The Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies is launching a series of talks on cybersecurity featuring national thought leaders. Political scientist Milton Mueller from the Georgia Institute of Technology will kick off the series, speaking on “Cybersecurity and the Territorial State: Alignment and ‘Fragmentation’ in Global Internet Governance,” Sept. 14 at 4:30 p.m. in Gates Hall G01.

Mueller is co-founder and co-director of the Internet Governance Project. His books include “Networks and States: The Global Politics of Internet Governance” (2010) and “Ruling the Root: Internet Governance and the Taming of Cyberspace” (2002).

The series is organized by a new interdisciplinary working group convened by Einaudi Center Director Hirokazu Miyazaki and is co-sponsored by the Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies.

Miyazaki says the group, made up of scholars from seven departments and four colleges at Cornell, is especially interested in questions at the intersection of technology, politics and international law. The group is co-led by Fred Schneider, chair of the Department of Computer Science, and Rebecca Slayton, assistant professor of science and technology studies and associate director of the Reppy Institute.

“How are the challenges of cybersecurity shaping the ways in which we understand rights, risk and responsibility?” Miyazaki asks. “How does that understanding shape our conceptions of the cybersecurity problem? In what ways do contemporary uses of cyberspace challenge conventional ideas about nation-state sovereignty and security?”

Mueller is a member of the advisory committee of the American Registry for Internet Numbers and the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority Stewardship Coordination Group, and has participated in policy development activities of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the International Telecommunications Union, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, and regulatory proceedings in the European Commission, China, Hong Kong and New Zealand.

The Einaudi Center is devoting three of its four Distinguished Speaker Series lectures this semester to the cybersecurity talks.

The series will present Jon Lindsay, a University of Toronto political scientist with a background in computer science and the military, on Oct. 26, and Fred Cate, vice president for research, Distinguished Professor, the C. Ben Dutton Professor of Law, and adjunct professor of informatics and computing at Indiana University, on Nov. 16.