Interview with Kevin Limonier

Kevin Limonier: "Geopolitics is not mere general knowledge; it is technical expertise that makes it possible to understand the complexity of the world"

Interview with Kevin Limonier, specialist in the geopolitics of cyberspace and member of the Advisory Board of the Chair in Geopolitics and Business Strategy at EDHEC Business School.

You agreed to join the Advisory Board of EDHEC's Chair in Geopolitics and Business Strategy. Why did you make this commitment, and why do you think it is important for business schools to take up these issues today?

I agreed because I believe there is still a severe lack of geopolitical culture within companies. And when I speak of geopolitical culture, I do not mean general knowledge. Business leaders are, in fact, often perfectly well informed about the state of the world. The problem lies elsewhere. It lies in a lack of anticipation and of understanding of the complexity of the systems in which the global economy is now embedded.

In an increasingly unstable, multipolar and interconnected world, geopolitical crises produce ever more complex consequences, sometimes unpredictable, but which can nonetheless be partly anticipated. This requires integrating conflicts and power relations into business leaders' intellectual software, and treating them as fully fledged components of the environment in which they operate. Things are moving in the right direction. The very existence of a chair such as yours is evidence of this: this kind of initiative was still relatively rare a few years ago. But the work to be done remains considerable. Structuring geopolitics teaching within a school that trains the future leaders of small, medium-sized and large companies is an investment whose fruits will be measured in ten or fifteen years. We are therefore working on timescales very different from the urgency to which we are all too often accustomed.

I also observe, among the students I train, a very clear change in younger generations' relationship to geopolitics. They are more aware of these issues and of the need to respond to them. So I remain an incorrigible optimist: we are on the right track, and initiatives like yours contribute to building the geopolitical culture we will need tomorrow.

Cyberspace was long associated with the promise of an open world, free from borders and territorial constraints. Today, this vision seems to be largely called into question. How do you explain this shift?

I have been working on these questions for some fifteen years, and I have witnessed, sometimes even taken part in, this transformation. Fifteen or twenty years ago, the Internet and the digitalization of economies were seen as instruments likely to complete a form of liberal globalization. This vision was rooted in particular in the libertarian culture of 1960s and 1970s Silicon Valley, marked by a desire to transcend borders and break free from the power of states, which were seen as obstacles to the emergence of a new society. This conception dominated debates for a long time. I remember that in 2018 or 2019, in certain Internet governance bodies, mentioning the existence of borders in cyberspace could still provoke extremely hostile reactions. I personally attended meetings where speakers defending this idea were literally booed.

Six or seven years later, the situation has changed profoundly. It is now difficult to deny that cyberspace reproduces the forms of territorial control that exist in geographical space. What is more, digitalization has not abolished the borders that run through our societies, whether state, social or ideological. It has sometimes helped to reinforce them and multiply them in new dimensions. This development had in fact been remarkably anticipated by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who, following the work of Michel Foucault, described the shift from a disciplinary society to a society of control. Whereas traditional institutions exercised their power by confining and monitoring individuals within delimited spaces, digital technologies now allow for a far more diffuse, permanent and deterritorialized form of control.

Yet at the outset there was a sincere conviction that the Internet could serve as a formidable counter-power. In the 2000s, I myself took part in developing a major independent French web host. We were driven by the desire to foster the emergence of a citizen blogosphere capable of contributing to democratic debate. But as cyberspace spread across the entire planet, it came to reflect societies in all their diversity and complexity. It no longer represented only the aspirations of a relatively privileged, liberal population attached to a certain ideal of emancipation. It became a commercial space, a space of power and a space of conflict like any other.

Should we therefore be fatalistic? I do not think so. We went through a first, relatively idealistic phase, followed by a swing of the pendulum during which digital technology asserted itself as an instrument of surveillance, destabilization and sometimes oppression. It is now up to us to build the frameworks that will make cyberspace a social space governed by rules consistent with our democratic values. From this point of view, I think Europe is taking a promising path with its approach to digital regulation. But these transformations unfold over long timescales, measured in decades.

