The stockyard paradox: a metaphor for research security policy?

In October 2025, Caroline Wagner and Hans Jorgen Gåsemyr wrote of the ‘stockyard paradox’ in research security: how universities, like ranchers eager to protect their stock from theft, were self-isolating, resulting in ‘the protection gradually undermining what it seeks to protect and creating a different kind of vulnerability’. In particular, they question whether the long-term implications of research security – many of which remain unquantified – were worth the short-term protections that they offered to university and higher education research ecosystems. Such questions are supported by a discontent in academia at being used as national security actors or proxies, or having their research curtailed or interfered with in the interests of good policy.