Prefiguring Digital Territories: Settler Security and Colonial Logics in U.S. Cybersecurity Policy

Abstract

This research examines how dominant discourses and imaginaries of cyberspace as a territorialized and frontier-like domain shape the development of U.S. cybersecurity policy through settler colonial logics that reproduce exclusionary governance frameworks. The central research question guiding this analysis is: How do U.S. cybersecurity policies discursively construct cyberspace in ways that reproduce and reinscribe settler colonial power relations? This overarching question is explored through three interconnected sub-questions. First, how do representations of cyber systems as critical infrastructure and cyberspace as a domain of war extend settler territorial authority into digital spaces? Second, how do cybersecurity responses to specific incidents such as the 2014 SONY hack serve as mechanisms for projecting imperial authority through digital domains? Third, how do historical and contemporary exclusions of Indigenous peoples from cybersecurity policy considerations reflect patterns of settler colonial governance that seek to render Indigenous technological sovereignty illegible within settler security paradigms? This research is grounded in scholarship on settler colonial studies, critical geography, and critical security studies. Empirically, this research provides the first comprehensive analysis of how settler colonial logics operate through U.S. cybersecurity policy revealing previously unexamined connections between security, territorial dispossession, and cybersecurity governance. This work also contributes towards critical cybersecurity scholarship by centring Indigenous experiences and priorities to call for more equitable cybersecurity frameworks grounded in ethics of relationality rather than logics of militarisation and territorial control that have dominated U.S. cyber policy.