Where to do a PhD in Cyber Conflict in Europe?

Are you interested in pursuing a PhD in the field of cyber conflict or cyber security? This page provides a non-comprehensive list of relevant PhD programs and available supervisors in Europe, followed by their respective biographies (by alphabetical order).

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Last updated: 20 December 2022.

OVERVIEW

SUPERVISORS

University	Department / program	Supervisor	Areas of interest	Part-time option	Remote option
ETH Zurich	Center for Security Studies	Andreas Wenger	Cyber security, Technology, Security Studies	No	No

Andreas Wenger is professor of International and Swiss Security Policy at ETH Zurich. He studied History, Political Science and German Literature at the University of Zurich. He holds a Doctorate from the University of Zurich and was a visiting fellow at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and the Center of International Studies, Princeton University. During that period, he wrote his doctoral dissertation analyzing the role of nuclear weapons in the Cold War international system. The focus of his main research interests lies on security and strategic studies and the history of international relations. Within the MA program in Comparative and International Studies (MACIS), he teaches seminars on political violence and security politics.

Andreas Wenger has been the Director of the Center for Security Studies (CSS) at ETH Zurich since 2002. The CSS is a center of excellence for national and international security policy. Since its foundation in 1986, the CSS has fulfilled a national role at the intersection of academia and public policy and a key bridging function vis-​à-​vis society and politics. The CSS maintains a strong partnership with the Federal Department of Defense, Civil Protection and Sport (DDPS) and the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs (FDFA). These partnerships cover research, education, and policy engagement.

University	Department / program	Supervisor	Areas of interest	Part-time option	Remote option
Hertie School	N/A	Anita Gohdes	Digital repression, digital authoritarianism, Hybrid warfare, Propaganda, Information Operations	No	No

I’m Professor of International and Cyber Security at the Hertie School in Berlin. Previously, I was Assistant Professor of International Relations at the University of Zurich, and postdoctoral research fellow at the Belfer Center and the Women and Public Policy Program in the Harvard Kennedy School. Prior to that I worked at the Chair for Political Science IV at the University of Mannheim, where I obtained my PhD.

My research focuses on political violence, state repression and the measurement of human rights. My book project theoretically and empirically investigates how governments use cyber controls to inform their strategies of violent repression. The book is based on my dissertation, which was awarded the 2014-2016 Walter Isard Dissertation Award (given every two years by the Peace Science Society International), and the Deutscher Studienpreis 2015 (German Dissertation Prize) for the Social Sciences.

My work has been covered by various news outlets and is accepted or appears in the American Journal of Political Science,  Journal of Politics, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Peace Research, Nature Human Behavior, Journal of Human Rights, and at Oxford University Press. I am also an Associate Editor at the Journal of Peace Research.

Since 2009, I have been working for the Human Rights Data Analysis Group. Read our UN report on the documented death toll in Syria here, and our report on the number of killings in Syrian detention centers here. I’ve also worked with Amnesty International on investigating the human rights costs on Internet shutdowns.

My pronouns are she/her.

University	Department / program	Supervisor	Areas of interest	Part-time option	Remote option
King’s College London	Department of War Studies	Tim Sevens	Politics of cybersecurity; cyberwarfare; cyber conflict; political economy of cybersecurity.	Yes	No

Dr Stevens is Senior Lecturer in Global Security and head of the King’s Cyber Security Research Group. His research looks at the intersection of technology, politics and global security practices, with specific interests in the politics and governance of cybersecurity. He has also written on time and temporality in International Relations, including in a monograph, Cyber Security and the Politics of Time (Cambridge University Press, 2016).

He joined the Department of War Studies as a lecturer in 2016, having previously taught at King’s and Royal Holloway University of London.

Dr Stevens has a BA (Hons) in Archaeology from University College London, and an MA, MRes and PhD in War Studies from King’s College London. He is an elected Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. He is also a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and Senior Fellow and Associate Researcher at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers (Cnam), Paris. He is the inaugural International Fellow at the Research Institute for Sociotechnical Cyber Security (RISCS).

Tim Stevens’ research is situated at the intersection of technology, politics and global security. He is particularly interested in information technologies and their roles in shaping and enabling global security practices. He has written extensively on the politics and governance of cybersecurity, especially in its strategic and international dimensions.

His current research projects explore: the role of offensive cyber operations in UK strategy; the nature and character of fragmentation in global cybersecurity governance; and topologies of cyberwarfare.

University	Department / program	Supervisor	Areas of interest	Part-time option	Remote option
Loughborough University	Computer Science	Tim Watson	cyber resilience, critical infrastructure, adversarial AI, defensive deception	Yes	Yes

Tim Watson is a Professor at Loughboroeugh University. He is also the Programme Director for Alan Turing Institute’s defence and security programme. He is an adviser to various parts of the UK government and to several professional and standards bodies.

