Toward a Decolonial Cybersecurity: Interrogating the Racial-Epistemic Hierarchies That Constitute Cybersecurity Expertise

Abstract

Beginning with a startling pattern of racialized practices in cybersecurity expert communities in the Gulf States, and drawing on the decolonial insights of the modernity/coloniality school, this article argues that race operates as a marker of who is a legitimate knower of dominant Euro-American knowledges of cybersecurity and who is not, and therefore whose understandings, experiences, and practices of cybersecurity are privileged. In demonstrating that decolonial thought can be fruitfully applied to questions of cybersecurity, this article makes three contributions to security studies. The first is empirical, drawing on original interview data to identify racial hierarchies of rationality and authority in cybersecurity expert communities. The second contribution is theoretical, demonstrating how a decolonial perspective is especially well equipped to understand racialized practices in cybersecurity knowledge production. The third contribution is programmatic, outlining a decolonial research agenda for cybersecurity—or, as we put it in the title, a path toward a decolonial cybersecurity.

Acknowledgments

The authors extend their sincere thanks and gratitude to the editors of the special issue on race and security for their support and guidance, as well as the conveners, discussants, and participants at the online workshops held to discuss this special issue in January and February 2022. The authors would also like to thank the organizers and participants at two workshops where previous versions of this article have been presented: the “Center Colloquium” of the Philipps-University Marburg Center for Conflict Studies in June 2022; and a panel on “The International Dimensions of Cybersecurity” at the British International Studies Association conference in Bath in June 2018.

Notes

1 We borrow this term from Lucy Taylor, “Decolonizing International Relations: Perspectives from Latin America,” International Studies Review 14, no. 3 (September 2012): 393.

2 For a gender analysis of cybersecurity, see Deborah Brown and Allison Pytlak, Why Gender Matters in International Cyber Security (Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom; Association for Progressive Communications, 21 April 2020), https://www.apc.org/sites/default/files/Gender_Matters_Report_Web_A4.pdf; Katharine Millar, James Shires, and Tatiana Tropina, Gender Approaches to Cybersecurity: Design, Defence, and Response (Geneva: United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research, 21 January 2021), https://unidir.org/publication/gender-approaches-cybersecurity.

3 See Audie Klotz and Deepa Prakash, eds., Qualitative Methods in International Relations: A Pluralist Guide (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Dvora Yanow and Peregrine Schwartz-Shea, eds., Interpretation and Method: Empirical Research Methods and the Interpretive Turn (London: Routledge, 2013); Beth L. Leech, “Asking Questions: Techniques for Semistructured Interviews,” Political Science & Politics 35, no. 4 (December 2002): 665–68.

4 Jack L. Amoureux and Brent J. Steele, eds., Reflexivity and International Relations: Positionality, Critique, and Practice (New York: Routledge, 2016).

5 James Shires, The Politics of Cybersecurity in the Middle East (London: Hurst, 2021), 56–63.

6 Interview I-1.

7 Interview I-9.

8 Interview I-12.

9 Interview I-11.

10 Interview I-30.

11 Interview I-26.

12 Interview I-30.

13 Interview I-10.

14 Interview I-4.

15 Interview I-10.

16 Interview I-35.

17 Interview I-33.

18 Interview I-2.

19 Interview I-1.

20 Interview I-12.

21 Interview I-35.

22 Interview I-13.

23 Interview I-24.

24 Interview I-33.

25 Interview I-5.

26 Interview I-1.

27 Interview I-15.

28 Interview I-22.

29 Interview I-34.

30 Interview I-33.

31 Interview I-27.

32 Interview I-21.

33 Interview I-10.

34 Interview I-22.

35 Interview I-17.

36 Interview I-2.

37 Erik Gartzke and Jon R. Lindsay, “Weaving Tangled Webs: Offense, Defense, and Deception in Cyberspace,” Security Studies 24, no. 2 (April–June 2015): 316–48; Rebecca Slayton, “What Is the Cyber Offense-Defense Balance? Conceptions, Causes, and Assessment,” International Security 41, no. 3 (Winter 2016/17): 72–109; Michael P. Fischerkeller and Richard J. Harknett, “Deterrence Is Not a Credible Strategy for Cyberspace,” Orbis 61, no. 3 (Summer 2017): 381–93; Richard J. Harknett and Max Smeets, “Cyber Campaigns and Strategic Outcomes,” Journal of Strategic Studies 45, no. 4 (August 2022): 534–67.

