Author: Rogers, D.
Published in National Security Journal on 20 October 2026.
DOI: 10.36878/nsj20261020.03
Download full PDF version – Secret Services and the Latent Power of Cultural Capital (472 KB)
Abstract
Despite their commitment to transparency, security practitioners who belong to
New Zealand’s secret services seldom disclose their use of academic research. This
conservative public relations approach is counterproductive because, by restricting
their ability to demonstrate core competencies, illustrate the connection between
their work and societal values, and defend their jurisdictional monopoly,
it denies them recognition as professionals. Yet few of these practitioners likely
appreciate the high costs accompanying their institutionalised practice of plagiarism
as they continue to invest in the tradecraft needed to collect and disseminate
secret intelligence, undertake clandestine protective security measures, and manage
covert violence as well as to ingest secret informational reports circulating
within the Five Eyes channels. This puts them at a serious disadvantage when a
cadre of security practitioners who work in policing and regulatory compliance
roles enter the academic field to acquire cultural capital which, when converted
into expert knowledge, enables them to become security professionals, challenge
the legitimacy of secret services, and, possibly, lead a symbolic revolution in the
field of New Zealand security.
Keywords: Five Eyes; transnational guild; expert knowledge; New Zealand security studies; terrorism
Introduction
In the long aftermath of Edward Snowden’s unauthorised disclosures – which, from 2014 onwards, prompted widespread public controversy across liberal democracies by revealing the large extent to which the United States National Security Agency and its transnational intelligence-gathering network undertake electronic surveillance of government, corporate, and private communications – executives in charge of New Zealand’s secret services have taken several opportunities to declare their staunch commitment to increased transparency.2 Such declarations are invariably accompanied by the caveat that official secrecy imposes strict limits on what can reasonably be shared with the public and, by extension, the individuals and groups of concern to the secret services. At the same time, however, these services produce for public consumption several official documents concerning New Zealand’s national security that do not cite any academic research conducted within the interdisciplinary field of security studies, including New Zealand security studies research.3 To be sure, a lack of footnotes in a few public intelligence reports does not necessarily mean that security practitioners who belong to the secret services ignore academic research in their everyday work.4 In fact, they explicitly state, albeit in exactly the same formulaic language over four consecutive years, their threat assessments reports are “based on information gathered from a variety of sources including New Zealand Government information, academic research and media reporting.”5 The academic problem that interests me here is that when these services fail to acknowledge the specific public sources of their knowledge – which for academics is, incidentally, the cardinal sin of plagiarism worthy of professional excommunication – we cannot understand how and explain why security practitioners within secret services use research in their everyday practices. In short, it obscures our view of these security practitioners as objects worthy of academic inquiry. But, as we shall see, it is a matter of concern for them as well.
In what follows, I signal the high costs that attend this refusal to disclose by focusing on the problem of terrorism. While this obfuscation might undercut potential critiques of their security practice that could further undermine the public’s trust and confidence in the secret services, it is an unnecessary ploy since the public – and the professionals of politics who represent them – do not constitute an informed citizenry capable of forming erudite judgments on sophisticated and theoretically informed academic work. Moreover, this conservative public relations approach is ultimately counterproductive for it restricts the ability of security practitioners to demonstrate their technical competency to discharge core tasks. It also precludes them from illustrating a connection between their security practices and deeply held societal values, an important connection when trying to reclaim the social license they once held during the Cold War. It compromises, too, the ability of security practitioners to defend their service’s jurisdictional monopoly from the encroachment by civil servants and other security practitioners. In short, it prevents them from claiming the status of professionals, as well as the legitimacy this status bestows.
I then argue that few of these security practitioners likely appreciate the high costs accompanying this institutionalised practice of plagiarism because they believe, mistakenly, that investing in the tradecraft needed to collect and disseminate secret intelligence, undertake clandestine protective security measures, and manage the state’s covert violence, and then ingesting secret informational reports that circulate centrifugally from the US intelligence community through the internal communication channels of the so-called Five Eyes arrangement, is a sufficient knowledge base from which to make sense of contemporary security challenges.6 The material and ideational conditions that comprise the Five Eyes arrangement has become something of a cognitive prison for those belonging to what Didier Bigo has conceptualised as a transnational guild.7 This places them at a serious disadvantage when defending their position within the field of New Zealand security.
I close out this article by revealing that a cadre of New Zealand security practitioners working in policing and regulatory compliance roles are entering, in increasing numbers, the academic field of knowledge production.8 Here, they acquire cultural capital in the form of postgraduate degrees in security studies, a deep understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the existing academic knowledge produced under the auspices of security studies, and the sophisticated methodological skills needed to produce new knowledge on security.9 They acquire, too, social capital in the form of networks of practitioners and academics.10 When this cadre returns to the security field, they are capable of converting their cultural capital into highly valued utile expert knowledge, becoming security professionals, and constituting an avant-garde capable of challenging the legitimacy of the secret services that dominate the field of New Zealand security.11 If successful, this challenge would invoke nothing short of a symbolic revolution that:
… overturns cognitive, and sometimes social, structures. When it succeeds,
it establishes new cognitive structures, which become invisible the
more they become generally recognized, widely known and incorporated
by all the perceiving subjects in a social universe. Our own categories of
perception and judgement – those we ordinarily use to understand the
representations of the world and the world itself – were created by [some
earlier] successful symbolic revolution.12
And it is within this contestation for dominance of the security field that I introduce and place the articles that comprise this special issue.