Authoritarian multilateralism in the global cyber regime complex: The double transformation of an international diplomatic practice

ABSTRACT

Multilateralism is regarded as a constitutive feature of the contemporary liberal international order and is associated with liberal values. However, for twenty-five years, authoritarian states have advocated the expansion of multilateral governance modalities for cybersecurity issues while major consolidated democracies have often opposed them. We explain this puzzle by distinguishing an overlooked variant of authoritarian multilateralism from the better-understood liberal variant. A Russo-Chinese coalition has employed various strategies within and beyond the United Nations to facilitate the adoption of this authoritarian variant for key cyber-governance processes, to achieve both specific cybersecurity goals and broader aims in contesting the liberal international order. Liberal democracies oppose instantiating authoritarian multilateralism, but they have also altered their understanding of multilateralism to encompass more space for private and multistakeholder governance alongside it, leading to a double transformation of the practice of multilateralism. The article concludes by discussing the implications of our analysis for multilateralism.

KEYWORDS:

• Cybersecurity
• multilateralism
• international organizations
• global governance
• United Nations
• internet

Multilateral diplomacy is a hallmark of the contemporary rule-based liberal international order (Ikenberry, 2001; Reus-Smit, 1999; Ruggie, 1992). Despite the existence of populist movements skeptical of, or hostile to, many global governance arrangements, there is a strong association between major democracies and commitment to multilateral governance arrangements at the international level. However, the global politics of Internet and cybersecurity governance demonstrate an unusual and puzzling pattern in which the United States and most of its liberal democratic allies seek to block authoritarian states’ proposals to increase the use of multilateral governance modalities for cyber-issues. Both aspects of this situation are puzzling, given the strong association between liberal values and multilateralism (Ruggie, 1992). Why are liberal states opposing the use of multilateral governance modalities, and why are authoritarian states promoting them? Since multilateralism is a core practice of contemporary world politics, and since cyber-issues are highly salient to governments and other global stakeholders, this kind of divergence from expected patterns is noteworthy.

In this article we identify and highlight the importance of a variant of authoritarian multilateralism in explaining both the actions of authoritarian states and of liberal democracies. Authoritarian multilateralism is a distinctive but previously unidentified form of multilateral governance that departs from the familiar liberal form of multilateralism in crucial ways, and creates tensions with and exacerbates legitimacy deficits in the contemporary rule-based global order (Bettiza & Lewis, 2020; Ginsburg, 2020). Distinguishing liberal and authoritarian multilateralism is also helpful to explaining why liberal states have opposed the use of many, though not all, multilateral governance modalities for cyber-issues.

In the empirical section, we demonstrate that Russian and Chinese diplomacy on cyber-issues is premised on, and seeks to further instantiate, authoritarian multilateralism. That is, these states are working to alter the familiar liberal multilateral DNA of the contemporary rule-based global order. This effort entails exploiting existing procedural rules in multilateral institutions in ways that nudge them away from liberal multilateralism and toward authoritarian multilateralism, as well as efforts to engage in parallel order-building. It is also an essential front in their challenge to the liberal order. Understanding this behavior is important not only to assessing the future trajectory of Internet and cybersecurity governance, but also to improving our conceptual understanding of multilateralism and to understanding the contemporary dynamics of the liberal multilateral order.

We further show that liberal states are not opposing multilateralism per se, but rather the instantiation of authoritarian multilateralism. The key to understanding liberal states’ preferences for cyber-governance modalities lies in the ways in which their notions of multilateralism have changed since 1945: Just as authoritarian states have developed their own understandings of multilateralism, liberal states’ understandings have also changed over time. Specifically, their understandings of how to legitimately practice multilateralism have evolved in ways that increasingly incorporate elements of multistakeholder governance practices. The key change is pressure from private sector and civil society groups for the use of multistakeholder governance modalities (Raymond & DeNardis, 2015). While the United States in particular has often seen multistakeholder governance as aligned with its interests given the historical role of the American private sector in the development of the Internet (Carr, 2015), calls to extend and alter multilateral governance modalities to accommodate the participation of various nonstate actors have been difficult for liberal states to oppose on principled grounds, given their commitment to principles of democratic representation and free speech. The expansion of multistakeholderism and of private governance (Wolff, 2024) has thus driven change in democracies’ understandings of multilateralism.

The process within the United Nations General Assembly’s First Committee has been central to this process of contestation, including with the recent approval of the UN’s Programme of Action alongside a new phase of the Open-Ended Working Group (OEWG). Liberal states have belatedly intensified their efforts to shape the nature of multilateral cybersecurity governance arrangements by exploiting their procedural knowledge of UN diplomacy (Adler-Nissen & Pouliot, 2014; Levinson, 2021; Raymond, 2021). In doing so, they have (in concert with private and civil society stakeholders) succeeded in making the OEWG process more open, consultative, and more reflective of the contemporary Western understanding of how to appropriately practice multilateralism than the initial Russian proposal envisioned. The stakes are high: The legitimacy deficits in the contemporary rule-based global order may accelerate trends toward the decline of this order (Cooley & Nexon, 2020). An international system based more on authoritarian than liberal multilateralism would likely amount to a fundamental shift in the systemic distribution of ideas about international order, which affects the prospects of particular countries for global leadership, and which therefore may increase the odds of a global power transition in the medium term (Allan et al., 2018).

The article proceeds in two major sections. The first introduces the concept of authoritarian multilateralism and distinguishes it from both nominal definitions of multilateralism and the notion of thick liberal multilateralism. As we detail below, existing research sheds light on authoritarian states’ efforts in international organizations and other global governance arrangements. However, our approach goes beyond these existing studies in highlighting authoritarian states’ use of procedural rules of liberal multilateralism to instantiate authoritarian multilateralism. Our approach is also distinguished by its ability to provide analytical leverage not only on authoritarian states’ behavior but also on that of liberal democracies. The second section illustrates the existence of authoritarian multilateralism as a nascent institutional form within Russian and Chinese order-building and order renovation efforts on Internet and cybersecurity governance issues. The article concludes with a discussion of the limits of our analysis and the implications of our findings, both for Internet and cybersecurity governance and for the study of multilateralism and IR theory more broadly.

Variants of multilateralism

Multilateralism is traditionally understood to entail relatively egalitarian and transparent diplomatic practices among three or more states on the basis of generalized rules of conduct (Reus-Smit, 1999; Ruggie, 1992). Russia and China are pursuing, in a loosely coordinated manner along with other like-minded states, the instantiation and proliferation of a fundamentally different form of authoritarian multilateralism. This alternate institutional architecture is being pursued in institutional fora such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which operates in a manner starkly different from the mainline post-1945 multilateral international organizations. However, it is also evident in United Nations cybersecurity governance processes. We employ these particular examples for two primary reasons. First, cybersecurity is among the most high-profile issues on the current international security agenda. As such, it is both timely and important. Second, the proliferation of Internet and related digital technologies means that institutions and processes for Internet governance have wide-ranging implications for virtually every other issue area in the international system (DeNardis, 2020; DeNardis & Raymond, 2017; Nye, 2014). Adoption of authoritarian multilateralism for cybersecurity governance would have enormous spillover effects on related issue areas including international trade, human rights, and international security. In this section of the article, we briefly discuss some alternative explanations suggested by the literature. We then sketch the main features of authoritarian multilateralism and demonstrate how they differ from the consensus understanding of (liberal) multilateralism.

