Description
Scholars have long debated the widening of security agendas in conceptual and normative terms, arguing that security has, or should be, widened beyond traditional military-state security to include, inter alia, environmental, human, and gendered insecurities (Booth, 1991; Fierke, 1998; Hudson, 2005; UNDP, 1994). These debates are now prima facie reflected in public national security and defence documents, yet these documents – now published by 94 countries - have barely been studied by international security scholars. This paper systematically analyses how and by whom security issues have been constructed in these documents. We (1) map the issues identified by states in their current top-level public national security documents, and (2) analyse the varied ways in which they have been constructed as threats, risks, priorities, etc. We employ a unique comprehensive corpus of documents collected by us, and a bespoke implementation of automated semantic content analysis based on natural language processing technologies.
