 'noopolitik' as opposed to state-centred realpolitik. Noopolitik emphasises the shaping and sharing of ideas, values, norms, laws, and ethics though soft power and is recognised by its authors as being very similar to the academic school of constructivism.

Twenty years ago we proposed noopolitik as a new approach for American information strategy. We urged strategists to rethink the concept of “information” and realize that a new realm is emerging—the noosphere, a global “realm of the mind”—that will profoundly affect statecraft. The information age will continue to undermine the conditions for realpolitik strategies based on material “hard power”; new strategies are needed for emphasizing noopolitik and its preference for ideational “soft power.” A decisive factor in the new global wars of ideas will be “whose story wins”—the essence of noopolitik. This update clarifies the origin and nature of the noosphere concept, and illuminates how America’s adversaries are deploying dark forms of noopolitik against us, quite effectively. The future of the noosphere and noopolitik may depend on what happens to the “global commons.” This construct has long had strong support in civilian environmental, social-activist, and military-strategy circles—but it is now viewed dismissively in some high-level government circles. Policy making would benefit from instituting a formal requirement for periodic reviews of our nation’s “information posture.”

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The online news coverage regarding the ongoing Gaza conflict published by Ynetnews extends beyond information dissemination but also includes information frames that align with Israel's noopolitik interests. However, this theme remains under academic research as literature regarding this study remains scarce. This study is also based on the question: how Ynetnews use media framing as an Israeli noopolitik tool to create a negative image of Hamas in the ongoing hostilities between Hamas and Israel. The data in this study was collected by analysing twenty-seven (27) news articles published on Ynetnews website using the keyword ‘Israel-Palestine Conflict’ from 10 December 2023 to 14 January 2024. This study employed the framing analysis method of Zhongdang Pan and Gerald M. Kosicky to uncover and answer the research questions. The study highlights two important findings on Israel’s noopolitik strategy: The first strategy is made through the consistent portrayal of Hamas as a terrorist group as being published by Ynetnews in its online content. Second strategy is by accusing Hamas of playing the victim, which is paradoxically a strategy being projected by Israel.

Abstract Across the spectrum of Information‐Age conflict, from social activism at one end to active military operations at the other, ‘swarming’ is emerging as an optimal doctrine for actualizing the potential of small, dispersed, networked groups using new information technologies. Swarms will feature a capability for ‘sustainable pulsing’ ‐ manœuvring separately, while combining on a particular object or target simultaneously, from all directions. This will be found both on battlefields, where decentralized, networked command and control will unleash the power of a BattleSwarm ‐ a possible successor to the twentieth‐century blitzkrieg form of war ‐ and in ‘global civil society’ actions, as seen in the campaign to ban landmines and in the protracted information operations to deter the Mexican government from using force against the Zapatista rebels in Chiapas. Achieving the organizational and doctrinal shifts we discuss will require unprecedented levels of information sharing. At the level of grand strategy, democratic states are advised to emphasize ‘guarded openness’ ‐ to remain open politically, economically and even militarily (to allies, especially), while creating mechanisms for guardedness as a ‘filtering system’ in order to mitigate the risks inherent in pursuing open information strategies. Improving relations between state and nonstate actors may prove a crucial challenge. Ultimately, the doctrinal and strategic ideas we raise imply calling for a ‘revolution in diplomatic affairs’ to match today's ‘revolution in military affairs’. Although power politics are not becoming obsolete, the classic model of realpolitik no longer quite fits the new realities; it will give way to what we call ‘noopolitik’ ‐ a new form of world politics in which the balance of power is superseded by the ‘balance of knowledge’.

From the earliest years of the Internet's creation, cyberspace has been distinguished from other types of political space because of three unique qualities: (i) its ability to mobilize users, particularly ''outsiders'' including those who have not been easily included in political systems using conventional means; (ii) its ability to quickly provide large quantities of information of uncertain or unregulated quality; and (iii) its ability to shrink distances between users, in some sense rendering conventional physical geography irrelevant. This paper presents three lenses for interpreting the significance of these developments: utopian, liberal, and realist. Evolving doctrines of cyberwarfare as put forth by China, Russia, and the United States in particular stress the ways in which cyberspace presents a unique security threat which may present greater advantages to nonstate actors engaged in unconventional warfare. Differing economic, political, and security policies derive from each lens.

This documented briefing continues the elaboration of our ideas about how the information revolution is affecting the whole spectrum of conflict. Our notion of cyberwar (1993) focused on the military domain, while our study on netwar (1996) examined irregular modes of conflict, including terror, crime, and militant social activism. Here we advance the idea that swarming may emerge as a definitive doctrine that will encompass and enliven both cyberwar and netwar. This doctrinal proposal relates to our efforts to flesh out a four-part vision of how to prepare for information-age conflict (see Arquilla and Ronfeldt, 1997, Ch. 19). We have argued, first of all, for adopting a broad concept of “information”—so that it is defined as something that refers not only to communications media and the messages transmitted, but also to the increasingly material “information content” of all things, including weapons and other sorts of systems. The next part of our vision focused on the organizational dimension, emphasizing that the information revolution empowers the network form—undermining most hierarchies. Moving on to the third part, we then exposited our ideas about developing an American grand strategy based on “guarded openness”—a principle that, for example, encourages reaching out widely with ideas about freedom and progress, while still being circumspect about diffusion of advanced information processes and technologies. In this document, we complete our four-part vision by articulating a doctrine we call “swarming,” and which we believe may eventually apply across the entire spectrum of conflict—from low to high intensity, and from civic-oriented actions to military combat operations on land, at sea, and in the air.

a month before the September 11 terrorist attacks against the United States. It, therefore, does not take into account many of the subsequent enhancements of the U.S. security apparatus. It does, however, identify prescient thinking about what comprises security in an increasingly interconnected world, thinking that ultimately informed much of the current administration's policies.

The online news coverage regarding the ongoing Gaza conflict published by Ynetnews extends beyond information dissemination but also includes information frames that align with Israel's noopolitik interests.However, this theme remains under academic research as literature regarding this study remains scarce.This study is also based on the question: how Ynetnews use media framing as an Israeli noopolitik tool to create a negative image of Hamas in the ongoing hostilities between Hamas and Israel.The data in this study was collected by analysing twenty-seven (27) news articles published on Ynetnews website using the keyword Israel-Palestine Conflict from 10 December 2023 to 14 January 2024.This study employed the framing analysis method of Zhongdang Pan and Gerald M. Kosicky to uncover and answer the research questions.The study highlights two important findings on Israels noopolitik strategy:The first strategy is made through the consistent portrayal of Hamas as a terrorist group as being published by Ynetnews in its online content.Second strategy is by accusing Hamas of playing the victim, which is paradoxically a strategy being projected by Israel.

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The news about the Indonesian National Army’s, or Tentara Nasional Indonesia (TNI), budget for internet buzzers has led to public disapproval. This disagreement shows how the public is still unfamiliar with the idea that Influence Operations and Information Warfare (IOIW) is now a thing in national security and defense strategy. This article aims to make sense of why TNI should consider the IOIW capability. With the library research method, this article introduces the conceptual and theoretical argument of Noopolitik and IOIW to the Indonesian policymakers and the general public. Noopolitik is a concept explaining the existence of the noosphere, a world "thinking circuit" and "realm of the mind" that politicians today, in the era of advanced information and communication technology, also consider. Thus, Noopolitik allows us to rationalize that a country nowadays should consider not only the geosphere for its national interest but also the noosphere which one country may hijack and influence through information dissemination. Thus, the noosphere is now a new emergent battlefield, and IOIW refers to the combat that takes place on it, with the goal of gaining influence using information as a weapon. With that idea, this article argues that it is reasonable for TNI to procure the capability for IOIW. The IOIW ability will allow TNI to protect the Indonesian Noosphere from the attacks of its potential adversaries, as they might want to influence Indonesian public opinion and action in a hostile outcome for the nation's harmony and stability. The general public have to grasp the theoretical framework of Noopolitik, which elucidates the contemporary relevance of IOIW. It will lead them to have necessary understanding why should they provide support to TNI for the procurement of additional power for IOIW capabilities when required. This article may function as an initial evaluation for politicians and the public to recognize TNI's augmentation of the IOIW force.