Authoritarian innovation

There are several possible explanations for authoritarian regimes’ choice to pursue multilateral cyber-governance modalities. One might be a realization that multilateral approaches are aligned with the prevailing distribution of ideas in the international system (Allan et al., 2018), as well as with widely-accepted procedural rules for international rule-making (Raymond, 2019). But these accounts, at least on their own, cannot explain the opposition to multilateralizing cyber-governance on the part of the states most historically associated with the practice of multilateralism.

Another explanation, more consistent with realism, might be that the underlying material balance of power has shifted in ways that render multilateral institutions more amenable to authoritarian states like Russia and China, and that cyber-issues therefore represent a canary in the coal mine. We think that power politics are central to making sense of the puzzling pattern evident in this case, but we doubt that a narrow focus on material power or strong assumptions about states as rational actors are particularly useful in understanding the more complex power political game involved. Rather, we concur with Goddard and Nexon (2016) on the value of a more ontologically expansive conception of what counts as power politics. As we will argue below, the promotion of authoritarian multilateralism in the cyber-regime complex is a crucial component of a broader strategy to contest the rule-based liberal multilateral order.

The notion of authoritarian challenges to the liberal world order has become commonplace (Copelovitch & Pevehouse, 2019; Hooghe et al., 2019; Lake et al., 2021). While Kentikelenis and Voeten (2021) found that such challenges were at a relative low, their data stopped in 2018 and was drawn from United Nations General Assembly speeches and so does not capture other forms of implicit or explicit contestation. Especially since the escalation of Russia’s war against Ukraine, the existence of this challenge to the liberal world order has become difficult to deny.

Recent studies have also documented various cases and modes of authoritarian innovation (Curato & Fossati, 2020) or modern authoritarianism (Patapan, 2022). The primary focus in this literature is on ways authoritarian regimes use different domestic policy levers to ensure regime survival (Morgenbesser, 2020; Pepinsky, 2020). However, some authors observe international dimensions. Yilmaz and Eliküçük Yildirim (2020) document increased bilateral cooperation between China and Turkey. Lemon and Antonov (2020) examine how post-Soviet states have employed the Commonwealth of Independent States to facilitate legal harmonization and sharing of best practices, while Debre (2021) looks more broadly at the way membership in regional organizations dominated by autocrats can bolster regime stability. However, this literature shares a focus on regime survival as the core purpose of authoritarian innovation.

While we acknowledge the importance of regime survival as an objective, we focus instead on authoritarian states’ attempts to contest the international system.¹ Several studies have examined recent changes in the attitude and practices of authoritarian great powers toward the liberal rule-based global order. Ginsburg (2020) examines authoritarian uses of international law, noting that Russia and China have sought to use international law “as a means of fostering their own illiberal projects, extending new authoritarian legal norms that exist alongside and compete with democratic principles” (p. 44). Bettiza and Lewis (2020) argue that great powers are crucial overlooked norm entrepreneurs in the international system, and develop a taxonomy of four modalities through which Russia and China contest key norms in the rule-based liberal order as “part of the enduring battles for power and influence in world politics” that “take place through the ideational realm” (p. 560). Paris (2020) identifies efforts by Russia, China and the United States to engage in a process of “norm retrieval” to revitalize norms of a great power “right to dominate” (pp. 462–465) in international relations, based on pre-Westphalian conceptions of sovereignty.

Each of these studies makes important contributions individually. Collectively, they coalesce into a striking demonstration that the liberal rule-based global order is experiencing a sustained, multifaceted challenge for the first time since the end of the Cold War. Attempts to alter prevailing conceptions of the rights and duties associated with sovereignty and with great power status threaten to alter rules, norms and practices related to the use of force and the conditions for military intervention (Paris, 2020). Efforts to employ, and simultaneously to alter, international law along illiberal lines threaten to further erode the enjoyment of human rights (Ginsburg, 2020). Bettiza and Lewis (2020) suggest that the consequences of these efforts will not be confined solely to the norms, rules, institutions, and practices of the international system. Instead, they conclude that these efforts by authoritarian great powers to contest liberal norms are “likely to lead both to an international order which is less liberal, as well as to the global weakening of liberal social and political norms within states” (p. 571).

Crucially, there is consensus in this emerging literature not only that the social structure of international order is being challenged by authoritarian great powers, but also that this challenge takes the form not of a material power transition but rather of efforts to change international norms, rules, institutions, and practices. The stakes of the conflict are understood in ideational or social terms, and the primary means of challenge is explicitly social. In this regard, this work is consistent with recent scholarship taking a more ontologically expansive view of the nature of power politics (Goddard & Nexon, 2016; Ikenberry & Nexon, 2019). Their specific empirical emphases, however, differ slightly.

While Paris (2020) focuses on efforts to retrieve older norms regarding sovereignty and great power privilege, and Ginsburg (2020) focuses on the rules and norms of international law more broadly, Bettiza and Lewis (2020) describe generic modalities of norm contestation. These various emphases are complementary to each other and to our analysis. International and global orders are highly complex systems of rules (Sandholtz, 2008) and associated practices, including rule-governed practices of rule-making and interpretation (Raymond, 2019). To understand the nature and dynamics of the contemporary authoritarian challenge to the current liberal rule-based order, it is necessary to combine site-specific empirical investigations of contestation (e.g., Ginsburg (2020) and Paris (2020)) with macro-level attempts to discern patterns in types of contestation and their different consequences (e.g., Bettiza & Lewis, 2020). We build on this emerging literature investigating the ongoing authoritarian challenge to the liberal rule-based global order by demonstrating the power political nature of attempts to instantiate a form of authoritarian multilateralism.

Our focus on authoritarian mutilateralism is important for at least three reasons. First, multilateralism, along with sovereignty and international law, is a constitutive practice of the contemporary international system (Glas et al., 2018; Reus-Smit, 1999). As such, identifying, describing, and explaining authoritarian efforts to contest and transform multilateralism is essential to fully comprehending the scope and contours of this challenge to the rule-based international order.

Second, there are intimate connections between the rules, norms, and practices of multilateralism on the one hand, and those of both sovereignty and international law on the other hand. While Ginsburg (2020) focuses primarily on international law, his analysis captures (without naming) elements of authoritarian multilateralism. He notes Russian and Chinese investment in existing multilateral international organizations in ways that subtly reorient their procedures for multilateral rule-making and interpretation (pp. 47–48) and their efforts to create new, illiberal international organizations that are distinctive precisely in their abandonment of key tenets of liberal multilateralism outlined below (pp. 50–51). These examples capture elements of what Bettiza and Lewis (2020) call the more minimal modalities of authoritarian norm contestation, liberal performance and liberal mimicry, as well as the more maximal strategies of civilizational essentialization and counter-norm entrepreneurship (p. 560). Similarly, successful norm retrieval to re-instantiate great power privileges for intervention in smaller states (what Paris (2020, p. 453) calls the “right to dominate”) would seem to require alteration of international law and the curtailment of key aspects of liberal multilateralism.

