About Article

Within the academic literature on national security law there is a conventional view which holds that this law is a formal system of rules applied to specific state institutions whose objectives and functions respond to the most serious, urgent, or existential pro blems facing a political community.1 Proponents of this view tend to assert that a state’s primary responsibility is to maintain its sovereignty, defend its territory, and protect its population from serious harm. To that end they also tend to assert that a state should maintain a Weberian monopoly over the use of armed force within its sovereign terri tory and that it is justified in collecting secret intelligence and using violence, both at home and abroad, under the auspices of national security. Understood in these terms the state is a unitary entity that exists in an increasingly complex and dangerous world and must respond to an evolving set of material and ideational phenomena that constitute objective security problems with a material existence independent from contemplation of them.