ABSTRACT
In order to explore the political process that moved cyber-threats onto the political agenda, I will assemble a theoretical framework in this chapter. This will provide the reader with the necessary vocabulary and background to understand some of the thoughts developed in later chapters. The approach most closely associated with issues of threat construction in political science is the so-called Copenhagen school’s securitisation theory (Wæver 1995; Buzan et al. 1998). It serves as a starting point for the framework of analysis that is developed in this chapter. However, despite its key role in this study and in security studies more generally, securitisation theory has a number of shortcomings. These are discussed in the following, and amendments from additional strands of theory that add analytical depth to certain problem areas of the Copenhagen school will be introduced. In pulling these various theoretical strands together, I create a dynamical framework based on securitisation theory that mainly focuses on threat frames presented by key actors at various stages in time.
