Back to the territorial state: China and Russia’s use of UN cybercrime negotiations to challenge the liberal cyber order

Cyberspace is still characterised by features that draw from the liberal international order into which it was born: namely, open data flows and multi-stakeholder governance mechanisms that allow private actors to shape global technical or normative standards. The application of this ‘liberal cyber order' has been resisted by Russia and China who seek a greater role for the territorial state in cyberspace governance. They have long sought new, binding rules to this effect with little success. The UN cybercrime convention bucks the trend of informal, non-binding agreements in this domain. Through an empirical analysis of proposals advanced by Russia and China during negotiations toward the cybercrime convention, this article demonstrates how they have sought to use it to develop rules that blunt the advantages enjoyed by Western liberal economies and major transnational actors in the current order. Going beyond the regulation of cybercrime, Russian and Chinese proposals empower states to thwart disruptive and intelligence-gathering cyber operations that may be conducted globally by Western adversaries. Additionally, they enhance the state’s regulatory capacity over private actors at home and abroad, limiting the ability of businesses or NGOs to shape cybersecurity and human rights standards around the transfer, retention and access of data.