Information can often provide a key power resource, and more people have access to more information than ever before. In this world, networks and connectedness become an important source of relevant power. 1

The article is devoted to the formation of new approaches to the purposes and tools of foreign policy and the emergence of a new direction in foreign policy noopolitik. By adopting the concept of noopolitik as the information strategy, Russia will openly declarea bout the formation of a new information strategy taking into account current political realities. Analyzing the political processes in North Africa, the author notes the need to take into account the religious factor in the formation of an information strategy. Specific features of mentality of the individual Muslim are identified. Understanding the lifestyles and attitudes of those who profess a religion other than the one that dominates in Russia will allow us, if necessary, to find the right leverage for the group.The author presents the methods, which help to form special information environment around the individual where individual attention is focused on one topic or problem. Such a topic or problem is directional information. The task of targeted information is to force the individual to make a choice and defend such position that is favorable for political actors. The more individuals will adhere to one position formulated by political actors, the easier it is to manage society.

This article asks questions about the futures of power in the network era. Two critical emerging issues are at work with uncertain outcomes. The first is the emergence of the collaborative economy, while the second is the emergence of surveillance capabilities from both civic, state and commercial sources. While both of these emerging issues are expected by many to play an important role in the future development of our societies, it is still unclear whose values and whose purposes will be furthered. This article argues that the futures of these emerging issues depend on contests for power. As such, four scenarios are developed for the futures of power in the network era using the double variable scenario approach. network power, surveillance, political-economy, netarchical capitalism, commons, cosmolocalization

The ascent of the Internet as phenomenon that affects and changes many aspects of world affairs is taking place against the broader backdrop of the so-called “Information Revolution.” One of the effects of this evolutionary change is the rising importance of information next to traditional military force capabilities in the formulation of strategy and the advent of a number of new doctrinal concepts, such as “Information Superiority,” that are seen as the key to winning wars. As a result, military attention focuses more on the informational aspect of conflicts. At the same time, there is a notion that an ever-widening range of actors has access to powerful tools for the rapid collection, production, and dissemination of information on a worldwide scale. Networks play a central role in this development. Usually, these intertwined systems are known as the World Wide Web, or simply www, the most popular and widespread incarnation of which is the Internet. The globalization and mass popularization of the Internet provide non-traditional actors with capabilities that were previously only available to the largest and most powerful entities, challenging the power and steering capacity of major actors.1 This creates tensions along the intersection of newly emerging actors, the resultant power redistribution, and changes in military affairs. One emerging issue is the role of the Internet in armed conflicts, or more specifically, the role of a new dimension called “Cyberspace”; a concept that stands for the fusion of all communication networks and sources of information into a tangled blanket of electronic interchange. Cyberspace is not part of the physical world, but is detached or “virtual,” existing where there are telephone wires, coaxial cables, fiber-optic lines, or electromagnetic waves—an environment inhabited by knowledge in electronic form.2

The article is concerned with an element of information strategy – noopolitik, adopted by People's Republic of China. To use it internationally China starts reform, which implies building law-based state. Paradigm shift is caused by the fact that China joined the group of powers forming political agenda; in order to do it China will need judicial ground. Analysing speeches by PRC leaders and materials of the Fourth Plenary Session of the 18th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, one can make a conclusion that PRC is ready to advocate its interests in different ways including military one.

The deployment of strategic stories, that is, stories designed to prevail over adversaries, is at work in domestic politics as well as in diplomacy. In both cases, the strategy has two aims: to create a division between ‘us’ and ‘them’, and at the same time to ascribe moral supremacy to ‘our side’ while posing ‘their side’ as an existential threat. Strategic storytelling specialises in discrimination and foe creation, but the nature of the actors involved has changed in the digital era. Now, ‘we’ and ‘they’ are organised into decentralised and mediated classes based on common identities, enabling collective action at planetary scale (e.g. climate activism, gender and ethnic justice, far-right extremism). At the same time, media platforms and news organisations are part of the apparatus by which strategic narratives are weaponised for warfare. Thus, I argue, digital media analysis needs to understand the ‘strategic turn’ in storytelling, and its deployment by states and ‘non-state actors’ alike, in this case, news media. Alternative models of worldmaking, in which popular culture acts as a pedagogic platform for class formation and activism, enter an ecology in which narrative is already a weapon of war – where it’s aircraft carriers, all the way down.

The Darknet is becoming an increasingly visible structural unit in the political sphere and at the same time remains a little-studied area of cyberspace. Therefore, the article aims to determine the conceptual prism for its consideration and its actual significance in the measurement of the political. With the help of comparative historical analysis, the study reveals the causes and time of the political birth of the Darknet, characterizes its resources and political role through system and content analysis, systematizes and clarifies the concepts of power and politics in the Network based on the provisions of R. Gel, M. Castels, K. Schmitt, etc. The author names the expansion of states (especially autocracies) in the digital space as the main factor in the politicization and transformation of the Darknet. The pressure of power and dominance systems aimed at maintaining sovereignty and control in cyberspace caused “digital resistance” of programmers and users seeking free data exchange and confidentiality, as well as civil activists who strived to avoid prosecution for dissent, which led to the renewed architecture and functionality of the Darknet, its transformation into an alternative space of informational interaction and a database to build up the opposition potential. Criminals also took advantage of the opportunities of the new network for their own purposes. The main result of the research is the thesis that the Darknet is being transformed into a special socio-technical system that is outside the sphere of international and state law, where all interactions are carried out exclusively through private agreements between clients, with an alternative world payment system based on cryptocurrencies.

Modern political science assumes that states need a civilized strategy ensuring the progressive development of a society. The leading positions in the global policy have been typically held by the states, which had certain national strategies, including information strategies. In light of the ideas of the need to change Russia’s information strategy, which are suggested in the scientific literature, the author proposes to adopt the concept of noopolitics. Noopolitic is an information strategy which involves manipulating international processes by forming, through the media, a positive or negative attitude of the public towards the internal and external policy of a state or a coalition of states, with the view of forming a positive or negative image of ideas and advocated moral values.

Retoryka uzbrojona to walka o wpływ w przestrzeni kognitywnej, czyli przestrzeni naszej świadomości, prowadzona przy pomocy symboli. Jest to namiastka wojny, a nawet nowy sposób prowadzenia wojny. Retoryka uzbrojona wykracza poza perswazję, argumentację, a nawet propagandę w ich tradycyjnych znaczeniach. Główne środki retoryki uzbrojonej to narracja, działanie i obraz. Polityka zawiera coraz więcej elementów wojny informacyjnej, a pojęcie bezpieczeństwa (narodowego i indywidualnego) odnosi się do domeny świadomości. Najwyższą wartością i stawką w tej wojnie jest reputacja i jej pochodna: legitymacja. Zjawiska te stanowią wyzwanie dla edukacji retorycznej i obywatelskiej.

Noopolitik im Empire Politisches Handeln und politische Legitimitt im Informationszeitalter .that knowledge is power, that power is diffusing to nonstate actors, and that global interconnectivity is generating a new fabric for world order.(Arquila/

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For better or worse, digital technologies are reshaping everything, from customer behaviors and expectations to organizational and manufacturing systems, business models, markets, and ultimately society. To understand this overarching transformation, this paper extends the previous literature which has focused mostly on the organizational level by developing a multi‐level research agenda for digital transformation (DT). In this regard, we propose an extended definition of DT as “a socioeconomic change across individuals, organizations, ecosystems, and societies that are shaped by the adoption and utilization of digital technologies.” We suggest four lenses to interpret the DT phenomenon: individuals (utilizing and adopting digital technologies), organizations (strategizing and coordinating both internal and external transformation), ecosystems (harnessing digital technologies in governance and co‐producing value propositions), and geopolitical frameworks (regulating the environments in which individuals and organizations are embedded). Based on these lenses, we build a multi‐level research agenda at the intersection between the bright and dark sides of DT and introduce the PIAI framework, which captures a process of perception , interpretation , and action that ultimately leads to possible impact . The PIAI framework identifies a critical research agenda consisting of a non‐exhaustive list of topics that can assist researchers to deepen their understanding of the DT phenomenon and provide guidance to managers and policymakers when making strategic decisions that seek to shape and guide the DT.

