About the Canberra Security Economics Network

The Canberra Security Economics Network (CSEN) was established by two Canberra-based economists with experience in the public sector and academia to create a forum to sharpen the understanding of the economic dimensions of national security. Amid a changing international order, the need to think, plan and understand the dynamics that will avert a less prosperous and less secure future has never been greater.

Our aim is simple: to encourage constructive discourse across disciplines to help build areas of consensus in a contested policy space, leverage connection between policymakers and academia, and bring forth the discussion on how economics as a discipline can help understand international and domestic security challenges. We are committed to contributing to a genuinely interdisciplinary approach to security-related policy questions.

Our Charter outlines our objectives as follows:

Be leaders, not followers in the practice of economics in a national security context;  

Bring nuance to the discourse to ensure balance prevails;  

Collaborate and build a network to increase capacity to influence; and  

Promote contestability of ideas to build defensible narratives. 

We are united by questioning conventional thinking and identifying how economics and other frameworks-based social sciences can shift the paradigm on broad-based and abstracted security thinking.

If you are interested in engaging with experts on the interdependence between economic thinking and national security outcomes, please contact us.