Approaches to international information security and the discourse of cyberspace

Abstract

This paper investigates the notion of sovereignty and territorial integrity of states in cyberspace by carefully examining the information security debate. Nowadays, issues related to infosec are posing fundamental challenges to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of nation-states. Our analysis has attempted to answer the critical question, which aspect makes infosec the most pressing issue of the 21st century? The United States, The Russian Federation, and China are the three technologically superior nations and are included in the study to compare their understanding of infosec issues. The authors have typically relied on their expertise to interpret primary and secondary data because of descriptive discourse. Moreover, the study is efficiently conducted through a deductive approach and has applied non-kineticism as a theoretical model. The results showed that due to the compelling non-kinetic application of infosec, the debate at international forums had become a victim of geopolitical considerations. Results also revealed that the discourse of infosec needs to be disassociated from social freedom as it has been adopted for military application and requires a national security perspective to confine the course of security implications. In abstract, the notion of infosec has given birth to new contestation in the domain of cyberspace that altogether would lead the competition into the ‘digital battlefield.’