Abstract Recent developments suggest that the international economic order is transitioning away from the Neoliberal Order that has flourished for much of the post-Cold War period toward a new Geoeconomic Order. The shift to this new order, which is characterized by a growing ‘securitisation of economic policy and economisation of strategic policy’, will likely see the rules, norms, and institutions of international trade and investment law undergoing significant change. We expose the differences in the underlying logic of these orders, explore how this shift is being driven by the emerging USA–China tech/trade war, and consider the consequences of this transition for global economic governance.

Abstract In July 2017, China’s State Council released the country’s strategy for developing artificial intelligence (AI), entitled ‘New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan’ (新一代人工智能发展规划). This strategy outlined China’s aims to become the world leader in AI by 2030, to monetise AI into a trillion-yuan (ca. 150 billion dollars) industry, and to emerge as the driving force in defining ethical norms and standards for AI. Several reports have analysed specific aspects of China’s AI policies or have assessed the country’s technical capabilities. Instead, in this article, we focus on the socio-political background and policy debates that are shaping China’s AI strategy. In particular, we analyse the main strategic areas in which China is investing in AI and the concurrent ethical debates that are delimiting its use. By focusing on the policy backdrop, we seek to provide a more comprehensive and critical understanding of China’s AI policy by bringing together debates and analyses of a wide array of policy documents.

The intersection of Artificial Intelligence (AI), International Relations, and Religion represents a complex and evolving landscape that is reshaping global politics, diplomacy, and cultural narratives. This paper explores how AI-driven technologies are influencing international power dynamics between the United States and the Global South, particularly through the lens of religious values and ethical frameworks. As the U.S. leads in AI innovation, it exports technological systems and governance models that may conflict with or reshape religious and cultural identities in the Global South. These systems, embedded with Western values, often raise concerns about digital colonialism, surveillance ethics, and ideological hegemony. Conversely, the Global South increasingly seeks to assert its own agency by developing AI frameworks rooted in indigenous knowledge systems and religious worldviews, creating alternative paradigms of technological governance. International relations theory must evolve to account for the growing role of AI in diplomatic strategy, cyber-defense, and geopolitical negotiations. AI tools are now integral in managing migration, climate diplomacy, disinformation campaigns, and international development. However, the integration of religious ethics into AI discourse remains underdeveloped, especially in multilateral forums. Faith-based organizations and religious leaders in both the U.S. and the Global South are beginning to engage in the ethical regulation of AI, advocating for human dignity, social justice, and inclusive innovation. This engagement fosters transnational dialogue and offers new pathways for soft power diplomacy. The paper also highlights the risks and opportunities inherent in AI’s role in religious radicalization, interfaith dialogue, and peacebuilding efforts. AI's capacity to personalize content and analyze sentiment can either exacerbate religious tensions or promote mutual understanding, depending on how it is deployed. Ultimately, the relationship between AI, religion, and international relations necessitates a rethinking of global governance structures to ensure equitable access, cultural sensitivity, and ethical standards in the development and use of AI technologies. Through an interdisciplinary approach, this study underscores the need for collaborative policy frameworks that integrate technological innovation with spiritual and moral dimensions to promote global peace and mutual respect.

In the international digital platform market, a handful of US companies enjoy immense cultural, economic and political power. The short form video platform TikTok provides significant competition to these US incumbents but so far policymakers have focused on the geopolitical implications of TikTok. This paper provides a content analysis of government and company sources, issued between April and August 2020, to systematically establish the geopolitics of the TikTok controversy. It is important to identify geopolitical motivations because they can obscure other factors relevant to platform politics, such as the value of competition in a highly concentrated international platform market. The paper concludes by outlining a research agenda for enhancing competition and avoiding the solidification of conventional geopolitical power dynamics in the international digital platform market.

Purpose: to discuss the changes in the scientific and technical field, and examine their impact on military art. Method: comparative analysis, and synthesis. Findings: Today's military and political realities require the Armed Forces to be ready for wars that may occur at any time, including in the future, in order to ensure the country's national security. Because, as in the past, the struggle for natural resources, competition between states, aspirations for hegemony, as well as ideological differences and security concerns, which lead to military conflicts, will continue in the future. At the same time, the great progress achieved and expected in the field of technology will significantly change the traditional forms and methods of fighting. The study and skillful application of these forms and methods in the Armed Forces will be one of the main conditions for success in future wars. Scientific and technical progress affects all areas of human activity without exception, and has a noticeable effect on the development of methods and forms of war. In the future, the content and typology of military operations, strategy and tactics, forms and methods of application of armed forces will be formed under the influence of scientific and technical progress, mainly in the fields of artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and nanotechnology. For this reason, in order to study the nature of future wars, to predict the methods and forms of military operations, the article considers the causes of wars, discusses the changes in the scientific and technical field, and examines their impact on military art. Theoretical implications: The paper enhances our understanding of significant transformations due to advancements in technology, changes in geopolitical dynamics, and evolving societal expectations, against the backdrop of the extensive use of autonomous systems, including drones, unmanned vehicles, and AI-powered decision-making tools. Practical implications: The paper contibutes to the development of military strategies and operational plans, which consider how technological, social, and geopolitical changes will concretely affect the future warfare. Value: The study offers significant value in understanding and predicting the nature and character of future warfare and provides multiple lenses through which to analyze the war and devise strategies in line with emerging security threats.

