How cyberspace affects international relations: The promise of structural modifiers

ABSTRACT

This article proposes a new way to understand cyberspace's impact on international relations by treating it as a “structural modifier.” This shared language with IR allows for a clearer picture of cyberspace's causal role and effects. Unlike previous views of cyberspace as a mere domain or a revolutionary tool, this approach sees it as influencing all states’ behavior within the existing international structure. Cyberspace alters the nature and number of interactions between states, but only within the confines and constraints of the existing structure. The article demonstrates the analytical value of this approach across four key areas: deterrence, foreign policy tool choice, uncertainty, and state/non-state actor interactions. Thinking of cyberspace as a structural modifier heeds policy-makers to remain skeptical of pressures to focus on cyberspace in isolation or at the expense of other statecraft domains and tools, or to make decisions based on the idea that cyberspace revolutionizes international relations.

KEYWORDS:

• Cyberspace
• cyber security
• international security
• international relations
• structural modifier

What is the role of cyberspace in international relations? Does cyberspace represent a domain of statecraft, or an independent system of rules and behaviors? The pervasiveness of cyber-attacks, their increasing economic damage, and the increasing number of states conducting cyber operations have made these questions increasingly salient. Early debates about the need to integrate cyberspace with broader concepts and theories of International Relations (IR) have started to move from the periphery to the core of the discipline (Dunn Cavelty, 2020; Gartzke & Lindsay, 2024). Cyber scholarship in IR has started to integrate into an own field of study, at least when one considers the various conferences, special issues in journals, and research seminar groups. They began to engage meaningfully with the discipline’s wider theories and concepts. However, this engagement tends to focus on particular aspects of cyberspace: its use in war or deterrence, its combination with other tools in particular states’ foreign policies, and so forth. Theorization remains nascent in the sense that cyber scholarship in IR has struggled to formulate broader policy and theoretical implications we can derive for patterns of international politics. This is partially because cyber scholarship in IR has lacked the theoretical tools to do so. In this article, we argue that conceptualizing cyberspace as a structural modifier offers a language shared with the IR discipline that can help us better understand the causal role and effects cyberspace has in international relations.

Most of the cyberspace debate in IR has occurred against the backdrop of cyberspace understood as a domain through which actors conduct cyber operations against other actors. Some scholars explain how cyber operations revolutionize the practice of international relations concerning deterrence or war. Other scholars remain moderate about cyberspace’s potential to fundamentally change international relations. These scholars stress what cyber operations cannot do and challenge some of the most dramatic claims about the likely effects of cyberspace. They doubt that cyber operations have strategic value or aid in conflict, and they stress the considerable barriers that states face when they develop cyber capabilities. However, this debate about cyberspace as a domain is challenged by scholars who argue that cyberspace does something different in terms of causation: it shapes all states’ behavior across international relations (Brantley, 2018; Buchanan, 2016; Fischerkeller et al., 2022; Gartzke & Lindsay, 2024; Kello, 2017, 2022; Kreps & Schneider, 2019; Libicki, 2007; Lindsay, 2020; E. D. Lonergan & Schneider, 2023; Maschmeyer, 2023; Smeets, 2022). These scholars have started to develop theories about the circumstances under which cyberspace matters in international relations, how actors shape the cyber domain, and how the cyber domain in turn influences actors’ interaction capacity. While this literature is promising, it suffers from two key problems: it has received relatively little attention as a collective body of work, and it has overlooked the policy and theoretical potential of further integrating cyber scholarship with IR theory and concepts.

This article proposes a solution to both problems. As we explain, cyberspace’s effects can be captured in existing conceptual language shared with the wider IR discipline: as a structural modifier. This reveals that cyberspace modifies the way actors likely experience the effects from international relations’ structure, and it reveals how cyberspace does so. How states behave in international relations is shaped by the structure of international relations. Structure refers to a set of macro-social arrangements that govern international relations (Wight, 2006, pp. 105, 129), also referred to as the “rules of the [international] game” (quoted from Wight, 2006, p. 282; see also Meibauer, 2023). Mainstream IR theory predominantly highlights the role of anarchy defined as the lack of a higher ruling body in international relations, as well as the distribution of material power among states. Because international relations are characterized by anarchy, states are uncertain about other states’ intentions. It therefore matters how material power, and especially military capabilities, are distributed among states. In an anarchical international environment states must care about and defend those things like territory, economic capabilities, and military capabilities that they need to protect themselves. Anarchy and distributions of material power among states thus shape actor behavior—but in indirect and complex ways: states are likely to experience anarchy differently depending on their geographic position or level of technological progress. As we explain, cyberspace specifies the structural constraints and opportunities that actors face because it regulates what kinds and intensities of interactions among actors are probable and desired.

Our research contributes to existing debates in three main ways. First, our research contributes to IR scholarship. IR has long lagged behind when it comes to grasping cyberspace. If IR scholars engage cyber scholarship, they may develop theories and concepts that better reflect empirical reality. Second, our research offers an avenue to integrate cyber scholarship as a collective body of work in IR. If cyber scholars forgo engaging the wider discipline, they risk developing ad hoc explanations and limiting unnecessarily the universe of cases to which their scholarship applies. Cyber scholars in IR have theorized in fairly disconnected ways: they adhere to different paradigms and cover different topics like deterrence or foreign policy tool choice. Of course, focusing on different particular aspects or effects of cyberspace and on particular states’ cyber policies is not in principle a problem. However, in practice it meant that cyber scholars forwent zooming out and considering the collective implications of their scholarship for international relations. Do cyberspace’s effects on different areas of international relations—like deterrence, uncertainty, foreign policy tool choice, and interaction between states and other actors—simply co-exist alongside each other, or do they interact to produce larger scale effects? The cyber debate in IR has so far lacked sustained discussion of cyberspace’s nature (what it is) and relative causal effect (what it does) in international relations. When we conceptualize cyberspace as a structural modifier, we may express systematically and in generalizable fashion how cyberspace causally affects international relations. This conceptualization can be operationalized in future research to reveal insights across key areas of international relations. This may also extend to other emerging technologies including artificial intelligence, outer space technology or lethal autonomous weapons. Finally, our research contributes to policy debates. Policy-makers must shift their thinking to taking structure more seriously. Thinking of cyberspace as a structural modifier heeds policy-makers to remain skeptical of pressures to focus on cyberspace in isolation or at the expense of other statecraft domains or tools. However much cyberspace modifies existing structural rules and processes across international relations; it does not do away with them. This should caution policy-makers against decisions based on the idea that cyberspace revolutionizes international relations.

The remainder of this article unfolds in four sections. Section one reviews extant research and introduces cyberspace’s domain-structure distinction. Section two introduces cyberspace as a structural modifier and shows how it captures and pushes forward cyber scholarship. Section three showcases the cyberspace structural modifier with clear empirical examples across four key areas in international relations. Section four demonstrates how the cyberspace structural modifier is productive of new research across cyber and IR scholarship. The final section outlines policy implications.