38 Jon R. Lindsay, “Stuxnet and the Limits of Cyber Warfare,” Security Studies 22, no. 3 (July–September 2013): 365–404; Aaron Franklin Brantly, The Decision to Attack: Military and Intelligence Cyber Decision-Making (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016); Jon R. Lindsay, “Restrained by Design: The Political Economy of Cybersecurity,” Digital Policy, Regulation and Governance 19, no. 6 (1 January 2017): 493–514; Max Smeets, “The Strategic Promise of Offensive Cyber Operations,” Strategic Studies Quarterly 12, no. 3 (Fall 2018): 90–113; Ben Buchanan, The Hacker and the State: Cyber Attacks and the New Normal of Geopolitics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020).

39 For example, see Hannes Ebert and Tim Maurer, “Contested Cyberspace and Rising Powers,” Third World Quarterly 34, no. 6 (2013): 1054–74; Martha Finnemore and Duncan B. Hollis, “Constructing Norms for Global Cybersecurity,” American Journal of International Law 110, no. 3 (July 2016): 425–79; Robert Morgus, Jocelyn Woolbright, and Justin Sherman, The Digital Deciders (Washington, DC: New America, 22 October 2018); Andrea Calderaro and Anthony J. S. Craig, “Transnational Governance of Cybersecurity: Policy Challenges and Global Inequalities in Cyber Capacity Building,” Third World Quarterly 41, no. 6 (2020): 917–38.

40 See, for example, Daniel W. Woods and Tyler Moore, “Does Insurance Have a Future in Governing Cybersecurity?” IEEE Security & Privacy 18, no. 1 (January/February 2020): 21–27.

41 Lene Hansen and Helen Nissenbaum, “Digital Disaster, Cyber Security, and the Copenhagen School,” International Studies Quarterly 53, no. 4 (December 2009): 1155–75; Myriam Dunn Cavelty, “From Cyber-Bombs to Political Fallout: Threat Representations with an Impact in the Cyber-Security Discourse,” International Studies Review 15, no. 1 (March 2013): 105–22; Tim Stevens, Cyber Security and the Politics of Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); James Shires, “Enacting Expertise: Ritual and Risk in Cybersecurity,” Politics and Governance 6, no. 2 (2018): 31–40; James Shires, “Cyber-noir: Cybersecurity and Popular Culture,” Contemporary Security Policy, 41, no. 1 (2020): 82–107; Florian J. Egloff, “Contested Public Attributions of Cyber Incidents and the Role of Academia,” Contemporary Security Policy 41, no. 1 (2020): 55–81; Clare Stevens, “Assembling Cybersecurity: The Politics and Materiality of Technical Malware Reports and the Case of Stuxnet,” Contemporary Security Policy 41, no. 1 (2020): 129–52.

42 For important reviews of the various lineages of decolonizing perspectives, see Leon Moosavi, “The Decolonial Bandwagon and the Dangers of Intellectual Decolonisation,” International Review of Sociology 30, no. 2 (2020): 332–54; Breny Mendoza, “Coloniality of Gender and Power: From Postcoloniality to Decoloniality,” in The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory, ed. Lisa Disch and Mary Hawkesworth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 100–121; Emma D. Velez and Nancy Tuana, “Toward Decolonial Feminisms: Tracing the Lineages of Decolonial Thinking through Latin American/Latinx Feminist Philosophy,” Hypatia 35, no. 3 (Summer 2020): 366–72.

43 Olivia Umurerwa Rutazibwa, “What’s There to Mourn? Decolonial Reflections on (the End of) Liberal Humanitarianism,” Journal of Humanitarian Affairs 1, no. 1 (1 January 2019): 65–67; Robbie Shilliam, “Decolonising the Grounds of Ethical Inquiry: A Dialogue between Kant, Foucault and Glissant,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 39, no. 3 (May 2011): 649–65; Lucy Taylor, “Welsh–Indigenous Relationships in Nineteenth Century Patagonia: ‘Friendship’ and the Coloniality of Power,” Journal of Latin American Studies 49, no. 1 (February 2017): 143–68; David L. Blaney and Arlene B. Tickner, “Worlding, Ontological Politics and the Possibility of a Decolonial IR,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 45, no. 3 (June 2017): 293–311.

