This is really wonderful work, @Rekka!
I suppose that we are no less "implicated into local geopolitical conflicts" by engaging in politicised memes than we are by holding politicised beliefs, whether social, historical, economical, or otherwise. The more interesting question is whether memes have uniquely geopolitical dimensions to them. Insofar as the Internet does, memes do too. A Google Scholar search for "memes" AND "geopolitics" brings up over 2000 results, so the intuition about the relevance of meme studies and geopolitics is shared by many (see "Weaponizing Memes").
It seems like the beginnings of a uniquely comprehensive framework about the geopolitical understanding of memes and cyberculture. From what I have seen of geopolitical meme studies thus far, two major strands exist:
- A representational tradition, focusing on digital expressions of existing beliefs and attitudes such as cybernationalism;
- A causal tradition, focusing on the impact of digital content on the development of new beliefs and behaviours among the participants.
Perhaps your approach can provide a more elegant way of understanding the relationship between memes and geopolitics.
I like the way that you have laid out your framework in a sort of descending order. This is a summary of what I understand from your post:
- Geographical Territory: the lands and the seas
- Weaponisation: the use of some entity by one agent against another within a power rivalry
- Popular Geopolitics: the communication of geopolitical beliefs and concepts to the mases
- Network: a boundaried and interconnected group of people
- Digital Platform: an infrastructure software that facilitates the formation of networks
Additionally, digital platforms often represent physical entities such as an electrical grid. Furthermore, unlike paper maps, digital platforms can facilitate interaction between the users and the entity being represented; hence, cyberattacks can target power grids as they become more digitised. In this way, representation becomes increasingly causal as well for every level within this framework (e.g. popular geopolitics is represented as well as manipulated through and by the platforms). So they form a kind of looping chain (of loops).