Institute members Andre Barrinha and Sean Garrett give an update on ‘Cyber Statecraft in an Era of Systemic Competition’ - CyCraft.

CyCraft is a joint project with King’s College London, RUSI and the University of Bath. In the last two decades, states have realised the importance of cyberspace as a strategic environment. Despite this, the lack of vocabulary for strategic competition in the cyberspace domain is striking. Prefixing cyber to existing conceptualisations often fails to describe or explain strategic competition in and of cyberspace, which then leads to the paucity of the conceptual toolbox for academia and policy. In this paper we attempt to rectify this by proposing a research agenda centred on the concept of cyber statecraft as the array of state-led attempts to achieve strategic goals by influencing other actors in and through cyberspace.

This session will explore the aims of the project and unpack the concept of cyber statecraft, exploring what it means, why it matters and how it can be studied.