Description
A principle theme of recent international relations scholarship has been the (re)emergence of state sovereignty in steering through the challenges of a modern globalized world. This has been particularly notable in discussions on cybersecurity, once considered a non-traditional area of security, now widely regarded as a prominent area of national security. Still, despite the preoccupation with ‘national’ security and ‘national’ strategies, these arguments have largely overlooked the role of the state beyond traditional definitions of sovereignty. This paper attempts to address this gap by adopting a poststructuralist understanding of the state as being constituted within discursive practices and actions, therefore politically provisional and contested as opposed to a self-evident entity that precludes political activity. Through discourse analysis of key cybersecurity policy documents released by the US, I consider how particular rhetorical frames facilitate state articulations of cyberspace as a delineated space that ultimately serve as a “spatial strategy” to affect, influence and control cyberspace. I argue that the emergence of such political spaces result in the construction of cyberspace as a constitutive space for the state where cybersecurity is imagined, premeditated and performatively enacted. Thus, employing a more critical interpretation of cybersecurity policies this paper provides a useful alternative to conventional problem solving, policy oriented analysis.
Key Words: cybersecurity; poststructural theory; critical security studies; performativity; sovereignty; states