“Digital sovereignty” is the political buzzword of the hour. Over the last decade, it has gone from being a vague idea invoked by a few policymakers and activists to a political slogan with global appeal. It was in 2016 that its growing popularity became especially clear. That year, Donald Trump was elected US president for the first time, with a protectionist agenda that included banning selected Chinese tech companies from the US market (Thumfart 2022); the EU adopted its General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which imposed rules that applied to actors outside EU territory for the first time (Chen, Frey, and Presidente 2020); and China adopted the Cybersecurity Law, establishing key provisions for data protection and localization and laying the groundwork for broader regulations on data, platforms and infrastructures (Creemers 2020). While the ideas underlying digital sovereignty are much older, the adoption of regulations and stances by these three major powers prompted new political debates on sovereignty (Danet and Deforges 2020; Pohle and Thiel 2020). Over the past decade, a growing number of governments, organizations, and groups have sought to lend this term (or connected terms such as internet sovereignty, technology self-sufficiency, strategic technological autonomy, or data sovereignty) their own meaning, as illustrated throughout this special issue. These actors do not solely include major world powers with strong leverage in shaping digital markets and policies. In fact, emerging powers, private organizations, and groups such as Indigenous populations are also seeking to establish their own views on digital sovereignty and to enforce them through technical arrangements, regulations, or economic practices (Cong and Thumfart 2022; Glasze et al. 2023; Roberts et al. 2021; Walter et al. 2020). As a result, digital sovereignty has now become a much more encompassing concept, addressing issues of digital communication and connection but also the much wider digital transformation of societies. While some still criticize digital sovereignty efforts as disguised protectionism or technological nationalism, the concept is now often used as a shorthand for an ordered, regulated, and secure digital sphere—a digital sphere, in which the multifaceted problems of individual rights and freedoms, collective and infrastructural security, political and legal enforceability and fair economic competition are finally resolved. In addition, in Western democracies' discourses, there is also a growing emphasis on internal sovereignty and democratic sovereignty with regard to the digital sphere. As such, the concept of digital sovereignty is understood as a prerequisite for citizens to be able to shape the process of digital transformation in a self-determined and democratic manner. This understanding is, however, not globally shared and thus gives rise to the ever-growing number of meanings of digital sovereignty. This special issue, titled Unthinking Digital Sovereignty, explores a number of definitions and perspectives on digital sovereignty from Europe, the United States, China, India, South Africa, Uganda, and Indigenous communities, with a case study on Mexico. The articles in it offer a re-examination and critical deconstruction/reconstruction of the digital sovereignty debate through various perspectives and disciplinary approaches. Yet, this special issue is not an exhaustive anthology of critical views on digital sovereignty. Rather, the different contributions aim to offer readers a foundation for reflecting on the discourses, practices, and dynamics shaping current debates on digital sovereignty and evolving relationships within global digital governance. While the term “digital sovereignty” dates back to the 1990s (Cong and Thumfart 2022; Glasze et al. 2023), it has only recently surged in popularity in academic and policy circles with the increasing politicization of technology. Today, it is invoked across various political and economic contexts, from more centralized and authoritarian countries to liberal democracies. Over time and across regions, it has acquired a large range of connotations. Although all understandings and narratives of digital sovereignty consistently share some core elements, they diverge based on the national contexts, the actor configurations and the forms of self-determination they prioritize (Couture and Toupin 2019). We align with Lambach and Oppermann's view that it is precisely the broad, adaptable nature of “digital sovereignty” that makes it appealing to diverse actors: its openness “is not a bug, but a feature. Digital sovereignty has not had a successful career despite its protean nature but because of it” (Lambach and Oppermann 2022). Due to the diversity of narratives attached to digital sovereignty, the majority of the existing research on the concept and its political repercussions has focused on discourses and practices in specific regions and countries. Particular attention has been paid to the European Union and its member states (Adler-Nissen and Eggeling 2024; Carver 2024; Floridi 2020; Lambach and Monsees 2024; Monsees and Lambach 2022; Pizzul and Veneziano 2024), and for good reason: The European debate on digital sovereignty is indeed a prominent example of how the concept has different meanings in different policy realms, even within the same country or block of countries. For example, the French concept of souveraineté numérique, which was introduced in the mid-2000s and first mentioned in a parliamentary debate in 2012, follows a rather classical understanding of sovereignty associated with democracy, the rule of law and territoriality. It was developed primarily in opposition to the perceived hegemony of US digital technology providers and the resulting French dependence on them (Musiani 2013; Thumfart 2022). At the same time, in Germany, demands for “digital sovereignty” only emerged after the Snowden revelations in 2013 and the comprehensive surveillance, not only of ordinary users but also of top German politicians, became public knowledge (Glasze et al. 2023). While the German debate thus also focuses on independent digital infrastructures and the protection of data flows, it is less state-centered than the one in France. Instead, it also emphasizes the need for user sovereignty, that is, the capacity of each individual to be in control in the digital sphere (Pohle 2020). Both the French and the German debates thus also differ from those at EU level. For instance, Charles Michel, serving as president of the European Council at the time of writing, has described digital sovereignty as a tool for strategic autonomy, with the latter being “about being able to make choices […] this means reducing our dependencies, to better defend our interests and our values” (European Council 2021). Similarly, the European Parliament's own think tank, the European Parliamentary Research Service (EPRS), has defined digital sovereignty as “Europe's ability to act independently in the digital world” (Madiega 2020). Both definitions address the EU's willingness to build, retain, and protect its own decision-making autonomy in the digital field. However, they fall short of defining what the field includes and what autonomy entails: while the often-cited objective is reducing the EU's dependence on US and Chinese technology (Dixon 2022), the establishment of an “EU stack,” in the sense of a value chain of digital technologies fully produced in Europe from semiconductors to infrastructure and the platforms that run on top of it, is an unrealistic one. Nonetheless, initiatives such as DNS4EU can be seen as part of an attempt to make the intra-EU digital infrastructure less prone to negative external influences (Kulikova 2021). Demanding digital sovereignty to express a desire for more autonomy in times of digital interconnectedness is most certainly not a unique European feature. China began deploying its concepts of internet sovereignty and information sovereignty in the 1990s. The country's policies have thus been a focus of much academic scrutiny (Creemers 2020; Hong and Goodnight 2019; Nanni 2022; Zeng, Stevens, and Chen 2017). Information sovereignty refers to the Chinese government's attempts to control information flows within the country amid the rise of digitalization and the increasing ubiquity of internet connectivity—a major target of Chinese investment from the late 1980s onward (Cong and Thumfart 2022; Gong 2005). The 2010 White Paper on (the Status of) the Internet in China is credited in the literature as China's first attempt to formalize internet sovereignty in a policy paper (Creemers 2020). In the Chinese debate, concepts such as internet sovereignty and information sovereignty have different origins than in the European debate. While the EU is concerned by the fact that it lacks major tech companies capable of competing with the United States and Chinese giants in device production, network manufacturing, and the platform economy (Roberts et al. 2021), in China, the debate is driven by a fear of foreign interference. This fear can be subdivided into a fear that countries will interfere through foreign propaganda, the definition of which often entails dissenting, politically sensitive opinions from Communist Party dictates, and a fear of (cultural) imperialism based on China's past as a country that underwent colonialism (Cong and Thumfart 2022). Besides addressing the popular topics of China and the EU, a growing number of studies have analyzed how the concept of digital sovereignty is applied in other authoritarian countries, most prominently Russia (Budnitsky and Jia 2018; Daucé and Musiani 2021; Litvinenko 2021), and in the countries of the so-called “Global South” (Basu 2023; Gehl Sampath and Tregenna 2022). Findings indicate that BRICS countries are increasingly prioritizing the development of cybersecurity frameworks, with a particular focus on data privacy regulations and digital policies designed to reaffirm national sovereignty and reduce the influence of foreign technology companies and governments (Belli 2021; Ifeanyi-Ajufo 2023). A similar securitarian discourse on digital sovereignty, emphasizing the need to protect the state from digital threats, can also be observed in the Euro-Mediterranean region, particularly in North Africa and West Asia (Santaniello, forthcoming). However, the actions undertaken under the auspices of digital sovereignty extend beyond mere security concerns. In Africa, for instance, the emphasis on digital sovereignty can be seen as both a form of resistance to foreign digital dominance and a tool for reinforcing and justifying authoritarian governance practices (Shaheed and Greenacre 2021). Claims of digital sovereignty extend beyond governments and states, yet research on how nonstate actors engage with this concept—and how their claims manifest in concrete practices—remains scarce. Some existing studies focus on how Indigenous communities worldwide are interacting with digital technologies, using them to revitalize and promote cultures and educational practices that were once suppressed by colonial powers. Others examine the physical internet infrastructure and hardware production, especially when they impact ancestral lands, thus bringing into sharp focus the debate around digital colonialism as a new dimension of the pursuit of digital sovereignty by global powers (Caranto Morford and Ansloos 2021; Couture and Toupin 2019; Young 2019). Almost all of these understandings of digital sovereignty share a common feature: digital sovereignty is framed primarily as a process rather than a status. Actors invoke digital sovereignty to articulate the objective of strengthening self-determination and the capacity to act in globally networked societies. However, while the aspiration of digital sovereignty thus indicates the path towards a brighter future, actors rarely present it as an objective that can ever be a final, attainable endpoint. And the anticipated journey varies depending on the specific context in which the concept is applied. This special issue is based on a recognition that digital sovereignty is a social construct. As such, it is conveyed through a series of narratives and pursued through policies, technological practices and legislation that invoke it and, in return, derive legitimacy from this reference. Hence, when we speak of “unthinking” digital sovereignty, we draw on Wallerstein's (1991) idea of “unthinking” as the process of reversing, dismissing, and unlearning previously established concepts. The goal is not to replace the concept or its meanings with new ones but rather to critically address them from nonconventional perspectives. Consequently, “unthinking” digital sovereignty first and foremost involves disconnecting the concept of digital sovereignty from the notion of Westphalian sovereignty. As we have argued, the discourse on digital sovereignty does not solely originate from nation states, nor is it tied to them. Additionally, “unthinking” digital sovereignty suggests that scholars studying sovereignty in the digital space do not occupy a neutral position; instead, their work plays a constitutive role in those policies and practices that invoke the concept as a source of legitimacy. Hence, “unthinking” digital sovereignty places epistemology at the core of the discussion on digital governance, inviting a critical examination of the frameworks, agendas, and academic debates that shape our understanding of sovereignty in the digital realm. Another implication of the “unthinking” approach is that the rise of digital sovereignty as a set of discourses and practices cannot be understood in isolation. Instead, it is part of a broader power struggle over digital governance, which itself is woven into fiercely contested and at times violent battles for global hegemony. This implies that a critical perspective on digital sovereignty needs to be both relational and historical. It must consider relations between world regions rather than between individual nation-states, and it must consider the dynamics between individuals, groups, and institutions rather than solely between governments. In addition, it should investigate long-term historical processes rather than isolated events, bringing path dependencies and structural relationships to the fore. As Bannerman (2022) has observed “sovereignty comes from relations,” meaning that neither individuals nor states nor platforms can be conceived of as self-contained and autonomous entities. Rather, they are the product of a network of historical and social relations that determine their sovereignty. Understanding digital sovereignty thus requires the acknowledgment of class, gender, race, and socioeconomic, colonial, material, and spatial relationships as they have evolved over centuries. Moreover, when “unthinking” digital sovereignty, scholars must also address the much-neglected question of how digitally sovereign powers can be controlled. In many instances, the idea of strengthening digital sovereignty does not just mean actively managing dependencies but also creating central control points for digital infrastructures and applications. Therefore, much more reflection is needed on how sovereign powers can be held accountable. It is not sufficient to propose that private actors' power could be tamed by public institutions to protect user rights, as many democratic governments across the world have done. Likewise, it is too simplistic to equate sovereignty with the ability to defend liberal and democratic values, as is often the case for discourses on digital sovereignty in Europe. For centuries, there has been an ongoing struggle to organize sovereign powers in a way that allows for liberal and pluralistic societies to flourish. Thus, the “unthinking” of digital sovereignty must also include debating the procedural frameworks that structure sovereign capabilities and how they can be opened up to public reflection and control. In other words, invoking digital sovereignty also entails advocating for its constitutionalization, implying a collective effort to set limits on the exercise of digitally sovereign powers and to establish new checks and balances. Finally, “unthinking” digital sovereignty must resist the temptation to consider the related objectives and practices in political, economic, or juridical terms alone. Understanding digital sovereignty requires a holistic approach that escapes the artificial separation between social spheres—a separation that is constitutive of the dominant paradigm of digital governance, the multistakeholder governance approach, against which the digital sovereignty discourse is often formulated. This special issue features six articles that seek to “unthink” digital sovereignty by deconstructing and (re)conceiving it from different viewpoints. While some of the issue's contributions provide much-needed conceptual and theoretical foundations for analyzing, contextualizing, and interpreting the discourses and practices of digital sovereignty, others reexamine various concepts linked to digital sovereignty by critically assessing how policy actors have envisioned and narratively shaped it through selected case studies. Finally, this special issue also foregrounds digital sovereignty through the of emerging powers, Indigenous communities, and countries. new research or a critical perspective to the concept of digital sovereignty, readers new for The first by Pohle and the by critically the from multistakeholder internet governance to digital sovereignty. 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Abstract As China and the United States strive to be the primary global leader in AI, their visions are coming into conflict. This is frequently painted as a fundamental clash of civilisations, with evidence based primarily around each country’s current political system and present geopolitical tensions. However, such a narrow view claims to extrapolate into the future from an analysis of a momentary situation, ignoring a wealth of historical factors that influence each country’s prevailing philosophy of technology and thus their overarching AI strategies. In this article, we build a philosophy-of-technology-grounded framework to analyse what differences in Chinese and American AI policies exist and, on a fundamental level, why they exist. We support this with Natural Language Processing methods to provide an evidentiary basis for our analysis of policy differences. By looking at documents from three different American presidential administrations––Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden––as well as both national and local policy documents (many available only in Chinese) from China, we provide a thorough comparative analysis of policy differences. This article fills a gap in US–China AI policy comparison and constructs a framework for understanding the origin and trajectory of policy differences. By investigating what factors are informing each country’s philosophy of technology and thus their overall approach to AI policy, we argue that while significant obstacles to cooperation remain, there is room for dialogue and mutual growth.

