Startseite State responsibility in the context of cyberwarfare: dilemma identification and path reconstruction
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State responsibility in the context of cyberwarfare: dilemma identification and path reconstruction

  • Le Cheng

    Le Cheng is Chair Professor of Law, and Professor of Cyber Studies at Zhejiang University. He serves as the Executive Vice Dean of Zhejiang University’s Academy of International Strategy and Law, Acting Head of International Institute of Cyberspace Governance, Editor-in-Chief of International Journal of Legal Discourse, Editor-in-Chief of International Journal of Digital Law and Governance, Co-Editor of Comparative Legilinguistics (International Journal for Legal Communication), Associate Editor of Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, former Co-Editor of Social Semiotics, and editorial member of Semiotica, Pragmatics and Society, and International Journal for the Semiotics of Law. As a highly-cited scholar, he has published widely in the areas of international law, digital law and governance, cyber law, semiotics, discourse studies, terminology, and legal discourse.

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    und Haonan Li

    Haonan Li is a Juris Master at Zhejiang University. His research interests include international law, digital law and cyber law.

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Veröffentlicht/Copyright: 26. Mai 2025
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Abstract

As a new type of military confrontation in the era of informationization, cyber warfare has broken through the physical boundaries of the traditional war paradigm in terms of its technical characteristics and strategic effectiveness. Due to the ambiguity of the object of regulation, the defect of attribution mechanism, and the lack of clarity of the constituent elements of responsibility, the existing international law framework has caused the state responsibility system in cyberspace to fall into the dilemma of normative failure. This paper takes the theory of international law subjectivity as the logical starting point and systematically deconstructs the normative attributes of cyberwar and the path of responsibility determination. This paper shows that the constitutive elements of state responsibility need to break through the rigid standard of traditional “behavior-damage” causality and build a dynamic attribution system combining technical verification and legal presumption. Through critical analysis of the use of force threshold doctrine, this paper, based on a comprehensive analysis of the core dilemma of the determination of state responsibility, proposes to appropriately introduce the concept of “substantial support”, and when the traditional theory of comprehensive control fails to make effective attribution, the criterion of “substantial support” can be used to complete the attribution of state responsibility with the increasingly developed technological traceability means.


Corresponding author: Haonan Li, Guanghua Law School, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, People’s Republic of China, E-mail:

About the authors

Le Cheng

Le Cheng is Chair Professor of Law, and Professor of Cyber Studies at Zhejiang University. He serves as the Executive Vice Dean of Zhejiang University’s Academy of International Strategy and Law, Acting Head of International Institute of Cyberspace Governance, Editor-in-Chief of International Journal of Legal Discourse, Editor-in-Chief of International Journal of Digital Law and Governance, Co-Editor of Comparative Legilinguistics (International Journal for Legal Communication), Associate Editor of Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, former Co-Editor of Social Semiotics, and editorial member of Semiotica, Pragmatics and Society, and International Journal for the Semiotics of Law. As a highly-cited scholar, he has published widely in the areas of international law, digital law and governance, cyber law, semiotics, discourse studies, terminology, and legal discourse.

Haonan Li

Haonan Li is a Juris Master at Zhejiang University. His research interests include international law, digital law and cyber law.

  1. Research funding: This work was supported by the project of National Social Science Foundation (Grant No. 24BYY151) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, Zhejiang University.

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Received: 2024-09-10
Accepted: 2025-03-15
Published Online: 2025-05-26
Published in Print: 2025-06-26

© 2025 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Heruntergeladen am 19.11.2025 von https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/ijld-2025-2005/html
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