School of Social and Political Science

Research interests

Professor Neal leads an ongoing project to analyse the content of current and historical national security and defence documents globally. The National Security and Defence Documents Dataset (1987-2024) consists of 575 national security and defence documents from 113 countries, covering the period from 1987 to 2024. It includes national security strategies, defence white papers, and other top-level security documents, all available as machine-readable PDFs. Non-English texts are accompanied by translations. The corpus is complemented by metadata providing context for each document and country, including variables such as UN region, regime type, and economic data. This collection enables comparative analysis, trend identification, and research across security studies, international relations, and related fields. The corpus serves as a resource for researchers, policymakers, civil society, and educational purposes, offering a compilation of global security priorities spanning nearly four decades. Additionally, the team provides code for reproducing their computational text analysis, allowing other researchers to replicate and build upon their work.

He is also co-lead of the project “Technology, Security and Infrastructure Protection in the North Sea” with Prof. Christian Bueger of the University of Copenhagen, funded by the Edinburgh – Copenhagen Strategic Partnership seed-fund.

Prof. Neal's most recent monograph is Security as Politics: Beyond the State of Exception (Edinburgh University Press, 2019).

His research interests are in critical security studies. Areas of expertise include parliamentary security politics in the UK, securitization and politicization, the security implications of Scottish independence, the works and methods of Michel Foucault, and political sociology. 

He teaches international security and international relations theory.

Prof. Neal was principal convenor of the ESRC seminar series 'Security in Scotland, with or without constitutional change' 2013-15, a founding executive member of the Theory Section of the International Studies Association, and a co-investigator in the ESRC training network 'An International Collaboratory on Critical Methods in Security Studies'. He serves on the editorial board of the journal Security Dialogue.

He has held visiting scholar positions at the University of Copenhagen, University of Melbourne, Australian National University, and University of Queensland.

Keywords: International security, War on terror, Discourse theory, Sociological theory, Political theory, UK, Britain, Critical theory, Critical security studies, Securitisation, Constructivism, Poststructuralism, Scotland

Topics interested in supervising

Prof. Neal is keen to supervise PhD projects in critical security studies broadly conceived. He has expertise in national security strategies, the relationship between politics and security, parliaments, Scotland and security, securitization theory, constructivism, critical theory and poststructuralism, and the works and methods of Michel Foucault. 

If you are interested in being supervised by Andrew Neal, please see the links below (open in new windows) for more information:

• PhD in Politics
• MSc (R) Politics