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EU Digital Sovereignty has emerged as a priority for the EU Cyber Agenda to build free and safe, yet resilient cyberspace. In a traditional regulatory fashion, the EU has therefore sought to gain more control over third country-based digital intermediaries through legislative solutions regulating its internal market. Although potentially effective in shielding EU citizens from data exploitation by internet giants, this protectionist strategy tells us little about the EU’s ability to develop Digital Sovereignty, beyond its capacity to react to the external tech industry. Given the growing hybridisation of warfare, building on the increasing integration of artificial intelligence (AI) in the security domain, leadership in advancing AI-related technology has a significant impact on countries’ defence capacity. By framing AI as the intrinsic functioning of algorithms, data mining and computational capacity, we question what tools the EU could rely on to gain sovereignty in each of these dimensions of AI. By focusing on AI from an EU Foreign Policy perspective, we conclude that contrary to the growing narrative, given the absence of a leading AI industry and a coherent defence strategy, the EU has few tools to become a global leader in advancing standards of AI beyond its regulatory capacity.

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Abstract While digital technologies were initially seen as harbingers of globalisation and cosmopolitanism, scholars increasingly acknowledge their role in the rise of nationalism and right‐wing populism. Yet this surge of interest leaves at least two important questions unanswered. Where was nationalism before its apparent resurgence? Are contemporary forms of nationalism different from their predecessors, and can these changes be linked to digital technologies? To answer these questions, we argue for the importance of understanding the less visible ways in which digital technologies reproduce our sense of belonging to a world of nations. We discuss three such mechanisms: the architecture of internet domains, the bias of algorithms and the formation of national digital ecosystems. Next, we examine three characteristics of contemporary nationalism that can be partly linked to recent shifts in the global communication ecology: diversification, fragmentation and commodification. We conclude by considering the implications of our arguments for future research in the field.

The EU’s revised Cybersecurity Strategy (2020) has been constructed in the context of increasing geopolitical tension and within a dynamically evolving technological environment. The onset of new technologies has brought with it new opportunities but also perceived risks and threats in cyberspace, to which the EU has sought to elicit a more comprehensive approach underpinned by a move to become more “technologically sovereign”. We seek in this article to critically unpack what such claims to technological sovereignty mean for the EU in the cyber domain and what the practical implications are of the EU taking ownership of and performing sovereignty. More specifically, in seeking to conceptually unpack technological sovereignty in its internal and external manifestations, we show how its articulation, legitimisation and operationalisation has implications and consequences for the EU’s identity and action in the cyber domain.

Can countries easily imitate the United States' advanced weapon systems and thus erode its military-technological superiority? Scholarship in international relations theory generally assumes that rising states benefit from the “advantage of backwardness.” That is, by free riding on the research and technology of the most advanced countries, less developed states can allegedly close the military-technological gap with their rivals relatively easily and quickly. More recent works maintain that globalization, the emergence of dual-use components, and advances in communications have facilitated this process. This literature is built on shaky theoretical foundations, however, and its claims lack empirical support. In particular, it largely ignores one of the most important changes to have occurred in the realm of weapons development since the second industrial revolution: the exponential increase in the complexity of military technology. This increase in complexity has promoted a change in the system of production that has made the imitation and replication of the performance of state-of-the-art weapon systems harder—so much so as to offset the diffusing effects of globalization and advances in communications. An examination of the British-German naval rivalry (1890–1915) and China's efforts to imitate U.S. stealth fighters supports these findings.

