Until Consensus: Mapping International Cyberspace Expressions by States Since 1998

Extant scholarship has until now relied on informal-theoretic, case study, and interpretative methods to assess patterns of norm development in cyberspace. Ideally, these accounts would be complemented with more systematic crossnational and longitudinal empirical evidence. To address this gap, this article introduces the International Cyber Expression (ICE) Dataset. The dataset includes a corpus of more than 35,000 official expressions of view by state actors regarding the international politics of cyberspace. The article describes the sources of this data and demonstrates the dataset’s usefulness, with an appendix containing an exploratory analysis of norm convergence. Future research can leverage the dataset to empirically test questions of theory and policy. For example, the dataset can be used to study how foundational theories of norm diffusion apply to cyberspace. It can also be paired with existing cyber conflict datasets to study the conditions under which state practice influences cyber discourse, and vice versa.