Ido Kilovaty
Non-intervention is a bedrock principle of international law which prohibits States from interfering in the domestic or foreign affairs of other States. Non-intervention is based on two constitutive elements: domaine réservé and coercion. The former protects the core areas of sovereignty under the exclusive jurisdiction of a State, while the latter creates a threshold of wrongfulness, which typically involves using force or pressure to compel a State to pursue an action that it otherwise would not pursue.
While the contours of non-intervention are well-understood outside the cyber context, the emergence of cyber operations as a tool of interference has complicated application of the non-intervention principle. Primarily, coercion as a pillar of unlawful intervention is increasingly becoming outdated and insufficient to address cyber operations that seek to destabilize election processes, spread disinformation online, or cause disruption to critical infrastructure systems.
This short post, based on my chapter entitled “Rethinking Coercion in Cyberspace” (which appeared in Mitt Regan and Aurel Sari’s Hybrid Threats and Grey Zone Conflict), explores how the traditional standard of coercion is losing its relevance in cyberspace, where State and non-State actors can engage in harmful interference without meeting the traditional threshold of coercion.
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