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China has one of the world’s fastest growing internet economies and most active cyber operations programs. Chinese penetration of Western commercial, government and defence networks encourages fears about the wholesale erosion of economic and military competitiveness. At the same time, China decries Western cyber exploitation and calls for the exclusion of American internet firms from the Chinese economy.

Cyber operations and the rhetorical reactions on both sides of the Pacific have significantly undermined trust in China’s foreign relations. The situation is not in fact as dangerous as many believe. For every type of Chinese cyber threat, there are also serious Chinese vulnerabilities as well as Western strengths, which incentivises restraint in cyber exploitation. China and other major powers can look forward to chronic and ambiguous intelligence-counterintelligence contests across their networks, even as the internet facilitates productive exchange and a degree of stability.

Jon R. Lindsay is Assistant Professor of Digital Media and Global Affairs at the University of Toronto Munk School of Global Affairs. A political scientist with a background in computer science and military service, his research examines the impact of technology on global security. His publications include the co-edited China and Cybersecurity: Espionage, Strategy, and Politics in the Digital Domain (Oxford University Press, 2015) and articles in International Security, Security Studies, Journal of Strategic Studies, Technology and Culture, and the Journal of Cybersecurity. He is completing a book, Shifting the Fog of War: Information Technology and the Politics of Control, and working on a multi-institutional research project on deterrence theory. Professor Lindsay holds a PhD in Political Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an MS in Computer Science and BS in Symbolic Systems from Stanford University. He has served in the U.S. Navy with operational assignments in Europe, Latin America and the Middle East.

This closing public session of the National Security College's week-long program of activities is a Q&A-style event with a lively exchange of ideas and reflections on securing Australia’s future in cyberspace. Head of College Professor Rory Medcalf moderates the discussion with a panel of the world’s leading cyberspace academics, think-tank specialists and industry experts. Members of the audience engaged with:

Dr Herb Lin, Senior Research Scholar for cyber policy and security at the Center for International Security, and Cooperation and Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University

Professor Paul Cornish, Research Group Director for Defence, Security and Infrastructure at RAND Europe, Cambridge

Professor Fred Cate, Vice President for Research at Indiana University; Distinguished Professor and C. Ben Dutton Professor of Law at the Maurer School of Law, and Adjunct Professor in the School of Informatics and Computing, Indiana University

Assistant Professor Jon Lindsay, Assistant Professor of Digital Media and Global Affairs at the University of Toronto Munk School of Global Affairs

Mr Mike Burgess, Chief Information Security Officer, Telstra

The symposium will take participants through a stimulating morning of informal presentations and debates on research-in-progress in the international Strategy and Statecraft in Cyberspace research program lead by the ANU National Security College. Topics will include: the ontology of cyberspace; the emergence of hegemons in cyberspace; China’s precarious hold in cyberspace; governance and ambiguity in cyberspace; critical slowing down and state shift in cyber terrorism; and the emergence of balkanisation in cyberspace.

This event will be of interest primarily to researchers, but policy and industry stakeholders with an interest in the leading-edge of research might also find the event rewarding. Presentations will be given by members of the program, including:

Professor Roger Bradbury, Director, Strategy and Statecraft in Cyberspace research program, ANU National Security College

Professor Paul Cornish, Research Group Director for Defence, Security and Infrastructure at RAND Europe, Cambridge

Professor Fred Cate, Vice President for Research at Indiana University, Distinguished Professor and C. Ben Dutton Professor of Law at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law, and Adjunct Professor in the School of Informatics and Computing

Assistant Professor Jon Lindsay, Assistant Professor of Digital Media and Global Affairs at the University of Toronto Munk School of Global Affairs

Professor Terry Bossomaier, Strategic Professor, Computing and Information Technology, Charles Sturt University

Mr Nathan Ryan, Associate Analyst, Defence, Security and Infrastructure Programme, RAND Europe.

2016 ANU Alumni of the Year, Bachelor of Arts, 1979.

The symposium will take participants through a stimulating morning of informal presentations and debates on research-in-progress in the international Strategy and Statecraft in Cyberspace research program lead by the ANU National Security College. Topics will include: the ontology of cyberspace; the emergence of hegemons in cyberspace; China’s precarious hold in cyberspace; governance and ambiguity in cyberspace; critical slowing down and state shift in cyber terrorism; and the emergence of balkanisation in cyberspace.

