School of Social and Political Science

National Security Strategies in a Fractured World: Small and Large States, from the US and Ukraine to Iran and Beyond

20 April 2026
12:00 - 13:00

Venue

Violet Laidlaw Room, Chrystal Macmillan Building

Media

Image

event poster

Description

Roundtable discussion

The 2025 US National Security Strategy shocked the world and raised fundamental questions: what is a national security strategy and what does it do? National security strategies have proliferated, from three states in 1987 to 118 today. This roundtable brings together three scholars with distinct perspectives. 

James Gow (KCL) was expert advisor on the first UK strategic review and teaches grand strategy at the Royal College of Defence Studies. Hillary Briffa (KCL) specialises in small state grand strategy, is Assistant Director of the Centre for Defence Studies, and advises governments on strategic review processes. Andrew Neal created the Edinburgh National Security and Defence Documents Dataset, a corpus of over 670 documents from 118 countries, and uses computational text analysis to study how security concepts spread through official documents.

Registration not required.

Location