EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Cyber Security

Year 2 Student - 2023 Cohort - Cohort 5

My interdisciplinary background in politics, economics and international relations informs a multifaceted approach to cybersecurity issues, with a focus on how developing technologies warp the political landscape in unanticipated ways.

I am pursuing research on the intersection of the private sector with national and international governance, particularly in areas of conflict, espionage, and the development of collective identity. As this research coalesces, I expect it to incorporate elements of anticipation, regulation, and international political economy

A Stronger Loving World: Trusted Research, Neo-Mercantilism, and the Mechanics of Securitization

None of us innovate in a vacuum! The way that states approach research—academic or industrial—is changing. Securing and territorializing research is no longer just a matter of prosperity, but one of national security and sovereign capacity. Because of the need to ally with friendly private actors and move against unfriendly ones, constructing this security encourages a heavily neo-mercantilist economic turn, facilitated by a process of informal alignment with researchers and research institutions. As a result, this construction process has complex political, economic, organisational, and normative components, and so is very difficult to properly analyse without a substantively interdisciplinary approach - which I hope to provide here.

This project focuses on a single case study: Trusted Research & Innovation, a UKRI programme designed to “protect the UK’s intellectual property, sensitive research, people, and infrastructure from potential theft, manipulation and exploitation.” An ambitious goal—but how achievable is it? I intend to conduct a detailed analysis of the implementation, reception, and effectiveness of Trusted Research & Innovation with the following two goals in mind:

• Primary Objective: to assess how states use partnerships with private and semi-private institutions to develop, shape and consolidate national cyber security research in academic settings, and what gives these partnerships force and binding power.

• Secondary Objective: to assess the wider impact of this partnership process, both on academic researchers and the state that is directly involved, and on wider social and economic stakeholders who might be indirectly affected.

By answering these questions through a series of interview studies, I hope to draw wider conclusions about the international currents affecting research, the uneasy construction of cybersecurity as an extension of national security, and how we as apparently apolitical researchers are connected to the aims and limitations of states. Are Trusted Research and similar initiatives working? If so, at what cost? More importantly, how should we as researchers respond to initiatives like these, and to the political pressures that provoke them?

Supervisor: Professor Richard Owen (Bristol)

• Cyber Statecraft in an Era of Systemic Competition (https://researchportal.bath.ac.uk/en/projects/9f28d32f-cb6f-49af-9c8c-2ef7ed93c56d)
• DSIT Cyber Security Policy Conference (UCL, 24th July 2024)

• OfCom Produced a detailed report on Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs) in order to inform OfCom policy on researcher access.
• RISCS - attended and wrote up the EPSRC/DSTL research project on 'Cyber Statecraft in an Era of Systemic Competition' on behalf of RISCS.