Cybersecurity in Humanities and Social Sciences: A Research Methods Approach

Cybersecurity is more than a technical problem: it is also a subject of law, politics, policy, social life, and research. Cybersecurity in Humanities and Social Sciences: A Research Methods Approach brings those perspectives together, focusing on how researchers can define the field, shape useful questions, and choose methods suited to its many dimensions.

Approaching cybersecurity as a research subject

The volume begins with questions of how cybersecurity can be understood and studied. It examines definitions, typologies, taxonomies, and ontologies, showing why the terms and frameworks researchers use matter when they set the boundaries of a complex subject.

Methods across law, policy, and social inquiry

Its chapters explore methodological approaches to data protection and public policy, state-sponsored cyber-espionage, cyber risk, and information warfare. Topics include legal interpretation, policy analysis, statistical modeling, qualitative document analysis, and the study of online spaces. Together, these examples offer a view of how different methods can illuminate different parts of cybersecurity research.

Following the questions into real-world cases

Case-focused chapters address such subjects as the relationship between cybersecurity and privacy, identifying state actors in cyber-espionage research, analyzing national cybersecurity strategies, and studying anti-feminist cyber-violence affecting feminist activists in France. These investigations place research choices alongside the specific challenges of studying people, institutions, documents, and digital environments.

Why an interdisciplinary lens matters

By bringing humanities and social science perspectives into conversation, the book challenges the idea that cybersecurity can be understood through technical explanations alone. Its range of approaches is especially relevant to readers working across disciplinary boundaries or developing a research project on cybersecurity’s social and institutional dimensions.

For researchers and students

Researchers and students in the humanities and social sciences will find a collection of methodological discussions and research examples to consider when defining a topic, selecting evidence, and choosing an analytical framework. It is a focused guide to thinking carefully about how cybersecurity can be investigated.