Smith, Kieran.
Published in National Security Journal on 20 October 2026.
DOI: 10.36878/nsj20261020.04
Download full PDF version — Exorcising Otherness: A Baudrillardian Analysis of New Zealand’s Countering Violent Extremism and Terrorism Communications (535 KB)
New Zealand government communications about countering violent extremism
and terrorism emphasise the values of “transparency”. A small but growing literature
on public intelligence analyses these types of communications. However, like
the government publications it focuses on, this literature tends to treat transparency
as an unqualified good. The French philosopher, Jean Baudrillard, problematises
the idea of transparency. His work positions transparency as part of a process
that reduces phenomena into concrete categories accessible to human reason. The
world is rendered as integral reality, operationalised and objectified. Anything that
does not fit, such as ambiguity and flux, is designated as an evil to be exorcised.
This paper employs Baudrillard’s theories on transparency to analyse government
communications about countering violent extremism and terrorism. The primary
empirical analysis is focused on one of these communications, the New Zealand
Security Intelligence Service’s New Zealand’s Security Threat Environment 2025 report.
This demonstrates that a Baudrillardian analysis of these documents is viable
and can lead to novel findings. The analysis is then extended more broadly to New
Zealand government communications about countering violent extremism and
terrorism. The paper concludes that transparency enables jurisdictional claims to
circulate as objective facts. In turn, these facts reproduce the logic of transparency.
This logic, which cannot admit ambiguity or the unknowable, expels otherness.
In this way, transparency impedes the state’s claimed goals of informing the public
about violent extremism and terrorism. However, transparency aids the state in
performing its role of doing security by deferring events.
Keywords: New Zealand, public intelligence, Jean Baudrillard, transparency, counter terrorism, violent extremism
Introduction
On 15 March 2019, New Zealand experienced a terrorist event that was live streamed
in real time and transmitted around the world. In the wake of the unprecedented transparency
of this terrorist event, the government began to incorporate transparency into
its own communications about countering terrorism and violent extremism. Accordingly,
previously secretive government agencies have begun producing intelligence
documents for the public. In this article, I employ concepts from the work of French
philosopher Jean Baudrillard to analyse some of these public intelligence communications.
Baudrillard is critical of the concept of transparency which is often taken to be
a self-evident good. I argue that, in the case of the documents I analyse, transparency
renders government agency’s claims for jurisdiction of the problem of terrorism and
the government’s ability to deter terrorist events as objective truths. These are effects of
what Baudrillard calls simulation, a globalising process that works to dispel ambiguity
and otherness from the world.
I begin this report by discussing some of the key literature about public intelligence
and its lack of critical engagement with the concept of transparency. To respond to this
gap in the literature, I turn to the work of Baudrillard. While he has written extensively
about the intersections between transparency and terrorism, his theories do not appear
to have been applied in the field of intelligence communications. I describe how
he problematises the idea of transparency. This problematisation draws on and utilises
concepts and terms that he developed over the course of his life. I describe these concepts
and terms in this section.
In the next section I use Baudrillard’s ideas to inform a qualitative analysis of an empirical
case. I argue that transparency operates in this case to propagate a government
agency’s claims for jurisdiction over the problem of terrorism as objective truths. These
objective truths leave no space for ambiguity or anything that cannot fit into their conceptual
framework. The case in question is the New Zealand Security intelligence Service’s
(NZSIS) New Zealand’s Security Threat Environment 2025 report. This report is
the most recent public intelligence document released by a New Zealand Government
agency at the time of writing.1 It is part of a series of reports that have elevated transparency
to a moral imperative. This is demonstrated in the agency’s announcement of
the publication of the first report, which included a quote from their Director-General,
Andrew Hampton. He stated, “being more open about national security means that as a
country we can develop a greater understanding and be better placed to manage risks.”
Similarly in the foreword of that threat assessment, Hampton states that “being open
and transparent with one another about the threats we face is one way we can have this
important discussion”. News media articles accompanying the report’s release dutifully
repeated Hampton’s remarks about the greater openness and transparency that its publication
represented.2 Although this report includes sections on espionage and foreign interference, I focus on the sections related to violent extremism and terrorism. This is because the strategy of transparency appears to have been most strongly influenced by the response to a terrorist event. However, this is not to claim that transparency’s logic only operates in these sections, it is merely to avoid unnecessarily diluting the analysis.
After demonstrating that it is not only possible to apply these ideas to public intelligence
communications but that they can lead to novel findings, I then extend this
analysis. In this next section I look more broadly at New Zealand government communications
about countering violent extremism and terrorism that followed the Christchurch
Mosque shootings. This section demonstrates how these communications use
a moralising frame to exclude dysfunction within the system from discussion. By moralising
events caused by dysfunction, critical distance is lost and events become part of
the information market. This allows the state to retrospectively deter terrorist events,
preserving its own claim to authority. Transparency, especially in the form of community
engagement, draws academics and the public into collaboration on this performance.
Kieran Smith is a PhD Candidate in Defence and Security Studies at Massey University. Contact by email Kieran.Smith.7@uni.massey.ac.nz