A preliminary engagement with the spatiality of power in cyberwar

Abstract

The growing prevalence of cyberwar highlights rapidly shifting conceptions of geopolitical space in global politics. However, critical geographical engagement with the topic remains limited, leaving the geopolitical spaces of cyberwar critically unexamined. To facilitate greater geographical engagement with cyberwar, this paper proposes a spatiality of power model to examine how political space and power might manifest in cyberwar. The model proposes four ways in which political space and power manifest offline and how the model can be applied towards cyberwar. The utility of the model is then applied as a framework for examining three well-known cyberwar case studies: the Estonia–Russia 2007 cyberwar, the Georgia–Russia cyber and kinetic war in 2008, and the U.S.-Iran cyberwar from 2010 to 2013 with a focus on the Stuxnet malware.