Deconstructing National Security Strategy as Professional Struggle

The practice of writing national security strategy, which justifies the collection of secret intelligence and use of state violence, has not yet received the scholarly attention it warrants. By deconstructing New Zealand’s first ‘national security strategy’ I find the authors of Secure Together place New Zealand’s constitutional arrangements in jeopardy as they enact a permanent deferral of the co-operation and contestation needed to transform a governmentality of unease into more participatory forms of democratic security. Compensating for the limits of that distil technique, I draw on my proximal experience as an academic and former security professional to argue that security bureaucrats have written this governance document to promote the doxa upon which their profession exists and their exalted status depends. Given the saliant insights generated by my double epistemological helix, I reflect on the possibility for disciplinary ir to embrace the radical explanatory potential of a politico-cultural anthropology of security.