O paradigma da soberania no ciberespaço: o moderno internacional no mundo informatizado

Abstract

The following dissertation aims to investigate how the disputes over sovereignty in cyberspace express constitutive elements of the paradigm of sovereignty of the modern international, taking the actions of USA over the internet as exemple. In order to reach this objective, it was chosen the pos-structuralist approach to sovereignty since this school of thought associates with sovereignty many other valuable elements, such as the modern subjectivity, the entanglement between power and knowledge and the production of technics and mechanisms that aims to the conduction of individuals, conjoining in what Foucault had called as governmentality. Internet has been globalized and popularized since the 1990’s, consolidating it's importance for either, capitalist companies and States alike. Simultaneously, the internet has been functioning, beside other things, as a major infrastructure used for the integration of markets around the world. However, in order to maintain itself cohesive and functional, the internet requires the existence of some critical resources and an authority to manage them, which should also engage in the creation of policies that directly affects the conditions of usage of the internet. In addiction, part of the literature on the sovereignty in the internet tends to separate two opposed ideals of sovereignty in cyberspace: one highlighting the protagonism of the private sector, the other regarding that State as a major articulator of internet through its territorial sovereignty. Nevertheless, as this dissertation argues, this approach to the struggles over the sovereignty in cyberspace renders invisible transversal and hybrid forms of articulation of sovereignty over the internet. Seen in these terms, this work reinforces the idea that since their inception the control technologies have been regarded as strategic and fundamental matter for the companies and governments alike, and thus granting a circulation of this knowledge between them, enabling their entanglement. In this way, the current dissertation presents the argument that through the neoliberal paradigm of sovereignty, companies and the USA state have been expanding and defending neoliberal values as the only legitimate form of managing and using the internet. This paradigm takes the market, free and competitive, as the only guarantor of the freedom and the production of knowledge, positioning the State as the main guardian against the threats to its core values. Nevertheless, these same systemic elements operate in order to enable the assurance of asymmetrical conditions of power for the USA, thus also being articulated with policies and practices os national security. In this way, the present dissertation sustains the hypothesis that sovereignty in cyberspace, through neoliberal rationality, express both, the territorial (of the state) and temporal (of the system of states) sovereignty.