Abstract This article introduces a special issue that examines the effects of strategic competition on the future of the global trade regime. We argue that traditional work in economics and the current set-up of global economic regimes ignores economic statecraft as a key element in understanding trade conflict. Specifically, we outline three examples of contemporary economic statecraft – industrial policy, trade restrictions, and new investment rules – that have been used to block foreign direct investment on the basis of national security claims. Based on this analysis, we explore how the WTO and other economic regimes might address the global economic governance of economic statecraft. In concluding, we outline the theoretical and empirical work in the subsequent case studies that examine the use of economic statecraft in the United States, China, India, Japan, and South Korea.

Abstract This article explores the struggle for ‘digital sovereignty’ in the European Union (EU). A seeming contradiction – the internet, after all, spans the globe – digital sovereignty is portrayed as the winning geoeconomic formula to keep the EU secure, competitive and democratic in the digital future. Approaching digital sovereignty as a discursive claim and analysing it through a case study of the European cloud project Gaia‐X, we show that there is no singular understanding of digital sovereignty in the EU. Instead, we identify six different conceptions across the domains of security, economy and rights. This article outlines three scenarios for how the digital sovereignty agenda may develop and thus shape the EU's digital policy and its relations with the rest of the world: constitutional tolerance (where the conceptions co‐exist), hegemony (where one conception dominates) or collapse (where the agenda falls apart due to inbuilt conceptual contradictions).

Trust has emerged as a key factor in any virtual transaction. Therefore, the protection of trustworthiness should be a central matter of concern in the online tourism sector, especially in emerging and, hence, more fragile markets such as nautical tourism. In this study, an exploratory investigation was conducted of four online sailing platforms using an inductive content analysis of the data collected. The goal was to examine cybersecurity-related indicators that may affect trustworthiness of the platforms. To this end, the study focused on two freely accessible types of information: the level of transaction security and the level of concern for personal privacy. Given that it may be unclear to many users how a small text file (a cookie) created by a website and stored in the user's computer can affect the user’s privacy, an interdisciplinary disclosive computer ethics approach was used for unveiling the risk related to cookies, especially third-party cookies, or web trackers. Interestingly, geopolitical and geoeconomic correlations were noted when interpreting the findings from a geographical point of view, although it was concluded that more research is needed to better understand the phenomenon. However, notwithstanding the relatively limited sample, this work offers valuable insights into a systematic understanding of how cybersecurity contributes to increased trust and, hence, improved competitiveness.

Abstract Disruptive innovations of the last few decades, such as smart cities and Industry 4.0, were made possible by higher integration of physical and digital elements. In today’s pervasive cyber-physical systems, connecting more devices introduces new vulnerabilities and security threats. With increasing cybersecurity incidents, cybersecurity professionals are becoming incapable of addressing what has become the greatest threat climate than ever before. This research investigates the spectrum of risk of a cybersecurity incident taking place in the cyber-physical-enabled world using the VERIS Community Database. The findings were that the majority of known actors were from the US and Russia, most victims were from western states and geographic origin tended to reflect global affairs. The most commonly targeted asset was information, with the majority of attack modes relying on privilege abuse. The key feature observed was extensive internal security breaches, most often a result of human error. This tends to show that access in any form appears to be the source of vulnerability rather than incident specifics due to a fundamental trade-off between usability and security in the design of computer systems. This provides fundamental evidence of the need for a major reevaluation of the founding principles in cybersecurity.

Abstract : This year, in both content and organization, this statement illustrates how quickly and radically the world and our threat environment are changing. This environment is demanding reevaluations of the way we do business, expanding our analytic envelope, and altering the vocabulary of intelligence. Threats are more diverse, interconnected, and viral than at any time in history. Attacks, which might involve cyber and financial weapons, can be deniable and unattributable. Destruction can be invisible, latent, and progressive. We now monitor shifts in human geography, climate, disease, and competition for natural resources because they fuel tensions and conflicts. Local events that might seem irrelevant are more likely to affect US national security in accelerated time frames. In this threat environment, the importance and urgency of intelligence integration cannot be overstated. Our progress cannot stop. The Intelligence Community must continue to promote collaboration among experts in every field, from the political and social sciences to natural sciences, medicine, military issues, and space. Collectors and analysts need vision across disciplines to understand how and why developments and both state and unaffiliated actors can spark sudden changes with international implications. The Intelligence Community is committed every day to providing the nuanced, multidisciplinary intelligence that policymakers, diplomats, warfighters, and international and domestic law enforcement need to protect American lives and America s interests anywhere in the world.

Connectivity infrastructure is constantly expanding, increasing internet access across countries, regions and socio-political contexts. Given the fast changing geography of the internet, there is a growing demand to strengthen cyber capacity beyond national frameworks, in order to develop a transnationally coherent and coordinated governance approach to cybersecurity. In this context, cyber capacity building initiatives are increasingly central in international debates, with the ambition to support countries in the global south in fostering their cybersecurity strategy from technical and policy perspectives. This article discusses the key factors explaining states’ efforts to enhance their cyber capacity. Based on a cross-national quantitative research approach, the findings contradict IR derived approaches to cybersecurity, which assume that countries develop their cyber capacity according to external security threats, domestic politics, or norms. In line with existing research on the role that science play in policymaking processes more broadly, our results suggest instead that a country’s science and technical knowledge is the most robust explanation for states’ cyber capacity levels. These findings emphasise the need for policymakers to support countries in the global south in developing their cyber capacity beyond national security paradigms by further strengthen education and technical skills in contexts lacking in this resource.

Paper deals with the design of the model of hybrid threats and cyber deception platform and solution for cyber threat detection. National networks face a broad range of cyber threats. It includes advanced and persistent peril that can evade commercially available detection tools and defeat generic security measures. Cyber attacks are becoming more intense and complex as they reflect an increasing level of sophistication, e. g. by advanced persistent threat (APT) activity. This environment of menace is of a global nature when transcending geographic boundaries and characterized by the emerging development of offensive cyber capabilities that are an inherent part of conflicts. Deception methods and techniques are being successfully employed by attackers to breach networks and remain undetected in the physical and in the virtual worlds. However, in the world of cyber security, deception as a tactic and element of a more robust defensive strategy has been still largely underexploited. The broad concepts of deception within cyber security were introduced decades ago. Still, these were technological solutions focused on providing technical capabilities to distract, mislead or misdirect the attacker. Only recently has the focus shifted on to how to shape the attackers' sense-making of what is happening as they illegitimately explore networks. In this way, Cyber Deception nowadays provides an opportunity to scare, deter, and retaliate against those that violate organizations' systems. In connection with the foregoing authors created and presented the novel model of hybrid threats in hybrid warfare as a combination of multiple conventional and unconventional tools of warfare. Authors investigate the cyber deception platform and industrial model and solution for threat detection using deceptionbased methods.

The recent emergence of the targeted use of malware in cyber espionage versus industry requires a systematic review for better understanding of its impact and mechanism. This paper proposes a basic taxonomy to document major cyber espionage incidents, describing and comparing their impacts (geographic or political targets, origins and motivations) and their mechanisms (dropper, propagation, types of operating systems and infection rates). This taxonomy provides information on recent cyber espionage attacks that can aid in defense against cyber espionage by providing both scholars and experts a solid foundation of knowledge about the topic. The classification also provides a systematic way to document known and future attacks to facilitate research activities. Geopolitical and international relations researchers can focus on the impacts, and malware and security experts can focus on the mechanisms. We identify several dominant patterns (e.g., the prevalent use of remote access Trojan and social engineering). This article concludes that the research and professional community should collaborate to build an open data set to facilitate the geopolitical and/or technical analysis and synthesis of the role of malware in cyber espionage.

This study conducts a comprehensive examination of the global cyber security landscape by analysing four prominent indexes: the Cybersecurity Exposure Index (CEI), Global Cyber Security Index (GCI), National Cyber Security Index (NCSI), and Digital Development Level (DDL). Leveraging an extensive dataset spanning 193 countries and territories across five geographic regions, the research employs advanced statistical techniques and data visualization methodologies to unravel the multidimensional challenges and opportunities in fortifying international data protection. By uncovering potential correlations, regional disparities, and emerging trends shaping the cyber security paradigm, the study aims to provide actionable insights to inform policymakers, security professionals, and stakeholders. The overarching objective is to enhance data protection measures, foster cross-border collaboration, and cultivate a resilient global digital ecosystem, while contributing a comprehensive, data-driven perspective to ongoing dialogues on mitigating evolving cyber threats and safeguarding the world's digital fortress.

