Giglio, E. (2026). Beyond the Tallinn Threshold: Referential Drift and the Legal Language of Cyber Conflict. In: Wagner, A. (eds) International Handbook of Legal Language and Communication. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-87993-7_1045-1
Abstract
The Tallinn Manual on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Operations represents the most authoritative restatement of how international law applies to cyber operations. It articulates threshold tests for the use of force, armed attack, sovereignty violation, and due diligence on which the doctrinal vocabulary of the field has come to depend. The legal architecture, however, is a linguistic construct. It presupposes the stability of categories such as operation, actor, effect, domain, civilian, and military. Each functions as a sign whose meaning depends on stable correspondence with operational reality. This chapter contends that the operational referent has shifted faster than the sign-system has been able to follow. The condition that results is what the chapter terms referential drift: the legal sign continues to operate, retains its institutional authority, and yet no longer designates the reality it was constituted to govern. Three concurrent transformations produce this drift. The first is the doctrinal evolution toward multi-domain operations, in which cyber effects are produced jointly with kinetic effects across land, sea, air, space, and cognitive domains. The second is the rise of autonomy in cyber systems, which attenuates the cognitive agency that legal categories of intent and operation presuppose. The third is the embedding of cyber conflict within operational technology, which destabilizes the civilian-military distinction. Drawing on the doctrinal literature, canonical cases, and the commercial litigation generated by these events, the chapter maps the breakdown. It then develops, through Peirce, a framework for the recovery of legal vocabulary adequate to contemporary operational realities.
Cite this entry
Giglio, E. (2026). Beyond the Tallinn Threshold: Referential Drift and the Legal Language of Cyber Conflict. In: Wagner, A. (eds) International Handbook of Legal Language and Communication. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-87993-7_1045-1