Deconstructing National Security Strategy as Professional Struggle

What is it about?

This article critically examines the practice of writing national security strategy by deconstructing Secure Together, New Zealand’s first ‘national security strategy.’ I use a double epistemological helix to argue that the strategy’s authors enact a permanent deferral of the co-operation and contestation needed to transform a governmentality of unease into more participatory forms of democratic security because they want to promote the doxa upon which their profession exists and their exalted status depends. I also suggest disciplinary IR should embrace the radical explanatory potential of a politico-cultural anthropology of security.

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