Cyberspace: Domain versus structure

Most existing scholarship tends to view cyberspace as a domain through which actors conduct cyber operations that they leverage against other actors. Cyberspace as a domain can be defined as comprising three main dimensions.¹ The first dimension concerns material factors like physical information technology infrastructure including storage, routers, semi-conductors, satellites, and processors. The second dimension concerns ideational factors like the meanings that actors attribute to the physical information technology infrastructure; through norms, conventions, acceptable behaviors, and software protocols in an organization or society (Maschmeyer, 2023, pp. 90–91). These material and ideational dimensions shape what is possible in and through cyberspace. A state with extensive economic and technological capacities may provide material information technology infrastructure that other actors rely and depend on. The former has a form of structural power over that latter. Conventions, software protocols, and international norms may be shaped by the most powerful actors and influence how other actors are likely to behave. Cyberspace’s material and ideational dimensions are, for example for reasons of strategic culture or resource availability, relied on and controlled by some actors more than other actors. This set-up and differentiated control also render cyberspace more advantageous for some actors than other actors. The third cyberspace dimension is semantic. It concerns information that computers hold, and the web of interactions and data transmitted in cyberspace. At this semantic layer occurs digital dissemination of propaganda or the offensive use of code to infiltrate another network. This semantic dimension of cyberspace adds to cyberspace’s material and ideational layers. It differentiates cyberspace from other technologies that affect international relations like nuclear weapons technology. These dimensions of cyberspace relate to each other in ways that render cyberspace unique. They are conventionally said to sit on top of one another (Libicki, 2009, p. 12). The material, ideational, and semantic dimensions of cyberspace affect how actors are likely to behave and what actor interactions are likely to occur; for example, when one destroys cyberspace’s material infrastructure one also disables substantial parts of cyberspace’s semantic dimension (Libicki, 2009, p. 12).

Existing scholarship that views cyberspace as a domain through which actors conduct cyber operations and that they may leverage against others can be grouped in two camps. One camp stresses that cyberspace and cyber operations revolutionize much of what we know about international relations. This camp argues that cyber-enhanced military tactics supposedly disrupt the face of war by altering who, when, and how actors fight battles, and who may win (Adams, 2001; Arquilla & Ronfeldt, 1993; Choucri & Clark, 2019; Junio, 2013; McConnell, 2009; Nye, 2010, p. 4; 2011). They seek to integrate cyberspace with broader IR debates (Choucri & Clark, 2019). Technological developments make information more accessible to more people, empowering individuals to mobilize their skills and participate in collective action. This led to new surveillance dynamics, control, and power with unclear consequences for peace, democracy, and human rights (Jordan, 1999, pp. 67, 79, 87, 102–103; Rosenau, 1990). The other camp remains more moderate about cyberspace’s potential to change international relations. It challenges some of the most urgent and sometimes exaggerated claims about how cyberspace revolutionizes dynamics of politics, war, diplomacy, and human rights (Blunden & Cheung, 2014; Borghard & Lonergan, 2017; Smeets in Foulon et al., 2021; Freilich et al., 2023; Gartzke, 2013; Gomez, 2022, p. 1; Harknett & Smeets, 2022; Libicki, 2009, pp. xv–xvi; Liff, 2012; Maschmeyer, 2021; Moore, 2022, p. 6; Rid, 2012; Smeets, 2022; Valeriano & Maness, 2015). While the two camps continue to debate cyberspace’s effects on international relations, the parameters of the debate seem to have ossified: new scholarship on cyberspace as a domain tends to fall relatively neatly into one of the two camps.

This debate about cyberspace as a domain is challenged by scholars who conceive of cyberspace not as a domain, but as factor that modifies the effects from structure. Specifically, these scholars argue that cyberspace shapes all states’ behavior across international relations. They argue that when we focus solely on how states act in and through cyberspace for example to conduct cyber operations, we risk ignoring how cyberspace interacts with other dynamics of international relations. When these scholars view instead cyberspace as a systemic factor, they develop theories that start with a baseline in international relations’ structure that is conventionally characterized by anarchy and the distribution of material power between states. Then they relinquish this baseline’s parsimony for more complexity and precision by injecting a good dose of cyberspace.² Some of them argue that cyberspace affects how states across international relations gather military intelligence and how they perform in militarily conflict (Lindsay, 2020, pp. 59–60, 212). Some of them argue that cyberspace incentivises states to operate in international cyber strategic environments by persistently engaging, spying, sabotaging, destabilizing, or otherwise exploiting vulnerabilities (Buchanan, 2020; Fischerkeller et al., 2022, p. 24).³ They argue that cyberspace incentivises states to deter aggression by responding to adversarial cyber operations’ sequences and cumulative effect (Kello, 2017, p. 9, also p. 10; 2022, p. 147).⁴ One actor’s digital information or disinformation campaigns may reverse another actor’s structural power in international relations: Russia’s campaign to influence the 2016 US Presidential Elections exploited the US’ open and computerized society, and turned it into a weakness (Maschmeyer, 2023).

This latter scholarship that views cyberspace as a systemic factor is promising, but it continues to suffer from two inherent tensions. First, cyber theories often remain disconnected from one another. Even as they cover a wider scope and effects of cyberspace, they tend to follow different paradigms and focus on different particular cyberspace aspects. They have largely foregone considering their scholarship as a collective body of work. One may certainly argue that cyberspace incentivises states to persistently engage and exploit vulnerabilities in the international cyber strategic environment (Fischerkeller et al., 2022), but are these effects isolated from how cyberspace affects other areas of international relations like deterrence or foreign policy tool choice? Much cyber scholarship lacks the theoretical and conceptual tools to consider systematically these types of integrative questions.

The second tension in cyber scholarship is that it continues to struggle engaging the wider discipline of IR—just as the latter often continues to overlook the former. One of contemporary IR’s most popular approaches to security and statecraft, neoclassical realism, has largely disregarded cyberspace despite the latter’s rapid growth over the last three decades (Meibauer et al., 2020; Ripsman et al., 2016). If IR scholars forgo engaging cyberspace, they risk developing theories and concepts that fail to reflect empirical reality. In turn, if cyber scholars forgo engaging the wider discipline, they risk developing ad hoc explanations and limiting unnecessarily the universe of cases to which their knowledge applies. They also miss out on theoretical and conceptual tools that can help them explain the relative effect of cyberspace compared to, and in interaction with, existing areas of international relations like anarchy and the distribution of power among states.

In the remainder of this article, we propose a solution to help resolve these tensions. We suggest that cyberspace functions causally as a structural modifier in international relations. This captures and combines key insights from of existing cyber scholarship. It addresses the unresolved debates between domain-focused and structure-focused approaches, as well between those highlighting cyberspace’s revolutionary effects on international relations versus those stressing cyberspace’s moderate effects.

Cyberspace as a structural modifier

IR scholars have long argued that international relations’ structure incentivises how states behave in international politics. Structure is an analytical term to describe properties of relationships between units in a system (here: states in the international system) (Meibauer, 2023). Specifically, international relations are often assumed to be governed by a dual structure (Buzan et al., 1993, p. 79). One part is the deep structure, namely anarchy defined as the lack of a higher ruling body. The other part is the distributional structure, namely the distribution of material power among states. These two parts of structure relate: anarchy creates constant uncertainty about other states’ intentions and whether states can defend themselves against others. It therefore matters how material power capabilities are dispersed among states. States must care about and defend those material things, like military capabilities, infrastructure, and territory, they need to protect themselves in international relations. Concurrently, states often depart from these structural incentives. They may fail to protect the material things they need to defend themselves, or do so in an untimely manner (Buzan & Little, 1996; Smith, 2019). They may even forego doing so entirely: in the end, states are “free to die” (Sterling-Folker, 1997, p. 19). Put differently, structure provides overall incentives for how actors behave, but it does not specify the types, location, and timing of interactions that are likely to occur between those actors.

Therefore, in addition to anarchy and the distribution of material power among states, scholars have emphasized the influence of structural modifiers. The term structural modifier has been used especially in realist studies since the 1990s to refer to a wide range of systemic properties that modify structural incentives (Foulon & Meibauer, 2020, p. 1207; Ripsman et al., 2016, pp. 38–43; Snyder, 1996, pp. 168–170). Structural modifiers specify underlying structural incentives: they pull and push states in clearer ways than the deep and distributional structure do. Structural modifiers change how actors likely experience the effects from international relations’ structure (Buzan et al., 1993, pp. 69, 72). In other words, structural modifiers do not change or modify structure itself, but alter the causal effect of structure on state behavior. They “condition the significance of structure” (Buzan et al., 1993, p. 72) as they “not only affect the ability and willingness of actors to interact, but also determine what types of levels of interaction are possible and desired” (p. 69). This refines and departs from a sparser Waltzian structure in crucial ways, but in turn offers new spaces for research and policy (Donnelly, 2023). Importantly, while structural modifiers may originate from one or a few states, they affect how all states across international relations interact and how they respond to structural incentives. That means that the nature and effects of structural modifiers are systemic. As Snyder (1996, p. 169) argues, structural modifiers influence how actors experience “the effects of the more basic structural elements [like anarchy and the distribution of material power among states] on the interaction process, but they are not interaction itself.”

