Wednesday, March 31, 2021
On March 30th, the Embassy of Liechtenstein and Women in International Security (WIIS) hosted a Policy Roundtable on the gender dimensions of new technologies and cyber security and to what extent cyber security challenges should be integrated in the United Nation's Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda.
Expert panelists included: Dr. Katharine Millar (Assistant Professor, London School of Economics), Dr. Sarah Shoker (Post-Doctoral Fellow, University of Waterloo), Tarah Wheeler (Cyber Project Fellow, Harvard University & International Security Fellow, New America), and Dr. Lauren Wilcox (Senior Lecturer, University of Cambridge).
Ambassador Kurt Jaeger provided introductory remarks. He recalled that both the WPS agenda and cyber are policy priorities for Liechtenstein. Liechtenstein actively participates in the UN Open Ended Working Group on developments in the field of information and telecommunications in the context of international security. He noted that the current polarized political climate makes these discussions very difficult. He also observed that discussions on new technologies are not gender neutral but gender blind—that is to say, gender is not taken into account. Panelists agreed with him that it is critical to unseat the myth that cybertech removes human biases, including gender biases. They stated that it can be a “challenge of the imagination” for some in the policy realm to view gender as relevant to cyber issues due to the perception of tech as ‘identity-less’ or ‘gender blind.’
Panelists also discussed how new technologies, including the use of autonomous weapons, affect the way wars are fought. They argued that the use of drones can actually reinforce and elevate identity-based issues. Drones force us to confront the relationship between the human and the machine because even if the weapon is separated from the operator and in a way "de-humanized," the targeting is still incredibly gendered (and racialized) and relies on assumptions about gender and racial differences.
Lastly, panelists addressed issues related to governance and whether new legal instruments were necessary. Panelists argued that existing international law covers most actions by state actors. The problem is cyber actions are often difficult to define as war-like attacks and there are many non-state actors active in this domain. This Policy Roundtable provided a foray into these complex issues, ones we hope to delve further into at a future Policy Roundtable event.