Arun Sukumar

Arun Sukumar is an Assistant Professor at Leiden University's Institute of Security and Global Affairs and a researcher with The Hague Program for International Cybersecurity. Arun’s research examines the creation and interpretation of rules for responsible state behaviour in cyberspace, and more broadly, of security regimes around emerging technologies.

Arun is a lawyer by training, and currently finishing his PhD in International Relations at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University. Arun’s dissertation studies how interactions with technical experts lead international lawyers to identify and apply principles of public international law to cyberspace differently from their commonly understood or accepted interpretations. He hopes the research findings will not only help understand how ‘international cyber law’ generates its own vocabulary, but also present an empirical framework to study the role of technical experts in setting rules for increasingly specialized domains of global governance.

Arun was previously the head of the Cyber Initiative at the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi, India. His first book, Midnight’s Machines: A Political History of Technology in India, was selected among Bloomberg’s Best Books of 2020, and won that year’s Ramnath Goenka Award for Best Book (Non-Fiction).

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