44 Walter D. Mignolo, “Delinking: The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality and the Grammar of de-Coloniality,” Cultural Studies 21, nos. 2–3 (March/May 2007): 453–84; Jean Baudrillard, “Modernity,” Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory / Revue canadienne de theorie politique et sociale 11, no. 3 (1987): 63–72.

45 María Lugones, “Toward a Decolonial Feminism,” Hypatia 25, no. 4 (Fall 2010): 742–59; Walter D. Mignolo and Madina V. Tlostanova, “Theorizing from the Borders: Shifting to Geo- and Body-Politics of Knowledge,” European Journal of Social Theory 9, no. 2 (May 2006): 205–6.

46 Mendoza, “Coloniality of Gender and Power,” 114; Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “On the Coloniality of Being: Contributions to the Development of a Concept,” Cultural Studies 21, nos. 2–3 (March/May 2007): 243.

47 Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012); Roxanne Lynn Doty, Imperial Encounters: The Politics of Representation in North-South Relations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).

48 Thus María Lugones prefers the language of nonmodernity—that is, the notion that there are ways of making sense of the world that are entirely divorced from modernity and instead emerge from the subjects of coloniality. Lugones, “Toward a Decolonial Feminism,” 743.

49 Olivia Umurerwa Rutazibwa, “From the Everyday to IR: In Defence of the Strategic Use of the R-Word,” Postcolonial Studies 19, no. 2 (June 2016): 191–200.

50 Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power and Eurocentrism in Latin America,” International Sociology 15, no. 2 (June 2000): 215–32.

51 Robbie Shilliam, “Intervention and Colonial-Modernity: Decolonising the Italy/Ethiopia Conflict through Psalms 68:31,” Review of International Studies 39, no. 5 (December 2013): 1134.

52 Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995); Taylor, “Welsh–Indigenous Relationships in Nineteenth Century Patagonia.”

53 Taylor, “Decolonizing International Relations,” 393.

54 Stephanie M. Wildman and Adrienne D. Davis, “Language and Silence: Making Systems of Privilege Visible,” Santa Clara Law Review 35, no. 3 (1995): 881.

55 As Walter Benn Michaels puts it, “Cultural identity both descends from and extends the earlier notion of racial identity.” Michaels, “Race into Culture: A Critical Genealogy of Cultural Identity,” Critical Inquiry 18, no. 4 (Summer 1992): 655–85.

56 Kay Anderson, “The Racialization of Difference: Enlarging the Story Field,” Professional Geographer 54, no. 1 (February 2002): 25–30. For a groundbreaking intervention in this large and growing debate, see Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay, eds., Questions of Cultural Identity (Los Angeles: SAGE, 1996).

57 Euro-American critical theories are also subject to the decolonial challenge described in this article. Perspectives such as poststructuralism, feminism, Frankfurt School scholarship, and even postcolonialism remain rooted in Eurocentric epistemologies. Eurocentrism in knowledge production is therefore endemic not just in mainstream perspectives but also in those who position themselves as the traditional challengers within Euro-American scholarly debates. Though decoloniality draws extensively from postcolonialism and overlaps in several ways with it, some have extended this critique to parts of postcolonial scholarship. Thus, “postcolonial theory ultimately constitutes, at least epistemologically, a Eurocentric critique of Eurocentrism,” according to Syed Mustafa Ali, “A Brief Introduction to Decolonial Computing,” XRDS: Crossroads, the ACM Magazine for Students 22, no. 4 (13 June 2016): 19; see also Ramón Grosfoguel, “Decolonizing Post-Colonial Studies and Paradigms of Political-Economy: Transmodernity, Decolonial Thinking, and Global Coloniality,” Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World 1, no. 1 (2011): 2; Meera Sabaratnam, “Avatars of Eurocentrism in the Critique of the Liberal Peace,” Security Dialogue 44, no. 3 (June 2013): 259–78; Shilliam, “Decolonising the Grounds of Ethical Inquiry.”

58 Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 25th anniversary ed. (London: Penguin Books, 2003); see also Edward W. Said, “Orientalism Reconsidered,” in Postcolonial Criticism, ed. Bart Moore-Gilbert, Gareth Stanton, and Willy Maley (London: Routledge, 1997), 126–44.

59 Rosemary Said Zahlan, The Making of the Modern Gulf States: Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Oman (Ithaca, NY: Ithaca Press, 1998); Lawrence G. Potter, ed., The Persian Gulf in Modern Times: People, Ports, and History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

60 Lord Curzon, cited in Sean Foley, The Arab Gulf States: Beyond Oil and Islam (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2010), 16.

