Internet, Social Media and Conflict Studies Can Greater Interdisciplinarity Solve the Analytical Deadlocks in Cybersecurity Research?

TL;DR

This paper explores how integrating interdisciplinary approaches, especially digital conflict studies, can help overcome methodological and data challenges in cybersecurity research.

Contribution

It highlights the potential of digital conflict studies to address cybersecurity research deadlocks through interdisciplinary methods and data sharing.

Findings

Digital conflict studies address key cybersecurity data issues.

Interdisciplinary approaches can enhance cybersecurity research.

Sharing event data fosters progress in the field.

Abstract

In recent years, computational research methods, digital trace data and online human interactions have contributed to the emergence of new technology-oriented sub-fields within International Relations (IR). Although the cybersecurity scholarship had an initial promise to be the primus inter pares among these emerging fields, the main thrust of this new methodological innovation came through the digital conflict studies sub-field. By integrating Internet and social media research tools and questions into its core topics of sub-national violence, terrorism and radical mobilization, digital conflict studies has recently succeeded in addressing some of the data validity and methodology problems faced by the cybersecurity scholarship. This article begins by briefly reviewing some of the persistent data and method-oriented hurdles faced by the cybersecurity scholarship. Then, it moves onto a more detailed account of how digital conflict studies have been addressing some of these deadlocks by focusing individually on the literature on onset, mobilization, targeting, intensity/duration and termination phases of conflicts. Ultimately, the article concludes with the suggestion that the cybersecurity scholarship could move past its own deadlocks by building more granular and dedicated research datasets and establishing mechanisms to share event data with the scientific community.