Finally, analysis of authoritarian multilateralism is essential to a complete understanding of the Russian and Chinese challenge to the rule-based liberal international order because, of its three fundamental elements (sovereignty, international law and multilateralism), only multilateralism is typically understood to be uniquely part of the liberal order. Both sovereignty and modern notions of contractual international law clearly predate the contemporary rule-based liberal international order. As such, they are compatible (if in altered forms) with other kinds of international orders. While challenging contemporary understandings of sovereignty and international law are important parts of the authoritarian playbook, it is the challenge to contemporary practices of multilateralism that comprise the heart of the Russian and Chinese efforts to transform the international system, by editing out its most important liberal DNA.

Liberal multilateralism

Ruggie argued that multilateralism entailed more than Keohane’s original formulation, which defined multilateralism as “the practice of co-ordinating national policies in groups of three or more states” (Keohane, 1990, p. 731). This thin definition “misses the qualitative dimension of the phenomenon that makes it distinct” (Ruggie, 1992, p. 566). Understanding that qualitative dimension required attention to whether or not there was “a permissive domestic environment in the leading powers of the day,” which led Ruggie (1992) to argue famously that the nature of the post-1945 institutional landscape owed less to “the fact of American hegemony” than to “the fact of American hegemony” (pp. 567–568).

Reus-Smit (1999) noted that the two fundamental principles of this post-1945 liberal multilateralism were that “rules should be authored by those subject to them” and that “rules should be equally applicable to all subjects, in all like cases” (p. 133). In a similar vein, Ruggie (1992) concluded that multilateralism must govern affairs among all participating parties “on the basis of ‘generalized’ principles of conduct … which specify appropriate conduct for a class of actions, without regard to the particularistic interests of the parties or the strategic exigencies which may exist in any specific occurrence” (p. 571). Thus, the substantive dimensions of multilateralism, both as understood in Ruggie’s original formulation and in the broader literature, are inescapably liberal in character.

Recent scholarship has turned a critical eye to the benign characterizations of multilateralism that characterized earlier work. Adler-Nissen and Pouliot (2014) utilized negotiations over humanitarian intervention in Libya to demonstrate the operation of power in three of the most important post-1945 multilateral organizations: the UN Security Council, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the European Union. They found that state actors with greater social competence in diplomatic procedures and practice enjoyed levels and kinds of influence inconsistent with predictions based on the material balance of power. Likewise, Pouliot (2016) has argued that the operation of practices of multilateral security diplomacy instantiate and perpetuate international hierarchy.

Critically examining the familiar story of liberal multilateralism is an important endeavor to make IR theory more sensitive to the often explicitly racialized and colonialized hierarchy of the international system (Hobson & Sharman, 2005; Spanu, 2019). However, here we seek to complicate the familiar multilateral story in a slightly different way. We argue that Ruggie’s conceptualization of (liberal) multilateralism is only one possible form of multilateralism. This matters because it opens analytical space for illiberal or authoritarian multilateralism. The conflation of multilateralism per se with a specific instantiation of it risks blinding IR theory to the emergence of an alternate, authoritarian form of multilateralism that is currently being developed and diffused across various parts of the global and regional institutional architecture. In the remainder of this section, we outline the main features of this alternate institutional form.

Interestingly, Ruggie (1992) acknowledged the existence of international organizations that would not meet his definition of multilateralism, including the Comintern and Cominform, as well as the Warsaw Pact (pp. 573–574). Ruggie excluded these examples because they failed to satisfy his additional (liberal) criteria, but the Warsaw Pact was executed in the form of a multilateral treaty among eight initial signatories. While it formally subordinated Communist bloc countries to Soviet authority in certain ways, it never formally denied the sovereignty of its subordinate member states. The anomalous nature of the Warsaw Pact is thus a strong indication that the prevailing conception of multilateralism is crucially incomplete.

The prevailing liberal conception of multilateralism overlooks the importance of the commitment to a conception of what Reus-Smit (1999) called the “moral purpose of the state,” which in the contemporary international system was understood as “the augmentation of individuals’ purposes and potentialities” (p. 7). This commitment entailed acceptance of the importance of transparency, and of the fundamental legitimacy of direct civil society participation in governance as derivative of the individual rights of free association and political participation.

The modern conception of the moral purpose of the state implies an analogous moral purpose of global governance that neither Ruggie nor Reus-Smit address. This purpose is inscribed in the UN Charter and in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, as well as other related treaties like The Convention on the Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. These commitments partially explain the emergence of private governance (Büthe & Walter, 2011; Cutler et al., 1999) and multistakeholder governance (Raymond & DeNardis, 2015) as additional institutional forms in contemporary global governance. Commitment to transparency and to civil society participation in governance independent of the state have made it difficult for the core liberal states of the post-1945 order to resist claims from firms and NGOs for alteration of the secondary rules of that system in ways that diminish the exclusive claim of the state to participate in global governance. However, these crucial procedural norms of good governance have also helped cause an additional shift over time in views about how to appropriately practice global governance. In addition to enabling the rise of private and multistakeholder governance arrangements, they have shaped democratic states’ views about how to practice multilateralism.

Authoritarian multilateralism

In contrast, authoritarian multilateralism differs from liberal multilateralism in two main respects. The first is a weaker commitment to the principle that rules should apply equally to all like cases. Authoritarian multilateralism tends to make broader allowances for great power privileges and special rights. Such rights were a feature of the international system in the early 19th century (Keene, 2013) and into the early twentieth century (Spanu, 2019), but largely fell out of the institutional architecture in explicit terms after 1945. In this sense, the Security Council veto and the system of weighted voting in the Bretton Woods institutions are vestigial and anachronistic concessions to power and interest that sit uneasily in principle with liberal multilateralism. However, recent scholarship has cast Russian foreign policy in terms of an explicit challenge to international order (Casier, 2021; Schmitt, 2020). Chinese foreign policy under Xi Jinping has been characterized similarly (Feng & He, 2017).

Paris (2020) has argued that Russia, China, and the United States are each making versions of claims that amount to a “right to dominate” arising from their great power status and traditionalist conceptions of state sovereignty, in what he refers to insightfully as a case of “norm retrieval.” The inclusion of the United States in this unlikely illiberal company helps to explain why the Trump administration’s foreign policy has so deeply unsettled its NATO and other liberal democratic allies. Even without continued American endorsement, Russia and China are likely to continue attempting to renovate the rule-based international order such that it affords more privileges to great powers, potentially up to and including violation or even alteration of the territorial integrity norm.

The second difference between liberal and authoritarian multilateralisms is that authoritarians reject the modern liberal notions of the moral purpose of the state identified by Reus-Smit (1999), and of the associated moral purpose of global governance elaborated above. States that embrace an authoritarian form of multilateralism articulate the moral purpose of the state in more collectivist terms, often in language emphasizing social stability and harmony. They have tended to prioritize economic and social rights at the expense of individual rights in their rhetoric, and to systematically violate the rights of their citizens in practice (Ginsburg, 2020, p. 52).

