Global Cyber Law Project

About the Project

The global rise of cross-border cyber-attacks in the past two decades has led states to convene several high-level interstate processes on the application of international law and the elaboration of norms of state behavior in cyberspace. Prompted by these developments, national governments have also begun releasing statements setting out positions on key questions that arise in this context (42 countries and the 2 state blocks have issued statements as of July 23, 2026; the US, UK and Estonia have issued multiple statements). These intense diplomatic efforts reflect a rising demand for the identification and consolidation of national positions on unsettled questions of law with direct bearing on global peace and security.

A limited number of independent, UN-based and state-sponsored projects are already underway to collect national position statements and track their language on an issue-by-issue basis, or to contextualize national positions with more information on domestic laws and survey responses. However, no resource currently exists that systematically and objectively breaks down each issue according to a common set of legal indicators and provides comprehensive, up-to-date expert analysis of trends in norms, rules and principles of international law.

Temple University’s Institute for Law, Innovation & Technology (iLIT) and American University's Technology, Law & Security (TLS) created this project to generate a public-facing, open dataset and web-based tool, tracking national positions on the application of international law to cyber operations using a transparent comparative methodology. An analytical tool which tracks trends in national positions will serve the interest of national governments, researchers, and other multistakeholder participants in the international law field.