Understanding UK security politics in the 21st century

The UK faces unprecedented transnational security challenges and a rapidly evolving security environment. State threats and renewed geopolitical contestation, the Covid pandemic, the escalating ecological crisis, the outcomes of war on terror and ‘forever wars’, and the effects of the 2007-08 global financial crisis - have transformed our shared experiences of what counts as ‘security’, and how it might best be addressed domestically and transnationally. Veteran diplomat Peter Ricketts argues these “major disruptions make it essential to rethink the fundamentals of national security”. The UK Government recognises this. The 2021 Integrated Review of Security Defence, Development and Foreign Policy (IR) is the key statement of how the UK Government has sought to ‘change our approach [to security] and adapt to the new world emerging around us’. Threaded through the IR are gestures towards a more expansive vision of security than has traditionally been adopted, noting, for instance, the need to tackle ‘the priority issues – health, security, economic well-being and the environment – that matter most to our citizens in their everyday lives’. Yet there is little detail on how this is to be achieved, and the IR has been criticised for ultimately reproducing a narrow conception of security rooted in military power and geopolitical competition (Reeve, 2021). There is a clear appetite for innovation in UK security policy. Yet there remains a tension between the ‘traditional’ approach in the IR, the diminishing salience of this framework in light of transnational challenges, and the more expansive language invoked in the IR itself. Responding to this requires a broad-based societal consensus. An inclusive national dialogue on the future of UK national security is thus of considerable value, but we lack an evidence base and understanding of competing perspectives upon which such a debate can take place. This project will generate that knowledge through research on how three key stakeholder communities think about and understand ‘security’ in, for and by the UK: the security policy-making community, the public, and the peace and security NGO community. The project adds significant value by developing the intellectual framework and empirical resources on which a national conversation can occur and setting the debate in motion through targeted outputs, convening and knowledge exchange.