As a result, architects of authoritarian multilateralism are likely to see the moral purpose of global governance or international order in terms of the maintenance of domestic political systems and elites.² This helps explain the fundamental cleavage in terms of Internet governance and cybersecurity governance between states comfortable with the legitimacy of the legacy Internet governance regime and its constituent multilateral, multistakeholder and private organizations; and those states who reject the legitimacy of these arrangements in pursuit of alternative, more purely multilateral, governance arrangements for cyber-issues detailed in the next section of the article.

Authoritarian multilateralism in the global cyber-regime complex

The rapid development and global diffusion of information and communications technologies (ICTs) has been accompanied by the development of a variegated, decentralized set of associated governance arrangements. These arrangements entail a set of loosely linked issue-specific international regimes, or an international regime complex (Raustiala & Victor, 2004) for global cyber-activities (Nye, 2014). This global cyber-regime complex has historically been rooted in legacy multistakeholder Internet governance arrangements (Radu, 2019; Raymond & DeNardis, 2015). While cybersecurity discussions in the UN General Assembly have been ongoing since 1998 (Levinson, 2021; Raymond, 2021), cybersecurity and Internet policy have become significantly more controversial since Edward Snowden’s disclosures about American signals intelligence programs (Bradshaw et al., 2015). As states assert themselves in Internet and cybersecurity governance processes, these fora have become increasingly characterized by power political interactions and by clear substantive disagreements (Carr, 2015; Urgessa, 2020).

Efforts to shape the global governance of issues created by the global adoption of digital technologies involve extensive work to make, interpret and apply rules (Finnemore & Hollis, 2016; Raymond, 2021). That is, they are instances of the power political rule-making activities that we highlight in this article. Major authoritarian states have sought to employ Internet and cybersecurity governance processes to advance their broader values and preferences about the nature of multilateralism in the contemporary rule-based global order. These efforts are notable both for their potential effects on the management of a crucial global issue and for their implications for the future trajectory of rule-based global order.

This section focuses on three illustrative examples of these phenomena: authoritarians’ efforts in UN cyber-norms processes, authoritarians’ cyber-governance efforts in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and Chinese state and company efforts to contest internet protocols. These examples were chosen in order to assess the extent to which authoritarian multilateralism is identifiable in a range of institutional contexts. Collectively they account respectively for the heart of the post-1945 order, perhaps the leading explicitly illiberal international organization in the world, and even for potential cross-fertilization of authoritarian multilateral norms and practices into private and multistakeholder processes historically linked to the technical community. Prior to discussing these examples, we briefly discuss a few conceptual and methodological issues.

Conceptual and methodological issues

Sizeable and growing literatures on Internet governance and cybersecurity policy demonstrate the enormous complexity of these related topics.³ For reasons of space, and because of our particular analytical purpose in this article, we cannot fully engage this scholarship here. However, before proceeding with the empirical illustrations, some brief background and a few caveats are in order. Accordingly, we contextualize our argument prior to making the case that authoritarian multilateralism is present in contemporary Internet governance and cybersecurity policy deliberations, and that it is likely to affect the trajectory of rule-based global order.

Most crucially, we make no claim to have a single subsuming analytical framework for Internet governance and cybersecurity policy. These issues areas have been, and remain, characterized by powerful private actors as well as by established private and multistakeholder governance arrangements (Weyrauch & Winzen, 2021). However, there is widespread agreement that states, particularly great powers, are asserting themselves in these governance arrangements. Hoffmann et al. (2020) lay out pathways by which Chinese involvement in Internet standards processes could have profound effects on the way the global Internet operates. Other recent studies have also examined China’s involvement in global internet governance processes (e.g., Fung, 2023; Gao, 2022; Hong & Harwit, 2020; Negro, 2023). We engage with these studies below.

Similarly, our focus on great powers is not meant to imply that we think smaller states lack agency. Kim (2022) has demonstrated that middle powers shape cyber-governance, but because we are seeking to identify indicia of authoritarian multilateralism, we focus on efforts by Russia and China, since these are the states that have led these efforts. In doing so, we largely leave aside recent scholarship on Russian and Chinese domestic efforts to update their cyber-policy frameworks. Future research examining the interplay of these states’ domestic efforts with their foreign policy agendas would be desirable, since it is virtually certain that the two are related. For example, Ermoshina et al. (2022) suggest that Russia lags China in its ability to use domestic legal and regulatory tools to accomplish the regime’s cyber-sovereignty objectives. However, scholars of China’s approach to cybersecurity also note that it, too, faces a complex landscape characterized by pushback from domestic and international firms (Creemers, 2021, 2022; Gao, 2022). Limitations on the effectiveness of domestic policy and regulatory tools might constitute an important reason that these regimes have sought to alter the substantive global governance arrangements for digital issues, but even if this is true it does not preclude that they may have broader world order related reasons for pursuing these same policy goals, as Fung (2023) also suggests. Further, in studying these regimes’ efforts to instantiate authoritarian multilateralism, we are not arguing that their domestic policy landscapes are monolithic.

We likewise acknowledge that a stark distinction between multistakeholder and multilateral approaches to Internet governance and cybersecurity policy is inaccurate. Russia, China and the United States all participate (officially and via quasi-official channels) in a variety of multistakeholder bodies (Weyrauch & Winzen, 2021); and research also correctly notes growing inclusion of non-state actors in UN processes (Levinson, 2021; Shires, 2024; Wolff, 2024). Indeed, states’ varying attitudes toward blurring of the distinction between the contemporary practice of multilateralism and multistakeholderism is precisely at the heart of the divergence between the two forms of multilateralism we identify. However, since our purpose is to study the emergence of authoritarian multilateralism in the cyber-regime complex, we focus primarily on multilateral institutions and processes. Accordingly, the interplay between multistakeholder and multilateral components of the broader cyber-regime complex is of secondary importance for our analysis. Like Fung (2023), we are interested in how Russia, China and other key states participate in cyber-governance, but we go further in two respects. First, we examine specific procedural tactics within liberal multilateral settings, as well as parallel order-building efforts within explicitly authoritarian multilateral settings, as tools distinct from rhetorical adaptation. Second, we investigate what this involvement reveals about the trajectory of rule-based global order.

Finally, we want to emphasize that our primary contribution here is in conceptual development. We employ selected illustrative examples to illuminate the distinctive features of authoritarian and liberal variants of multilateralism identified in the previous section. In doing so, we rely mainly on secondary academic sources, as well as on open-source news reports and a limited number of primary documents. There are admittedly limitations to this approach, which we discuss in the conclusion. However, we take confidence in our preliminary findings from their consistency across our three illustrative examples, and from their consistency with those of the studies examining authoritarian states’ procedural innovations in global governance discussed in the previous section. Most importantly, the variant multilateralism identified here has immediate relevance not only for scholars of cyber-governance, multilateralism, and great power politics; it is also relevant for practitioners in these fields.

