{"id":109,"date":"2024-01-30T09:35:50","date_gmt":"2024-01-30T09:35:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.making-security.gsi.lmu.de\/?page_id=109"},"modified":"2024-05-14T08:52:40","modified_gmt":"2024-05-14T07:52:40","slug":"title","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.making-security.gsi.lmu.de\/index.php\/title\/","title":{"rendered":"About the Project"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Today, the political authority of elected politicians to make binding decisions is often superseded by the epistemic authority of security experts. Rather than exclusively deploying their own coercive capacities, many advanced democracies have come to rely on rules to incentivize and steer indirect security governance by non-state actors. For instance, Europe\u2019s and the United States\u2019 responses to Russia\u2019s large-scale aggression in Ukraine display that most democratic states hardly \u201cmake national security\u201d by themselves. Instead, they draw on commercial arms producers, private security firms as well as tech companies and regulate them to ensure they contribute to national security. Yet, these transformations are neither uniform nor uncontested. There are countervailing dynamics towards military capacity-building, and prevailing foundations of authority as well as predominant policy instruments vary across security fields and across countries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In our project, funded by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, we seek to capture this \u201ccontested complexity\u201d by deploying a novel typology of security states. To replace the uniform notion of the<\/em> Westphalian state, we conceptualize four different types of security states: (i) positive, (ii) managing, (iii) technocratic, (iv) regulatory. These types vary according to the prevailing foundation of authority (i.e. political or epistemic) and the predominant policy instrument (i.e. rules or capacities).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Types of Security States<\/td>Policy Instrument<\/td><\/tr>
Capacity<\/td>Rules<\/td><\/tr>
Authority Basis<\/td>Political<\/td>Positive<\/strong> <\/td>Managing<\/strong><\/td><\/tr>
Epistemic<\/td>Technocratic<\/strong> <\/td>Regulatory<\/strong> <\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Drawing on this typology, we map security policy-making in the sectors of conventional warfare, military support services, critical infrastructures and cyber warfare in the four most capable democratic powers (i.e. United States, India, France, United Kingdom) in the period of 1990\u2013today. Beyond this mapping, we draw on a pluralist theoretical framework to explain variation in types of security states as well as shifts from one type to another. Our explanatory conditions and pathways of reforming security states link the structural drivers of technological innovation and security pressures with interests-, ideas- and institutions-based approaches. Our research design draws on congruence analysis and causal process-tracing and aims to analyze a variety of secondary and primary sources, including semi-structured interviews with firm representatives, military officials, experts from think tanks etc.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Our project aims to make several important contributions. Conceptually, we take the regulatory governance framework to national security, demonstrate its analytical leverage, and further refine this heuristically productive approach by developing a more fine-grained typology and new causal mechanisms. Empirically, we generate extensive amounts of original comparative data on variation within and across security states. Last but not least, our new understanding of the security state and its transformation will provide policy-relevant insights into contemporary attempts of democratic military powers to reform their security states in response to challenges such as the return of large-scale, territorial aggression in Europe, heating geopolitical rivalries between the US and China, or the transformation of security policies in cyberspace.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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