The impact of structural modifiers is uneven across differently situated states, differing by region, grouping, and in time (Lobell, 2018, p. 597). Structural modifiers are not to be confused with unit-level (domestic) variables, which usually affect the behavior of only one particular state. In other words, structural modifiers occupy a middle ground between structure and units (actors). This means that structural modifiers provide important information on two interlinked causal effects of the system’s underlying structure: one, on the parameters of all state interactions in general, and two, therefore, on the likely behavior of any one particular actor (Ripsman et al., 2016, p. 40). From the perspective of any one state, structural modifiers allow for a more detailed, specific examination of an adversary’s power or threat (Lobell, 2018, p. 597).

Consider geography and nuclear weapons as structural modifiers. While geographic features like oceans, rivers, mountains, or deserts do not cause aggressive state behavior, they may enable or constrain it. It is more difficult to project power across a vast ocean (Mearsheimer, 2003/2014). Nuclear weapons originated from one or a few states and belong to only a few. But because nuclear weapons exist, they have system-wide effects: they decrease the prospects of war between nuclear armed states as well as between their client states where the former have important interests. States’ individual geographical features and nuclear weapons transcend the unit-level and have broader, system-wide effects.

Or consider military technology and the rate of technological diffusion, especially regarding the offense-defense balance. Military technology comes closest to cyberspace in terms of thinking as a structural modifier. Military technologies alter the type and nature of interactions between states. As military technologies spread in the system of states, they advantage or disadvantage a threatening component of an adversary's power (Lobell, 2018, p. 597). New technological innovations may become available across the system of states through diffusion via trade, espionage, and emulation (Mallett & Juneau, 2023). New military technology may favor the offense and make conquest easier (Jervis, 1978, p. 187). The implication of military technology that favors the offense is that states are less secure, less likely to cooperate, and more likely to seek to strike first or pre-emptively as well as seek opportunistic expansion (Van Evera, 1999). This holds even for status quo powers who would not otherwise act aggressively but are forced to do so to defend themselves against aggressors.

In turn, military technology may favor defense, meaning that states have little incentive to engage in aggression. When military technology favors defense, balancing behavior should be slower, less intense, and involve buck-passing (Christensen & Snyder, 1990). Defense dominance may even “render … international anarchy relatively unimportant” (Jervis, 1978, p. 187). Technology like long-range missiles may also lessen the impact of other structural modifiers like geography (Mallett & Juneau, 2023). Consider the threat of China to Taiwan (following Lobell, 2017): geography pushes Taiwan to emphasize air and naval capacity, coastal defense, fortification of possible landing sites, and civil defense networks. Advances in missile and drone technology favor Taiwan’s defense because of the increased vulnerability of large objects like ships and transports. Concomitantly, China still lacks the appropriate amphibious, sealift and airborne capacity required to conquer Taiwan by air and/or sea assault, which remain, given current technological complexity, extraordinarily difficult and costly endeavors (Gilli & Gilli, 2019).

In sum, structural modifiers comprise those factors in international relations that meet two main criteria. Firstly, structural modifiers are non-structural; they do not change structural elements like anarchy or the balance of power, but they alter their effect. Secondly, structural modifiers are systemic. They transcend any one state and they affect, albeit to varying degree, all states or at the very least multiple states in the international system. This differentiates structural modifiers from domestic or individual factors anchored within any one state. While domestic and individual factors also influence how a state experiences or deals with structural incentives, they do not usually have system-wide effects for all states.

The cyberspace structural modifier

It is in this way that cyberspace, too, can be understood as a structural modifier that shapes how actors likely experience international relations’ structure’s effects. Simply because cyberspace exists, it has system-wide implications for all states. Specifically, cyberspace refines the salience of the effects from international relations’ structure on actors: the extent to which exogenously given facets of international relations—like anarchy and the distribution of material power among states—enable or constrain state behavior. To the extent that states’ behavior in international relations hinges on access to specific technologies and know-how (like computers, microchips, and the internet), these technologies not only add or subtract from any one state’s material power capabilities. Rather, cyberspace alters the number, character, and density of relations between states and between states and non-state actors. Not only does cyberspace shift incentives for or against offensive or defensive behavior; it may empower smaller states, accelerate conflictual dynamics, blur boundaries between states and non-state actors, and raise the relative importance of military cyber-capabilities versus other, conventional capabilities. This means that cyberspace is best understood as a systemic factor.

Cyberspace has system-wide implications in that it affects all states’ behavior across international relations. While cyberspace originated in one or a few states (whether cyber technology that underpins cyberspace; or the norms, protocols, and conventions that actors attribute to it); cyberspace’s nature and effects transcend any one state. This is similar to other modifiers discussed in relevant scholarship, like nuclear weapons. Some aspects of cyberspace can be captured at the unit level regarding the capabilities any one state commands. However, the effects of cyberspace cannot be expressed by recourse to state attributes alone, just as the logic of mutually assured destruction (introduced by the presence of nuclear weapons technology) concerns a logic of state interaction not reducible to any one state’s capabilities.

As cyber capabilities and the logics of cyberspace spread, they modify the quality and character of state’s interaction capacity in the system of states as a whole. This is similar to some variants of the structural modifier of technology, though it goes beyond simply speeding things up like one might argue the invention and diffusion of the telegraph did. It enables new ways of interaction, for example between a state’s government and another state’s population directly and without much delay. As cyberspace and access to cyberspace spreads, it becomes akin to a systemically distributed capability. Concurrently, cyberspace does not itself govern the system in the same way as existing structure does: it does not constitute or reconstitute the underlying logics of state behavior that are driven by anarchy and the distribution of material power. Again, this is similar to existing understandings of structural modifiers: the availability of nuclear weapons and mutually assured destruction have not reconstituted the structural, underlying logics of state behavior that continue to be driven by anarchy and the distribution of material power. Rather, cyberspace modifies how actors experience these structural factors’ effects; how anarchy and the distribution of material power are interpreted, handled, and perceived. Just like the military technology modifier, it makes states reappraise what type of capability or behavior constitutes a threat to their national interests. It modifies how international relations unfold in specific circumstances, what types of constraints and incentives states confront, and what types of state behavior emerge.

Cyberspace’s dual distinction: Nature and effects

The cyberspace structural modifier can best be seen at play in the mapping of the dual distinction on the nature of cyberspace and its effects. The first distinction concerns ways to conceive of the nature of cyberspace: whether cyberspace is understood as a domain through which actors conduct operations; or as a systemic factor that affects states’ behavior across international relations. The second distinction concerns cyberspace’s effects: cyberspace as only moderately impacting international relations; or cyberspace as revolutionizing international relations.⁵ This dual distinction is shown in Table 1. Key contributions are placed in them for illustrative purposes. Table 1’s categories represent ideal types; one author or study may span multiple categories.

Table 1. Cyberspace’s dual distinction, illustrated with selected cyber publications in chronological order of publication date.

