Neorealist Analysis of Security Dilemma in Cyberspace; A Quantitative Study

Abstract

Two crucial factors urged IR academia to account for state behaviour in cyberspace; one is the increasing volume of cyber attacks, and the other is the raising scale of damage induced by these attacks. This has brought a series of initiatives to appeal to the grand theories of IR so as to scrutinize state behaviour in depth in terms of securitization and militarization of the cyberspace. Subscribing to the same pattern of endeavor, this work intends to contribute to IR academia by putting forth a neorealist analysis of state behaviour in cyberspace by relying on quantitative methods. The analysis conducted by using a dataset consisting of 8,991 samples indicates that as states build more cyber security capacity, they become more tended to execute disruptive actions against other states in the cyberspace. Even after reinforcing the model with three additional control variables, the model yielded highly statistically important results.