The New Geopolitical Imperatives in the Age of Cyberspace

Cyberspace has taken on full geopolitical significance, constituting a new dimension of power and redefining the traditional categories of sovereignty, security, and conflict. It is not an immaterial environment, but a global strategic infrastructure that influences competition between states, businesses, and cultures. National security now depends on control of information flows, algorithmic sovereignty, and cognitive resilience.

In the 21st century, the domain of the mind and data replaces that of territories: those who govern connections, platforms, and narratives exercise true hegemony. The analysis explores the geopolitical nature of cyberspace, the transformation of war in a cognitive sense, and the need for new strategic imperatives based on the integration of technology, culture, and political power.

Cyberspace represents a new geopolitical dimension, integrated and interdependent with land, sea, air, and space. It is not simply a technical domain, but a strategic space in which power and sovereignty are expressed through infrastructure, data, and algorithms. Cyber-geopolitical power has ushered in the most advanced form of conflict: hybrid power, where physical, informational, and cognitive components merge.

Cyberspace has a concrete geography made up of submarine cables, satellites, data centers, and sovereign clouds. Just as maritime choke points determined naval supremacy in the past, today digital nodes define global influence. Digital sovereignty in terms of data localization, technological standards, and regulatory governance has become the equivalent of territorial sovereignty. Those who control protocols and infrastructure today impose their own worldview.

Connectivity has always been the matrix of power: from Venice to global information networks. The internet represents its cognitive evolution: it has abolished time and space, connecting minds, languages, and narratives. Those who govern connections dominate not only markets or data, but perceptions and consensus, which form the basis of political power. In cyberspace, ordering information means orienting thought. Google, with over 90% of global searches, shows how visibility determines social truth: what appears is what matters.

Traditional military superiority is no longer sufficient to guarantee security. Contemporary warfare is hybrid, multidimensional, and cognitive, based on the control of information, intelligence, and decision-making. Military artificial intelligence is now the new foundation of deterrence: whoever best integrates algorithms and complex command and control systems defines the global strategic order. The US-China competition for algorithmic supremacy marks the transition from a territorial system to a digital order of learning, in which cognitive speed decides victory.

Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and hyperconnectivity are rewriting the processes of civilization. Humans have become a cognitive target: predictable, manipulable, vulnerable. National security therefore requires cognitive resilience, critical training, and the defense of shared truth. Hybrid warfare is transforming into cognitive warfare, which represents a permanent conflict for dominance of perception. As the information war in Ukraine shows, controlling the narrative precedes controlling the territory.

The principle of cognitive anentropy (Hartley and Jobson, 2019) describes the ability of technological systems to create order against social disorder. Artificial intelligence embodies this trend because it is capable of organizing both the economy and politics on new scales of complexity and predictability. This gives rise to algorithmic sovereignty, i.e., the power to maintain order through the automation of decision-making processes. This power, while efficient, risks compressing cognitive freedom and interpretative plurality. The geopolitical challenge of the century is therefore to govern anentropy, maintaining a balance between calculation and consciousness, efficiency and freedom. The digital age has thus given rise to new geopolitical imperatives for the security of the nation and the state.

National security today is based on three strategic imperatives: the integration of the four levers of state power, namely diplomatic, informational, military, and economic, into a unified vision of power; technological sovereignty, to ensure independence from external infrastructures and platforms; and cognitive resilience, to defend social cohesion and shared truth.

Global power today is measured by the ability to dominate networks and algorithms, and those who govern information flows shape reality. Digital sovereignty is now the highest form of contemporary political sovereignty.

Power in the 21st century no longer resides solely in material force, but also in the ability to influence the mind. Defending both the individual and collective mind today is equivalent to defending freedom itself. Digital powers do not dominate territories, but attention, emotion, and perception. Only societies capable of integrating ethics, technology, and culture will be able to govern the digital order without suffering it.

As Norbert Wiener warned, “to govern the machine means, first of all, to govern oneself.” In a world where history is written in code rather than treaties, cognitive sovereignty is the supreme form of political freedom.

This was first published on November 2, 2025 on Formiche and is republished with the author’s permission.