LAUSR

In the process of bringing together this special issue of the Australian Journal of International Affairs, we were struck by how frequently the term ‘national security’ is used and abused, by both academics and policymakers. Some use it to refer to conventional statist threats. Others employ it as a broad catch-all for anything that may create or imply harms against anyone in a particular polity. Still others use the term to justify an array of populist and politicised policy choices with apparently little to justify the link between the threat and the referent object—that is, the thing being secured. This is confusing to say the least. After all, it is often assumed that national security implies a particular set of underlying judgments about the ways in which political communities might go about guarding against potential harms. To the extent that the nation state remains the referent object of security under such a formulation, characterisations like this are broadly correct. But it is also then often assumed that national security implies a particular type of security concept, not to mention security practice. It has become commonplace, for instance, to refer to a ‘traditional’ national security paradigm, as though the state is somehow irrelevant or incapable of adapting to change (Sil and Katzenstein 2010). Our view is that it is cartoonish at best to depict national security as an old-fashioned (Newman 2010) and narrow field of study. We further believe that it is erroneous to dismiss it as the exclusive domain of realpolitik and outmoded conceptions of the national interest in contemporary international society. We therefore agree with T. V. Paul and Norrin Ripsman’s (2010) observation that states remain the basic security actors in international relations, and this means that deepening our knowledge of national security in contemporary circumstances is vital. This is especially so since state capacities in identifying, categorising and responding to harm have become stretched by globalisation, advancements in technology and the rise of a host of threats, from transnational actors to natural disasters. It would be wrong, of course, to suggest that national security has been absent from the literature on security studies. There has been much contemporary scholarship on national security policy in democratic nations, centred especially on the transatlantic space (for example, Dannreuther and Peterson 2006; Webber, Sperling, and Smith 2013). In addition, a large body of work exists on the national security postures of Asian nations, particularly Japan (for instance, Hughes 2004; Lind 2016; Oros 2008), China (Christensen 2011; Ji 2015) and Australia as well (Medcalf 2014). Often this has been done using a specific theoretical lens, or from a particular paradigmatic perspective. Regional-security-complex theorists (Wirth 2015), neoclassical realists (Saltzman 2015) and liberal