Can States Hold Monopoly As Security Providers In The Digital World?

Nandiinii Gupta

In the world of information technology, digitality has seeped into battlespaces and has found its place within the world of security as well. Information warfare, cyber attacks and the domain of cybersecurity, especially with the rise of artificial intelligence, have found themselves in the center of a soon-to-come contestation of states as monopolistic security providers. Security, both traditional and non-traditional, relies on the creation and construction of narratives. That is, during times of both peace and conflict, the information that is relayed between the state, the military and the civilian population may differ in nature and purpose.

During times of inter-state conflict, governments will ensure that the confidence of the civil
population in its capacity to provide security remains intact through print media like newspapers and pamphlets, digital media such as television news, social media channels and broadcast speeches, advertisements and films. This is a cognitive battle that states tend to fight, which penetrate the boundaries of traditional, physical and kinetic warfare, by using mediatic presentation to either influence or reinforce the beliefs of citizens in the direction that benefits the state.

An important aspect of how states can use cyberspace to establish faith in their capacity as
security providers is the exploitation of algorithms to spread false narratives and assign
credibility to their agenda. An example of this can be seen through the example of India and
Pakistan’s engagement with each other in the online world. India and Pakistan are presently
engaged in what is a full-scale online information war, with India struggling to tackle the force
with which Pakistan has launched an online information campaign against India. This can be
seen in the form of “bot accounts” across social media such as Reddit, X (formerly Twitter),
Instagram, Discord and Facebook, to name a few, which are responsible for posting anti-Indian rhetoric.

This comes in reinforcing racist rhetoric through memetic forms, or racial stereotypes, and with the advent of generative artificial intelligence, the fabrication of slanderous video and
photographic content against India. By aiming to distort the truth around India’s intentions and actions, the Pakistani state is able to mislead the global public, and is able to pacify its own civil population. Information warfare such as this, therefore, plays an important role in setting up a narrative, reinforcing it and using that narrative as an attack on the opposing party, without so much as firing a bullet or violating state sovereignty.

However, as with most security concerns surrounding the digital and cyberspace, this usage of
algorithms can backfire. Since cyberspace is not monopolised by governments, it is open to
usage by non-state actors, insurgents and other destabilizing elements that are present. What this means is that an effective cyber attack on a state may exploit the same algorithmic patterns that a state uses to keep citizens pacific, to arouse and undermine state-created narratives regarding the nation. Further, due to the phenomenon of the “global village” that the Internet has allowed, there are no longer delineations between what the state wants citizens to believe, and what the citizens are allowed to know.

Therefore, the strength and credibility of the state as a monopolistic
security provider may be undermined, especially if the algorithm reinforces that the citizens do
not need to necessarily believe what the government needs them to believe. All that the
destabilizing group has to do is plant information online that openly criticises the target
government, and fabricate a well-developed counter narrative, that social media algorithms can multiply and spread.

In effect, citizens who are able to deny, reject and question what their governments tell them,
even if those are fabrications fed to them by non-state actors, are citizens that are more prone to civil unrest, civil disobedience and economic disruption than their counterparts. This potential
unrest and disruption create internal insecurity within the state, and upend the state’s credibility as the sole provider of security to its denizens.

While it seems a fairly radical idea that governments are reasonably faced with the threat of no
longer being the only security providers to their citizens, there is a question to be asked here. If
only the state can be a security provider, what is stopping the state from abusing this power for
its own objectives?

If a ruling government finds that keeping its citizens under the threat of war
is the best way to ensure its own re-election and retaining power, what is stopping them from
enforcing that the narrative embedded in the collective national consciousness is that they are
always under threat? The answer is that there is little civil society can do to prevent itself from
being indifferent to the narrative that the state wants to feed it.

People living in any country must embed their identity in some form or another to the nation they belong to. Residing in any nation means that one’s identity is tied to their immediate
surroundings, which are tied to the nation at large. This residence, and the subjectivities of
national narratives create the social, political and economic context in which one is raised.
Therefore, self-identity is often linked to beliefs, values and ideas that are inextricably linked to
the state one grew up in. This provides persons with the ontological security they seek, when
they have routinized their relationships with the state (Mitzen, 2006).

Therefore, the ontological security-seeking individual will always be prone to believing national narratives, rather than seeking to question them. That is why, if a government decides that in order to keep its citizens in line, it must spread a narrative of perpetual war, then there is little that individuals can do to counter it.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s “Super Sparta” model is an example of this idea
(Svetlova, 2026). The “Super Sparta” model seeks to keep Israeli society in mid-to-low level
conflict perpetually, despite the lack of any decisive victories in the many wars Israel initiated
with the intention to win. This model has faced a decline in popular support, as many Israeli
citizens have begun to question the perpetual “security threat” that Israel faces from its
surrounding nations, after nearly three years of believing government propaganda about the
gravity of threats that Gaza, Iran and Lebanon posed to the community.

The point stands that following the social contract, and the centralisation of human security, the state must provide security and dignity to individuals especially within the apparatus of a
sovereign state. However, there is no doubt in the fact that states and ruling governments have
been known to misuse this monopoly on power to further their political gains and agendas, at the cost of truth to civil society. Finally, while the nations may have the power to provide ontological security to their citizens via the digital world, it is not a sovereign space.

Hence, citizens who look beyond what is being fed to them algorithmically may find their ontological security compromised if they choose to be skeptical and not immediately acquiesce to state power.

References:

Mitzen, J. (2006). Ontological Security in World Politics: State Identity and the security
dilemma. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/epdf/10.1177/1354066106067346
Padmi, M. F. M. (2015). Nation State as Security Provider in Human Security Issue.
Jurnal Hubungan Internasional. https://journal.umy.ac.id/index.php/jhi
Svetlova , K. (2026a, April 22). Israel’s perpetual mobilization: The limits of Netanyahu’s
‘super-sparta’ model. Chatham House .
https://www.chathamhouse.org/2026/04/israels-perpetual-mobilization-limits-netanyahus
-super-sparta-model

About the Contributor:Nandiinii Gupta has completed B.A. Hons. Politics, Philosophy and Economics, Specialisation in Economics; P.G. Diploma in International Relations and Media Studies graduate from Ashoka University,

Disclaimer: All views expressed in the article belong solely to the author and not necessarily to the organisation.