ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the ways in which international law historically has sought to regulate various global information flows, violence and technology, and how the novel nature of cyber warfare requires a rethinking of the harm caused by cyber attacks against the state. It examines how cyber warfare challenges the traditional understanding of warfare, in what is identified as an ontological gap between kinetic and cyber warfare. The chapter argues that an informational approach offers a means to broaden international law’s containment of violence to also forms of informational violence, enabling recognition of how cyber attacks can harm the state as an information entity. Walter Benjamin distinguished between two forms of violence: law-making violence and law-preserving violence. In addition to the conceptual containment of violence within the confines of law, states have also sought to contain or control weapons technologies as the instruments of violence.
