Cybersecurity and the politics of responsibility: Renegotiations of state-citizen relations in a digital democracy

The complex, unbounded, decentralized, and deterritorialized nature of the Internet places the problem of responsibility at the center of global and national cybersecurity debates.

By showcasing the politics of responsibility in Sweden’s emerging cybersecurity agenda, this project contributes new knowledge on how our democracy is affected by the rapid digitalization of society.

To this end, the project studies the politics of responsibility in cybersecurity discourse, analyzing how policies of cybersecurity re-negotiate roles and responsibilities in society at large, including state-citizen relations.

The project studies how Swedish cybersecurity policies are influenced by and re-negotiate global discourses of cybersecurity and responsibility, often critiqued for being neoliberal by design.

Empirically, the project conducts a detailed, systematic, and critical analysis of how responsibility in cybersecurity discourse is conceptualized, attributed, and acted upon across the many different levels and actors engaged in Swedish government cybersecurity discourse: from the cybersecurity strategies of Sweden’s international partner countries, national policies, parliamentary debates, to how cybersecurity is implemented by particular government agencies.

Through quantitative and qualitative discourse analysis and interviews, the project provides an understanding of the politics and subjectivities produced by cybersecurity discourse.