Advocacy coalitions in cyber warfare: From global negotiations to issue-specific initiatives

Over the past few decades, cyber warfare has become what the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) calls a ‘policy subsystem’. This article asks: how far can ACF explain the policy dynamics of cyber warfare? The article argues that understanding key camps in global cybersecurity negotiations as advocacy coalitions has three theoretical benefits for scholarship on cyber warfare. First, the ACF’s detailed account of coalition formation helps explain the interplay between normative and strategic considerations on cyber warfare at different levels of coalition commitment. Second, the ACF’s emphasis on internal and external ‘subsystem shocks’ as catalysts for policy change helps to identify key events in each coalition’s narrative of cyber warfare and the framing power of these events on negotiations over policy. Third, the ACF stresses the role of coalition building as a necessary step to achieve policy change, and thus sheds a fresh light on recent diplomatic initiatives related to cyber warfare, from commercial spyware regulation to counter-ransomware campaigns. Finally, we highlight some conceptual challenges posed by cyber warfare to the ACF, as cyberspace offers wider – and more effective – possibilities for coalition action beyond advocacy.