CeSeR Seminar Series - Why States Publish National Security Strategies: A Multi-LLM Validation Study of State Transparency Motivations
Venue
Room 1.12 Practice Suite, Chrystal Macmillan BuildingMedia
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Description
Why States Publish National Security Strategies: A Multi-LLM Validation Study of State Transparency Motivations
Why do states publish national security and defence documents? The existing literature, which is limited and mostly focused on the US, argues that the main purposes of these documents are to communicate strategic intentions to allies and adversaries, provide a measure of democratic accountability and legitimacy, and shape an umbrella narrative for the multiple government departments and agencies involved in security and defence. However, 119 countries now publish these documents, and they vary widely in size, wealth, geography, and democratic status. What applies to the US and other big strategic players may not necessarily apply to them. This research is the first to systematically investigate states’ claimed reasons for publishing. Using the Edinburgh National Security and Defence Documents Dataset (NSDDD) and multiple large language models (LLMs), it offers a convergent validation analysis of 2,012 expressed publication reasons in 607 documents across 119 countries from 1987 to 2024.
Part of CeSeR’s Series: Contemporary Security Challenges.
Speaker: Professor Andrew Neal, Professor of International Security, University of Edinburgh
Registration not required.