Developing Cyber Buffer Zones
This work is incremental, building on prior definitions to address a complex, domain-specific issue in international security and peacekeeping.
The paper addresses the gap in understanding how cyber warfare impacts peace operations by exploring the practicalities of establishing a Cyber Buffer Zone (CBZ) as part of cyber peacekeeping efforts.
The United Nations conducts peace operations around the world, aiming tomaintain peace and security in conflict torn areas. Whilst early operations werelargely successful, the changing nature of warfare and conflict has often left peaceoperations strugglingto adapt. In this article, we make a contribution towardsefforts to plan for the next evolution in both intra and inter-state conflict: cyberwarfare. It is now widely accepted that cyber warfare will be a component offuture conflicts, and much researchhas been devoted to how governments andmilitaries can prepare for and fight in this new domain [1]. Despite the vastamount of research relating to cyber warfare, there has been less discussion onits impact towards successful peace operations. This is agap in knowledge thatis important to address, since the restoration of peace following conflict of anykind is of global importance. It is however a complex topic requiring discussionacross multiple domains. Input from the technical, political, governmental andsocietal domains are critical in forming the concept of cyber peacekeeping.Previous work on this topic has sought to define the concept of cyber peacekeeping[2, 3, 4]. We build upon this work by exploring the practicalities ofstarting up a cyber peacekeeping component and setting up a Cyber Buffer Zone (CBZ).