61 See, for example, Madawi Al-Rasheed, A History of Saudi Arabia, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Tim Niblock, Saudi Arabia: Power, Legitimacy and Survival (London: Routledge, 2006).

62 Francis Owtram, A Modern History of Oman: Formation of the State since 1920 (London: I. B. Tauris, 2004); Marc Valeri, Oman: Politics and Society in the Qaboos State (London: Hurst, 2017).

63 Robert Vitalis, America’s Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier (London: Verso, 2009); Laleh Khalili, Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula (London: Verso, 2020).

64 Steffen Hertog, Princes, Brokers, and Bureaucrats: Oil and the State in Saudi Arabia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011). See also Tim Niblock with Monica Malik, The Political Economy of Saudi Arabia (New York: Routledge, 2007).

65 Toby Craig Jones, Desert Kingdom: How Oil and Water Forged Modern Saudi Arabia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 13–15.

66 Calvert W. Jones, Bedouins into Bourgeois: Remaking Citizens for Globalization (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 178.

67 David Easter, “Spying on Nasser: British Signals Intelligence in Middle East Crises and Conflicts, 1956–67,” Intelligence and National Security 28, no. 6 (2013): 824–44; see also Hugh Wilford, America’s Great Game: The CIA’s Secret Arabists and the Shaping of the Modern Middle East (New York: Basic Books, 2014). Richard J. Aldrich, GCHQ: The Uncensored Story of Britain’s Most Secret Intelligence Agency (London: HarperPress, 2010), 17. Sarah Mainwaring and Richard J. Aldrich have taken this argument further, suggesting that signals intelligence was not merely a side benefit of imperial arrangements but, in the 1950s and 1960s, their key driver. Mainwaring and Aldrich, “The Secret Empire of Signals Intelligence: GCHQ and the Persistence of the Colonial Presence,” International History Review 43, no. 1 (February 2021): 54–71.

68 Department for Trade and Industry, Telecommunications Related Opportunities for UK Companies in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (London: UK Government, 1988), 106–7.

69 Teresa May, “Prime Minister’s Speech to the Gulf Co-Operation Council 2016” (UK Government, 2016), https://perma.cc/PFL9-73YR.

70 David Ignatius, “The Dazzling Rise and Tragic Fall of Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Nayef,” Washington Post, 6 July 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/07/05/dazzling-rise-tragic-fall-saudi-arabias-mohammed-bin-nayef/.

71 David Ignatius, “Why the State Department Rejected a Plan to Train Saudi Intelligence,” Washington Post, 5 December 2019, https://perma.cc/39Z2-X8BS; but they are increasingly aware of the risks: Julian E. Barnes and Maggie Haberman, “C.I.A. Warns Former Officers about Working for Foreign Governments,” New York Times, 26 January 2021, https://perma.cc/UDF7-QZTY.

72 The “Crypto AG” scandal, concerning a half-century-old European encryption company controlled by the Central Intelligence Agency, revealed that Saudi Arabia and the UAE had been among many countries targeted by this operation. Leaked documents in 2017 indicated that the National Security Agency (NSA) covertly obtained persistent access to a vast quantity of financial information from UAE banking services provider Eastnets. Media reports also suggest the NSA covertly obtained access to airport and hotel data in Dubai. Separately, the most extensive intelligence operation by the Five Eyes countries in the region, however, was named by private cybersecurity companies as “Equation Group,” and widely believed to be the NSA. Equation Group’s tools include the malware family “Regin”: extremely sophisticated malware discovered by cybersecurity companies on a wide range of organizations worldwide. According to Symantec, 24% of Regin infections observed were in Saudi Arabia, the second-highest single country (after Russia with 28%). For further details of these events, see Greg Miller, “The CIA Secretly Bought a Company That Sold Encryption Devices across the World. Then Its Spies Sat Back and Listened,” Washington Post, 11 February 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/world/national-security/cia-crypto-encryption-machines-espionage/; Jenna McLaughlin and Zack Dorfman, “‘Shattered’: Inside the Secret Battle to Save America’s Undercover Spies in the Digital Age,” Yahoo! News, 30 December 2019, https://news.yahoo.com/shattered-inside-the-secret-battle-to-save-americas-undercover-spies-in-the-digital-age-100029026.html?guccounter=1; Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, “This Is How the NSA Infiltrated a Huge Banking Network in the Middle East,” Motherboard: Tech by Vice, 19 April 2017, https://www.vice.com/en/article/aemeqe/nsa-eastnets-hack-banking-network-middle-east; Symantec Security Response, “Regin: Top-Tier Espionage Tool Enables Stealthy Surveillance, version 1.1,” Symantec Security Response Blog, 27 August 2015, 6, https://docs.broadcom.com/doc/regin-top-tier-espionage-tool-15-en.

