Abstract
How can an ontological framework help us to better understand strategic behaviour in cyberspace? Characterized by low entry barriers, fluid borders, and networked hierarchies, cyberspace presents opportunities for us to problematize classical assumptions about power projection and their implications for how we conceive of strategic behaviour in the digital age. However, present literature has largely overlooked the ontological dimension to cyberspace, focusing instead upon the production and consequences of cyber effects. This oversight is particularly stark in debates about how global actors have engaged in ‘cyber-geopolitics’, which seem to rely on–and simultaneously eschew–territorial sovereignty to explain strategic behaviour. This paper argues that the field’s failure to take ontology seriously has resulted in inadequate assumptions and explanations about contemporary strategic behaviour. To advance this claim, I make two analytical moves. First, I interrogate scholarly assumptions about what makes certain cyber capabilities ‘matter’ for producing effects in the first place. Building on these findings, I then demonstrate the utility of ontological security theory for explaining how and why policymakers have pursued geopolitical objectives in cyberspace through particular discourses and practices. The European Union’s cyber-foreign policy development from 2013-2022, which has thus far escaped pure realist and materialist-oriented expectations, is leveraged as an illustrative case. Overall, the paper reveals the co-constitutive relationship between cyberspace as an environment and foreign policy actors’ self-construction within it through discourses and practices, contributing to an emerging research agenda on this subject (e.g. Lupovici, 2022).
Panel: Knowledge Production on War