Margot FRANCOIS, UNIVERSITÉ PARIS 8, France
At first glance, talking about borders in cyberspace may seem paradoxical. By nature, the global network is a transborder infrastructure and, in the 1990s, the Internet was associated with the process of globalization. But over the last decade, both the rise of cyberthreats and the awareness of the United States’ technological hegemony have changed the representations of cyberspace as a neutral cross-border domain. Numerous States and organizations have built their own policies to protect what they conceive as “their” cyberspace, rising the question of territorialization and bordering processes in cyberspace.
In this regard, the political scientist Joseph Nye proposed in 2010 the concept of "cyber power", or digital power, which he defined as "a set of resources related to the creation, control and communication of electronic and computer information, whether in terms of infrastructure, networks, software and human skills".
This emergence of powers competition within cyberspace, as well as the growing awareness of new risks and threats, resulted in the appearance of different security discourses from the beginning of the 2000s. This process of securitization of cyberspace echoes in some cases previous nationalist discourses. This research work aims to highlight this aspect of the possible encounter between a nationalist discourse and the securitization of cyberspace, through the case studies of Cuba and the Western Balkans. This study will allow us to propose a typology of the different types of border discourses observed in cyberspace.
Mots clés : borders|securitization|cyberspace|Balkans|Cuba
A103269AC