Abstract
Because of the pervasiveness of digital technologies, academic interest in cybersecurity studies from all disciplines has surged. Cyber threats have become a compelling problem for international security and the object of a growing interest in International Relations (IR). IR scholars have sought to catch up with the empirical evolutions of conflict in cyberspace; to unpuzzle motivations behind state interactions in this domain. However, rigorous scholarship, in particular theorisation and conceptualisation (Smeets 2022, Egloff 2022) remains at an early stage. Still today, the field needs progress in methodological tools (Stevens 2018). While the literature has been primarily focused on meta-theoretical work, one of the methodological advances in cybersecurity studies has been the application of Foreign Policy Decision Making (FPDM) methods that include scenario playing and simulating. As McDermott (2019) and Gomez (2021) pioneered the “cognitive turn” in cybersecurity studies, this approach allows looking beyond the black-box of the state, by shifting to an agent-oriented system. All the while, scenario-based experiments can provide cybersecurity scholars with a fertile ground to observe decision-making dynamics (Gomez and Whyte 2022). However these tools are not the panacea, and there are significant obstacles in developing an experimental design, primarily when research is conducted in a comparative approach. On this basis, the purpose of this paper is to discuss the methodological framework in an ongoing comparative study that looks at decision-making dynamics of cybersecurity professionals, using a scenario-based experimental design. The study will also discuss difficulties in developing cyber threat scenarios, in a domain that differs significantly from that of the kinetic domain. This paper will also address potential deadlocks in conducting cross-national cybersecurity research, such as difficulties in matching samples, the fragility of trust between agents, and other barriers to information sharing.