Introduction

The title of Raymond Carver’s 1981 collection of short stories, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, is inspiring, and, when put as a question, demanding. The very issue of understanding a theme is fundamentally an ontological and epistemological, but also, ultimately, a political one. It is political in the spirit of Schmitt (1932) and Lasswell (1936), drawing lines of demarcation, distilling the acceptable and accepted, segregating others from us. When talking about international cybersecurity we cannot escape the ontological, epistemological and political issues that underlie and surround it.