Description
Digital risk arises from contemporary conditions of informational hyperconnectivity and consequent relations of value and dependence. As the pandemic has illustrated, increased use of and reliance upon digital networks and systems has heightened awareness of these dynamics and deepened attention to digital risk as the object of public policy, corporate practice and user behaviours. Scholarship on digital risk management, as found in the cybersecurity literature and adjacent fields, has yet to fully link these processes and practices to wider notions of societal and systemic risk, particularly to sociological accounts of the contemporary ‘risk society’. This paper explores the notion of ‘digital risk’, asking how we might understand it through a sociotechnical lens. It pays specific attention to how we can begin to theorise ‘digital risk’ in Large Technical Systems (LTS), in which our understanding of risk goes beyond organisational imperatives of ‘risk management’ and into treating digital risk as a set of productive knowledges and practices within a political economy of uncertainty. This emergent research programme will contribute to theoretical and methodological innovation at the intersection of International Relations (IR) and Science and Technology Studies (STS).
