Description
Cyber technology enables practices that challenge state actors. More than other challenges that state actors have been facing over the years the cyber domain enables the emergence of effective, efficient, and powerful alternatives to the current state-system practices. As such, it creates fundamental challenges to states' self and identity, putting into question dominant and ingrained narratives of states regarding their roles in the international arena. While International Relations scholars are extensively studying the influence of cyber technology on international politics, not much attention has been paid to the question of how practices the cyber domain enables becomes a challenge to states' self and identity.
I suggest that although rarely used in this context, the emerging concept of ontological security provides a nuanced understanding of the challenges the cyber domain creates for state actors, capturing how it affects their narratives, routines, their sense of home and their emotions. Focusing on these issues is important for achieving a better understanding of questions concerning technology in international relations, but also for advancing the research of ontological security, especially around a number of issues that have not received enough scholarly attention, including the level of analysis, materiality, and time and space.
