Defending Democracies with Cybernorms
Professor Hollis will survey the most prominent existing regulatory mechanisms for combating foreign election interference today — international law, domestic law, and technical measures — and explain the gaps and challenges each faces. To supplement these responses, he'll discuss calls for democracies to develop and apply cyber-norms — socially constructed shared expectations of appropriate behavior for members of a particular community. Based on his work with Jan Neutze of Microsoft, his central claim is that States and other stakeholders should affirmatively construct international norms tailored to the challenges of online foreign election interference, including delineating “out-of-bounds” behavior vis-à-vis foreign elections and setting expectations for assistance or cooperation when such behavior occurs. Of course, cyber-norms are not a salve for all wounds. Yet, as Professor Hollis will discuss, they may build off new norm candidates from the G7 and the Paris Call for Trust and Security in Cyberspace to highlight how cyber-norms can provide critical tools to a broad, multi-layered, and multi-disciplinary response to the threat of foreign election interference.
Note: This talk will be based on a forthcoming chapter from his book with Jens Ohlin: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3635782