73 Anthony H. Cordesman with Michael Peacock, Military Spending and Arms Sales in the Gulf: How the Arab Gulf States Now Dominate the Changes in the Military Balance (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic & International Studies, 28 April 2015); Pieter D. Wezeman et al., Trends in Arms Transfers, 2018 (Stockholm: Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, March 2019).

74 See, for example, Athol Yates, “Western Expatriates in the UAE Armed Forces, 1964–2015,” Journal of Arabian Studies 6, no. 2 (2016): 182–200; Zoltan Barany, “Foreign Contract Soldiers in the Gulf,” Carnegie Middle East Center, 5 February 2020; David B. Roberts, “Bucking the Trend: The UAE and the Development of Military Capabilities in the Arab World,” Security Studies 29, no. 2 (April–May 2020): 301–34.

75 Kenneth M. Pollack, Sizing Up Little Sparta: Understanding UAE Military Effectiveness (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute, October 2020), 33, https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/sizing-up-little-sparta-understanding-uae-military-effectiveness/; for further discussion, see Kenneth M. Pollack, Armies of Sand: The Past, Present, and Future of Arab Military Effectiveness (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019).

76 Pollack, Sizing Up Little Sparta, 34.

77 Ahmed Salah Hashim, “Military Orientalism: Middle East Ways of War,” Middle East Policy 26, no. 2 (Summer 2019): 31–47; Patrick Porter, Military Orientalism: Eastern War through Western Eyes (London: Hurst, 2009); Tarak Barkawi and Keith Stanski, eds., Orientalism and War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).

78 In Saudi Arabia specifically, these organizations represent a separate power base but also significant prestige. In the region more widely, they are domestically focused on repression, rather than external threats. See, for example, Hazem Kandil, The Power Triangle: Military, Security, and Politics in Regime Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

79 Although for a critical examination of the complex citizenship claims of UAE “natives,” see Noora Lori, Offshore Citizens: Permanent Temporary Status in the Gulf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

80 Anh Nga Longva, Walls Built on Sand: Migration, Exclusion, and Society in Kuwait (London: Routledge, 2019 [1997]).

81 For an exploration and critique of this approach, see Abdulhadi Khalaf, Omar AlShehabi, and Adam Hanieh, eds. Transit States: Labour, Migration and Citizenship in the Gulf (London: Pluto Press, 2015).

82 Neha Vora, Impossible Citizens: Dubai’s Indian Diaspora (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 3, 14.

83 Bina Fernandez, “Racialised Institutional Humiliation through the Kafala,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 47, no. 19 (December 15, 2021): 4344–61.

84 Fernandez, “Racialised Institutional Humiliation through the Kafala,” 4348.

85 Interview I-4.

86 Interview I-15.

87 Nick Couldry and Ulises Ali Mejías, “The Decolonial Turn in Data and Technology Research: What Is at Stake and Where Is It Heading?” Information, Communication & Society 26, no. 4 (2023): 786–802.

88 Ali, “Brief Introduction to Decolonial Computing.”

89 Ilyas Mohammed, “Decolonialisation and the Terrorism Industry,” Critical Studies on Terrorism 15, no. 2 (June 2022): 417–40.

90 Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality,” Cultural Studies 21, nos. 2–3 (March/May 2007): 168–78.

91 Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, “The Dynamics of Epistemological Decolonisation in the 21st Century: Towards Epistemic Freedom,” Strategic Review for Southern Africa 40, no. 1 (2018): 23–26; see also the crucial Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, reprint (London: James Currey, 2005), 10–13.

92 Walter D. Mignolo, “Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and Decolonial Freedom,” Theory, Culture & Society 26, no. 7–8 (December 2009): 160.

