PRIF Working Paper No. 23 The Original Battle Trolls: How States Represent the Internet as a Violent Place by Ben Kamis and Thorsten Thiel analyzes the rise of the cyber war metaphor and how it is connected to the spread of the norm of sovereign statehood on the Internet.
Although early discourse about the social and political meaning of the Internet prophesied a stateless utopia, the growing importance of digital communication triggered an active proliferation of state-based metaphors. This is shown by analyzing the discourses on violence and the risks of war in the internet in states like Estonia, Hungary and Germany.
Ben Kamis, MSc.I.R., is a research associate at the Cluster of Excellence "The Formation of Normative Orders".
This PRIF Working Paper is available as a free PDF download.