Australia’s Strategic Environment and future security challenges

This course is available for on-campus & remote (online) learning. All students participate in interactive, real-time classes. Australia faces twenty-first century national security challenges that combine many of the trade-offs that Canberra has long grappled with with a new spate of risks and threats. Australia’s strategic environment therefore raises a host of new challenges for national security policy-makers. This course provides a whole-of-government focus to address these national security challenges, and offers theoretical grounding with deep policy-maker engagement to enable students to establish theoretically grounded and empirically supported policy proscriptions and prescriptions. The first half of the course focusses on more traditional issues including the balance of power in the Indo-Pacific, the U.S.-Australia alliance and other partnerships and agreements, conventional defence and deterrence and nuclear weapons, deterrence and related threats. The second half of the course focusses on newer threats and how they mesh with older challenges. It includes geoeconomics, critical technologies, cyber and contemporary challenges in Australia’s maritime inner arc and the Pacific. These foci of Australia’s current strategic environment will be taught by an integration of scholarly and contemporary policy-maker perspectives. The course also involves a whole of class interactive and dynamic wargame that models pressing challenges, risks, threats and opportunities in Australia’s strategic environment to further illustrate the myriad of national security challenges that characterise Australia’s strategic environment.