What does critical cybersecurity look like?

Cybersecurity research has largely evolved through Western- and state-centric lenses, particularly in the field of international relations (IR). Recent critical work has challenged conventional approaches, incorporating marginalised voices and considering questions that traditional IR analyses and cybersecurity research methods have overlooked. ‘Critical Perspectives on Cybersecurity: Feminist and Postcolonial Interventions’ is a significant contribution in this regard. 

Edited by political scientists Anwar Mhajne, an expert in feminist security studies and Middle Eastern politics, and Alexis Henshaw, who has written extensively on gender and security in Latin America, ‘Critical Perspectives’ boasts a diverse authorship, a human security viewpoint, and analysis of under-explored topics and case studies. The volume offers a refreshing take amidst a growing body of literature grappling with what it means to study cybersecurity critically. 

The authors use feminist and postcolonial frameworks to analyse issues of security, sovereignty, representation, and resistance in cyberspace, with a focus on the Global South. Thus, the book is an important read for scholars in cybersecurity, IR, sociology, feminist and postcolonial studies, and critical theory. It also presents valuable insights for policymakers, digital rights and social justice advocates, and anyone interested in how technology intersects with issues of power, identity, and global inequalities. 

A human-centric perspective

 ‘Critical Perspectives’ challenges state-centric questions in cybersecurity research, which prioritise topics like cyber warfare, regulating state cyber behaviour, and superpower competitions over technology dominance. Instead, its authors adopt a human-centric perspective, highlighting injustices and inequalities in human experiences of cybersecurity. There are chapters on data weaponisation in armed conflicts, authoritarian state practices in cyberspace, data privacy in colonised territories, and gendered online resistance to power hierarchies. 

As put by the book’s editors, this approach not only ‘critiques and de-centres the state’, but also views the state itself as an agent of cyber ‘insecurity’. For example, the development of military cyber commands in Latin American countries in cooperation with foreign powers has drawn criticism for undermining democratic governance. Alexis Henshaw takes this analysis a step further. She argues that the US, Canada, and international agencies supply surveillance tools to Latin America to build cyber capacity, but this also enables state abuse and harms marginalised social groups.   

Underrepresented authors and overlooked questions

The volume combats the ‘racial-epistemic hierarchies’ of cybersecurity expertise by gathering diverse academics and practitioners from across the globe. It emphasises cases from the Global South, offering important insights to overlooked questions, not just in cybersecurity research, but in IR research more generally. For example, Julia-Silvana Hofstetter examines the influence of digital technologies on gendered (in)security in Afghanistan, while Mhajne explores discriminatory practices by the Israeli government against Palestinians.

Following the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan in 2021, much analysis focused on strategic aspects of the withdrawal or the Taliban’s brutality against women. This overlooked the ways foreign governments and aid organisations themselves may have contributed to repression through data collection. Hofstetter’s incisive analysis reveals how discriminatory colonial structures led to invasive data collection by foreign powers and aid groups in Afghanistan, producing gender-specific vulnerabilities that enabled the repression of Afghan women. 

Similarly, Mhajne presents a significant critique of the lack of research on civilians’ right to data privacy in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, despite the massive volume of research on the conflict, and investigates the applicability of international humanitarian law in cyberspace. 

The view through intersectional and post-colonial lenses

‘Critical Perspectives’ is rich with discussions of feminist and postcolonial theoretical and conceptual literature, developing critical analysis to complement the empirical case studies. Building on the growing feminist critique of cybersecurity, the volume integrates gender, race, ethnicity, and geographical positionality as inseparable aspects of human experiences of cybersecurity. The book also adopts a postcolonial lens, investigating spaces of resistance, refusal strategies to hierarchies of power, and how movements in the Global South challenge the boundaries of cyberspace. 

Murat Yılmaz argues that whilst all Uyghurs abroad are at risk of harassment by the Chinese regime, women face more significant personal attacks, for being women, Muslim, and Turkic. Through a qualitative review of secondary resources, including reports by NGOs and Uyghur lobbies’ social media platforms, Yılmaz compellingly shows how cyberspace facilitates state surveillance and transnational authoritarianism, subjecting the Uyghur diaspora to continuous repression. 

Meanwhile, Margaret Monyani and Allan Wefwafwa discuss the opposite side of the coin: when cyberspace allows vulnerable communities to participate in activism that is otherwise restricted in traditional public spaces. Using internet ethnography and interviews with social media users, they reveal how women in Kenya defy legal and societal restrictions on their freedom of expression by posting nude pictures online and maintaining control over their bodies. Social media platforms in the Global South are widely being used in a fight to expand social freedoms, online citizenship, and political debates, as was seen as early as 2011, during the Arab Spring.

Toward a progressive cybersecurity practice

‘Critical Perspectives’ does not stop at critiquing; it also addresses one of the most difficult questions in critical security studies: What do progressive security practices look like? Crystal Whetstone and Luna K.C. call for the application of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 and the women, peace, and security agenda to cybersecurity. They also insist on the need for an international legal framework that acknowledges how cybercrime and cyber violence disproportionality affect women and girls. 

Similarly, Erin Saltman and Dina Hussein argue for global baseline standards for data protection and privacy. They write that an international body should be established to promote such standards and mitigate divides between the Global North and South. Even if such calls seem utopian and unpragmatic in the contested realm of cyberspace regulation, it is important for critical research to continuously push for a more just world, and engage with the very meaning of that ‘justice’.

Future paths for critical cybersecurity

‘Critical Perspectives’ is undoubtedly a significant contribution to critical cybersecurity, applying feminist and postcolonial perspectives to a field often limited by conventional IR questions and frameworks. Future research should forge new, cybersecurity-informed theoretical, conceptual, and methodological frameworks to contribute in turn to feminist and postcolonial literature. The book does so to some degree, employing concepts like ‘technocolonialism’ and ‘digital transnational authoritarianism’, but its questions tend to be more empirical than theoretical. 

It is also intriguing to think about how the human-centric approach to cybersecurity presented in the book connects with queer theory, as well as feminist and postcolonial approaches that adopt a new materialist perspective or a ‘more-than-human’ lens, emphasising the active role of bodies, objects, and non-human forces in shaping social phenomena. Given the book’s assertion that feminist scholarship has neglected digital politics, examining how critical cybersecurity perspectives could disrupt existing frameworks and introduce novel ones is essential for advancing not only the cybersecurity agenda but also more digitally informed research in IR and beyond.