Zurich, 22 January 2015
On 20–21 January 2015, the ICT4Peace Foundation organised a workshop on “Cybersecurity Processes and Events”, hosted by ETH Zurich. The workshop set the parameters for ICT4Peace’s Annual Cybersecurity “State of Play” Review.
The Annual Review builds on the Baseline Review of ICT-Related Processes and Events that ICT4Peace released in April 2014. It will provide an update on ICT-related threats and risks, and on how these are shaping governmental and non-governmental processes to reduce risk and foster stability at the international and regional levels. It is planned for launch in July 2015.
The workshop was prepared and led by Camino Kavanagh (King’s College London) and Eneken Tikk-Ringas (IISS), together with Daniel Stauffacher. Prof. Dirk Helbing, Professor of Computational Social Science at ETH Zurich, opened the meeting. ICT4Peace warmly thanks him and his team, in particular Dietmar Huber, for hosting the workshop at ETH.
The workshop was made possible by the generous support of Zurich Insurance Group. It brought together academic, policy, technical, business and government experts from Brazil, Canada, China, Estonia, Germany, Kenya, the Netherlands, Russia, Spain, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States.
Institutions represented included:
- Universities: ETH Zurich, Cambridge University, MIT-CSAIL, King’s College London, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Temple University, University College London and China’s Institute for International Relations
- Research and civil society: IISS, publicknowledge.org and the George C. Marshall Institute
- Private sector: Microsoft and Zurich Insurance Group
- International organisations: the Organization of American States (OAS), which joined remotely, the OSCE and the UN
- Governments: the Ministries of Foreign Affairs of Switzerland and the Netherlands, and Switzerland’s Ministry of Defence
Building on the discussions, ICT4Peace will develop three outputs:
- the Annual Review, as a reference guide to international cybersecurity processes
- a paper on the role of the private sector
- a paper on terrorism and cyberspace
The findings will also feed into ICT4Peace’s capacity-building programme on international cybersecurity policy and diplomacy, starting with the forthcoming workshop in Nairobi.