![Clare Stevens](https://profiles-cardiff.imgix.net/attachments/5504?w=200&h=200&auto=format&crop=faces&fit=crop&q=90")
Dr Clare Stevens
(she/her)
Lecturer in International Relations
- Available for postgraduate supervision
Overview
I am interested in research that takes a critical and reflexive approach to matters of security, and that questions commonplace assumptions about cybersecurity and technologies at the international and national security levels. My research is interdiscplinary in nature, sitting at the intersections between critical security studies, International Relations, STS, sociology and politics.
My current research interests include:
- Cybersecurity politics: how it is contested and fought over between state actors, their bureaucracies and agencies and with those outside of governments.
- Cyber Power: while the UK government has recently declared its intent to be 'a democratic and responsible cyber power', there is still a lot of doctrinal and strategic work to be done in clarifying what this means in practice.
- Sociological approaches to technologies and scientific knowledge
- Secrecy Studies and critical approaches to how knowledge is made and unmade in global politics
I am happy to receive informal enquiries relating to doctoral degree (Ph.D) supervision in the areas of International Relations, Security Studies and also sociological approaches technology and scientific knowledge such as Science and Technology Studies.
Publication
2024
- Van Veeren, E., Stevens, C. and Senu, A. 2024. Secrecy games, power, and resistance in global politics. Review of International Studies (10.1017/S0260210524000275)
- Slayton, R. and Stevens, C. 2024. Expertise at the boundaries: Understanding critical infrastructure cybersecurity. H-Diplo Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum 3(4), article number: 6.
2023
- Stevens, C. 2023. Technologies and time tempers: how things mediate a state’s (cyber vulnerability) disclosure practices. Secrecy and Society 3(1), article number: 1072. (10.55917/2377-6188.1072)
- Stevens, C., Van Veeran, E., Rappert, B. and Thomas, O. D. 2023. Being curious with secrecy. Secrecy and Society 3(1), article number: 1078. (10.55917/2377-6188.1078)
2022
- Dwyer, A. C., Stevens, C., Pijnenburg Muller, L., Dunn Cavelty, M., Coles-Kemp, L. and Thornton, P. 2022. What can a critical cybersecurity do?. International Political Sociology 16(3), article number: olac013. (10.1093/ips/olac013)
- Stevens, C. L. and Haggman, A. 2022. Connectivity and exploitation in the digital age. In: McGlinchey, S. ed. Foundations of International Relations. E-International Relations London: Bloomsbury Publishing Company, pp. 275-290.
- Stevens, C. 2022. Book review: Radical secrecy: The ends of transparency in datafied America. [Online]. Security Dialogue. Available at: https://blogs.prio.org/SecurityDialogue/2022/01/book-review-radical-secrecy-the-ends-of-transparency-in-datafied-america/
2019
- Stevens, C. 2019. Assembling cybersecurity: the politics and materiality of technical malware reports and the case of Stuxnet. Contemporary Security Policy 41(1), pp. 129-152. (10.1080/13523260.2019.1675258)
Articles
- Van Veeren, E., Stevens, C. and Senu, A. 2024. Secrecy games, power, and resistance in global politics. Review of International Studies (10.1017/S0260210524000275)
- Slayton, R. and Stevens, C. 2024. Expertise at the boundaries: Understanding critical infrastructure cybersecurity. H-Diplo Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum 3(4), article number: 6.
- Stevens, C. 2023. Technologies and time tempers: how things mediate a state’s (cyber vulnerability) disclosure practices. Secrecy and Society 3(1), article number: 1072. (10.55917/2377-6188.1072)
- Stevens, C., Van Veeran, E., Rappert, B. and Thomas, O. D. 2023. Being curious with secrecy. Secrecy and Society 3(1), article number: 1078. (10.55917/2377-6188.1078)
- Dwyer, A. C., Stevens, C., Pijnenburg Muller, L., Dunn Cavelty, M., Coles-Kemp, L. and Thornton, P. 2022. What can a critical cybersecurity do?. International Political Sociology 16(3), article number: olac013. (10.1093/ips/olac013)
- Stevens, C. 2019. Assembling cybersecurity: the politics and materiality of technical malware reports and the case of Stuxnet. Contemporary Security Policy 41(1), pp. 129-152. (10.1080/13523260.2019.1675258)
Book sections
- Stevens, C. L. and Haggman, A. 2022. Connectivity and exploitation in the digital age. In: McGlinchey, S. ed. Foundations of International Relations. E-International Relations London: Bloomsbury Publishing Company, pp. 275-290.
Websites
- Stevens, C. 2022. Book review: Radical secrecy: The ends of transparency in datafied America. [Online]. Security Dialogue. Available at: https://blogs.prio.org/SecurityDialogue/2022/01/book-review-radical-secrecy-the-ends-of-transparency-in-datafied-america/
Biography
My PhD thesis took an in-depth critical look at cybersecurity politics in the United States. Despite its prominence in security discourses and policies in the United States, what counts as ‘cybersecurity’ and how it is to be practised by state actors is still a matter of ongoing contention. By deploying the analytical framework of ‘boundary work’ from Science and Technology Studies (STS), I argued that what cybersecurity ‘is,’ and how its boundaries are drawn, are not overdetermined by strategic or technological imperatives, so much as they reflect the efforts of different entities to defend and extend their own organisational and symbolic boundaries. As my thesis found, this approach opened up critical questions over the extent to which security imaginaries and conceptions of US national identity work as important codes of intelligibility in (and transformed through) cybersecurity politics over time, finding that technologies, consequential categories, institutional responsibilities, political authority, and national identity are also constituted and challenged in and through these debates.
As well as exploring cybersecurity politics in other contexts and settings, my current reasearch is also looking at the role that time and temporality plays in government secrecy and is also examining what emerging conceptions of 'cyber power,' and its strategic implications, mean for the UK.
Contact Details
Research themes
Specialisms
- Cybersecurity
- Secrecy studies
- Science and Technology Studies
- Security studies