Photos and Conference Report | 2025 Conference on International Cyber Security
From 4-5 November 2025, we held our eighth annual conference, the fourth as The Hague Program on International Cyber Security on Democracy and Cyberspace. We were joined by academics and other interested participants from across the world, for two days filled with four fantastic keynotes and 23 paper presentations during the parallel sessions.
The conference was opened with a short welcome by Dennis Broeders, Full Professor of Global Security and Technology and Senior Fellow of our Program at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs, Leiden University. Corneliu Bjola, Professor of Digital Diplomacy at the University of Oxford and the Head of the Oxford Digital Diplomacy Research Group, kicked off the day with his keynote on Tech Diplomacy and the Future of International Digital Order. During this first day, there were also panels on the evolution and future of cyber diplomacy, geopolitics and digital infrastructures, normative (re-)ordering of cyberspace, and surveillance of the digital realm. The day ended with a keynote by Paul Timmers, professor at KU Leuven, focusing on geopolitics and technology, entitled No pain, no gain: a reality check on EU digital autonomy.
The second day started with a keynote by Duncan Hollis, Laura H. Carnell Professor of Law at Temple Law School, Faculty Co-Director of Temple University’s Institute for Law, Innovation & Technology, and Co-Convenor of The Oxford Process on International Law Protections in Cyberspace, entitled Aligned or Unaligned? Geopolitics and International Law in Cyberspace. The parallel sessions of day two focused on the politics and agency of cybercriminals, national perspectives on a geopoliticised internet, cybersecurity communities beyond the state, and cyberspace and conflict. Myriam Dunn Cavelty, Senior Scientist at the Center for Security Studies (CSS) at ETH Zurich, gave the last and closing keynote of the conference: Cyber is dead – long live cyber!
Finally, the best paper award this year was awarded during the closing words of the conference by Dennis Broeders to Jack Goldsmith, AI Corporate Governance Specialist at the Human Technology Institute within the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), for his paper “The geopoliticization of open-source software communities: Towards a model of features, organization, and methods”. He wins a ticket, travel, and accommodation to next year’s conference in November 2026.
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