This event will be of interest primarily to researchers, but policy and industry stakeholders with an interest in the leading-edge of research might also find the event rewarding. Presentations will be given by members of the program, including:

Professor Roger Bradbury, Director, Strategy and Statecraft in Cyberspace research program, ANU National Security College

Professor Paul Cornish, Research Group Director for Defence, Security and Infrastructure at RAND Europe, Cambridge

Professor Fred Cate, Vice President for Research at Indiana University, Distinguished Professor and C. Ben Dutton Professor of Law at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law, and Adjunct Professor in the School of Informatics and Computing

Assistant Professor Jon Lindsay, Assistant Professor of Digital Media and Global Affairs at the University of Toronto Munk School of Global Affairs

Professor Terry Bossomaier, Strategic Professor, Computing and Information Technology, Charles Sturt University

Mr Nathan Ryan, Associate Analyst, Defence, Security and Infrastructure Programme, RAND Europe.

In this public seminar, Professor Paul Cornish reviews one important aspect of the contemporary debate concerning the governance of cyberspace and the direction it might take: state sovereignty. Like it or not, sovereignty is intrinsic to the idea of modern statehood, and therefore to the interaction of states within the international political system, of which cyberspace is one part. But a territorial, sovereignty-based approach to the governance of cyberspace is contested by the ‘multi-stakeholder approach’; the argument that as well as national governments, non-state actors, the private sector and all others with an interest in cyberspace must be allowed to play a part in ensuring that it becomes a vehicle for economic and social development around the world.

If the goal is to achieve stability in cyberspace as the foundation for a global governance framework with which cyber risks and threats can be managed and ICT opportunities exploited, then we need a permissive and imaginative adaptation of the age-old, yet still potent Westphalian principle of state sovereignty. ‘Quantum sovereignty’ permits the coexistence of these two sets of ideas about the governance of cyberspace which are otherwise irreconcilable.

Professor Paul Cornish is Research Group Director for Defence, Security and Infrastructure at RAND Europe in Cambridge. His appointments have included Professor of Strategic Studies at the University of Exeter, Professor of International Security at the University of Bath and (inaugural) Carrington Professor of International Security at Chatham House. He was educated at the University of St Andrews and the London School of Economics. He then served in the British Army and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office before completing his PhD at the University of Cambridge. He directed the Centre for Defence Studies at King’s College London and taught at the UK Defence Academy and the universities of Cambridge, Bath and Exeter.

Professor Cornish’s work covers cyber security, national strategy, arms control, the ethics of armed conflict, civil-military relations and other aspects of contemporary international security. He is a Fellow and Co-Director of Oxford University’s Global Cyber Security Capacity-Building Centre, a Principal Research Associate in the Department of Computer Science at University College London and a participant in UK-China Track 1.5 discussions on international cyber security and governance.

We are really excited to welcome you to the ANU community. It's going to be an exciting year.

What are the opportunities and frameworks for Australia and Japan to work together with other key countries in the Indo-Pacific to pursue common strategic objectives? What is the role of India in Indo-Pacific maritime security? What are the advantages and disadvantages of ‘minilateral’ (as opposed to bilateral or multilateral) frameworks for maritime security cooperation in the Indo-Pacific?

Moderator: Professor Bates Gill, Professor of Asia-Pacific Strategic Studies, Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs, The Australian National University

Speakers:

Ms Kathy Klugman, First Assistant Secretary, South and West Asia Division, Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade

Vice Admiral Hideaki Kaneda, JMSDF (Retd), Director, Okazaki Institute

Dr Jennifer D.P. Moroney, Director, RAND Australia

Mr Nitin Pai, Co-Founder, Takshashila Institution, India

The symposium will take participants through a stimulating morning of informal presentations and debates on research-in-progress in the international Strategy and Statecraft in Cyberspace research program lead by the ANU National Security College. Topics will include: the ontology of cyberspace; the emergence of hegemons in cyberspace; China’s precarious hold in cyberspace; governance and ambiguity in cyberspace; critical slowing down and state shift in cyber terrorism; and the emergence of balkanisation in cyberspace.

This event will be of interest primarily to researchers, but policy and industry stakeholders with an interest in the leading-edge of research might also find the event rewarding. Presentations will be given by members of the program, including:

Professor Roger Bradbury, Director, Strategy and Statecraft in Cyberspace research program, ANU National Security College

Professor Paul Cornish, Research Group Director for Defence, Security and Infrastructure at RAND Europe, Cambridge

Professor Fred Cate, Vice President for Research at Indiana University, Distinguished Professor and C. Ben Dutton Professor of Law at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law, and Adjunct Professor in the School of Informatics and Computing

Assistant Professor Jon Lindsay, Assistant Professor of Digital Media and Global Affairs at the University of Toronto Munk School of Global Affairs

Professor Terry Bossomaier, Strategic Professor, Computing and Information Technology, Charles Sturt University

Mr Nathan Ryan, Associate Analyst, Defence, Security and Infrastructure Programme, RAND Europe.

