AJIL Online Symposium on Sovereignty in Relation to Cyber Operations

AJIL Unbound, which supplements the American Journal of International Law’s print edition by publishing short, original essays online, today posted a symposium on sovereignty, cyber operations, and the Tallinn Manual 2.0. The symposium includes an introduction by Tom Ginsburg and essays by Gary Corn & Robert Taylor, Michael Schmitt & Liis Vihul, Phil Spector, and Ahmed Ghappour.

In their essays, the contributors explore and debate the nature of sovereignty in the cyber context. One key question – on which some of the contributors disagree – is whether sovereignty constitutes a stand-alone, binding international legal norm that states violate when they engage in certain cyber operations that fall below the level of a use of force, or, alternatively, whether sovereignty is a principle that simply informs other primary international rules of conduct. This is an important debate, one that the essays frame well.