By Faculty of Law Professor Dan Svantesson
What is cyber peace, and how do we achieve it? A Nobel Fellow explores how international law can guide us toward a safer, more harmonious digital future.
Dan Svantesson is a Professor at Bond University’s Faculty of Law, but right now, he’s working far from the Gold Coast. In Oslo, Norway, he’s undertaking a fellowship at the prestigious Norwegian Nobel Institute—one of the world’s most iconic centres for peace research.
His goal? Cyber peace. Dan says it’s an idea that’s gotten very little attention to date. “There’s no one out protesting in the streets wanting peace in cyberspace,” he says.
“Maybe people see it as too technically complex. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter.”
Hitting close to home
The distinction between “online” and “offline” has all but disappeared. As a result, how cyberspace is regulated has shifted from a fringe concern to a core part of modern life.
“The biggest myth is that the internet is a lawless territory, which stems from the early days when people used to joke the ‘www’ in a browser’s address bar stood for ‘wild, wild, web’—a play on the idea of a ‘wild west’ where there is no law or rules,” Dan says.
“That’s completely wrong; it’s governed by both national legislation and international law, as well as platform-imposed rules that shape what we see, share, and say.
“But there are certainly areas where the law needs to do much more.”
Defining the undefinable
As part of his fellowship, Dan is delving into one of the most elusive questions in digital governance—what does cyber peace mean?
While other academics have tried to define the term, Dan believes most current interpretations fall short of capturing the full complexity of peace in a digital context.
"Most of them are focused on cybersecurity and, while it’s an important aspect, it's a bit of a dated view,” he says.
“Peace in cyberspace needs to include dealing with a range of things, like all the information warfare we see, including information campaigns aimed at influencing foreign elections, that are not fully captured by a focus on cybersecurity.”
Dan says there are more risks than benefits to determining a strict definition for cyber peace, instead calling for a more instinctive view of the concept that leaves it more “open-ended”.
“I’m putting together a practical agenda of things we want to achieve on the road to cyber peace because we’re not well-served by lofty proclamations; we need practical, specific, and realistic tasks we can work towards,” he says.
A focus on doing
Drawing on Alfred Nobel’s original Peace Prize criteria—advancing fellowship among nations, reducing standing armies, and promoting peace congresses—Dan has translated each into a modern, digital context.
“From that I started mapping out clear actions we could take, for example, pre-emptively banning artificial general intelligence (AGI)—technology that matches or surpasses human-level intelligence,” Dan says.
“Because once we get there, we can get to the next step where we have AGI that is smarter than us and can become something we cannot go back from. The risks there are massive.
“I also include a criterion around how likely it is that we could make progress on a particular topic, and I think AGI is one where we should have a decent chance.
“In the end, no one knows what it will be capable of doing; it seems that should motivate potential agreement in that field.”
That’s just one of ten cyber peace agenda items Dan has outlined so far, each designed to reframe peacebuilding for the digital age.
A surprising setback
Dan once believed the internet would bring the world closer together. Now, he’s not so sure. “It’s probably the most wonderful tool we’ve ever had to advance fellowship among nations, but if you look at the world today, compared to the early 1990s, it feels less harmonious,” he says.
“We see it between nations, with diplomatic communications now occurring in tweets, often hastily written and poorly thought through, and within each country itself, you can see what social media has done... it gives you content in-line with your thinking and creates these bubbles, breaking down social cohesion.
“It’s a failing of laws. The tech community gave us this wonderful tool, but the regulators have failed it to the degree that it has been more divisive than it has been unifying.”
Building a future for cyber peace
Dan Svantesson’s shift to a more direct focus on cyber peace came in response to global instability. “Since the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, I've redirected much of my research more to public international law, focused on peace and defence issues,” he says.
“I'm not saying we should all drop what we're doing and focus on cyber peace, but I think we can all pause every now and then and see if there's anything we can do to promote peace.”
For students and early-career lawyers, that pause can be a powerful starting point. “You need to understand the law a bit before you can figure out how it should be applied in the tech setting,” Dan explains.
“But students can reflect on what’s in their textbooks. If you pick up a contract law or tort law book, there might be a few lines about the online environment—yet we live maybe more than half our lives online. It shows the gap between legal thinking and how central the internet is to our lives.
“This is a field where we need more good lawyers. If you graduate with expertise in data privacy or cybersecurity law, you bring something new to many firms, and that gives you a head start.”
As technology continues to outpace regulation, Svantesson’s work reminds us peace in the digital world is not a given—it’s something we must define, protect, and build toward. The path to cyber peace is one we all have a role in shaping.
Published on Wednesday, 4 June, 2025.
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