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AbstractWhile there is a burgeoning literature on cyber security, little scholarly work has been completed on how cyber security issues are affecting small states. This article attempts to contribute to the debate by exploring whether small states are facing unique or different challenges in enhancing their cyber security. Drawing on the extensive small states literature, the article begins by outlining three conceptual models of small state security, based on alliances, institutional cooperation and norms. These models are then applied to the small state cyber security context. It is argued that institutional cooperation on cyber security issues and the emergence of cyber security norms are being hindered by strategic rivalries between the United States, Russia and China and that military alliances are struggling to adapt to collective defence against cyber threats. The article then explores New Zealand's cyber security strategy and outlines the various domestic and international challenges that exist for New Zealand policymakers. The article finds: that a globalised cyber security environment is eroding New Zealand's geographical isolation; that the New Zealand government is struggling to formulate a tenable balance between security and privacy in responding to cyber security issues.KeywordsCyber securityNew Zealandsmall states Additional informationNotes on contributorsJoe BurtonAuthor biographyJoe Burton is a Lecturer in the Political Science and International Relations Programme at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He holds a PhD and Master of International Studies degree from the University of Otago, and a BSc. Econ in International Relations from the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. Joe's doctoral research was on the NATO alliance. His current research is focused on US and New Zealand foreign policy, contemporary security issues, and how states, non-state actors, international organisations and alliances are adapting to deal with evolving strategic challenges. Joe has also worked in professional politics: as a ministerial advisor, national campaign coordinator, legislative assistant, researcher, and political organiser.

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In this paper, military use cases or applications and implementation thereof are considered for natural language processing and large language models, which have broken into fame with the invention of the generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) and the extensive foundation model pretraining done by OpenAI for ChatGPT and others. First, we interrogate a GPT-based language model (viz. Microsoft Copilot) to make it reveal its own knowledge about their potential military applications and then critically assess the information. Second, we study how commercial cloud services (viz. Microsoft Azure) could be used readily to build such applications and assess which of them are feasible. We conclude that the summarization and generative properties of language models directly facilitate many applications at large and other features may find particular uses.

AI has made significant strides recently, leading to various applications in both civilian and military sectors. The military sees AI as a solution for developing more effective and faster technologies. While AI offers benefits like improved operational efficiency and precision targeting, it also raises serious ethical and legal concerns, particularly regarding human rights violations. Autonomous weapons that make decisions without human input can threaten the right to life and violate international humanitarian law. To address these issues, we propose a three-stage framework (Design, In Deployment, and During/After Use) for evaluating human rights concerns in the design, deployment, and use of military AI. Each phase includes multiple components that address various concerns specific to that phase, ranging from bias and regulatory issues to violations of International Humanitarian Law. By this framework, we aim to balance the advantages of AI in military operations with the need to protect human rights.

The REAIM 2024 Blueprint for Action states that AI applications in the military domain should be ethical and human-centric and that humans must remain responsible and accountable for their use and effects. Developing rigorous test and evaluation, verification and validation (TEVV) frameworks will contribute to robust oversight mechanisms. TEVV in the development and deployment of AI systems needs to involve human users throughout the lifecycle. Traditional human-centred test and evaluation methods from human factors need to be adapted for deployed AI systems that require ongoing monitoring and evaluation. The language around AI-enabled systems should be shifted to inclusion of the human(s) as a component of the system. Standards and requirements supporting this adjusted definition are needed, as are metrics and means to evaluate them. The need for dialogue between technologists and policymakers on human-centred TEVV will be evergreen, but dialogue needs to be initiated with an objective in mind for it to be productive. Development of TEVV throughout system lifecycle is critical to support this evolution including the issue of human scalability and impact on scale of achievable testing. Communication between technical and non technical communities must be improved to ensure operators and policy-makers understand risk assumed by system use and to better inform research and development. Test and evaluation in support of responsible AI deployment must include the effect of the human to reflect operationally realised system performance. Means of communicating the results of TEVV to those using and making decisions regarding the use of AI based systems will be key in informing risk based decisions regarding use.

We propose methods for analysis, design, and evaluation of Meaningful Human Control (MHC) for defense technologies from the perspective of military human-machine teaming (HMT). Our approach is based on three principles. Firstly, MHC should be regarded as a core objective that guides all phases of analysis, design and evaluation. Secondly, MHC affects all parts of the socio-technical system, including humans, machines, AI, interactions, and context. Lastly, MHC should be viewed as a property that spans longer periods of time, encompassing both prior and realtime control by multiple actors. To describe macrolevel design options for achieving MHC, we propose various Team Design Patterns. Furthermore, we present a case study, where we applied some of these methods to envision HMT, involving robots and soldiers in a search and rescue task in a military context.

Since the cyberspace consolidated as fifth warfare dimension, the different actors of the defense sector began an arms race toward achieving cyber superiority, on which research, academic and industrial stakeholders contribute from a dual vision, mostly linked to a large and heterogeneous heritage of developments and adoption of civilian cybersecurity capabilities. In this context, augmenting the conscious of the context and warfare environment, risks and impacts of cyber threats on kinetic actuations became a critical rule-changer that military decision-makers are considering. A major challenge on acquiring mission-centric Cyber Situational Awareness (CSA) is the dynamic inference and assessment of the vertical propagations from situations that occurred at the mission supportive Information and Communications Technologies (ICT), up to their relevance at military tactical, operational and strategical views. In order to contribute on acquiring CSA, this paper addresses a major gap in the cyber defence state-of-the-art: the dynamic identification of Key Cyber Terrains (KCT) on a mission-centric context. Accordingly, the proposed KCT identification approach explores the dependency degrees among tasks and assets defined by commanders as part of the assessment criteria. These are correlated with the discoveries on the operational network and the asset vulnerabilities identified thorough the supported mission development. The proposal is presented as a reference model that reveals key aspects for mission-centric KCT analysis and supports its enforcement and further enforcement by including an illustrative application case.

The massive diffusion of social media fosters disintermediation and changes the way users are informed, the way they process reality, and the way they engage in public debate. The cognitive layer of users and the related social dynamics define the nature and the dimension of informational threats. Users show the tendency to interact with information adhering to their preferred narrative and to ignore dissenting information. Confirmation bias seems to account for users decisions about consuming and spreading content; and, at the same time, aggregation of favored information within those communities reinforces group polarization. In this work, the authors address the problem of (mis)information operations with a holistic and integrated approach. Cognitive weakness induced by this new information environment are considered. Moreover, (mis)information operations, with particular reference to the Italian context, are considered; and the fact that the phenomenon is more complex than expected is highlighted. The paper concludes by providing an integrated research roadmap accounting for the possible future technological developments.

The escalating frequency and sophistication of cyber threats increased the need for their comprehensive understanding. This paper explores the intersection of geopolitical dynamics, cyber threat intelligence analysis, and advanced detection technologies, with a focus on the energy domain. We leverage generative artificial intelligence to extract and structure information from raw cyber threat descriptions, enabling enhanced analysis. By conducting a geopolitical comparison of threat actor origins and target regions across multiple databases, we provide insights into trends within the general threat landscape. Additionally, we evaluate the effectiveness of cybersecurity tools -- with particular emphasis on learning-based techniques -- in detecting indicators of compromise for energy-targeted attacks. This analysis yields new insights, providing actionable information to researchers, policy makers, and cybersecurity professionals.

This working paper examines how geopolitical strategies and energy resource management intersect with Artificial Intelligence (AI) development, delineating the AI-energy nexus as critical to sustaining U.S. AI leadership. By analyzing the centralized approaches of authoritarian regimes like China and Gulf nations, alongside market-driven approaches in the U.S., the paper explores divergent strategies to allocate resources for AI energy needs. It underscores the role of energy infrastructure, market dynamics, and state-led initiatives in shaping global AI competition. Recommendations include adopting geopolitically informed analyses and leveraging both market and non-market strengths to enhance U.S. competitiveness. This research aims to inform policymakers, technologists, and researchers about the strategic implications of the AI-energy nexus and offers insights into advancing U.S. global leadership in AI amidst evolving technological paradigms.