We often forget that cyberspace rests first and foremost on physical infrastructure. What does its geography tell us about international power relations?

The question of digital infrastructure is fundamental, precisely because it was neglected for so long. For years, the Internet was regarded as an almost immaterial universe, independent of territorial contingencies. This representation helped make invisible the infrastructure that actually makes it work. A first major turning point came in 2013 with Edward Snowden's revelations. They exposed the scale of the surveillance apparatus developed by the United States, notably through the NSA, and the strategic advantage its position in the global architecture of the Internet gives it. These revelations contributed to a growing awareness, particularly in Russia, but also in Europe: the Internet is not a space outside power relations. On the contrary, its infrastructure, its location and its control are major strategic issues.

A second turning point came in 2014, with Russia's annexation of Crimea. The Russian authorities then set about modifying the physical and logical structure of the network to reroute the peninsula's communications toward their own territory. Before the annexation, Crimea's main land connections ran through the Perekop isthmus and up to Kyiv. The Russians gradually changed these routes, relying first on satellite connections and then on new infrastructure linking the peninsula directly to Russia. The aim was to reshape the geography of the network to serve their territorial control. The Covid-19 crisis also played an important role in this collective awakening. Strains on networks and the massive increase in digital usage served as a reminder that behind dematerialized services lie cables, equipment and physical infrastructure subject to very real constraints. Finally, the war in Ukraine marks a new stage. Digital infrastructure is now directly integrated into military targeting logic. It can be subject to strikes, sabotage or operations aimed at disrupting the adversary's communications. This is an important development: this infrastructure, relatively spared in some previous conflicts, has become a strategic target in its own right. We are therefore gradually becoming aware of its geopolitical importance, even if this understanding is still largely insufficient in public debate.

The notion of digital sovereignty occupies a growing place in European debates. Is it truly relevant, or should we instead seek to identify, understand and master our dependencies?

I think no one can truly claim total digital sovereignty, not even the United States, and certainly not Russia despite the considerable efforts it has made in this area. The notion of digital sovereignty took hold in the early 2010s, in the wake of the Snowden revelations. The idea at the time was to develop national infrastructure and services in order to reduce dependence on American players and guard against their surveillance capabilities.

But we must also recognize the excesses to which this ambition can lead. In Russia, for example, discourse on digital sovereignty gradually accompanied the construction of a genuine apparatus of censorship and information control. The Russian Internet has become considerably bunkerized. This raises a fundamental question: what exactly do we mean by sovereignty? Is it the ability to control everything, everywhere and at all times? Or is it the ability to understand a space, to exercise authority over it when necessary and to have the means to intervene in it? Take the example of French territory. The state does not exercise permanent control over all the activities that take place there, and that is a good thing. It does, however, have legal, institutional and security tools that allow it to exercise its sovereignty. It also has detailed knowledge of the territory, which is indispensable to its action. I believe this distinction between control and mastery is essential. The desire for absolute control almost inevitably leads to excesses incompatible with the principles of a free and democratic society. In the digital field, this means in particular that it would be futile to try to systematically replicate the major American platforms by creating European equivalents of the GAFAM. That is not necessarily where our main lever for action lies.

Europe can, however, make a difference by pursuing its work of regulating the digital space. It has undertaken an important effort, which would no doubt deserve more political courage. But there is a second lever, just as fundamental: knowledge. Exercising sovereignty over a territory first requires having the maps that make it possible to understand how it is organized. This is one of the historical foundations of geography. It is precisely what we are trying to do at GEODE: build the cartographic representations needed to understand the interdependencies, infrastructure and power dynamics that structure cyberspace.

