UCLA

Recent debates on Internet censorship and the role of the state in online communications highlight concerns about sovereignty, borders, and territory in a globalizing world. Conventional geopolitical thought views the world as divided into discrete spatial units, with each state free to act within its territory. The space in which the state can act is its territory, demarcated by its borders, and its freedom to act within those boundaries is its sovereignty. Territory, borders, and sovereignty are the geographical assumptions which underpin the international state system.

States viewed the Internet as an extension of existing territory, and sought to extend that territory in the new informational space by developing laws and technical systems to territorialize cyberspace. In effect, the international state system became duplicated in cyberspace, such that the Internet experienced from within one state could radically differ from the Internet experienced from another. However, the image of stability provided by replicating existing geopolitical logics becomes illusory during times of cyberwar. States no longer regard the informational boundaries and territories they created in cyberspace as meaningful, and instead seek to gather as much cyberpower as possible without regard for the very geographic logic which cyberwar attempts to maintain.

This dissertation exposes the cyber-geographical gap between state territorialization of cyberspace and state practice during times of cyberwar. It does so by demonstrating how states territorialize the Internet and, through case studies, how cyberwar is conducted without regards for conventional geographies. This research is significant because 1) it represents the first critical geopolitical engagement with Internet filtering and cyberwar in academic geography; 2) it provides a theoretical background for the problem of attribution in cyberwar; 3) it reveals a theoretical geographical instability at the nexus of traditional sovereignty and alternative spatialities of power. It is this last element of geographical instability which this dissertation ultimately argues may represent a new geography for states in cyberspace.