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Article ID: CBB777052436

Making Digital Territory: Cybersecurity, Techno-nationalism, and the Moral Boundaries of the State (January 2021)

Norma Möllers (Author)

Science, Technology and Human Values
Volume: 46
Issue: 1
Pages: 112-138

URI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243920904436

DOI: 10.1177/0162243920904436

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Computers and computing Technology and State Information technology Technoscience; science and technology studies Infrastructure Computer security; cyber security Expertise National identity 21st century Germany

Drawing on an analysis of German national cybersecurity policy, this paper argues that cybersecurity has become a key site in which states mobilize science and technology to produce state power. Contributing to science and technology studies (STS) work on technoscience and statecraft, I develop the concepts of “territorialization projects” and “digital territory” to capture how the production of state power in the digital age increasingly relies on technoscientific expertise about information infrastructure, shifting tasks of government into the domain of computer scientists and network engineers. The notion of territorialization projects describes states’ ongoing struggle to mobilize science and engineering in order to transform globally distributed information infrastructure into bounded national territory and invest it with patriotic meaning: making digital territory. Digital territory, in other words, is nationalized information infrastructure: it includes building and monopolizing infrastructure as well as normative ideas about nation—who is a digital citizen, and who isn’t; or what constitutes “good” and “bad” digital citizens. Nationalizing information infrastructure and placing statecraft into the hands of scientists and engineers might indicate an emerging form of “techno-nationalism”—a combination of nationalist and technocratic tendencies—raising urgent questions for STS scholarship to investigate the consequences of territorialization projects for justice, democracy, and civic life.

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