Journal Abstract

The private sector and the third sector were once relatively independent actors in global cybersecurity governance. However, with the continuous expansion of the breadth and depth of global security governance and the increasingly fierce geopolitical game, the ‘power diffusion’ has begun to reverse, and the government has accelerated the ‘power collection’. Therefore, the government is now playing a decisive role in global cybersecurity governance. In this context, the role of the private sector and the third sector in global cybersecurity governance has shifted from ‘actor’ to ‘tool’. A case study of private and third sector operations in the Russian-Ukrainian cyber conflict reveals that those two sectorsare increasingly taking orders from the government in their home country to participate in cyber security operations at its request, losing their relative independence, which has enormous implications for global cybersecurity governance.