2. Towards an international agreement

The fact that potential future cyberattacks, while possibly causing widespread destruction, could also initiate conventional warfare has fuelled initiatives to codify diplomatic response, as well as to disentangle the challenges of the application of international law to cyberspace and formulate a framework for responsible state behaviour.

Negotiations in this context fall into three main areas:

•   Criteria for entering a war or invoking jus ad bellum (‘right to war’, i.e. the body of international law governing the right of states to resort to war), and in particular, how principles and specific articles of the UN Charter apply to cyberspace.
•   International humanitarian law or jus in bello (‘law in war’, i.e. laws that govern the conduct of conflict), in particular, how to apply The Hague Conventions and the Geneva Conventions in cyberspace.
•   Weapons and disarmament, and questions like how (and if) to introduce cyberweapons into the disarmament process.

Even though, for many countries, these issues are new at the foreign affairs agenda, they have been discussed within the UN context since 1998. A brief history of the UN cyber processes is illustrated in video 1, while more details are discussed later in the module.

Besides clarifying how international law applies to cyberspace, the UN deliberations have also discussed how to address peacetime incidents, for example, cyberattacks that fall under the threshold of armed attacks. In this regard, a set of voluntary norms, confidence-building measures (CBMs), and capacity-building principles have been developed by the UN and regional organisations.