State Cybersecurity Governance in the Fourth Industrial Revolution: An International Law Perspective

Abstract

The state remains the primary role player, which will determine cybersecurity policy and governance for the 4IR. The purpose of this chapter is to determine how states under international law should govern cybersecurity globally when faced with the disruptions that the 4IR will bring. The chapter uses the perceived future 4IR disruptions, prominent international law policy documents and the diversity of state practice to discern the prevailing normative order of state cybersecurity governance. The chapter identifies cyber justice as the desired foundational normative prescript to manage state cybersecurity governance and policy interventions. It further identifies two critical disruptions for state cybersecurity governance under a 4IR paradigm. These are the redundancy of customary legislative and regulatory intervention to legal and policy challenges and the threat to the notion of the state and state sovereignty through an evolved interpretation of cyber sovereignty as uncoupled from state territorial integrity. The research in the chapter is prescriptive. It provides a novel contribution for normative modelling of state cybersecurity governance under international law.