International Relations, Cybersecurity, and Content Analysis: A Constructivist Approach
The development and global diffusion of access to the Internet has—as is the case with most new and game-changing technologies—been accompanied with fears and threat perceptions. This chapter argues, on the one hand, that Constructivist IR theory is parti
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Abstract The development and global diffusion of access to the Internet has—as is the case with most new and game-changing technologies—been accompanied with fears and threat perceptions. This chapter argues, on the one hand, that Constructivist IR theory is particularly suited for addressing and interpreting the threat discourses and identity issues which come in focus in cybersecurity. The ease with which cyber-culprits can hide their identity and location, operating through networks of hijacked computers across the world, makes fear-mongering threat and identity discourses a key issue in cybersecurity. On the other hand, this chapter presents content analysis—a set of quantitative methods focusing on key word searches—as a pertinent or even ubiquitous method for both the study and practice of cybersecurity. Through simple and globally accessible interfaces, the entire Web can be scrutinized using content analysis. Equipped with Constructivist theory and content analysis methods, the IR scholar stands prepared to uncover and better understand the massive discursive world of the Internet. Keywords Cybersecurity • Constructivism • Content analysis • Search string
1 Introduction What is the meaning of security in the digital age, and how can International Relations (IR) scholars address this topic? While there are as many answers to these questions as there are approaches in the empirical cyber-security literature, and in the IR literature (for an overview, see Eriksson and Giacomello 2006), there J. Eriksson (*) Swedish Institute of International Affairs, So¨derto¨rn University, Stockholm, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] G. Giacomello University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy e-mail: [email protected] M. Mayer et al. (eds.), The Global Politics of Science and Technology - Vol. 2, Global Power Shift, DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-55010-2_12, © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014
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is an emerging consensus that cyber-security has become increasingly politicized, and even militarized (Dunn Cavelty 2012; Nye 2011). Digital-age security has moved out of the low-political and technical-managerial realm of cyber-geeks, to the high-political domain of foreign and security policy. The nature of the Internet implies endemic difficulties of uncovering and understanding cyber-attacks—the identity of culprits, their goals and capacities, and indeed whether an “incident” really is an attack or merely a systems failure. Moreover, the ever-growing Internet is made up of massive amounts of globally accessible text and images. Against this background, this chapter suggests that Constructivism as a theoretical paradigm and content analysis as a particular set of methods particularly pertinent for investigating security in the digital age. While Constructivism highlights issues of identity and the power of discourse and framing, content analysis, as a set of quantitative methods, can uncover patterns of meaning in massive amounts of text. The “Constructivist turn” in International Relat
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