United Nations cybersecurity norms processes

Chinese and Russian cyber-governance proposals in the United Nations, made since the 1990s (Radu, 2013) but especially pushed over the last decade (Levinson, 2021; Raymond, 2021), illustrate authoritarian multilateralism in the evolving global cyber-regime complex. UN delegations from Beijing and Moscow, through a number of proposals in the UN General Assembly (UNGA), the UN Open-Ended Working Group (OEWG) on cybersecurity, and the UN Group of Governmental Experts (GGE)’s First Committee on disarmament and international security, have proposed resolutions on “information security” and “cybercrime” that have amounted to efforts to edit the fundamentally liberal multilateral DNA of contemporary rule-based global order. These proposals employ politicized language (Giles & Hagestad, 2013) around “information security,” “cybercrime,” “cyber-terrorism,” and other terms that couch state desires to control the flow of information and data over the internet in their borders in the language of legitimate domestic policing, of reasonable state exertions of sovereignty over the internet, and even of democracy (Russian Federation, 2016). In doing so, they leverage the form, but not the substance, of liberal multilateralism, in a process Fung refers to as rhetorical adaptation, designed to avoid obstructionist positions while altering the substantive content of specific norms (2023). While we agree with this assessment, we add an additional dimension to analysis of Chinese and Russian engagement in multilateral global governance arrangements for cyber-issues that is focused primarily on procedural rather than substantive tactics.

Other studies emphasize complexity in the Chinese position on cyber-issues (Creemers, 2021; Gao, 2022; Hong & Harwit, 2020; Negro, 2023). They note the increasing involvement of Chinese firms and scholars in Internet standards and other global governance processes and disagree that this is due to a deliberate state strategy. Alternately, various studies point out, correctly, that we should hesitate in attributing coherence and effective implementation to either Russian or Chinese attempts to control Internet content or to achieve their intended cyber-sovereignty doctrines (Creemers, 2022; Ermoshina et al., 2022; Gao, 2022). Hong and Harwit (2020) advance an optimistic view of the Chinese position on cyber-sovereignty, insisting that it is primarily motivated by pursuit of “the collective right to self-determination and development in the face of global structural imbalance, but not a return to absolute Westphalian autonomy” (p. 3).

Even if Chinese academics and firms are increasingly engaged in cyber-governance processes, this is orthogonal to our argument, which is limited to official Chinese proposals in multilateral processes, where there is consensus that China strongly prefers multilateral arrangements even if it has engaged in multistakeholder ones. The contribution we make to this literature is to differentiate Chinese and Russian understandings of how to practice multilateralism from those of democratic states. These distinctive variants of multilateralism have not been previously identified in the literature. Similarly, even if an analyst or practitioner accepts the substantive values or vision of cyber-governance advanced by Russia, China, or any other state, this does not necessarily entail accepting the procedural tactics by which those positions are advanced.

In line with the second difference between liberal and authoritarian multilateralism, Russia and China rhetorically prioritize social and economic rights and employ collectivist language about defending the common good on the internet to justify what amounts to top-cover for internet repression (Segal, 2020). For instance, the term “information security” is used in many Western liberal-democracies in a narrow, cybersecurity-focused sense—e.g., the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of digital systems, networks, and data. In Russia, however, “information security” is a much broader concept that focuses on regime security and the stability of the online space as just one component of the information ecosystem; it encompasses not just machine-readable data but information more broadly. When it appears in UN cyber-documents, the perspectives with which the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, South Korea, and other democracies approach the terminology is notably different than the intentions of Russian officials.

These efforts have advanced beyond the formulation of national policy and diplomatic rhetoric. They entail the advancement of concrete processes and proposals within the context of major liberal multilateral international organizations. That is, there are identifiable cases in which Russia, China and like-minded states are attempting to nudge existing multilateral organizations closer to the authoritarian rather than the liberal variant of multilateralism. For example, in November 2019, China and Russia, working in concert with several other authoritarian countries, sponsored a successful cybercrime resolution in the UN General Assembly’s Third Committee, which passed 88–58, with 34 abstaining. Not only did Angola, Egypt, Iran, North Korea, Syria, and Uganda vote for the resolution—just some of the authoritarian countries who have historically supported such proposals in the UN (and some of whom cosponsored the resolution itself)—but so did India, the most populous democracy on earth. Other countries who have historically opposed such initiatives either supported or abstained from the vote.

The November 2019 resolution had two key provisions, both consistent with common UN procedural practices. The first created an “open-ended ad hoc intergovernmental committee of experts” to establish ideas and terminology around “a comprehensive international convention” on cybercrime, again using politicized language to legitimize domestic internet repression (United Nations General Assembly, 2019). Both the creation of expert study groups and the authorization of terms of reference for a draft treaty are standard modalities for UN work processes. However, these procedural consistencies mask a gambit designed to put states supportive of liberal multilateral practices in a difficult diplomatic position.

Joining the negotiating group would mean lending credence to the Chinese and Russian efforts (reflected in the resolution)⁴ to undermine multistakeholderism on the internet in favor of efforts at greater state control, while abstaining would mean disinvolvement in the process of shaping the content of the potential treaty and ceding further rulemaking ground to China and Russia.⁵ Authoritarian states thus exercise creativity and flexibility, including bad-faith invocation of liberal multilateral principles, in order to shape the rules, norms and practices of the United Nations itself, in ways similar to those emphasized in Pouliot’s study of “gray zones” (2021).

The second core provision of the November 2019 resolution was a venue shopping push to relocate cybercrime governance discussions away from the Budapest Convention—a Council of Europe treaty on cybercrime ratified in 2004⁶ which Russia and China have long opposed—to the UNGA Third Committee (United Nations General Assembly, 2019). The logic behind this effort seems clearly driven by the relative membership of the two bodies. With 47 member states, the Council of Europe is dominated by relatively established democracies, whereas the UN member states include a broader range composed of a greater proportion of emerging democracies and authoritarian regimes.

This forum shopping effort aligns with previous Chinese and Russian efforts to move cybercrime discussions to the UN OEWG and away from the UN GGE, because the former (which China and Russia established after criticizing the GGE) enables China and Russia to better leverage authoritarian voting blocs: any UN member state can join the UN OEWG and therefore participate in efforts to build a global cybersecurity governance regime (Levinson, 2021; Raymond, 2021). This does not stand alone; as mentioned, China and Russia have introduced similar proposals before, and the UNGA’s Third Committee similarly adopted a resolution on “Crime prevention and criminal justice” online in November 2018 (Sherman & Morgus, 2018; United Nations General Assembly, 2018). The focus on process and procedural rules for rule-making and interpretation aligns with the recommendations of major analyses of global cyber-norms (Finnemore & Hollis, 2016).

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization as an incubator of authoritarian multilateralism

Chinese- and Russian-led efforts in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) are another demonstration of authoritarian multilateralism in global cyber-governance.⁷ In fact, McKune and Ahmed (2018), writing on Chinese contestation and shaping of global cyber-norms, call the SCO “perhaps one of the most successful examples of multilateral embrace of digital authoritarian norms and practices” (p. 3841). The SCO is the first major explicitly illiberal international governance organization created since the end of the Cold War. It is difficult to study, mainly due to its deliberate rejection of transparency of the kind employed by liberal international organizations—both to increase information in world politics to assist states in overcoming obstacles to cooperation (Koremenos et al., 2001; Oye, 1985) and as an expression of their fundamentally open, liberal character (Reus-Smit, 1999; Ruggie, 1992).

