Speaker
Description
Digital technologies have become deeply entangled with the fabric of contemporary societies. Data infrastructures and cybersecurity practices underpin not only economic activity but also state authority and national security. This growing entanglement gives rise to a central question: how are states reorganizing their authority structures and cybersecurity policies, when digital infrastructures are simultaneously strategic assets and commercial commodities?
To address this question, we develop a comparative framework investigating how states design cybersecurity policies across institutional and technological contexts. We distinguish between centralized or fragmented authority, on the one hand, and capacities-based or rules-based cybersecurity policies, on the other. These distinctions serve us as a typology of state control over cybersecurity. First, ‘controllers’ possess the ultimate authority and capacity to command and control. Second, ‘custodians’ set agendas and align a variety of government actors without delegation. Third, ‘incentivizers’ influence third-party behavior indirectly through mostly material and legal incentives. Fourth, ‘managers’ exercise delegated authority over day-to-day implementation. We argue that the evolution of these models is shaped by the interaction of two factors: the demand for securing cyberspace and technological complexity.
Empirically, we take a longue durée and focus on a single rising power, India. We analyze the temporal evolution of cybersecurity governance within India from 1950 to 2025, with a focus on information and communication technologies (ICT) – the backbone of all digital infrastructures. We identify four phases, each corresponding to one of our four types of state control.
Our case study illustrates the politics of digital infrastructures. While less state control redistributes power to firms embedded in critical infrastructures, but also creates incentives for regulatory capture, states simultaneously seek to retain control through coercive backstops and “kill switches”. The paper thus speaks to broader debates on the hybrid ordering of security in the information age.
| If you are submitting an Open Panel proposal, have you included all four abstracts in attachment? | Yes, I have included all required information (see below). |
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| Would you like to be considered for travel funding through the NetSec COST Action? | No |
| Are you a member of the NetSec Management Committee? | Yes |
| What discipline or branch of humanities or social sciences do you identify yourself with? | Political Science |
| Which of the following best describes your stage of the career? | Associate Professor |
| In which country is your home institution? | Germany |
| What is your gender? | Male |