The political economy of national security

The study of international security and political economy are two sides of the same coin. Yet the disciplinary fields of security studies and political economy too often maintain a deliberate distance from each other. The three books discussed in this article are a welcome departure from such an artificial division between (inter)national security issues on the one hand, and economic issues on the other. Furthermore, like much political economy scholarship, they each aim to incorporate an analytical focus on domestic politics that many international security scholars still eschew. Such a broader (re-)integration of the domestic political economy dimension of security into international relations scholarship provides a comprehensive theoretical and empirical understanding of how and why national security, like all areas of public policy, is riddled with the pursuit of political agendas.