		Effects of Cyberspace
		Revolutionary	Moderate
Nature of Cyberspace	Domain for Unit-Level Activity	Rosenau (1990)	Libicki (2009)
		Arquilla and Ronfeldt (1993)	Liff (2012)
		Jordan (1999)	Rid (2012)
		Nye (2010, 2011)	Gartzke (2013)
		Junio (2013)	Valeriano and Maness (2015)
		Arquilla (2021)	Borghard and Lonergan (2017)
			Harknett and Smeets (2022)
			Valeriano et al. (2020)
			Gomez (2022)
			Maschmeyer (2021)
			Smeets (2022)
			Moore (2022)
			Freilich et al. (2023)
	Systemic Factor	Buchanan (2016)	Libicki (2007)
		Kello (2017, 2022)	Buchanan (2020)
		Brantley (2018)	Fischerkeller et al. (2022)
		Kreps and Schneider (2019)
		Lindsay (2020)
		Lonergan and Schneider (2023)
		Maschmeyer (2023)
		Gartzke and Lindsay (2024)

Specifically, the promise of the cyber structural modifier is demonstrated in Table 1’s bottom row. The top row maintains the dominant view of cyberspace being a domain or tool. Some of them consider it a potentially revolutionary tool. Junio (2013) argues that several mechanisms exist that can cause uncontrollable, violent escalation with cyber weapons. Others are more moderate about the effect of cyberspace. Valeriano et al. (2020) argue that cyber coercion pairs with other statecraft tools like military, economic, and diplomatic tools (rather than cyberspace supplanting other statecraft tools or having independent, decisive effects in international relations). Maschmeyer (2021) argues that cyber operations’ speed, intensity, and control are negatively correlated, and thereby challenges the assumptions that information technology increases operational effectiveness and that cyber operations are independently useful in warfare and low-intensity competition.

Scholarship in the bottom row tends to characterize cyberspace as a systemic factor. Specifically, it focusses on how cyberspace changes the way actors in international relations likely experience structure’s effects. Considerable disagreement exists about what types of actor interactions exist and are likely to occur. Some suggest that cyberspace more fundamentally changes international relations (bottom left quadrant). Lindsay (2020, p. 22) argues that cyberspace may reverse the performance of military units. Gartzke and Lindsay (2024, p. 2) argue that cyberspace fundamentally challenges core concepts and processes associated with deterrence theory, since “new technologies often enable political groups and individuals to seek out new ways to cooperate and compete, and sometimes conflict.” Other scholars are more moderate about cyberspace’s potential to change international relations (bottom right quadrant). Buchanan (2020) argues that cyber-attacks are pervasive and interlink with geopolitics, but that they are far less damaging than anticipated. All of them stress that international relations’ structure fails to explain why states belatedly or suboptimally protect their interests in international relations.

Table 1 thus offers a first cut into grasping cyberspace’ role in international relations. It reveals key theoretical and conceptual differences in cyber research. But it also raises thorny questions. If certain cyber tools revolutionize power projection (top left quadrant), is there a spill-over point at which this fundamentally changes how distributions of material power operate among states and which actors and behaviors constitute major, systemic threats? On the one hand, cyber tools are unlikely to fundamentally change how distributions of material power operate, at least when the distribution of material power is measured in terms like a state’s gross domestic product, geography, and population size.⁶ That is because cyber tools are unlikely to affect these aspects of the distribution of material power as measured in gross terms, like a state’s population. On the other hand, cyber tools are more likely to change distributions of material power among states when measured in terms of more fine-grained elements of power. That is because the availability of cyber tools may change (the relevance of) some gross elements of the distribution of material power. Modern technologies may enable complex, advanced military capabilities, and thus greatly affect the fine-grained distribution of material power (Foulon, 2023, p. 8). If cyber tools revolutionize such refined distribution of material power logics, this may amount to structural change. In sum, Table 1 points to a mid-level solution to grasping cyberspace’s role in international relations, a framework that reveals why there are so many different positions on what cyberspace is and what it does: whether cyberspace is primarily structure or domain; whether it affects international relations in a revolutionary or moderate manner; and what types of actor interactions exist and are likely to occur in and through cyberspace.

What the cyber structural modifier is not

At this stage, four important clarifications are in order about what the cyberspace structural modifier is not. Firstly, the cyberspace structural modifier is not a factor that affects all states in the exact same way. Cyberspace affects how states behave in international relations, but it does so in dissimilar ways for differently positioned states. Where states are positioned in international relations concerns, amongst other things, their geography, power resources, and alliance configuration. It also concerns, for example, whether they provide information technology infrastructure that others depend on. Great powers with highly developed cyber organizations may be more advantaged or, counter-intuitively, more vulnerable in cyberspace (Smeets, 2018a, p. 22). When one large or influential state shapes a relevant dimension of cyberspace like critical information technology infrastructure, it will be advantaged if other states operate within that environment. These other states may be potential adversaries. So, when China or the US provide 5G cell base stations with computing capabilities, this creates dependencies of other states that must rely on that infrastructure and its vulnerabilities. When the US and China establish standards or norms regarding the use of cyber technologies, they constitute what is possible or considered appropriate in cyberspace.

Secondly, the cyberspace structural modifier is not simply a restatement of existing IR theories. While the cyberspace structural modifier builds on insights from existing research, it progresses knowledge in three ways: it integrates existing cyber scholarship, connects it to IR theories, and clarifies cyberspace’s causal properties in international relations. In a similar vein, cyberspace as a structural modifier is not simply about capturing the processes or effects of states’ continuous interaction (it is not the interaction itself). Rather, cyberspace’s existence modifies how actors across international relations likely experience the incentives from international relations’ structure, which in turn affects their interactions.

Thirdly, the cyberspace structural modifier is neither theoretically nor empirically redundant, or simply a reformulation of other modifiers. Critics might object that little empirical ground exists to introduce cyberspace as a structural modifier. By this criticism, cyberspace requires no novel theorization. Critics might argue that insights from other structural modifiers, like military technology, can simply be applied to cyberspace, or that cyberspace’s effects on international relations are insignificant when compared to other modifiers, like nuclear weapons. IR theory predominantly focusses on cyber as a state-level capability and disregards it as a space that generates system-wide effects across all states. Having or not having access to cyber technology would then simply add or subtract from a state’s material power capabilities. However, this obscures how cyberspace operates as a systemic factor that modifies how all actors likely experience the effects from international relations’ structure. Lessons from nuclear weapons’ or other military technologies’ system-wide effects cannot moreover be easily copied to cyberspace. Cyber warfare may present important challenges for warfighting (Herbert, 2019), but the internet and cyber operations, unlike nuclear weapons, present no existential material threat (Nye, 2011, p. 22; 2013). In this regard, cyber operations are arguably inferior to conventional means of warfare (Gartzke, 2013, p. 42). Whilst cyberspace has an affinity with the military technology structural modifier, the former transcends the latter’s primarily military logic in that cyberspace incentivises new types of interactions among states. For example, it allows states to behave aggressively in cyberspace even though they cannot in conventional space for fear of retaliation (Choucri & Clark, 2019; Saltzman, 2013). In addition, in contrast to how the military technology structural modifier usually operates, even actors with few resources can enter cyberspace easily (though sophisticated operations are costly and difficult). Initial diffusion in cyberspace is simplified through dual-use capacity at the entry level; for example, standard civilian hardware can in principle be employed for aggressive cyber operations like hacking, infiltration, and DDOS attacks. In sum, this means that both the empirical phenomenon and the theoretical nature of cyberspace provide ample space for novel theorization.

Finally, thinking of cyberspace as a structural modifier is evidently not the only way to think about cyberspace. It may well be useful to understand cyberspace in other ways. Depending on what the research question is, what analytical strategy one follows, and which empirics one seeks to employ, cyberspace may well better be theorized as a domain or tool that actors leverage against other actors (Table 1’s top row). In other words, we propose not that cyberspace is a structural modifier (which would be an ontological claim). Rather, we propose that it is useful to think of cyberspace as a structural modifier, and that this way of thinking has significant analytical advantages (which is an epistemological claim).⁷ It allows us to understand effects of cyberspace across key areas in international relations holistically, to appraise and nuance existing claims around cyberspace’s effect on international relations, and to impart important policy lessons.