Cyberspace may be ending its Wild West phase, but the law is still struggling to tame it. Scholars of international law are divided on whether cyberspace is just another domain of international affairs so that existing international law can be stretched to cover it, or whether it is sui generis and so needs a distinctive body of law. And more generally, with the emergence of the cloud and the internet of things, the notion that transactions occur somewhere, and hence the regulation and law of that somewhere may apply, is fast fading. Whatever else it is, fast-changing cyberspace is not yet tamed.

Fred H. Cate is the Vice President for Research at Indiana University. He is a Distinguished Professor and C. Ben Dutton Professor of Law at the Indiana University (IU) Maurer School of Law and an Adjunct Professor in the School of Informatics and Computing. His work focuses on information privacy and security law and policy issues. He served as the founding director of the university’s Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research from 2003 to 2014, where he is now a senior fellow, and he served as managing director of the IU Center for Law, Ethics and Applied Research in Health Information.

Professor Cate is a member of: the U.S. National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine Forum on Cyber Resilience; the Department of Homeland Security’s Data Privacy and Integrity Committee’s Cybersecurity Subcommittee; the National Security Agency’s Privacy and Civil Liberties Panel; the OECD’s Panel of Experts on Health Information Infrastructure; Intel’s Privacy and Security External Advisory Board; the Board of Directors of The Privacy Projects; the Board of Directors of the International Foundation for Online Responsibility; and the Board of Directors of the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction. He is also a senior policy advisor to the Centre for Information Policy Leadership at Hunton & Williams LLP.

A fellowship program at ANU has brought researchers together from diverse fields to collaborate and learn from each other. Under the Vice Chancellor's College Visiting Artist Fellows Scheme, artist Steven Holland spent one year working in the Research School of Biology with Professor Scott Keogh, a herpetologist. The collaboration has produced a aluminium crown in the shape of a eastern brown snake. Created by Holland, the crown was designed to fit one of the founding fathers the Australian Society of Herpetologists, Dr Murray Littlejohn.

The ANU School of Art was a fitting location for the crown’s construction. It was here that that Australian Society of Herpetologists first convened in 1964, when the building was the the Canberra High School.

In this video Steven Holland and Professor Scott Keogh discuss the fellowship and the crown’s creation.

A discussion on The Government Next Door: Neighborhood Politics in Urban China, (Cornell University Press) winner of the 2016 Association for Asian Studies Joseph Levenson book prize for post-1900 China.

About the Book

Chinese residential communities are places of intense governing and an arena of active political engagement between state and society. The Government Next Door investigates how the goals of a government consolidated in a distant authority materialize in citizens' everyday lives. Chinese neighborhoods reveal much about the changing nature of governing practices in the country. Government action is driven by the need to preserve social and political stability, but such priorities must adapt to the progressive privatization of urban residential space and an increasingly complex set of societal forces. The book’s ethnographic accounts of neighborhood life and politics in Beijing, Shenyang, and Chengdu depict how such local "translation" of government priorities takes place.

The book reveals how different clusters of residential space are governed more or less intensely depending on the residents’ social status; how disgruntled communities with high unemployment are still managed with the pastoral strategies typical of the socialist tradition, while high-income neighbors are allowed greater autonomy in exchange for a greater concern for social order. Conflicts are contained by the gated structures of the neighborhoods to prevent systemic challenges to the government, and middle-class lifestyles have become exemplars of a new, responsible form of citizenship. At times of conflict and in daily interactions, the penetration of the state discourse about social stability becomes clear.

With its annexation of Crimea in 2014 Russia challenged the international order in Europe. Its military intervention in Syria has helped to relieve the internal and international pressure on President Bashar al-Assad and weakened the moderate Syrian opposition.

Yet in recent years it has also played a constructive role in the international community’s efforts to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons; it allowed NATO forces to transit its territory en route to Afghanistan; and it has worked with China, Japan, South Korea and the US to constrain North Korea’s nuclear threat.

In this public seminar, Ian Bond will consider the drivers behind these different faces of Russian foreign policy in the light of Russia’s new National Security Strategy. Is Russian policy in the Middle East and Asia truly strategic, or is it opportunistic? Does the new strategy reflect the real threats to Russia, or President Vladimir Putin’s Cold War mind-set?