Speaker
Description
This paper confronts a core paradox in contemporary security governance: While cyberspace disperses technical knowledge across civilian agencies, intelligence services, and the private sector, fracturing the military's epistemic centrality, EU military structures have not retreated but have recalibrated their role.
Through an analysis of the EU’s CSDP architecture, this research argues that the militarization of cyberspace follows a novel logic. Applying a tripartite framework of technification, epistemic community contestation, and institutional path dependency, the study demonstrates that EU military bodies like the EUMS and EUMC fail to constitute a cohesive epistemic community in cyber. Critical deficits in recruitment, shared training, and a fragmented talent pool prevent the formation of a unified, authoritative expert voice.
Yet, influence persists through a strategic adaptation. As technification shifts cybersecurity governance into closed, expert-driven committees, military actors leverage their enduring institutional advantages: control over classified information channels, security clearance regimes, and operational planning cycles. This represents a performance of epistemic authority—a compensatory mechanism where power derives not from unique technical knowledge, but from managing the procedural ‘grammar’ of security.
The outcome is a unique EU model of structured interdependence. Civilian primacy in strategy is formally preserved, yet military actors become functionally indispensable within a dense web of mandated coordination bodies (e.g., the Hybrid Fusion Cell, Cyber Rapid Response Teams). This reconfiguration resolves the paradox: military structures endure not despite the erosion of their knowledge monopoly, but because they successfully adapt to control the process of security in a domain where they no longer control the substance. The paper concludes with a final question: Should cyber be conceptualized and institutionalized as a defence domain at all? The EU’s struggle to fit digital conflict into a military framework suggests the need for a more foundational reimagining of cybersecurity governance.
| If you are submitting an Open Panel proposal, have you included all four abstracts in attachment? | No, I am submitting a Closed Panel abstract |
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| Would you like to be considered for travel funding through the NetSec COST Action? | Yes |
| Are you a member of the NetSec Management Committee? | No |
| What discipline or branch of humanities or social sciences do you identify yourself with? | International Security; European Security. |
| Which of the following best describes your stage of the career? | PhD Candidate |
| In which country is your home institution? | Portugal |
| What is your gender? | Female |