Cyberspace’s modifying effects in four areas of international relations

Cyberspace’s modifying effects can be illustrated in four key areas of international relations: deterrence, foreign policy tool choice, uncertainty, and states and non-state actors’ interaction. While evidently not the only areas affected by cyberspace, these four areas highlight cyberspace’s effects widely discussed in scholarship. The four areas are moreover each associated with longstanding research traditions, which may profit from further engagement with cyber scholarship. In each of the four areas, some modifications are more thorough; other modifications more moderate, subliminal, or specific. Each of the four areas draw on cyberspace research in IR from Table 1. In each of the four areas, cyberspace does not change the structure of international relations, but modifies, to varying degree, the effects from structure on actors.

Deterrence

The first IR area where the cyberspace structural modifier can be seen at work is how states interact in deterrence. When states operate in an anarchical system, they should deter other actors from acting against their interests. Deterrence is here understood as one state’s use of force, threats of the use of force, and alliance formation to deny, punish, or retaliate against other states. When states deter other actors, they attempt to convince the latter that the costs of initiating some course of action outweigh the benefits of such action (Huth, 1999, p. 26). However, cyberspace may complicate how states deter or it may affect how deterrence manifests itself regarding other actors’ cyber operations when compared with conventional threats (Soesanto, 2022).

Cyberspace may affect conventional deterrence logic by affecting decision-makers’ understanding of deterrence strategy. For example, cyber operations disrupt and damage an adversary without clear attribution (Devanny et al., 2022; Egloff & Dunn Cavelty, 2021; Kostyuk, 2021). The possibility that cyber operations may remain unattributed may complicate deterrence stability by reducing the attacker’s expectation that it will incur penalties, thereby affecting the attacker’s cost-benefit calculus (Kello, 2017, p. 130). Larger-scale cyber operations that are more easily attributable are unlikely to occur because they would undo much of the time and resources invested in developing (often secret) cyber capabilities in the first place. Cyberspace may cause states to seek to deter differently, for example by responding to a series of adversarial cyber operations and their cumulative effect (Kello, 2022, pp. 5–7, 143-147; Lindsay & Gartzke, 2018; Smeets, 2018a, p. 27). In turn, cyber tools are specialized for particular objectives like deception or disruption. This means that cyberspace changes how deterrence is integrated with a conventional deterrence strategy’s other objectives like maintaining the distribution of material power or preventing a conventional military invasion. It necessitates prioritizing particular objectives across a bundle of different deterrence means and ends, like prioritizing conventional military preventive war to avoid invasion, over a cyber strategy of deception to divert an adversary actor’s attention away from one’s own IT infrastructure (Gartzke & Lindsay, 2024). Cyberspace may incentivise states moreover to persistently engage other actors: the cyber strategic environment “is defined not by such tactics [like coercion to further one’s interests] but instead by the fact that persistent exploitation in setting the conditions of cyberspace is the means to more or less security” (Fischerkeller et al., 2022, p. 24).

Other scholars detail how cyberspace more moderately affects conventional deterrence logic. Persistent engagement may be insufficient to address the variety of threat actor behavior in cyberspace; instead, cyber deterrence must be made “more specific and tailored to the particular target of deterrence” (E. Lonergan & Montgomery, 2021, p. 69). Cyber operations may not involve kinetic force and “are ill-suited for communicating with other states to encourage or discourage future behavior” (Buchanan, 2020, p. 307). Analogies to nuclear deterrence with cyber deterrence may be misleading as cyber deterrence does not aim to deter every possible offensive cyber operation (“total prevention”) (Nye, 2016/17). In cyberspace, offense is often difficult and expensive whereas defense can be more effective (Gartzke & Lindsay, 2015). And cyber deterrence remains possible even if the sources of offensive operations are unidentifiable (Nye, 2016/17). Cyberspace may moreover influence how states operate regarding alliances: while states can enter the cyber domain relatively easily and cheaply (Areng, 2014; Nye, 2010, p. 4), cyber specialization costs problematize alliance formation and states require significant resources to adapt effectively to cyberspace (Burton, 2013; Smeets, 2018a, p. 27).

The above shows that cyberspace’s effects transcend any one state and complicate, albeit to varying degree, deterrence dynamics across the international system. If we consider the modifying effect of cyberspace concerning deterrence, we may reveal how cyberspace complicates and alters deterrence dynamics as well as how deterrence manifests differently in cyberspace. Evidently, given the existence of cyberspace, states need to reconsider how best to deter at what point in time, and what types of deterrence outcomes are possible, likely, and/or stable. The cyberspace structural modifier helps us understand how cyberspace affects conventional deterrence: it incentivises states to respond to a series of adversarial operations rather than “tit for tat”. Even where it produces only small effects, it suggests that actors reconsider and respond differently to structural incentives from international relations (for example by making states forego the deterrence goal of total prevention of adversarial actor’s offensive action). This may explain also why states fail to deter other actors in particular cases. Western states may fail to threaten cyber intruders sufficiently to convince them that the retaliatory costs outweigh the gains in cases like Russia’s 2016 interference in US elections and the 2020 Chinese interference in European public health infrastructures. That is because Western states tend to adhere to conventional wisdom regarding how the deterring state may change the deterred actor’s cost-benefits calculus (for example by aiming for total prevention) (Kello, 2022, pp. 5–7). Concurrently, while cyberspace affects deterrence, it does not change structural elements like the principle of anarchy or the balance of power that make deterrence a dynamic in international relations that is crucial and, from any one state’s perspective, desirable in the first place.

Foreign policy tool choice

A closely related IR area where the cyber structural modifier can be seen at play concerns how decision-makers choose foreign policy tools. According to conventional logic, when foreign policy decision-makers choose tools, they evaluate the tools’ costs and benefits against one another (Baldwin, 1999, p. 86; Simon, 1945, pp. 75, 82-86). Cyber operations are conventionally considered useful when they complement economic, military, and diplomatic tools (Gartzke, 2013, p. 68; Lindsay & Gartzke, 2018; Valeriano & Maness, 2014).

The introduction of cyberspace may affect the conventional logic of foreign policy tool choice by affecting decision-makers’ costs-benefits calculations and by constraining the foreign policy tool choices available to them. Conventional foreign policy tool choice logic meant that foreign policy decision-makers trade off costs and benefits of military, economic, and diplomatic foreign policy tools. The existence of cyberspace changes this dynamic. For example, the considerable uncertainty around processes and effects of cyberspace operations constrains the range of foreign policy tools that foreign policy decision-makers are likely to choose. At least until recently, decisions makers were hesitant to deploy cyber capabilities. When decision makers give meaning to the international cyber environment, they may struggle to a priori appraise cyber operations’ effects and possible collateral damage. This challenge to accurate perception and appraisal depends only in part on decision-makers’ knowledge and skills. Cyber operations are more complex and faster when compared to conventional operations like aerial bombing. When foreign policy decision-makers contemplate the use of cyber operations, they may struggle to accurately prognosticate consequences of using cyber operations regarding collateral damage or escalation risks (Kello, 2017, p. 124). When US officials prepared the 2011 air campaign against Libya, they considered employing weaponised code to mute the Libyan government’s communications systems. US officials worried about possible and incalculable collateral damage to civilian systems and refrained from conducting the cyber operation (Kello, 2017, p. 123).

