ICT4Peace is honoured to announce that its acclaimed paper BASELINE REVIEW of ICT-RELATED PROCESSES & EVENTS has been published in the Chinese language as part of its cooperation with the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations (CICIR), Beijing.

At the 2013 Seoul Conference on Cyberspace, the ICT4Peace Foundation hosted a side-meeting during which strong emphasis was placed on ensuring greater inclusivity with regard to on-going and emerging cyber security-related processes, including with regard to ensuring greater regional participation in related discussions and debate, and greater involvement of civil society, industry and academia (as per the UN GGE reports). ICT4Peace Foundation’s related plenary Statement reiterated these views, committing itself to ensuring that information on the different processes reaches a broader geographical audience and establishing means to report these views to government. The release of the baseline review report in Chinese language ia now a further step in this direction. The translation into Spanish is planned.

The report is structured around the following three areas: i) international and regional security (the predominant focus); ii) transnational crime and terrorism; iii) and governance, human rights and development. These areas are obviously interdependent, with developments in one area often impacting another, yet they have traditionally been approached separately through distinct communities of practice and fora. This has been the case over the past fifteen years; yet more recent developments demonstrate that these policy areas are converging, thus constituting an opportunity for wider ranging agreements on the one hand, and greater risk of misunderstanding and tension on the other. The report also serves as a baseline for future annual reports.

ICT4Peace is indebted to Ms. Tang Lan, Director at CICIR, for this cooperation and her staff for having translated the text, and to Yuheng Zhang of the East-Asian Institute of the University of Zurich, Switzerland for the review of the translation and finalising the tables in the Chinese edition.

ICT4Peace also published the paper A ROLE FOR CIVIL SOCIETY? – ICTs, NORMS AND CONFIDENCE BUILDING MEASURES IN THE CONTEXT OF INTERNATIONAL SECURITY in Spanish Language in cooperation with the Organisation of American States (OAS).