News & Events
Past Events
Historicizing National Security in the 21st Century
4th October 2023, Deakin Downtown
For many countries, the first few decades of the twenty-first century were defined by the concept of ‘national security’. In the wake of 9/11, governments around the world developed new laws, structures, and institutions, in the name of ‘national security.’ Yet an increasingly interconnected world tested national identities, and exposed states and populations to new vulnerabilities. Following an earlier workshop on the origins of concept in the 1920s-30s, in this event we untangled the concept of ‘national security’ in the 21st century:
• Why was ‘national security’ selected by 21st century policymakers over other established concepts, such as ‘national interest’ and ‘national defence’?
• How was ‘national security’ deployed to play on emotions, such as fear, anxiety, and hope?
• How did new kinds of security threats - including climate change, digital technologies, and international terrorism - intersect with traditional security issues?
• How will recent developments, such as Russia’s war with Ukraine and tensions between the United States and China, affect academic security studies? Will these developments, questions of war and peace, lead back (or forward) to a more traditional understanding of security and security research?
Hosted by the ARC ‘A Conceptual History of National Security in Australia since 1901’ team in the Centre for Contemporary Histories at Deakin University, this workshop brought together visiting scholars from the Security History Network in Europe and Virginia Tech Center for Humanities with scholars across Australia working on security-related research.
Full program available below.
20230912 Historicizing N in the C21 Workshop Program FINAL.pdfEnd of Empire Workshop: Threats, Security, and Stress in the Australia-UK relationship
26 June 2023, Deakin Downtown
Recent events have revived longstanding questions about the nature and meaning of the Australian relationship with the United Kingdom. Brexit, AUKUS, the death of a long-reigning monarch, and renewed calls for a Republic have shone a light on our economic, military, historical and political ties with the UK. Meanwhile, the unfolding effects of globalisation, China’s economic rise, and the climate crisis underscore the importance of Australia’s position in the Asia-Pacific, with some suggesting that regional relationships should take precedence over historic links to the colonial parent.
Co-hosted by the History Council of Victoria and the Centre for Contemporary Histories, this workshop brought together visiting scholars from ‘Threatened Orders - Societies Under Stress’ with the National Security team at Deakin University to examine the ways in which stress, broadly applied, has manifested in the Australian-British relationship with the end of empire.
Our first panel focussed on Australia, Empire and the Pacific, with papers examining Australia’s role in (de)colonization, international development, and external politics in Papua New Guinea and the South Pacific Islands. Our second panel examined environmental security and Australian identity, with papers exploring food production, drought, Australian settlement and placemaking, and expression of climate anxiety. Our final panel explored national identity, with papers investigating the position of formerly colonised subjects in Britain and Australia, the impact of Britain joining the European Union on Australia’s relationship to the UK, the Anzac resurgence, and imperial nostalgia in Australian defence policy.
Full program available below, and see a report from our German colleagues on HSozKult here.
20230608 End of Empire Workshop V2.pdfIdeas and Concepts of National Security: Australia and Europe in Comparative Perspective
1-2 December 2022
In December 2022, we traveled to Germany to co-convene a workshop with Eckart Conze, Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at the University of Marburg. The workshop brought together scholars on security from Germany and other parts of the world, exploring the different historic uses of "national security" internationally.
Papers by the Australian team focussed on the interwar years. While US scholars have explored the intellectual and policy transition from 'defense' to 'national security' in the late 1930s and 1940s, they remain mostly within the boundaries of think-tanks and government circles. But the term was used in other countries, including Australia, during the 1930s, and it was deployed in a wide variety of ways. Our research demonstrates the need to go wider and deeper in locating of the origins of national security as it emerged between the two world wars.