Moreover, the complex nature of cyberspace may narrow the foreign policy choices available to decision-makers. Specifically, the complex nature of cyberspace means that conducting cyber operations requires a widely diverse workforce including vulnerability analysts; malware developers; linguists to support investigations; and strategists to plan the cyber organization’s strategic means, ways, and ends (Smeets, 2022, pp. 25–27, 31, 75-77). It is possible to conduct cyber operations with formal cyber command structures by ad-hoc use of existing structures or outsourcing to (semi-)private actors. Conducting cyber capabilities therefore requires either a considerable investment of the state’s resources or significant investment in domestic mobilization efforts because much of a state’s cyber power capabilities lie “outside direct government control in the business and civil-society sector” (Klimburg, 2011, p. 43).

More recent trends point to a normalization effect as decision-makers and bureaucracies have been getting more used to cyberspace as well as its threats and opportunities. While decision-makers may have been hesitant to deploy cyber operations when these tools were new additions to the foreign policy toolkit; more recently there has been a growth of cyber capabilities, cyber incidents, military and intelligence cyber organizations, and stated in intents in strategic documents. Parts of the international environment in which cyber decisions occur are now changing, given increasing competition between Europe, the US, Russia, China, or Iran. International threats have become clearer and the international environment less permissive, which affects state behavior including in and through cyberspace. By 2021, over forty states had formed a cyber command or similar organization (Smeets, 2022). Concurrently, while cyber operations are now more prevalent, they seem to have only moderate effects on decision-making processes, not least because cyber operations are far less destructive than commonly presumed (Buchanan, 2020) and because they deplete themselves rapidly (Libicki, 2007).

Beyond coercion, cyberspace has also affected other aspects of foreign policy tool choice by facilitating remote diplomacy and virtual summitry (Hedling & Bremberg, 2021) or providing new opportunities for alliance formation and cohesion (Smeets, 2018b, p. 27) and status seeking (Danielson & Hedling, 2022). This has contributed to, for example, the frequency and speed at which leaders, diplomats, negotiators, and other actors both within and outside of states may regularly interact even across considerable distances. It has also exposed these actors to new risks in terms of secrecy, information overload, or interpersonal and performative aspects crucial to successful diplomacy (Naylor, 2020). Cyberspace facilitates different forms of interaction among states and a variety of non-state actors. And by that virtue affects what tools any one state’s leadership may have available and how it may value them in terms of costs and benefits. But it does not change the need to carefully weigh them against the incentives and constraints provided by the state’s international environment.

The above shows that cyberspace’s effects transcend any one state and complicate, albeit to varying degree, foreign policy tool choice for states across the international system. Considering the modifying effect of cyberspace concerning foreign policy tool choice lets us investigate questions such as why decision-makers were hesitant to use cyber operations in the 2011 air campaign against Libya. While cyberspace expands or narrows foreign policy tool choice, it does not fundamentally change structural elements like the principle of anarchy or the balance of power in gross terms like a state’s geography, population size, and gross domestic product. It specifies how states likely experience the effects emanating from international relations’ structure and affects what mix of foreign policy tool choices are possible and likely to be made.

Uncertainty

This relates to another IR area that illustrates cyberspace’s modifying effects: how states experience uncertainty. Uncertainty is “central to every major research tradition in the study of international relations” (Rathbun, 2007, p. 533). Its prominence can be traced in classical works (von Clausewitz, 1832, pp. 48–49, also pp. 79, 105–106). Uncertainty refers to the lack of information and associated fear of other states’ capabilities and intentions (Rathbun, 2007, pp. 538–541). Uncertainty matters in international relations primarily because international relations are anarchical and permeated with risks and threats that states may face from other states. Whether states successfully defend their interests in international relations depends on how they deal with this uncertainty.

Cyberspace does not change, revolutionize, or take away this uncertainty; rather, cyberspace modifies the effects of uncertainty in multiple and contradictory ways. The easiest example might be large-scale information gathering and interpretation. States have more access and possibilities to gather intelligence because of cyberspace, which increases the speed of intelligence gathering and the volume of data they can collect to inform their behavior. Different states may have different capacities to access and use this information. But the technology itself is deployed across all states to condition the type of uncertainty that is produced in and relevant through an anarchical system of states. In an uncertain environment, a key problem for states concerns producing and accessing scarce sources of information. Cyberspace reshapes this problem into one of filtering and interpreting data that is amply available but often of bad quality.

Specifically, cyberspace’s modifications of the effects of uncertainty can be moderate. Even as cyberspace vastly increases available information because it facilitates exchange of information, allows taking control of people’s information systems, and thereby reduces uncertainty; it is difficult to actually take control of another actor’s information systems (Libicki, 2007). Cyberspace may also thoroughly modify the effects from structure and reverse political processes. Cyberspace can worsen uncertainty because of problems regarding information gathering and interpreting. Consider information overload and overreliance on bad data. Information gathering in cyberspace may undermine how states perform through their military organizations that are increasingly digitized. States can become rigidly reliant on cyber technology, procedures, and cultural practices to process new information and update computerized data. When states’ militaries rely too much on complex information technologies and practices, they become insufficiently flexible to adjust to dynamic, unexpected, exceptional, or ambiguous challenges in the international environment. This may worsen intelligence analysis and undermine military performance (Lindsay, 2020, pp. 59–60, 212). This was the case with the US’ accidental bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999. The US military overly relied on complex information technologies for intelligence gathering, storing, and analysis. This overreliance combined with a rigid and inflexible military structure and culture. It problematized how military personnel processed new and exceptional incoming information. So, when China relocated its diplomatic mission, this information remained missing from the US Department of Defense’s Modernized Integrated Database. Soldiers and bureaucrats relied on the computerized information process. When they reviewed the bombing target list, they “failed to notice the Chinese embassy, because no one was looking for it” (quoted from Lindsay, 2020, p. 4, also 22; also: Pickering, 1999).

States and non-state actors interaction

An equally important IR area that illustrates the structural modifier at work concerns how states relate to non-state actors. Specifically, private actors own and operate a considerable part, if not most, of cyberspace’s underlying infrastructure. That private actors play such a pronounced role is not entirely unique to cyberspace. For example, private and semi-private companies in the defense industry like BAE Systems, Airbus, and Lockheed Martin dominate military production and procurement. There is an even more immediate overlap between cyberspace and the private defense industry, as the military equipment these companies produce, for example fighter aircrafts, rely on cyberspace in terms of software as well as information technology infrastructure (Gilli & Gilli, 2019, p. 151). However, in cyberspace a much wider range of non-state and private actors dominate, with different levels of government control and oversight. This concerns large corporations such as Google or Meta. It concerns also prominent roles in cyberspace for other non-state actors with different motives and capabilities. These other non-state actors include, amongst others, smaller firms, terrorists, criminals, political insurgencies, social movements, international organizations, and hackers and hacktivists. Evidently, how states relate to, say, Google differs from how they relate to hackers. Notably, cyberspace continues to be dominated by non-state actors because the barriers for entry are low (even for coercive cyber operations), certainly if one compares the costs for an individual hacker to those of a defense company seeking to produce a new fighter aircraft.

This means that cyberspace expands the range of relevant and consequential non-state actors and it blurs the boundaries between non-state actors and states both in terms of international relations and from the perspective of any one state. Specifically, cyberspace modifies which actors matter, how they matter, and how states relate to them. Non-state actors may behave in cyberspace differently when compared to what an account solely based on anarchy and the distribution of material power would lead us to expect. States are likely to remain key actors of international relations in most of the mainstream study of international relations, even as the relevance of various non-state actors grows and even as states regularly interact with non-state actors in partnership or adversity.

