This is a PLuS Alliance course offered through UNSW. Students at UNSW, Arizona State University and Kings College London who are in a PLuS Alliance program can enrol into this course.

This course will provide postgraduate students with a detailed examination of the current debates within the fields of Politics and International Relations (from both philosophical and social scientific perspectives) surrounding the important and increasingly prominent area of cyber security. Students will be introduced to how cyber security has been defined, and analysed, from a range of perspectives, including the following: Critical Security Studies, International Ethics/ International Political Theory and Intelligence Studies.

Students will address, and critically enage with, themes including the tension between individual privacy and state security, the proposed threats of 'cyber warfare' and 'cyber terrorism', and the ethics of certain forms of intelligence collection. Attention will also be given to the distinction between how cyber security is understood in computer science and IT and how it is understood from an international politics perspective by focusing on the perceived 'referent objects' of the perceived threat (a phrase take from Critical Security Studies). This course will be of great value to postgraduate students interested in one or more of the following areas: politics, the cyber industry, defence, the academic study of International Relations (IR), practices and ethics of intelligence collection, the media, and the use of individual and organizational computing systems.