In contrast, the SCO is a relatively opaque body. Blank (2013) writes that “Officially published accounts are of little help in assessing the SCO since they confine themselves to high-flown, vague language and are short on specifics” (p. 40). Ambrosio (2008) writes that, because of numerous factors including especially its membership, “the SCO represents a formidable challenge to the ideas of universal democracy and human rights through its de facto legitimization of authoritarianism and by establishing itself as a counterweight to external democratic norms” (p. 1322). This body continues to serve as an incubator and as a vector for authoritarian multilateralism. Notably, it has made cyber-issues a major area of focus (Gao, 2022, p. 10), highlighting the connection between cybersecurity governance and broader effects on global multilateralism.

Within the SCO itself, member states signed a cooperation agreement in June 2009 in the realm of “information security,” echoing politicized language seen in Chinese and Russian proposals to the United Nations that seek to legitimize norms of tight state control of the internet domestically in the language of crime prevention and even fair democratic regulation (Shanghai Cooperation Organization, 2020a). One SCO proposal, for example, discusses such terms as “information warfare,” “information terrorism,” and “cybercrime” in exactly this way. It also employs a key component of authoritarian multilateralism by emphasizing social and economic values over political ones and by espousing the benefits of collectivism: one line in a SCO cyber-treaty speaks of “information prejudicial to the socio-political and socio-economic systems, spiritual, moral and cultural environment” of states (Shanghai Cooperation Organization, 2020b).

Further, China and Russia have leveraged the SCO as an organizing force for advancing authoritarian internet proposals in the United Nations, outside of just the SCO. In August 2006, a Chinese government delegate to the UN submitted a statement on information security on behalf of the SCO’s then-member states, which called for “States to step up their information security efforts through joint action at bilateral, regional and international levels.” It echoed some of the previously mentioned proposals while continuing to promote a multilateral (e.g., state-centric) vision of cyber-governance over a multi-stakeholder one (United Nations Conference on Disarmament, 2006). This was not the only authoritarian proposal to the UN the SCO organized. In September 2011, China, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan submitted a Draft International Code of Conduct for Information Security to the UNGA. In January 2015, the SCO’s founding member states—China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan—submitted a slightly different version of the same document (McKune, 2015; Shanghai Cooperation Organization, 2020b).

The employment of the SCO not only as a forum to diffuse Russian and Chinese values and preferences for cyber-governance in Eurasia, but also as a coordinating mechanism for efforts in the UN General Assembly and other global bodies, demonstrates a purposive and sustained effort to shape cyber-governance and to alter the liberal multilateral practices and cultures of key international organizations. The SCO’s opacity continues to pose a challenge for researchers and policymakers seeking to understand the exact nature of the body’s procedures and deliberations. Its lack of transparency and refusal to allow nonstate actor participation mark it as fundamentally different in character from the contemporary practices of liberal multilateralism in other international organizations, which have further incorporated aspects of multistakeholder governance modalities to augment multilateralism. The SCO—by enhancing Chinese and Russian great power influence and using collectivist language to purport moral principles while actually pursuing the repression of political rights on and through the internet—embodies authoritarian multilateralism in the evolution of the global cyber-regime complex. Indeed, it may be indicative of a more ambitious attempt to instantiate authoritarian multilateralism not only within but also beyond existing international organizations in the form of what might be called parallel order-building. We return to this point briefly in the next section.

Technical standards processes and infrastructure diplomacy as avenues for authoritarian multilateralism

A third example of authoritarian multilateralism in the evolving cyber-regime complex is Chinese companies’ efforts to update the Internet Protocol (IP) that underpins the Internet as we know it today, and to drive internet standards development away from multi-stakeholder bodies and towards multilateral forums in the process. Part of the reason the Chinese government actively seeks to establish norms of internet behavior in the United Nations is because it desires to replace the multi-stakeholder vision of the internet as we know it today—one that involves civil society, academics, private companies, and government stakeholders—with one that is state-driven and therefore would give Beijing more legitimacy to influence the internet’s shape and development (Hoffmann et al., 2020).

One such area in which this battle is playing out is Chinese telecommunication company Huawei’s proposal of a “NEW IP” (Huawei Technologies, 2020) to replace the existing Internet Protocol. Historically, deliberations over internet standards have been carried out in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), a multi-stakeholder nonprofit organization with heavy involvement of academics, nonprofit technical experts, and private companies from around the world. However, Huawei proposes to push these proposals to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) of the United Nations, a more political body with more express state involvement and which has typically had a much smaller role in internet standards-setting.

Much attention has been paid to the substance of these documents, which, while relatively light on details, are themselves concerning—but not enough attention has been paid to the procedural dimension of this proposal, in its attempt to shift future standards development conversations from the IETF to the ITU. Huawei has filed documentation in the ITU proposing a “strategic transformation” for ITU-T, the ITU’s Telecommunication Standardization Sector, which includes mention of New IP (Huawei Technologies et al., 2019). Huawei has also situated New IP in the context of broader plans for a “New Internet for the Year 2030 and Beyond,” also aimed at standardization conversations in the ITU (Huawei Technologies, 2020).

Debate persists about what degree of coordination, if any, exists between Huawei and the Chinese government in attempting to drive internet standards conversations away from the IETF and toward the more state-controlled ITU, but the fact remains that Huawei’s actions are aligned with goals expressed by the Chinese government around state-centric cyber-governance (Sherman, 2020). These efforts to relocate standard-setting processes for a crucial Internet technology standard from a multistakeholder to a multilateral body are indicative of the larger effort to shape the cyber-regime complex and the broader architecture for global governance in a manner conducive to authoritarian multilateralism, especially when seen in context of the examples above of ways in which China seeks to alter how multilateralism is practiced in the United Nations and beyond. Chinese efforts to advance authoritarian multilateralism not only within traditional multilateral organizations but also by undermining and minimizing the role of the multistakeholder legacy system of Internet governance are rooted in rejection of the modern liberal conception of the moral purpose of the state and the moral purpose of global governance, as well as the related commitments to transparency and independent civil society participation in global governance that are central to contemporary practices of liberal multilateralism.

Though not discussed in depth here, infrastructure diplomacy—e.g., the Chinese government’s Belt and Road Initiative and related infrastructure capacity-building programs—has also been a point of discussion in the policy debate over cyber-governance. Additional research is required on the nature of these infrastructure-building projects, coincident technology exports from Chinese firms, and correlated effects on internet governance and content freedom in recipient countries. It is not yet clear if, or to what extent, these technology development programs are conduits through which online authoritarianism can be promoted or enabled. The Belt and Road Initiative does represent a turn to internet governance by infrastructure, or a situation in which policy objectives are accomplished by means of long-term choices in infrastructure design, construction and/or operation that foreclose alternate Internet policies entirely or render them cost-prohibitive (Musiani et al., 2016). If this capacity-building diffuses internet authoritarianism, that could be a powerful means by which China, Russia, and other authoritarian countries could advance authoritarian multilateralism in the global cyber-regime complex.

