Chimdi Igwe is a Doctoral Researcher in Cybersecurity University College London, supervised by Professor Madeline Carr and Dr Nilufer Tuptuk. His research examines African actors – state, private sector, and civil society – in global cybersecurity governance, with a focus on cyber norms development. Before beginning his PhD, he worked as a network engineer and holds a MEng from Imperial College London.

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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 a network approach to viewing the deliberative process, it examines a corpus of the transcripts of the OEWG substantive sessions using a mixed-methods methodology, combining natural language processing (NLP) methods – such as named-entity recognition (NER), topic modelling, and word embeddings – with thematic through close reading of select transcripts. In doing so, 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.

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 a network lens offers an epistemological opportunity to better understanding the underlying relations informing the dynamics of this evolving landscape.