What is the role of political economy in cyber statecraft? Nation-states develop, exercise and restrict the use of offensive and defensive capabilities in cyberspace to meet their strategic objectives. To do so, they rely on a number of private actors; a state’s ability to coerce them is governed by structural variables of trust, interdependence, and power in state-state and state- private relations. We analyse these relationships through a conceptual framework that theorises political, social, economic, and technological trust within cyberspace as an information system.
Contrasting Chinese and Western cyber ecosystems, we find that leveraging domestic political economy is key in projecting national cyber power, at the cost of adverse structural outcomes, such as asymmetry, volatility, and potential fragmentation in cyberspace. Implications for coercive and cooperative strategies, and the future of cyber statecraft are discussed.
