Given the weakness of today’s UN as an instrument for tackling global challenges, we need to rely on treaties and diplomacy for urgent safety measures at the international level: a new pact on restricting bioweapons and synthetic biology, with inspections for verification; a treaty on AI and cyberwarfare; and a treaty to restrain the arms race for weapons in the oceans and outer space. After creating an Office for Emerging Biotechnology in the US, we should promote the creation of similar offices in as many other nations as possible, building a network of global regulatory capabilities. Finally, we can undertake a series of moderate reforms to beef up the effectiveness of the UN: enlarging the Security Council; restricting the use of the veto; and adding new Peacebuilding roles to the General Assembly.

Cyberspace may constitute either the exclusive area of operations or a means of conduct of hostilities in an otherwise conventional armed conflict. The basic text concerning the rules applicable in cyber warfare is the Tallinn Manual 2.0, a 'soft law' text that is not generally followed by the few States that include cyber warfare in their military manuals. However, the relevance and applicability of the law of neutrality in cyber conflict is not disputed. The proposed legal framework is in principle premised on the Hague Conventions V and XIII, though the particularities of cyberspace as a domain have admitted substantive deviations with respect to inviolability of neutral territory and neutral due diligence.

Describing examples of noteworthy cybersecurity incidents and cyber operations of the past fifteen years, this chapter outlines the current transnational cybersecurity landscape. Focusing on some of the political implications, it is examined how states have reacted to operations that were supposedly carried out by adversarial states, such as the distributed denial-of-service attacks in Estonia in 2007, the Stuxnet operation jointly undertaken by Israel and the United States against the Iranian uranium enrichment programme, incidents triggered by the WannaCry and NotPetya malwares, or the Russian hacking and disinformation campaigns in the run-up to the US presidential election in 2016.