Cyberspace can modify structural effects by blurring the line between states and non-state actors. States can co-opt hackers as proxies in hybrid virtual-physical battlefields. A group of hackers, linked to Iran, released a computer virus on Saudi Arabian oil company Saudi Aramco in 2012. The virus sabotaged and erased data on Saudi Aramco’s computers (Kello, 2017, pp. 12–13; Periroth, 2012). Hackers linked to China’s People’s Liberation Army conducted cyber operations against Google in 2009. The latter threatened to operate its search engine uncensored in China or leave the country. This implicated the US, as the US government regularly and closely cooperates with digital corporations like Google, Twitter, or Meta which may be crucial to cyber conflict (Dyer-Witheford & Matviyenko, 2019, p. 46; Waters et al., 2010). Cyberspace modifies moreover how states interact with non-state actors like organized groups in civil war. Cyberspace serves as a platform to spread propaganda, rally supporters, or mobilize and organize popular movements. This may lessen the barriers of conflict onset especially in the context of civil conflict between governments and organized groups within states. Governments may employ large data volumes to more precisely map and suppress organized groups of political insurgencies, unruly citizens, and demonstrators (Dyer-Witheford & Matviyenko, 2019, p. 11). Cyberspace “both expands the scope of such operations across planet-spanning networks and intensifies the precision with which they can be targeted” (Dyer-Witheford & Matviyenko, 2019, p. 17, also 23). In other words, what emerges is a system where states compete with each other, compete with digitized non-state actors, and sometimes cooperate with them.

Implications for research

The preceding introduction of cyberspace as a structural modifier aids in resolving some of the constitutive questions that strain cyber scholarship.

What is cyberspace’s nature?

There is considerable contestation over the nature or ontology of cyberspace. Ontological questions are primarily questions of theory and meta-theory; answers to them tend to be plausible, coherent, and analytically useful rather than true or false. Two broad understandings may be differentiated. The first rests on a thick ontology. Cyberspace is not a “thing”; it is multidirectional, and mutually constructed between structures and agents (Dunn Cavelty, 2013, 2018, p. 105). No fixed meaning of cyberspace can easily be established; cyberspace is always emergent and in flux. This understanding of cyberspace transcends positivist inquiry into causal mechanisms. The second, alternative understanding rests on a thin ontology. Conceptualizing cyberspace as a structural modifier is meaningful primarily within this (fairly mainstream) view of cyberspace, the structure-agent relationship, and causation. Whilst cyberspace is subject to its constituent actors’ interpretations and actions (as a thick ontology maintains), these interpretations and actions are not infinite (as a thin ontology suggests). It is possible to establish a relatively fixed meaning of cyberspace at a given time. Understanding cyberspace in this thin ontological manner is imperfect; however, it is analytically useful because it allows positing testable propositions regarding cyberspace’s unidirectional influence on other social phenomena.

This theorized causal mechanism starts with, or primarily relies on, either material or ideational factors. This affects in turn whether research designs conceptualize cyberspace as primarily characterized by its material or ideational dimensions. Research designs may stress cyberspace’s material properties like physical infrastructure or capabilities in different states. To increase analytical precision and where theoretically consistent, research designs can substitute or complement the hypothesized causal mechanisms with ideational factors like state leaders’ perceptions and cyberspace’s norms. In either case, it is analytically useful to explicitly reflect on the nature of cyberspace to better grasp how it affects theorization, operationalization, methodological choices, data collection, and interpretation of results.

Can the cyberspace structural modifier be used across different theoretical orientations?

The answer to the question above also contributes towards resolving the question of whether the cyberspace structural modifier can be operationalized in research designs of varying theoretical orientation. This article introduced the cyberspace structural modifier based on a loosely Waltzian understanding of structure (defined by anarchy and the distribution of material power among states). If one relaxes this understanding of structure, the cyberspace structural modifier can be used in wider theoretical approaches to IR and foreign policy. Thin constructivists conceive structure as consisting of a set of international norms that have causal effects to the extent that they guide state behavior (Wendt, 1999, pp. 82, 130). The presence of cyberspace may modify the effects of these norms regarding the appropriateness of specific forms of conduct (like hacking, propaganda). English School scholars explain international relations through social structures of world order, and they have long had a particular interest in interaction capacity and structural modification. They highlight the role of information technology in terms of diplomacy, knowledge exchange, and decision-making. Neoclassical realists explain state behavior by complementing the causal effects of international relations’ structure with individual and domestic variables. Neoclassical realist literature showed renewed interest in the role of structural modifiers, though they have so far not investigated cyberspace. Innenpolitik and Foreign Policy Analysis approaches tend to focus on specific states’ adaptation to cyberspace or on states’ policies and behavior in cyberspace. These theories can work comparatively to reveal the similar or dissimilar international incentives that differently placed states may face. The relevance of the cyberspace structural modifier could extend also to approaches that conceive of the structure of international relations as hierarchical rather than anarchical because some states submit—or are forced to submit—to other states’ hegemony or authority over issue-areas like economic policy or defense policy (Gilpin, 1981; Lake, 2009). Cyberspace may offer avenues to further such domination, but it may also offer avenues to subvert and escape it.

Should scholars clarify cyberspace’s relationship with domestic and individual factors?

Once cyberspace’s foundational ontology and theoretical anchoring have been clarified, research designs become a matter of specifying how the cyberspace structural modifier relates to domestic and individual factors. If scholars explain international relations only with structure and the cyberspace structural modifier, they inevitably and incompletely capture international relations. They would be limited to saying that cyberspace likely affects state behavior under anarchy in X or Y ways. Such an explanation may well be desirable for greater parsimony or abstraction. But it risks asserting spurious relationships when it comes to concrete state behavior: “[s]tructures condition behaviors and outcomes, yet explanations of behaviors and outcomes are indeterminate because unit-level and structural causes are in play” (Waltz, 1986, p. 343). Scholars should specify, either as a matter of theory or as a matter of empirical analysis, when state behavior is primarily driven by structural factors, systemic factors, or domestic and individual factors, or some specific interaction between them (Ripsman et al., 2016, p. 176; Waltz, 1986, p. 343).

Despite cyber scholars’ best efforts, they remain unclear about how structural factors relate to domestic and individual factors. On the one hand, some cyber scholars investigate the relationship between cyberspace, state behavior, and international relations’ structure. These cyber scholars come closest to conceiving of cyberspace as a structural modifier (Table 1’s bottom row) (even as they do not employ the structural modifier terminology). Some of them assume, for the purposes of theorization, that actors behave rationally and have perfect information in international relations. By this interpretation, were cyberspace non-existent, and therefore would not alter how actors experience structure’s effects, foreign policy decision-makers would be able to correctly assess other states’ intentions and capabilities and design policy accordingly. On the other hand, other cyber scholars stress the role of domestic and individual factors like a state’s strategic culture or foreign policy decision-makers’ perceptions in producing state behavior. How can the cyberspace structural modifier be complemented with domestic and individual factors? How do foreign policy decision-makers’ perceptions relate to cyberspace? How do they perceive risks and how do they respond to incentives emanating from cyberspace?

When scholars clarify how structural factors relate to domestic and individual factors, they are also likely to better advise foreign policy decision-makers. Specifically, scholars who conceive of cyberspace as a structural modifier downplay domestic and individual factors. Yet, policy advice almost by necessity implies considering domestic and individual factors like a state leader’s perceptions; and a state’s institutional set-up, legal regimes, or strategic culture. Consequently, thinking of cyberspace solely as a structural modifier does not easily and consistently translate into advising how to better operate in cyberspace and international relations. The question of how to relate the cyberspace structural modifier to domestic and individual factors turns moreover on whether research designs in international relations require scholars to collaborate across disciplines and areas of expertise in ways often absent from IR scholarship. Analyzing cyberspace’s nature and effects, including in empirical cases that require cross-disciplinary collaboration, may also generate better innovation in research (Whyte, 2019, p. 440). It needs networks, associations, and conversations across, amongst others, economics, sociology, political science, international relations, international law, computer engineering, and business administration (Smeets, 2022).

