Event Details

Tsvetelina van Benthem (Oxford University) and Professor Duncan Hollis (Temple University, Philadelphia)

Summary:

Threats have long been endemic in inter-State relations with diverse goals, communicative values and means of signaling. Yet, international law explicitly focuses on just one type of threat – threats of force. Under the jus ad bellum, States must refrain from threats of force in their international relations. This prohibition has received limited attention from States unlike its companion – the prohibition on uses of force. Yet, existing doctrine establishes that States can violate it by threatening force implicitly as well as explicitly, with the legal threshold measured via an objective methodology. In this seminar, the speakers will discuss the elements of the prohibition, as well as its application to cyberspace conduct. The idiosyncrasies of information and communications technologies provide fertile ground for cyber-specific threatening behavior. The ubiquity of unauthorized access means that a compromise for one purpose – e.g., espionage – could, under the right circumstances, simultaneously (and implicitly) threaten a future use of force. The talk will also highlight the potential of “Big Data” to change the nature of cyber threats of force as well as its capacity to improve States’ ability to identify them.

Link to the speakers’ recent chapter on the topic.

Biographies:

Duncan B. Hollis is Laura H. Carnell Professor of Law at Temple Law School and a co-convenor of The Oxford Process on International Law Protections in Cyberspace. His scholarship engages with issues of international law, interpretation, and cybersecurity, with a particular emphasis on treaties, norms, and other forms of international regulation. He is currently a non-resident Scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and an elected member of the American Law Institute, where he served as an Adviser on its project to draft a Fourth Restatement on the Foreign Relations Law of the United States. In 2016, he was elected by the General Assembly of the Organization of the American States to a four-year term on the OAS’s Inter-American Juridical Committee. Professor Hollis’s books include The Oxford Guide to Treaties (OUP, 2nd ed., 2020); International Law (with Allen Weiner); and (with Jens Ohlin) Defending Democracies: Combatting Foreign Election Interference in a Digital Age (OUP, 2020).

Tsvetelina van Benthem is a research officer at the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict and a lecturer in Public International Law for the Diplomatic Studies Programme at Oxford. She is a DPhil candidate in International Law at Merton College. Her dissertation focuses on the regulation of accidents and mistakes under the law of armed conflict and international criminal law. Tsvetelina is a co-convenor of the Oxford Transitional Justice Research (OTJR) and the president of the Centre for International Law ‘Erga Omnes’, Bulgaria. Her scholarship engages with the intersection of international law and technology, international humanitarian law, international human rights law, the jus ad bellum and human rights law