De definitie van virtuele grenzen – de rol van de geopolitieke andere in Russische narratieven over cyberbeleid (1998-2022)

Over the course of the last decade, the information space has risen as a new area of contestation between Russia and the West. The implications of the instrumental use of information and communication resources to achieve political-military goals are greatly exacerbated by the increasing levels of global connectivity and the growing dependence on Internet infrastructure to make networked communication possible. With tensions rising over the need to regulate the Internet, Russia is increasingly attempting to safeguard its own information space through domestic legislation aimed at centralizing control over Internet infrastructure, as well as through emphasizing the territorial and sovereign limits of its information space in the international community. Language underpinning Russian efforts to sovereignize its information space seems to rely heavily on the support of narratives emphasizing a Russia-specific civilizational model through the instrument of geopolitical othering. When looking at the case of the sovereignisation of the online information space, there is a tension between what is done on a domestic level with increasing efforts to sovereignize internet infrastructure (Nocetti 2015) and what is proclaimed on a regional and international level where discourse emphasizes the need to internationalize internet governance, as well as the need to provide an international code of conduct for information and communication technologies. In this sense, the emphasis on sovereignty at the domestic level gets a different meaning when it is elevated to the regional and the international one, where it takes on a more civilizational approach in referring to the need to uphold previously established "true" values of the international system. The aim of the present PhD project is to assess the impact of this combination of narratives building on the logic of securitization and narratives emphasizing a distinct Russian civilizational path of development at three different levels of governance (domestic, regional and international). The project zooms in on the case of Russia's policy towards the regulation of the Internet by 1) laying bare the structure of narratives underpinning the sovereignisation of the online information space; and by 2) assessing the impact of this discourse on the practice, namely Russia's approach to internet governance.