Making digital territory: Cybersecurity, techno-nationalism, and the moral boundaries of the state

• In Event: 3507 - Nations/Nationalisms II

Abstract

Often overlooked by scholars of politics and nationalism, science and technology can be a key site for the construction of national identity. This paper analyzes the official cybersecurity strategy of the German government to understand how states reconfigure national identity in the digital age in response to shifting economic and political orders. Drawing on scholarship on the roles of science and technology in making and maintaining state power, I argue that current state attention to cybersecurity can be understood as ‘territorialization projects,’ efforts to turn the seemingly borderless world of cyberspace into national territory, targeting a range of intersecting concerns about national identity, the national economy, and sovereignty. I show that cybersecurity obtains its urgency through gendered and racialized constructions of feminized vitality, purity, and vulnerability of infrastructure on the one hand, and masculinized, hypersexualized, and racialized aggressors on the other. Because race, gender, and sexuality serve as important organizing principles of drawing moral boundaries around the nation-state, territorialization projects raise troubling questions about when, where, and how data traces to bodies, and how cyberspace traces to place.

Author

• Norma Möllers, Queen's University