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Political elites in liberal democracies are showing heightened concern about threats to national security from the overseas political activities of the People's Republic of China (PRC) and its supporters. This Whitehall Paper argues that an effective liberal democratic policy response requires careful disaggregation of distinct sets of risks: to national security; civil liberties; and academic freedom. Although widely cited as a model to follow, Australia's response to these issues illustrates how aggregation of these diverse risks into a singular national security threat – commonly labelled ‘Chinese influence'– can produce alarmist public policy discourse, legislative overreach and mismatched institutional responsibilities. The Paper suggests a set of measures for liberal democracies to manage their engagement with China's powerful and increasingly authoritarian party-state.

This book outlines the main technological, legal, and operational options that liberal democratic nations have when confronting challenges in cyberspace. It offers a range of policy ideas they can adopt to make their defense stronger and deter future cyber-attacks. The author explores how liberal societies, especially those in the Western world, have so far confronted a variety of cybersecurity challenges by hackers in nondemocratic regimes like Russia and China. and zooms in on the main challenges that democratic states face in adopting strategies of cyber deterrence, and how those challenges shape their ability to actually deter hackers.

The Handbook on Democracy and Security offers an insightful new interpretation of the topic that reframes the contemporary challenge of democracy away from competing ideologies or external existential threats, and centres on the security of democracy in the minds and lived experience of its citizens. With a global focus, it provides a cutting edge understanding of contemporary developments in democratic breakdown, investigating the role of new media, social media and the Internet. Expert contributors explore how democracy is affected by the resurgence of populism, terrorism and migration alongside the decline of independent mass media and associated conspiracy theories. The Handbook further argues that the security of government by the people is best understood through the security of people and examines the analysis of democratic security. Providing a diverse range of perspectives on how democratic breakdown occurs, this Handbook will be an excellent read for political scientists interested in human security and the effect of social media on democracy. Policymakers interested in policy prescriptions and stabilizing democratic backsliding will also find this an illuminating and informative resource.

Recent scandals like WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden's disclosure of NSA documents have brought public debates over government accountability and secrecy bubbling to the surface. How can modern democracies balance the need for privacy in delicate foreign policy matters with the necessity of openness in gaining and maintaining the trust of citizens? Democracies keep secrets from potential enemies and their citizens. This simple fact challenges the surprisingly prevalent assumption that foreign policy successes and failures can be attributed to public transparency and accountability. In fact, the ability to keep secrets has aided democratic victories from the European and Pacific theatres in World War II to the global competition of the Cold War. At the same time, executive discretion over the capacity to classify information created the opportunity for abuse that contributed to Watergate, as well as domestic spying and repression in France, Norway and Canada over the past forty years. Therefore, democracies face a secrecy dilemma. Secrecy is useful, but once a group or person has the ability to decide what information is concealed from a rival, citizens can no longer monitor that information. How then can the public be assured that national security policies are not promoting hidden corruption or incompetence? As Democracy Declassified shows, it is indeed possible for democracies to keep secrets while also maintaining useful national security oversight institutions that can deter abuse and reassure the public. Understanding secrecy and oversight in democracies helps us explain not only why the Maginot Line rose and the French Republic fell, or how the US stumbled but eventually won the Cold War, but more generally how democracies can benefit from both public consent and necessary national security secrets. At a time when ubiquitous debates over the issue of institutional accountability and transparency have reached a fever pitch, Democracy Declassified provides a grounded and important view on the connection between the role of secrecy in democratic governance and foreign policy-making.

The promotion of security is no longer a state monopoly. It is dispersed and takes place through the practices of states, corporations, non-governmental actors and community-based organizations. But what do we know about the ways in which'security'is thought about and promoted in this pluralized field of delivery? Are democratic values being advanced and protected, or threatened and compromised? Wood and Dupont bring together a team of renowned scholars to shed light on our understanding of the arrangements for contemporary security governance. Offering a'friendly dialogue'between those who argue that democratic transformation rests in the development of strong state institutions and those who propose a more de-centered agenda, the scholars in this volume bring cutting-edge theoretical analyses to bear on empirical examples. This volume will appeal to researchers in the fields of criminology, political science, sociology and security studies.