Papers by the 'National Security in Australia' team:
David Lowe - 'Enacting Australian National Security: Intelligence and Intransigence'
Carolyn Holbrook - 'Concepts of National Security in Australia during the Interwar Period: the National Insurance Debate'
Mia Martin Hobbs - 'Compound Threats: Themes and Uses of National Security in Australia in the 1930s'
From left to right: Carolyn Holbrook, Mia Martin Hobbs, Eckart Conze, David Lowe, David Ekbladh at the Herder Institute, Marburg
Australian Dilemmas: Then and Now - a forum on Australian Foreign Policy
20th July 2022, Robert Menzies Institute and the University of Melbourne
After a day of discussion on the historical forces that shaped Australia's past and present standing in the world - including ideology, technology, international partnerships, and the environment - Professor David Lowe took part in the dinner panel with Geraldine Doogue, Greg Sheriden, and Maj Gen Mick Ryan to cast a look forward at the decisions Australians will need to make politically, culturally, and strategically to navigate the trials of a more volatile century.
Fulbright Fellow visit
July 2022
We were delighted to host Professor David Ekbladh (Tufts University) for a month this winter. Professor Ekbladh's forthcoming book, Plowshares into Swords: Weaponized Knowledge, Liberal Order, and the League of Nations (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming 2022) reveals how new ideas developed by the international community in the interwar period shaped American thinking on the modern global order. Professor Ekbladh visited Deakin on a Fulbright fellowship, and through this collaboration we explored American/Australian understandings of national security in the 1930s.
Commentary on uses of "national security" by Australian politicians
Mia Martin Hobbs, "'National security' once meant more than just conjuring up threats beyond our borders", The Conversation, 24 February 2022.
New Interventions on the History of Australian National Security
Panel at the Australian Historical Association 2021 conference
2 December 2021
The concept of ‘national security’ has become particularly powerful since the terrorist attacks of September 2001. The term has justified the establishment of a greatly expanded national security state in Australia and rafts of new legislation, all underpinned by political rhetoric that encourages us to be alert to imminent threat. This militarised mobilisation of the concept of ‘national security’ has been countered by appeals to expand the term to include environmental, social, economic, health and other threats to the security of the nation-state. These three papers seek to expand the parameters within which we understand the term ‘national security’, to alert us to the fact that the concept has a history of its own, and to begin the process of recording that history.
Paper 1: 'We Are Australians': Security Assessments of Soviet Children Applying to Return to Australia, 1956-61 - Ebony Nillson
Paper 2: 'The Security Situation Changes Everything': Empathy and Ideology in the US Reconstruction of Iraq - Mia Martin Hobbs
Paper 3: Towards a genealogy of Australian national security - David Lowe
Chair: Carolyn Holbrook
Concepts of national security: Australian and international perspectives
25 November 2020
How has the idea of national security evolved over the last 100 years? Who tells us how to feel secure/insecure and how has this changed over time? And how do Australian perspectives, contemporary and historical, compare with other conceptions and architectures of national security?
On 25 November 2020, the Australian Policy History Network and National Security College, ANU co-hosted a one-day conference on ‘Concepts of National Security: Australian and international perspectives’. The program was shaped largely by David Lowe and Carolyn Holbrook and sought to contextualise concepts of national security in different temporal and geographical contexts, with an emphasis on its significance in Australia.
The conference included presentations and discussion with Caroline Millar (Deputy Secretary, National Security, Prime Minister and Cabinet), Eckart Conze (Philipps University Marburg), Jon Piccini (ACU), William Stolz (ANU), Matt McDonald (UQ), Joan Beaumont (ANU/Deakin), David Ekbladh (Tufts, Boston), Ian Kemish AM (UQ), Sylvester Johnson (Virginia Tech), Frank Bongiorno (ANU), Matthew Ricketson (Deakin), Mia Martin Hobbs (Melbourne/Deakin), Sue Thompson (National Security College, ANU), Rory Medcalf (National Security College, ANU),and Ian Warren (Deakin).
A recording of the conference is available on the Contemporary Histories Research Group website