The Normative Enactment of International Cybersecurity Capacity Building Assistance: A Comparative Analysis On Japanese And South Korean Practices

Absztrakt (kivonat)

The international community strongly encourages states to embrace the international cooperation approach to support and assist each other in reducing risks stemming from the digital divide. However, the international community at the same time cannot agree upon how international laws and norms apply to cyberspace, let alone shaping and regulating international CCB assistance. Consequently, states are open to using international CCB assistance to impose cyber-norms based on their perceptions. It results in different variations in the forms of international CCB assistance provided by each donor country. Using the theory of social constructivism and the concept of CCB as international assistance, this research compares the practice of CCB assistance from selected cases in two donor countries, Japan and South Korea. The further analysis emphasises the role of each donor country’s normative structure in defining their perceptions on the digital divide and cybersecurity. The resulted normative structure shapes a donor country’s identities, roles, interests, and behaviours in international CCB assistance. Japan’s security-oriented international cybersecurity cooperation normative structure shapes Japan’s identities and roles that prioritise security-dominant normative and material interests. Meanwhile, South Korea’s “developmental” international cybersecurity cooperation normative structure constructs the country’s identities and roles that shape developmental normative and material interests. In conclusion, while Japan’s international CCB assistance is highly security-oriented, South Korea’s is less security-oriented. The implication is that their differences assert the fragmentation of global cyber-norms caused by a different process of perceiving them by countries all around the world.