The outcome of these ongoing efforts to instantiate authoritarian multilateralism in Internet and cyber-governance is not yet determined. The February 2022 Russian escalation of its longstanding war in Ukraine has had clear negative implications for Russian diplomatic efforts at the United Nations and beyond. The most notable effect to date in our area of empirical concern is the election of American candidate Doreen Bogdan-Martin as Secretary-General of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the UN’s communications technology agency, in September 2022. Bogdan-Martin was elected in a wide margin (139–125) over Russian candidate Rashid Ismailov (International Telecommunication Union, 2022). It is possible that authoritarian internet governance activities in multilateral fora will not ultimately be effective, as indicated by the US’ ability to build a coalition to overwhelmingly outvote Ismailov at the UN. However, it is difficult to reliably draw broad conclusions from this effort, given the fact that it was the Putin regime’s war on Ukraine—not Russia’s internet governance activities per se—that underpinned international action against Russia in the ITU prior to the election (Daneman & Buskirk, 2022). Analytically, it is hard to separate the election results from the broader political context that is not specific to internet and cybersecurity governance. Future Chinese government efforts, for example, may continue to be effective in this arena.

Within the UN First Committee, results have been mixed. On one hand, a coalition of largely liberal states prevailed in seeking approval for the Programme of Action (PoA), which is meant to be a permanent vehicle for consideration of cybersecurity issues within the First Committee.⁸ The PoA is expected to build on these states’ efforts to ensure that the OEWG remained as open as possible to civil society and private sector participation, blunting the intention by its initial sponsors to create a purely statist process with a mandate to negotiate treaty modalities. However, the authoritarian bloc also secured approval for a successor phase of the OEWG itself (2021–2025), running in parallel with the new PoA (Painter, 2021).

There is little reason to think that authoritarian states will simply abandon their efforts to make Internet and cybersecurity governance modalities more amenable to their interests and values, including by attempting to instantiate authoritarian multilateralism in existing international institutions. However, given that further progress within the United Nations has been imperiled by damage to Russian legitimacy and status, one likelihood is that the action will increasingly shift toward Chinese efforts to engage in parallel order-building. The strongest indication of this possibility to date is China’s announcement that it will seek to transition its World Internet Conference, previously an annual convening in China, to a new multilateral Internet governance organization, and that it has created a new informal multilateral diplomatic coalition in support of this effort (Sherman, 2022). China has shown interest in building parallel multilateral organizations both with the SCO and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). While the nature of its intended Internet body remains unclear, such a step is more destabilizing than the creation of a regional organization or an infrastructure bank for the simple reason that the stability and interoperability of the global Internet today is dependent on universality in certain Internet resources and standards. Neither the SCO nor the AIIB create this kind of potential concern.

Further, the creation of a new illiberal multilateral organization puts liberal states in the same difficult position as other efforts to fracture the institutional playing field. If they join, they enter an institutional context that stacks the deck in favor of authoritarian rather than liberal values and that therefore risks serious adverse consequences for human rights. If they decline to join, they will have virtually no influence over the ongoing processes of rule-making, interpretation and application that occur within the organization. Because Internet and cyber-governance decisions are highly transnational, this poses a global challenge even if China’s parallel order-building remains limited in scope to certain member geographies. To the extent that China continues to build on this strategy of parallel order-building in other issue-areas, it represents another vector for the expansion of authoritarian multilateralism.

Whether the efforts documented in this section collectively form a fully developed, coherent strategy is difficult to tell. It is likely that many of the individual elements are aimed primarily at short-term objectives intended to facilitate ICT use for regime survival (Gunitsky, 2015). However, it is also plausible that Chinese and Russian leaders have at least partial conceptions of a broader strategy to recode the liberal DNA of the post-1945 order. Even if the strategy is not entirely conscious or fully coherent, its effects will be the same. The crucial point is that rule-making and interpretation for Internet governance and cybersecurity governance have the potential not only to be extremely significant in shaping the human rights affordances of next-generation digital technologies, but also for directly and indirectly shaping the fundamental character of rule-based global order.

This case of rule-making and interpretation therefore amounts to high-stakes power politics. That reality is rendered invisible by prevailing contributions to the literature on power politics and power transitions in the international system, which continue to understand these concepts mainly in rationalist and materialist terms. Our findings thus underscore the need for a more ontologically expansive conception of power politics like that suggested by Goddard and Nexon (2016). Treating rule-making as power-political and distinguishing between liberal and authoritarian variants of multilateralism, as we do here, provides significant value-added in making sense of contemporary trends in great power politics.

Conclusion

In this article, we have developed and proposed a more expansive understanding of multilateralism that adds a distinct type of authoritarian multilateralism alongside the familiar notion of liberal multilateralism. This authoritarian variant differs in its weaker commitment to the liberal principle that like cases should be governed in like manner, and is premised instead on notions of great power privilege that qualify the principle of sovereign legal equality. Authoritarian multilateralism also supplants liberal notions of the moral purpose of global governance with more collectivist notions of social stability and harmony that buttress the survival of existing authoritarian regimes.

Our analysis contributes by identifying and specifying a novel variant of how multilateralism is practiced, as well as signs that liberal states’ understandings of how to appropriately practice multilateralism have also undergone change over time. We outline the reasons that this matters below, but first we identify some limitations in our approach and briefly discuss connections with other contributions in this special issue. Our empirical approach is a waterfront survey of different parts of the cyber-regime complex to demonstrate the presence and importance of authoritarian practices of multilateralism. We cannot make strong claims about the extent to which the patterns we observe would hold across all possible institutional settings. Accordingly, this initial analysis should be followed by empirical studies that can more fully document such practices not only in the cyber-regime complex, but also in other issue-area regimes. Further, we acknowledge that our empirical illustrations are limited by reliance on English-language sources. To the extent possible, it would be ideal for future research to remedy this limitation.

In this regard, our analysis is complemented by Barrinha and Turner’s (2024) focus on narratives, which are crucial tools in advancing or resisting instantiation of particular forms of multilateralism. While variants and narratives of multilateralism are logically distinct, we think that additional research can show important and productive relationships. Barrinha and Turner show, for example, that Russia consistently employs narratives emphasizing sovereignty and multilateralism that are rooted in its preferred understandings of the international system, in order to inform particular policy narratives on substantive issues like the treatment of content offenses in ongoing negotiation of a global cybercrime treaty.

Likewise, Shires (2024) points to the importance of long-term personal connections among negotiators that can contribute to forming and maintaining transnational policy networks. While we find his analysis impressive and important, we think it is notable that the Budapest Convention process he documents took place among negotiators working relatively unproblematically within a procedural context defined by contemporary understandings of how to practice liberal multilateralism. While there are empirical cases that demonstrate the formation and maintenance of such networks across substantial divides, we think that differences on something so fundamental as what multilateralism is and how it should be appropriately practiced are likely to condition and restrict success in the short run.

