Cyber Security and the Politics of Time

Abstract

Time is an under-represented topic in security studies and International Relations (IR). The development and implementation of security measures are often justified as necessary responses to the contemporary rate of global change yet little attention is granted time and temporality as factors influencing the politics and practices of security. This thesis proposes that security can be understood within the framework of a 'politics of time' (chronopolitics), in which collective perceptions of time and temporality are constitutive of security politics and practices. Its principal object is cyber security, which aims to regulate and exploit complex sociotechnical systems of networked and interdependent information technologies. The thesis examines how cyber security actors imagine time and temporality in (post)modernity and the implications of these temporal biases for the politics of cyber security. It explores how cyber security actors imagine the accelerating present and the relative deceleration of political decision-making; how apocalyptic narratives of imminent catastrophe illustrate concerns about the immanent dangers of technology; how the past is mobilised through historical analogies to understand dystopian futures; how the future is metaphorically inhabited through preparedness exercises and simulations, and literally populated through education, training and recruitment. These 'chronotypes' inform the cyber security imaginary and disclose a manifold of deeper chronopolitical tendencies, theorised here as the logics of assemblage, real time, event, and eschaton. The thesis makes an original contribution to IR by promoting the interdisciplinary analysis of time to help understand the politics and practices of contemporary security. DeclarationThe copyright of this dissertation rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. ContentsAcknowledgements …………………………………………………………………………………….……...

Global Cybersecurity: New Directions in Theory and Methods

“…This work complements other critical engagements with cybersecurity language, particularly the role of analogies and metaphors in knowledge construction (Betz & Stevens, 2013;Lawson, 2012). STS-inflected studies examine non-discursive facets of cybersecurity, generating sociotechnical analyses of the co-construction of material and immaterial actors in cybersecurity assemblages (Aradau, 2010;Balzacq & Dunn Cavelty, 2016;Stevens, 2016). We should also recognize rich deployments of classical IR theory (Kello, 2017) and theories of risk and governmentality (Barnard-Wills & Ashenden, 2012;Deibert & Rohozinski, 2010;Stevens, 2015).…”

Cyber Security Assemblages: A Framework for Understanding the Dynamic and Contested Nature of Security Provision

“…Cyber security is replete with global and local, public and private agents whose relationships are deeply competitive as well as cooperative, conflictual, and at times coordinated. While the concept of a security assemblage has been applied to cyber security in previous literature (Stevens, 2012(Stevens, , 2016, the argument for why and how the concept should be used and applied to cyber security remains underdeveloped-an imbalance this article hopes to correct.…”

“…Whether it is encryption disputes, the increasing regulation of cyber security issues, or the knowledge of vulnerabilities that government actors withhold, states increasingly challenge, disrupt and often undermine the norms and practices that have previously been established amongst private actors. Government actors often 'argue through the past' (Stevens, 2016) evoking, for example, historical analogies regarding their previous ability to access the data of criminals and terrorist suspects through wiretaps in an attempt to make normative claims and justify why they should be able to access encrypted data. Here, states play on their broadly-perceived legitimacy within other security issues in the past to justify an expanded role in the context of cyber security in the future.…”

Internet (Governance)

“…Apart from cyber issues, the control of the Internet resources reveals political control (Biju 2017;Mueller 2010;Stevens 2016). For, Internet governance is increasingly contested, where global politics and economic power are unfolding entangled within discourses of civil liberties, national security, technology, and information policies.…”