The development of international norms of state behaviour in cyberspace, through United Nations processes such as the Group of Governmental Experts (GGE) and the Open-ended Working Group (OEWG), has received much critical interest within academic discourse. However, much of the literature focuses on tensions between major global powers, defaulting to the East-West dichotomy often utilised in international and strategic studies. In so doing, the agency of African state actors (both individually and collectively) within these deliberative processes – exhibited through their participation, engagement, and geo-political alignments – has largely remained critically under-examined. Given their distinct post-colonial socio-economic, political and developmental contexts, this represents an analytical lacuna.

Hence, this study seeks to examine how African states exhibit this agency within the ongoing OEWG cyber norms development process. Adopting actor-network theory (ANT) as a theoretical framework, it examines a corpus of the transcripts of the OEWG substantive sessions using natural language processing (NLP) methods such as named-entity recognition, word embeddings, and sentiment analysis. Combining these with social network analysis, it seeks to highlight the strategies used by African states in proposing, promoting and contesting normative discourse against the backdrop of great power competition in cyberspace. Preliminary results show continental alignment on digital sovereignty informs these states' positions, including divergence with great powers such as the US and China on the principle of due diligence in cyberspace.

This study aims to supplement the current cyber norms scholarship with a greater understanding by centring African states – often overlooked given their relatively low cyber capacities and diplomatic power – within existing critical analysis of international cyberspace. Additionally, approaching the norm development process through the lens of ANT – well established in science and technology studies – offers an epistemological opportunity to better understanding the underlying relations informing the dynamics of this evolving landscape.