Despite the limitations outlined above, we have demonstrated that authoritarian countries—principally, China and Russia—have used the existing liberal procedures of multilateral bodies like the United Nations to advance illiberal norms, processes, policies, and standards for Internet governance. Across cyber-norm proposals in the UN; cyber-norm proposals and policy efforts in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization; and contestation of existing, free, open Internet standards in the International Telecommunication Union, China and Russia have weaponized liberal multilateral processes to pursue Internet repression on the global level. These processes of weaponization have sought to subvert key liberal multilateral governance arrangements in ways that make them more amenable to authoritarian multilateral practices.

These efforts merit attention, given the importance of digital technologies in the twenty-first century (Drezner, 2019; Milner & Solstad, 2021) and the potential harms to human rights. However, we argue that these efforts also have more fundamental significance for scholars and practitioners of world politics. To the extent that Russia, China and other like-minded states succeed in making procedures for rule-making and interpretation on cyber-issues more amenable to authoritarian rather than liberal multilateralism, they will be engineering significant changes in the foundations of the contemporary rule-based global order. This is a dimension of the multifaceted challenge to that order that has been thus far overlooked. The power-political nature of rule-making and interpretation has begun to receive sustained attention among IR scholars in the last several years (Ikenberry & Nexon, 2019; Raymond, 2019). Our work advances this research by demonstrating the relevance of ongoing attempts to alter the basic practices of governance for cyber-issues in ways that have clear spillover potential for the general nature of multilateral governance.

Such changes matter in policy terms for a variety of reasons, including the question of whether future revisions to core Internet standards are undertaken in legacy governance forums like the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) or in multilateral forums like the ITU that offer very different conditions of participation for firms and civil society actors (Raymond & DeNardis, 2015). Contestation of efforts to entrench and employ more authoritarian variants of multilateralism for cyber-issues must therefore begin with an assessment of authoritarian multilateralism in cyber-governance processes—and by reexamining assumptions about how well China, Russia, and other internet-repressive authoritarians can use bodies like the United Nations to shape global cyber-governance regimes. This work also raises important questions about bodies like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and questions about how new international for a, like China’s newly-announced World Internet Conference organization, could be used for similar authoritarian ends.

Our findings also help explain our puzzle; namely, why are authoritarian states actively promoting multilateral governance arrangements for Internet and cyber-issues, while liberal states closely associated with the multilateral global order are often resisting those proposals? We have focused primarily on conceptualizing and documenting authoritarian multilateralism; however, the approach we take here is also strongly suggestive of an interesting explanation for liberal states’ behavior. In addition to a purely agonistic explanation that might focus on either material interests or preexisting rivalrous identities among the major state protagonists, our approach highlights the importance of changing understandings about appropriate modalities for global governance on the part of liberal states. Indeed, the sovereigntist focus articulated by authoritarian states is in some ways consistent with traditional state-led practices of multilateral diplomacy and governance.

Liberal states’ understandings of appropriate governance modalities have experienced drift from that kind of state-led approach toward a more hybrid one that accepts the prima facie legitimacy of both private and multistakeholder governance modalities in at least some situations, alongside, within, or sometimes even instead of multilateral governance. While acceptance and promotion of these alternate governance modalities has been particularly prominent in Internet and cybersecurity governance issue-areas, it is by no means unique to them (Raymond & DeNardis, 2015; Taggart & Abraham, 2023). Fully explaining this shift is beyond the scope of this article, but we believe a strong possibility is that this change has been driven largely by domestic demand within liberal societies, and that liberal societies have found it difficult to resist these demands because of the way their proponents have framed them to draw on rhetorical resources embedded in liberal societies’ constitutional values.⁹

Our findings also matter for IR theory for two deeper reasons. First, they significantly alter and expand existing understandings of multilateralism, which is counted among the distinctive and constitutive features of the contemporary international system (Glas et al., 2018; Ikenberry, 2001; Keohane, 1990; Reus-Smit, 1999; Ruggie, 1992). We show that the familiar variant of liberal multilateralism is a special case of a broader phenomenon. Our analysis thus opens a new vein in the extensive literature on multilateralism, and in doing so builds on broader attention to the roles and strategies adopted by authoritarian states in multilateral settings and in global governance more broadly.

Second, this is crucial because the conflation of multilateralism with liberal multilateralism has occluded the ways in which authoritarian states are advancing their interests through multilateral fora of various kinds, as well as the ways in which they are reconfiguring those fora to be more consistent with their values. In advancing procedural approaches that maximize the influence of authoritarian voting blocs, exclude, or marginalize non-state actors of various kinds, and seek to prompt liberal states to absent themselves from certain governance processes, authoritarian states are excising the liberal DNA of the contemporary rule-based global order. Their efforts to exploit existing procedural rules to create long-term change in important international institutions should thus be understood as explicitly power-political in nature and as a vector for contestation of the liberal international order.

Authoritarian multilateralism is not simply a case of applying a new label to a previously identified phenomenon. It reveals substantial drift in states’ understandings of what multilateralism means and how it should be practiced. It further reveals efforts by important international actors to leverage this split by employing specific kinds of procedural maneuvers within the cyber-regime complex in ways that not only shape the trajectory of cyber-governance, but also of rule-based global order writ large.

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the editors, as well as the anonymous reviewers, for their helpful comments. We also benefited enormously from comments and feedback from colleagues at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI) and at The Hague Conference on International Cybersecurity, hosted by Leiden University. Finally, we thank Ayazhan Muratbek and Typhaine Joffe for their research assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 While it is likely that contesting the international system is at least partially in service of regime survival, we see no reason to think that authoritarian great powers and relatively consolidated authoritarian regimes would not pursue other goals as well.

2 In virtually every case, these beliefs are self-serving in the sense that they are held and advanced by domestic political elites who benefit enormously from their continuation. We do not argue that these values are held entirely in good faith. However, whether we agree with them or not, it is possible that these alternate conceptions of politics and of the relationship between the state and the individual may have at least some degree of sociological legitimacy in the eyes of a portion of the population.

3 See DeNardis (2014) and Radu (2013, 2019) for excellent overviews.

4 For instance, the November 2019 UN resolution stresses “the need to enhance coordination and cooperation among States in combating the use of information and communications technologies for criminal purposes” and points to a UN GGE consideration “that States should consider how best to cooperate to prosecute the criminal use of information and communication technologies”—both examples of rhetorically shifting the conversation to multilateralism rather than multistakeholderism.

5 This procedure was used at the 2012 World Conference on International Telecommunications (Radu, 2013; Taggart & Abraham, 2023, pp. 17–18).

6 See https://www.coe.int/en/web/conventions/full-list/-/conventions/treaty/185

7 Other international coalitions of potential interest include the G77 and the BRICS. We thank a reviewer for making the excellent point that future research might explore whether these groupings also represent vectors for authoritarian multilateralism.

8 The resolution, adopted on 3 November 2022, was approved by a vote of 157–156 with 14 abstentions.

9 Our understanding of these values is drawn largely from Reus-Smit’s (1999) study of the modern liberal international system, and we believe the basic strategy employed by advocates of private and multistakeholder governance modalities often involves strategies such as rhetorical coercion (Krebs & Jackson, 2007) or rhetorical adaptation (Fung, 2023). It is worth noting that Wolff (2024) suggests the impetus for private (as opposed to multistakeholder) governance may also be driven in part by market pressures.