Policy implications

Thinking of cyberspace as a structural modifier has two major implications for policymakers. Firstly, it requires policy-makers to shift their thinking to taking structure more seriously. Western militaries tend to view cyberspace as a domain or tool to fight wars that is at least comparable to land, air, sea, and space warfighting domains. Many of these militaries consider cyberspace’s strategic value and how to integrate it into military planning and operations both at the strategic and tactical levels. The March 2022 report by the US Congress’ Cyberspace Solarium Commission, for example, calls for integrating cyber power tools with other national power tools (Cyberspace Solarium Commission, 2022). The US Department of Defence published its 2022 National Defence Strategy and its 2023 Cyber Strategy, calling for integrated deterrence that combines conventional means of deterrence like conventional military strength and signaling, with cyberspace operations (NDS, 2022, pp. 8–9; Strategy, 2023, pp. 2, 10). The UK government published a white paper in 2023, calling for the integration of the National Cyber Force in both Defense and the intelligence agencies and the integration of cyber with other UK military capabilities and domains like land, air, and space (Ministry of Defence, 2023). This dominant view of cyberspace as a domain or tool is intuitive but potentially misleading. Shifting the policy paradigm to structure reveals that different states’ different positions in cyberspace impact how foreign policy must be crafted. When states devise foreign policy and foreign cyber policy, they must mind their relative position in cyberspace versus the position of the targeted actor. When a state depends on the targeted state’s norms regarding the use of cyber technologies or on the targeted state’s IT infrastructure (like US, Chinese, and Taiwanese semi-conductors and 5G cell base stations with computing capabilities), then the latter may gain structural power over the former and constrain the foreign policy choices available to it. This narrows or expands the room for strategic autonomy and technological sovereignty. The EU funds part of the planned German production site of the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company; however, if this production site provides only outdated production machinery then this may not reduce the EU’s technological dependency on other states. When foreign policy decision-makers mind the nature and effects of cyberspace, they can tailor foreign policy to the targeted actor’s position in cyberspace. This means that foreign policy makers must consider several factors, like the targeted actor’s position in cyberspace’s physical infrastructure and normative set-up. Greater scrutiny of these factors will help devise effective policy and consider which combinations of cyberspace modifications are likely to constitute effective policy.

Secondly, thinking of cyberspace as a structural modifier heeds policy-makers to remain sceptical of demands to focus on cyberspace in isolation or at the expense of other domains or tools of statecraft. Cyberspace is a systemic factor with considerable effects across international relations. It is neither advisable to downplay cyberspace nor to focus on only one area like investing in cyber deterrence and neglecting thinking carefully about how cyberspace affects foreign policy choices, including of adversaries or non-state actors. Cyberspace modifies existing structural areas and processes across international relations; it does not do away with them. While cyberspace matters (just as geography, technological diffusion, or international norms matter), it does not change the fact that states operate in an uncertain and anarchical international environment and it unlikely changes the gross distribution of material power between states. In such an environment, states cannot afford to rely solely on what cyberspace may promise—the old rules still apply. This should caution policy-makers against decisions based on the idea that cyberspace revolutionizes international relations. It also means cyberspace cannot be a silver bullet: careful investment across different aspects of cyberspace and wider foreign policy remains necessary to guard a state’s interests, security, and survival.

Conclusion

This article introduces the conceptual language of structural modifier to capture cyberspace’s role in international relations. It anchors cyberspace as a systemic factor that shapes all states’ behavior across international relations. It highlights a dual distinction of cyberspace that is crucial to grasp international relations. The distinction about cyberspace’s nature concerns cyberspace as a domain through which states conduct cyber operations against other actors; versus cyberspace as a systemic factor that shapes all states’ behavior across international relations. The second distinction concerns cyberspace’s effects on international relations: whether cyberspace has the potential to revolutionize or more moderately impact the effects of structure on international relations. It is the peculiar combination of this dual distinction that reveals insights about why there are so many different positions on what cyberspace is and what it does.

This dual distinction demonstrates the promise of thinking of cyberspace as a structural modifier. The cyberspace structural modifier rests on a clear assumption about cyberspace’s nature: that it is a systemic factor which modifies the effects from anarchy and the distribution of material power on states. It comprises a variety about the ontological assumption of cyberspace’s effects: what types of actors interactions exist and are likely to occur. Cyberspace affects the causal pathway from the structure of international relations to foreign policy and international outcomes. Cyberspace’s mere existence shapes how states are likely to experience their international environment, seek to maximize their security, invest in capabilities, and interrelate with one another, whether in peace or war.

Two main implications are derived for policy. Firstly, the cyber structural modifier suggests that policy-makers must take structure more seriously. When states craft foreign policy, they must consider the targeted actor’s position in cyberspace’s physical infrastructure and normative structure. Greater examination of these factors will aid crafting effective policy and mind which combinations of cyberspace modifications are likely to constitute it. Secondly, the cyberspace structural modifier cautions policy-makers to remain critical of pressures to invest in cyberspace at the expense of other domains or tools of statecraft. In this sense, understanding cyberspace as a structural modifier is a conservative argument for policy: cyberspace modifies existing structural dynamics and processes in international relations, but it does not do away with them. This means that carefully investing in different aspects of cyberspace and wider foreign policy remains key to protect a state’s interests, security, and survival.

Conceptualizing cyberspace as a structural modifier offers avenues to integrate cyber scholarship with wider debates that continue to vex the study of international relations: how should we best understand the role of emerging technologies in international relations? If we think of technology as disruptive and revolutionary—what changes do we expect? Can the logic of structural modifiers help us understand other emerging technologies like drones, artificial intelligence, and lethal autonomous weapons? How can this improve International Relations theories about foreign policy, balancing, grand strategy, and war—and how can it help policy-makers to discern suitable responses? Answers to such questions will allow the study of cyberspace and emerging technologies to more fully move beyond its original community, thereby profiting the discipline writ large.

Acknowledgements

For fruitful discussions and feedback at various stages of this project, the authors thank Myriam Dunn Cavelty, Miguel Alberto Gomez, Lennart Maschmeyer, Max Smeets, and Stefan Soesanto. The authors are grateful to the participants of the research seminars on their manuscript at the Center of Security Studies at ETH Zurich, the Digital Issues Discussion Group, the “Grand Themes in IR” session at the Swiss Political Science Association Annual Congress, and the “Conceptualizing Cyberspace and Its Utility in Conflict” panel at ISA 2025.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We exclude the cyber persona dimension (Joint Chiefs of Staff, 2013) as our article centres on making a distinction between actors and structure. Syntactic or logical dimensions are “the instructions that designers and users give the machine and the protocols through which machines interact with one another” (Libicki, 2009, p. 12). They partially overlaps with the ideational dimension (Maschmeyer, 2023, pp. 90–91).

2 On parsimony and complexity: Foulon (2015, pp. 637–638).

3 For a criticism of cyber persistent engagement theory: Lonergan and Montgomery (2021)

4 Also Brantley (2018), Kreps and Schneider (2019), and Lonergan and Schneider (2023).

5 “Revolutionary” relates to those views that ascribe to cyberspace the potential to reverse or dramatically change international and/or domestic political processes and their outcomes, such as changing foreign policy decision-makers’ choices, the outcomes or meaning of war, or the relevance or causal role of anarchy and the distribution of material power. “Moderate” views are more doubtful of the existence, depth or significance of such changes.

6 On the distribution of material power’s seven elements: Waltz (1979, p. 131).

7 This is analogous to scholars arguing that if we think of nuclear weapons as a structural modifier, we understand that their existence affects existing interactions among states via new dynamics (like mutually assured destruction and the stability-instability paradox). This is evidently not the only way to think about nuclear weapons: from the perspective of a government, for example, nuclear weapons may well be conceived of as a tool of statecraft.