The increasing role of techno-nationalism in international relations: An analysis of the TikTok ban in the United States

Abstract

This dissertation presents a critical analysis of the decision of the United States government to ban the Chinese-owned short video sharing social media app, TikTok. Using interpretivist research paradigm and qualitative, document-based research design, this dissertation applies discourse analysis to relevant documents like policy documents, judicial rulings, executive orders, and media sources in the period 2019 to 2026. Using the techno-realist framework, an extension of the realist tradition, the dissertation argues that the ban reflects deliberate techno-nationalism within U.S. China great power competition, rather than verifiable national security concerns. As conceived, techno-realism contends that in today's digital age, technology is the main channel through which power is generated, that corporations controlling these technologies function as geopolitical actors, and that treating foreign-owned platforms as security issues reflects a rational strategy by states rather than a reaction to an objectively demonstrable threat. The dissertation demonstrates that the national security case against TikTok was created and institutionalised by successive speech acts by United States officials, heavily relying on hypothetical risk and as opposed to actual harm. To put it differently, TikTok was banned not because it was proven to be dangerous, but because it was successfully framed as such. The dissertation further argues that the framework for TikTok in this way was not driven solely by the state. Domestic technology firms like Meta and Oracle acted as state auxiliaries, lobbying for the ban, and materially benefitting from it. This dissertation calls this, the State-Corporate Nexus and contends that it is a structural characteristic of technonationalism in practice. The most significant finding demonstrated that the United States government's rejection of TikTok's data localisation proposal, Project Texas, reveals that ownership change was always the goal. In essence, the problem was never about U.S. data, but who controlled the platform. The dissertation situates the ban within a historical three phase evolution of techno-nationalism and finds that it represents the most advanced stage of an escalating trajectory of techno-nationalist intervention in the United States technology policy towards China.