International negotiations over issues of digitalization and cyber issues have taken on a profound standing in international affairs. This article adds to recent scholarship on these issues and draws attention to the role of expertise in structuring and shaping these negotiations. Leveraging a range of qualitative materials, we identify key trends in the composition of cyber diplomacy expertise and investigate how these have shaped outcomes of international negotiations across key diplomatic arenas. We find that expertise matters for the outcome of international cyber negotiations along two main avenues. First, the composition of expertise during early stages of field formation tend to spill over into institutional arrangements that create lasting path dependencies, as in the example of the institutionalization of cyber diplomacy discussions within the UN 1st committee.
Second, compositions of expertise within state administration tend to produce contingent outcomes where issue complexity opens the door for struggles over what type of knowledge is best suited to address a given issue, resulting in variations in terms of how countries mobilize expertise – oftentimes underpinned by organizational politics within the diplomatic apparatus and across sub-state agencies beyond the MFA. Combined, the existence of expertise-based institutional lock-in effects and rapid technological change produce temporal mismatches that create an awkward bases for diplomatic interactions to deliver impactful results. Navigating this diplomatic arena requires not only diplomatic skill but also combinations of subject matter expertise across law and technology. Forging such networks of expertise is expensive and reproduces unequal access to diplomatic negotiations with small developing nations severely disadvantaged.
Lars Gjesvik is a senior researcher in the Research Group for Security and Defence at NUPI, where he also serves as the co-leader of the research center for digitization and cyber security. His research focuses on the intersection of private enterprise and state interests, security challenges, and power politics related to digitalization and emerging technologies.
Ole Willers work is located at the intersection of digitalization, economic sociology and international political economy. His most recent publications focuses on digitalization processes in the insurance sector and on the organization of cyber risk.