93 Rosalba Icaza and Rolando Vázquez, “Diversity or Decolonisation? Researching Diversity at the University of Amsterdam,” in Decolonising the University, ed. Gurminder K. Bhambra, Dalia Gebrial, and Kerem Nişancıoğlu (London: Pluto Press, 2018), 112. Note that heteronormativity and anthropocentricity are not problems only of Euro-American knowledge, but Euro-American epistemes require special attention from the decolonial perspective because they are hegemonic.

94 Maureen Mauk, Rebekah Willett, and Natalie Coulter, “The Can-Do Girl Goes to Coding Camp: A Discourse Analysis of News Reports on Coding Initiatives Designed for Girls,” Learning, Media and Technology 45, no. 4 (December 2020): 395–408.

95 Linda Nordling, “How Decolonization Could Reshape South African Science,” Nature 554, no. 7691 (February 2018): 159–62; Robert P. Crease, Joseph D. Martin, and Richard Staley, “Decolonizing Physics: Learning from the Periphery,” Physics in Perspective 21, no. 2 (June 2019): 91–92; Rohan Deb Roy, “Science Still Bears the Fingerprints of Colonialism,” Smithsonian Magazine (blog), 9 April 2018, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/science-bears-fingerprints-colonialism-180968709/.

96 Mātauranga Māori is one example, see “Mātauranga Māori and Science,” Science Learning Hub, accessed 21 October 2022, https://www.sciencelearn.org.nz/resources/2545-matauranga-maori-and-science; see also the Decolonizing Light project hosted by Concordia University, Canada, which engages Indigenous knowledges in the study of natural light: “Decolonising Light: Tracing and Countering Colonialism in Contemporary Physics,” Decolonizing Light, accessed 21 October 2022, https://decolonizinglight.com/.

97 This is exemplified by the beginning of Immanuel Kant’s famous essay, “What Is Enlightenment?”: “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another.” The unequal power relationship of “guidance,” implicit in his definition, captures Kant’s contradictory perspective on colonial practices. See Walter D. Mignolo, “The Many Faces of Cosmo-Polis: Border Thinking and Critical Cosmopolitanism,” Public Culture 12, no. 3 (Fall 2000): 733–36; Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” in James Schmidt, ed., What Is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996 [1784]), Katrin Flikschuh and Lea Ypi, eds., Kant and Colonialism: Historical and Critical Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).

98 Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015 [1989]).

99 Akhil Gupta, Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998).

100 John M. Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

101 Madeline Akrich, “The De-Scription of Technical Objects,” in Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change, ed. Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 205–24.

102 Sandra Harding, Is Science Multicultural? Postcolonialisms, Feminisms, and Epistemologies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998).

103 For recent versions, see International Standards Organization, “ISO/IEC 27001: 2022,” October 2022, https://www.iso.org/standard/82875.html; National Institute for Standards and Technology, “Cybersecurity Framework, version 1.1,” April 2018, https://www.nist.gov/cyberframework/framework.

104 The Global Cybersecurity Capacity Centre at the University of Oxford has also designed a well-known maturity model for cybersecurity. However, this model has not been applied in the GCC and it was not mentioned in interviews, so we do not consider it here.

105 CMMI Institute, “What Is Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI)^®?” 2017, https://perma.cc/QHS6-WFFD.

106 Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); V. Spike Peterson, A Critical Rewriting of Global Political Economy: Integrating Reproductive, Productive and Virtual Economies (London: Routledge, 2003); John M. Hobson, “Civilizing the Global Economy: Racism and the Continuity of Anglo-Saxon Imperialism,” in Global Standards of Market Civilization, ed. Brett Bowden and Leonard Seabrooke (London: Routledge, 2007), 60–76; Michal Frenkel and Yehouda Shenhav, “From Americanization to Colonization: The Diffusion of Productivity Models Revisited,” Organization Studies 24, no. 9 (November 2003): 1537–61.

107 For example, Ali states that “decolonial computing, as a ‘critical’ project, is about interrogating who is doing computing, where they are doing it, and, thereby, what computing means both epistemologically (i.e. in relation to knowing) and ontologically (i.e. in relation to being),” Ali, “Brief Introduction to Decolonial Computing,” 5. Emphasis in the original. See also Syed Mustafa Ali, “Prolegomenon to the Decolonization of Internet Governance,” in Internet Governance in the Global South: History, Theory and Contemporary Debates, ed. Daniel Oppermann (Sao Paulo: NUPRI University of Sao Paulo, 2018), 118.