Tim’s research includes EU-funded projects on combating cyber crime, UK MoD research into automated defence, insider threat and secure remote working, and UKRI-funded research, focusing on the protection of critical national infrastructure against cyber attack. In PETRAS he is the Chair of the Research Excellence Board.

University	Department / program	Supervisor	Areas of interest	Part-time option	Remote option
Masaryk University	Institute of law and technology, Faculty of law	Stupka Vaclav	Legal, policy and compliance issues related to cybercrime, cybersecurity and cyber defence	Yes	No

Deputy director of the cooperative research institute focused on cybersecurity, that was established by Masaryk University, Czech Technical University and Brno University of Technology. Focus on research coordination, coordination of services provided by the CSH within the European Digital Innovation Hub consortium and management of certification activities of the CSH.

University	Department / program	Supervisor	Areas of interest	Part-time option	Remote option
Bordeaux	Faculté de droit et de science politique	Sébastien-Yves Laurent	Cyber coercion. Cyber conflict. Cyber governance.  Epistemology & methodology	Yes	Yes

Professor at the University of Bordeaux (UB, Faculty of Law and Political Science), Vice-President of the UB and lecturer at Sciences Po Paris.

In the context of state analysis, Sébastien-Yves’ three main research interests are the role of social sciences for analysis and anticipation, the dynamics of armed conflict, and issues of governance and conflict in cyberspace

In collaboration with Jean-Pierre Bat, François David, Philippe Hayez and Floran Vadillo, he directs the seminar “METIS, Intelligence and democratic societies”.

University	Department / program	Supervisor	Areas of interest	Part-time option	Remote option
University of Nottingham	Politics and International Relations	Joe Burton	Cyber war, cyber crime, emerging technologies, cyber Diplomacy	Yes	No

My research is focused on the relationship between culture, politics and cyber security (cyber warfare, cyber peace, cyber diplomacy, cyber crime etc.) and the positive and negative impacts of emerging technologies (e.g. Artificial Intelligence and Quantum Computing) on international relations.  I have extensive interdisciplinary research experience, including working with behavioural scientists, statisticians, and computer scientists on security issues, including cyber security, AI, maritime security, non-proliferation, regional collective security, information warfare and hybrid threats.

I have worked at the highest levels of professional politics and policy, as an advisor to Cabinet Ministers in New Zealand and the UK, a national campaign coordinator, legislative assistant, researcher, and political organiser.

I am recipient of the US Department of State SUSI Fellowship (New York, Washington D.C.), the Taiwan Fellowship (Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Taipei), the Fernandes Fellowship (University of Warwick) and I have been a visiting researcher and lecturer at the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence (CCDCOE, Tallinn, Estonia).

I hold a Doctorate in International Relations and a Master of International Studies degree from the University of Otago, New Zealand and an undergraduate degree in International Relations from Aberystwyth University in Wales.

University	Department / program	Supervisor	Areas of interest	Part-time option	Remote option
University of Oxford	Blavatnik School of Government	Roxana Radu	Tech & public policy, Internet governance, cybersecurity governance	Yes	No

Roxana Radu is a Departmental Lecturer in Technology and Public Policy. Her research focuses on the governance of digital technologies and internet-related policymaking. She is the author of the monograph ‘Negotiating Internet Governance’ (Oxford University Press, 2019), inspired by her work with the diplomatic community in Geneva, Switzerland. Since 2020, she has been the Program Chair of the Global Internet Governance Academic Network (GigaNet).

Prior to joining the Blavatnik School, Roxana was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, University of Oxford and a Research Associate at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. She holds a PhD (summa cum laude) in International Relations from the Graduate Institute and an MA in Political Science (with honours) from the Central European University.

University	Department / program	Supervisor	Areas of interest	Part-time option	Remote option
University of Portsmouth	Strategy, Enterprise, Innovation (SEI)	Clare Stevens	Critical cyber security; science and technology studies; cyber conflict	Yes	Yes

I am a Teaching Fellow in International Security based at RAF College Cranwell, working as part of the Portsmouth Military Education team (PME).

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.

I am interested in research that takes a critical and reflexive approach to matters of security, and that questions commonplace assumptions about cybersecurity 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.

University	Department / program	Supervisor	Areas of interest	Part-time option	Remote option
Westphalian University	Computer Science, Cyber Security	Christian Dietrich	Threat Intelligence, Attribution, Malware Analysis	No	No

In 2017, Chris joined the Westphalian University as a professor of computer and network security. He is interested in systems security, and in particular malware analysis techniques in the context of targeted attacks, as well as the broader field of threat intelligence analysis.

With years of experience as a technical threat intelligence analyst with CrowdStrike, Chris has dealt with advanced nation-state targeted attacks.

Together with Lars Wallenborn, he initiated and contributes to the Armchair Investigators podcast dealing with malware, cybercrime and cyber espionage (in German).