Institutional Foundations for Cyber Security: Current Responses and New Challenges

"Almost everyone recognizes the salience of cyberspace as a fact of daily life. Given its ubiquity, scale, and scope, cyberspace has become a fundamental feature of the world we live in and has created a fundamentally new reality for almost everyone in the developed world and increasingly for people in in the developing world. This paper examines an important aspect of this new international reality, namely the institutions responsible for addressing threats to the security of cyberspace and international relations transmitted via cyber venues. In this context, institutions are located at the intersection of two important lines of inquiry in political science, namely in the long tradition of institutional analysis in international relations and the nascent area of theorizing about cyberpolitics in international relations. Our purpose is to provide a mapping, an initial base line, for representing what is likely to be a rapidly-evolving feature in the international landscape, real as well as virtual. Accordingly, we shall also highlight emerging responses and challenges, while simultaneously evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of the current institutional framework. A secondary goal is to investigate the feasibility of using quantitative data to evaluate cyber security performance."