108 B. S. Chimni, “International Institutions Today: An Imperial Global State in the Making,” European Journal of International Law 15, no. 1 (February 2004): 4–6; see also William I. Robinson and Jerry Harris, “Towards a Global Ruling Class? Globalization and the Transnational Capitalist Class,” Science & Society 64, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 11–54; Peter M. Haas, “Introduction: Epistemic Communities and International Policy Coordination,” International Organization 46, no. 1 (Winter 1992): 1–35.

109 McKenzie Wark, “Information Wants to Be Free (But Is Everywhere in Chains),” Cultural Studies 20, nos. 2–3 (March/May 2006): 172.

110 Kieron O’Hara, “The Contradictions of Digital Modernity,” AI & Society 35, no. 1 (March 2020): 197–208; Stevens, Cyber Security and the Politics of Time.

111 Safiya Umoja Noble and Sarah T. Roberts, “Technological Elites, the Meritocracy, and Postracial Myths in Silicon Valley,” in Racism Postrace, ed. Roopali Mukherjee, Sarah Banet-Weiser, and Herman Gray (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 113–32.

112 Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (New York: New York University Press, 2018); Cathy O’Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy (London: Penguin, 2017); Mario Koran, “Black Facebook Staff Describe Workplace Racism in Anonymous Letter,” Guardian, 13 November 2019, https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2019/nov/13/facebook-discrimination-black-workers-letter; Mimi Onuoha, “What Is Missing Is Still There,” YouTube video, accessed 21 October 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57Lgztk62uY&t=6s.

113 Michael Kwet, “Digital Colonialism: US Empire and the New Imperialism in the Global South,” Race & Class 60, no. 4 (April–June 2019): 3–26; Renata Ávila Pinto, “Digital Sovereignty or Digital Colonialism?” Sur International Journal on Human Rights 15, no. 27 (July 2018): 15–27; Nima Elmi, “Is Big Tech Setting Africa Back?” Argument (blog), Foreign Policy, 2020, https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/11/11/is-big-tech-setting-africa-back/; Ussal Sahbaz, “Artificial Intelligence and the Risk of New Colonialism,” Horizons: Journal of International Relations and Sustainable Development, no. 14 (Summer 2019): 58–71; Gado Alzouma, “Myths of Digital Technology in Africa: Leapfrogging Development?” Global Media and Communication 1, no. 3 (December 2005): 339–56; Rex Troumbley, “Colonization.com: Empire Building for a New Digital Age,” East-West Affairs 1, no. 4 (July–December 2013): 93–107; Toussaint Nothias, “Access Granted: Facebook’s Free Basics in Africa,” Media, Culture & Society 42, no. 3 (April 2020): 329–48; Elia Zureik, “Settler Colonialism, Neoliberalism and Cyber Surveillance: The Case of Israel,” Middle East Critique 29, no. 2 (2020): 219–35; Jason C. Young, “The New Knowledge Politics of Digital Colonialism,” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 51, no. 7 (October 2019): 1424–41; Danielle Coleman, “Digital Colonialism: The 21st Century Scramble for Africa through the Extraction and Control of User Data and the Limitations of Data Protection Laws,” Michigan Journal of Race and Law 24, no. 2 (2019): 417–39.

114 While what might be termed the “jaded” character of cybersecurity experts confronted with persistent cyber insecurity would seem to contradict the narratives of technological progress fundamental to the transnational techno-elite, they are in fact two sides of the same coin. Cybersecurity experts must deal with what, in their view, is an inevitable side effect of technological development, but due to its continuous production of dissatisfied or marginalized opponents, such side effects (interpreted as cybersecurity threats) can only ever be contained or kept at bay, never eliminated.

115 Bagele Chilisa, Indigenous Research Methodologies, 2nd ed. (Los Angeles: SAGE, 2020); Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, 3rd ed. (London: Zed Books, 2021).

116 Ben van Gelderen and Kathy Guthadjaka, “The Warramiri Website: Applying an Alternative Yolŋu Epistemology to Digital Development,” Research and Practice in Technology Enhanced Learning 12, no. 1 (December 2017): 14.

117 For the project website, see https://www.indigenous-ai.net/.

118 Laura DeNardis and Andrea M. Hackl, “Internet Control Points as LGBT Rights Mediation,” Information, Communication & Society 19, no. 6 (2016): 762–64.

119 Moya Bailey and Trudy, “On Misogynoir: Citation, Erasure, and Plagiarism,” Feminist Media Studies 18, no. 4 (2018): 764.