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24 Brown J. World Aff. 139 (2017-2018)
Defending Democracies in a Cybered World

handle is hein.journals/brownjwa24 and id is 139 raw text is: Defending Democracies in a Cybered World CHRIS DEMCHAK AT ITS INCEPTION, CYBERSPACE WAS viewed as a miracle maker. Its ability to connect everyone's information needs was widely promoted for years, said to inexorably expand prosperity and the democratic civil society model of gover- nance on a global scale.' This vision dominated technical, business, and social literature-as well as policy discussions about the internet from the early 1990s until the late 2000s.2 In 2009, however, President Barack Obama declared that the internet posed national security threats and directed the creation of a dedi- cated defensive cyber command. Still, the language of domestic and international policy statements from Western nations reiterated the increasingly unrealizable 1 dream of a universally democratizing, borderless, and safe global cyberspace.3 This utopian vision of the internet was so powerful that China was expected to compliantly fold into this future, despite being a long-time adversary and a rising, deeply authoritarian global competitor.' The promised digital, ubiquitously democratic global nirvana was derailed throughout the first generation of cyberspace's creation. First, the underlying cyberspace substrate was poorly built for commercial reasons and spread naively into modern societies with so little protection that a new form of cybered con- flict now threatens the societies that originated cyberspace. Second, though its demographic scale made China's rise inevitable, the cyber insecurity of digitized economic and societal resources hastened China's acquisition of wealth and its rise as an economic and cyber power. The emerging, largely authoritarian, post-Western, conflictual, and deeply cybered world favors China's preferences, CHRIS DEMCHAK is the RDML Grace M. Hopper Professor of Cyber Security and Director, Center for Cyber Conflict Studies (C3S), U.S. Naval War College. In her research on cyberspace as a globally shared insecure complex substrate, she takes a systemic approach to emergent structures, comparative institu- tional evolution, and other areas of cyber security. These are solely the author's ideas, and not the position of any element of the U.S. government. Copyright © 2017 by the Brown journal ofWorldAffairs FALL/WINTER 2017 * VOLUME XXIV, ISSUE I

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