I am in fact working on a notion I call the "cybernetic landscape". The idea is to move beyond preconceived representations of the digital world in order to analyze concretely how networks are organized, the strategic chokepoints, the forms of dependence and the resilience mechanisms. On the basis of this detailed knowledge, it becomes possible to develop much more precise and effective sector-specific strategies. But this requires developing a genuine cartographic, infrastructural and, ultimately, geopolitical culture of the digital world.

Can this work of mapping dependencies also be carried out at the level of companies? How could it help them better anticipate risks?

Not only can companies do it, I think they must. It is now entirely possible to map a company's digital environment in order to identify its vulnerabilities and assess its exposure to risk. It is ultimately an approach comparable to the one you would take before setting up a warehouse in an area at risk of flooding: you need to know your environment in order to gauge the possible consequences of an event. In the digital field, this means looking at the services the company subscribes to, their owners, their shareholders, the location of the infrastructure, and the conditions under which data is hosted and protected. This work makes it possible to understand to whom you are entrusting your data, your activities and, to some extent, your security. It also shows that the cheapest services are not necessarily the most reliable, the most secure or the most resilient. There is already a whole economy built around auditing and analyzing these environments. But I believe the problem runs deeper: companies generally still struggle to genuinely integrate risk anticipation into their decisions.

In my view, cyber risk and geopolitical risk stem from comparable mechanisms. Both arise from what might be called the weaponization of the growing complexity of our societies. Companies operate within systems of interdependence that they do not always master. Without mapping these systems, they expose themselves to crises whose origin and propagation mechanisms they sometimes fail to understand. It remains difficult to convince some organizations that it is better to invest one euro in prevention than to have to spend a hundred, a thousand or several million managing the consequences of a crisis. This difficulty is also cultural and generational. The world has changed extremely quickly, but many management reflexes are still inherited from the liberal globalization of the 2000s and 2010s. A telling example is that of connected equipment in large-scale retail. Some supermarket managers discovered, during cyberattacks, that their refrigeration systems were connected and could therefore be points of vulnerability. This raises a very simple question: are these connected features still necessary? Were they adopted on the basis of a genuine analysis of benefits and risks?

This is precisely where business schools have a role to play. We need to train leaders capable of understanding their environment and integrating risk upstream, rather than discovering it when a crisis occurs.

Beyond cyberattacks, companies are also exposed to information risks. How can they become, sometimes in spite of themselves, targets or instruments of geopolitical strategies?

Companies can be affected in many ways, even when they have no intention of taking a stance in a political debate. Take the example of the boycott calls that targeted certain companies after the attacks of 7 October 2023 and the outbreak of the war in Gaza. Companies were singled out because of their activities in Israel, regardless of their actual involvement in the conflict. This example illustrates a fundamental reality: a company can find itself drawn into a political or geopolitical controversy simply because of where it operates, its image or the representations with which it is associated. This obviously does not mean that companies should engage in politics. They must, however, understand that they operate in an environment shaped by geopolitical representations, ideological narratives and power relations that can have direct consequences for their activities. Similar mechanisms can be observed in the context of the war in Ukraine. French companies that still held assets in Russia found themselves in particularly delicate situations, from a reputational, economic and legal standpoint. But we need to go further than the question of reputation alone. Some smear campaigns may be organized or amplified by state actors with the aim of indirectly weakening another state, feeding a political narrative or pursuing strategic objectives.

To understand these phenomena, companies must be seen as components of a much larger system that includes states, citizens, platforms, infrastructure and the narratives circulating between them. All of this forms an extremely complex web of interdependencies that we are not yet able to represent fully. It is therefore essential for companies to learn to position themselves within these different spaces: geographical space, cyberspace and the information space. With the massification of social networks and the accelerating circulation of narratives, they are now caught up in dynamics they do not always control. The first challenge is therefore to understand what is happening to them, which is still far from systematic.

In your view, is there a major geopolitical phenomenon whose importance remains underestimated in public debate and in the business world?