Industry 5.0 marks a new phase in industrial evolution, emphasizing human-centricity, sustainability, and resilience through the integration of advanced technologies. Within this evolving landscape, Generative AI (GenAI) and autonomous systems are not only transforming industrial processes but also emerging as pivotal geopolitical instruments. We examine strategic implications of GenAI in Industry 5.0, arguing that these technologies have become national assets central to sovereignty, access, and global influence. As countries compete for AI supremacy, growing disparities in talent, computational infrastructure, and data access are reshaping global power hierarchies and accelerating the fragmentation of the digital economy. The human-centric ethos of Industry 5.0, anchored in collaboration between humans and intelligent systems, increasingly conflicts with the autonomy and opacity of GenAI, raising urgent governance challenges related to meaningful human control, dual-use risks, and accountability. We analyze how these dynamics influence defense strategies, industrial competitiveness, and supply chain resilience, including the geopolitical weaponization of export controls and the rise of data sovereignty. Our contribution synthesizes technological, economic, and ethical perspectives to propose a comprehensive framework for navigating the intersection of GenAI and geopolitics. We call for governance models that balance national autonomy with international coordination while safeguarding human-centric values in an increasingly AI-driven world.

Geopolitical tensions increasingly reshape the structure and openness of global science, yet we still lack a clear understanding of how successfully scientists adapt their work under such pressures. Using millions of funding and publication datasets across the past ten years, we investigate how U.S. China geopolitical tensions reshaped individual research activities of U.S. based scientists, particularly those collaborating with Chinese peers. We find that although U.S. China geopolitical tensions significantly reduce funding opportunities, many scientists actively respond by pivoting their research portfolios toward alternative topics, and this adaptive reorientation partially mitigates funding losses. Crucially, the effectiveness of this adaptive strategy is highly unequal: for scientists in high risk domains, those of Asian descent, and early-career scientists, pivoting offers only limited protection against funding loss. Our results demonstrate that geopolitical tensions reshape science through shifts in scientists' strategic decisions about their research focus. Understanding this adaptive but uneven reconfiguration is essential for science policies to strengthen the resilience and inclusiveness of the scientific enterprise.

The fields of study encompassed by cyber science and engineering are broad and poorly defined at this time. As national governments and research communities increase their recognition of the importance, urgency and technical richness of these disciplines, a question of priorities arises: what specific sub-areas of research should be the foci of attention and funding? In this paper we point to an approach to answering this question. We explore results of a recent workshop that postulated possible game-changers or disruptive changes that might occur in cyber security within the next 15 years. We suggest that such game-changers may be useful in focusing attention of research communities on high-priority topics. Indeed, if a drastic, important change is likely to occur, should we not focus our research efforts on the nature and ramifications of the phenomena pertaining to that change? We illustrate each of the game-changers examples of related current research, and then offer recommendations for advancement of cyber science and engineering with respect to each of the six game-changers.

Incident management is a classical topic in cyber security. Recently, the European Union (EU) has started to consider also the relation between cyber security incidents and cyber security crises. These considerations and preparations, including those specified in the EU's new cyber security laws, constitute the paper's topic. According to an analysis of the laws and associated policy documents, (i) cyber security crises are equated in the EU to large-scale cyber security incidents that either exceed a handling capacity of a single member state or affect at least two member states. For this and other purposes, (ii) the new laws substantially increase mandatory reporting about cyber security incidents, including but not limited to the large-scale incidents. Despite the laws and new governance bodies established by them, however, (iii) the working of actual cyber security crisis management remains unclear particularly at the EU-level. With these policy research results, the paper advances the domain of cyber security incident management research by elaborating how European law perceives cyber security crises and their relation to cyber security incidents, paving the way for many relevant further research topics with practical relevance, whether theoretical, conceptual, or empirical.

When `cyber' is used as a prefix, attention is typically drawn to the technological and spectacular aspects of war and conflict -- and, by extension, security. We offer a different approach to engaging with and understanding security in such contexts, by foregrounding the everyday -- mundane -- experiences of security within communities living with and fleeing from war. We do so through three vignettes from our field research in Colombia, Lebanon and Sweden, respectively, and by highlighting the significance of ethnography for security research with communities living in regions afflicted by war. We conclude by setting out a call to action for security researchers and practitioners to consider such lived experiences in the design of security technology that aims to cater to the needs of communities in `global conflict and disaster regions'.

This paper examines the recent advances and applications of AI in human geography especially the use of machine (deep) learning, including place representation and modeling, spatial analysis and predictive mapping, and urban planning and design. AI technologies have enabled deeper insights into complex human-environment interactions, contributing to more effective scientific exploration, understanding of social dynamics, and spatial decision-making. Furthermore, human geography offers crucial contributions to AI, particularly in context-aware model development, human-centered design, biases and ethical considerations, and data privacy. The synergy beween AI and human geography is essential for addressing global challenges like disaster resilience, poverty, and equitable resource access. This interdisciplinary collaboration between AI and geography will help advance the development of GeoAI and promise a better and sustainable world for all.

This paper demonstrates the potential for autonomous cyber defence to be applied on industrial control systems and provides a baseline environment to further explore Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning's (MARL) application to this problem domain. It introduces a simulation environment, IPMSRL, of a generic Integrated Platform Management System (IPMS) and explores the use of MARL for autonomous cyber defence decision-making on generic maritime based IPMS Operational Technology (OT). OT cyber defensive actions are less mature than they are for Enterprise IT. This is due to the relatively brittle nature of OT infrastructure originating from the use of legacy systems, design-time engineering assumptions, and lack of full-scale modern security controls. There are many obstacles to be tackled across the cyber landscape due to continually increasing cyber-attack sophistication and the limitations of traditional IT-centric cyber defence solutions. Traditional IT controls are rarely deployed on OT infrastructure, and where they are, some threats aren't fully addressed. In our experiments, a shared critic implementation of Multi Agent Proximal Policy Optimisation (MAPPO) outperformed Independent Proximal Policy Optimisation (IPPO). MAPPO reached an optimal policy (episode outcome mean of 1) after 800K timesteps, whereas IPPO was only able to reach an episode outcome mean of 0.966 after one million timesteps. Hyperparameter tuning greatly improved training performance. Across one million timesteps the tuned hyperparameters reached an optimal policy whereas the default hyperparameters only managed to win sporadically, with most simulations resulting in a draw. We tested a real-world constraint, attack detection alert success, and found that when alert success probability is reduced to 0.75 or 0.9, the MARL defenders were still able to win in over 97.5% or 99.5% of episodes, respectively.

This paper sets the context for the urgency for cyber autonomy, and the current gaps of the cyber security industry. A novel framework proposing four phases of maturity for full cyber autonomy will be discussed. The paper also reviews new and emerging cyber security automation techniques and tools, and discusses their impact on society, the perceived cyber security skills gap/shortage and national security. We will also be discussing the delicate balance between national security, human rights and ethics, and the potential demise of the manual penetration testing industry in the face of automation.

This paper provides an overview of research programs in cyber security performed by the U.S Army Research Laboratory. Although ARL is the U.S. Army's corporate laboratory that focuses on fundamental and early applied research, the fundamental science endeavors are closely integrated with extensive operationally-oriented programs. One example is the Cyber Collaborative Research Alliance (CRA) that brings together ARL scientists with academic researchers from dozens of U.S. universities. ARL cyber scientists are largely driven by challenges unique to the ground operations of the Army; this paper outlines a few of these challenges and the ways in which they are addressed by ARL research efforts. The long-term campaign of cyber research is guided by the vision of the future Army battlefield. In the year 2040, it will be a highly converged virtual-physical space, where cyber operations will be an integral part of the battle.