Neorealist Analysis of Security Dilemma in Cyberspace; A Quantitative Study

Could countries’ cyber security capacity-building result in the emergence of a security dilemma in cyberspace? This work seeks to answer this question by bringing a theoretical framework through a neorealist perspective. The author argues that neorealism remains a relevant theory for explaining state behaviour in cyberspace by providing a quantitative backbone to the theoretical discussions on the subject. The analysis made by deploying a negative binomial regression incorporating fixed effects on panel data suggests that as countries build more cyber security capacity, it is more likely for them to be targeted by cyber attacks. Robustness checks of the findings were subsequently performed using logistic regression with fixed effects on panel data by mutating the dependent variable into binary format, which enhanced the validity of the results computed by the negative binomial model.