Yes, and it is precisely the subject that runs through our entire conversation: the growing complexity of our interdependencies. We talk a great deal about economic, technological or strategic dependencies, but often in relatively vague terms. We frequently stay at the level of broad representations, without really understanding the mechanisms that link the different systems. Yet I think that one of the major geopolitical phenomena of the coming years will be precisely this complexity, which is gradually turning isolated crises into systems of interconnected crises, capable of feeding off one another.

We have not yet mentioned environmental risk, which is nevertheless an essential dimension of this development. Take the massive development of artificial intelligence. It relies on a proliferation of data centers, on considerable computing power requirements and on growing resource consumption. This infrastructure generates significant environmental externalities, particularly in terms of energy, water and land take.

It could tomorrow provoke increasingly strong citizen opposition, possibly accompanied by radical forms of protest. We can therefore see how a technological and economic choice can produce environmental, social, political and, ultimately, geopolitical consequences. It is this intertwining that seems essential to me. Environmental risks will interact with geopolitical risks, which will in turn combine with cyber and information risks. We are going to face chains of risk that are increasingly difficult to identify, understand and anticipate. This requires taking a new step in the way we understand the world. We can no longer content ourselves with studying separately categories of risk that, in reality, are constantly interacting.

In this context, some companies are considering creating positions dedicated to geopolitics, sometimes under the title of Chief Geopolitical Officer. What do you think of this development?

It all depends on what lies behind this role and, above all, on the training of the people who hold it. One of the problems with geopolitics is that many people think that taking an interest in international news is enough to be able to practice it. That is a fundamental mistake. Geopolitics cannot be reduced to general knowledge about the state of the world. It is highly technical and specific expertise, based on proven methods, analytical tools and years of training. Of course, having a good general knowledge of international affairs is indispensable for a business leader. But that does not mean one masters the methods needed to analyze power relations, map interdependencies or understand complex chains of causality. We must distinguish knowledge of events from the ability to produce operational geopolitical analysis. If the role of Chief Geopolitical Officer means recruiting professionals genuinely trained in these methods, capable of using tools, software, analytical matrices and precise know-how to inform the company's decisions, then it obviously makes perfect sense. If, on the other hand, it is simply about having someone who can comment on the main international conflicts in a few minutes, its usefulness to the company seems far more limited to me.

There is in France a fascination with general knowledge, which obviously has its virtues, particularly for intellectual and civic education. But general knowledge is not, in itself, a professional skill that makes it possible to solve concrete problems.

This is also why some companies still struggle to see the value of recruiting geopolitics specialists. If the discipline is presented as mere knowledge of current affairs, it is indeed difficult to demonstrate its added value. On the contrary, we must show what its methods make it possible to understand, anticipate and solve.

To conclude, do you have any reading recommendations for our students and readers who would like to explore these subjects further?

I would suggest three complementary readings, which also reflect my attachment to the methodological dimension of geopolitics.

The first is Introduction à la méthode géopolitique, a book I wrote with my colleague Amaël Cattaruzza. It is aimed in particular at students and anyone who wants to go beyond an approach to geopolitics based solely on general knowledge. In it, we present the methods, tools and reasoning that make it possible to carry out a genuine geopolitical analysis.

The second is L'Empire déconnecté, my latest book, devoted to Russian cyberspace. Beyond its subject of study, it also has an important methodological dimension. In it, I explain how to conduct a geopolitical exploration of a segment of cyberspace, using methods that can be reproduced in other contexts.

This is an aspect I am particularly attached to: scientific research should not only describe phenomena, it should also make explicit the methods used to study them and, ideally, to reproduce the analyses.

Finally, I recommend the issue of the journal Hérodote devoted to the geopolitics of digital infrastructure. It brings together work by young specialists in particular and provides a better grasp of the complexity of networks, their interdependencies and the power relations that run through them.

Each in its own way, these three readings make it possible to understand that geopolitics is above all an analytical approach, based on rigorous methods, and not mere commentary on international news.