Description
This article explores the political stakes associated with the emergence of blockchain technologies as normative enablers of cybersecurity. More specifically, it analyzes how the distributed architecture and functioning of blockchain-based networks further dilute national sovereignty in cyberspace. Formed through protocols of distributed consensus, these networks facilitate decentralization and autonomy from a central authority. With no central authority or storage location, they distribute responsibility to each of its user-controlled nodes, the ‘ledgers’. As each ledger stores portions of the network and holds responsibility for its security, distributed configurations organize themselves as borderless and ‘core-less’ systems, constituting nevertheless the most secure approach to data protection. This distributed approach to security has proven to be of particular relevance for different domains of cybersecurity: the empowerment of IoT devices in the identification of anomalies (such as Byzantine faults); the delocalization and distribution of storage (clouds); and the creation of secure and trustworthy DNS. Through the allocation of authority to autonomous ledgers, blockchain-based cybersecurity extends political responsibility and agency beyond the conventional sites of the nation-state and the human. At the same time, it further delegates a traditional sovereign function to non-sovereign agents, both human and non-human. Drawing on critical approaches to the security/sovereignty nexus, this article problematizes the role of blockchain technologies by focusing on a) how distributed consensus functions as a new foundational norm of ‘the cyber’; b) how distributed cybersecurity ultimately deconstructs national sovereignty and the vision of a ‘national cyberspace’; and c) how the increasing authority of ledgers threatens the pluralist essence of the (inter)national system by prioritizing practices over political deliberation.
