National Security and Society

As the deadline for this project has quickly approached, I want to summarize a few things that have been discussed in the blog since the beginning of October.

National security is not just a term used to protect the integrity of a country and its borders. Rather, the idea of national security can be wielded in certain ways. As a tool, national security can be used in a variety of ways and the State Security and Dissent class discussion on September 9, 2008 alluded to many of the ways in which national security could be used, including, being used as a tool to by those in power to create trust, protect citizens, protect majority interests, create fear, eliminate fear, protect security and national sovereignty, maintain peace and order, and how it is used as an instrument to shape behaviour.

While each blog entry covered a different event or topic, they all related back to this concept of national security. In addition, if you have been critically reading every entry, you will also find that in every discussion there is some element of national security being utilized as a tool by those in power to ultimately shape behaviour. In this light, national security is an imposed framework of rules where these rules are not necessarily intrinsic to social order. Thus, national security is very much an ideology, which is able to affect norms, and these norms are able to affect the legitimacy of the state. As this blog has illustrated, these norms come to operationalize themselves in several ways, such as the War on “The Other.”

Another part of this blog has been to demonstrate what the media’s role has been in manufacturing consent amongst the general population. The media is not just an unbiased conduit in which we receive information from. In many cases, as the post on Manufacturing Consent discussed, the media is part of the state institution, which also looks to consolidate its power and legitimize the action of those in power.

The overall message that I wanted to convey in these past few weeks has simply been to question the nature of national security as it operates in our society. As a former Border Services Officer with the Canada Border Services Agency, this has been an especially unique and pertinent project for myself as I critically reflected upon my role as a law enforcement officer and an agent of the state, who was responsible for the protection of “national security.”