About the Canberra Security Economics Network
What we do
The Canberra Security Economics Network (CSEN) was established by two Canberra-based economists with experience in the public sector and academia to create a forum to sharpen the understanding of the economic dimensions of national security. Amid a changing international order, the need to think, plan and understand the dynamics that will avert a less prosperous and less secure future has never been greater.
Our aim is simple: to encourage constructive discourse across disciplines to help build areas of consensus in a contested policy space, leverage connection between policymakers and academia, and bring forth the discussion on how economics as a discipline can help understand international and domestic security challenges. We are committed to contributing to a genuinely interdisciplinary approach to security-related policy questions.
Our Charter outlines our objectives as follows:
Be leaders, not followers in the practice of economics in a national security context;
Bring nuance to the discourse to ensure balance prevails;
Collaborate and build a network to increase capacity to influence; and
Promote contestability of ideas to build defensible narratives.
We are united by questioning conventional thinking and identifying how economics and other frameworks-based social sciences can shift the paradigm on broad-based and abstracted security thinking.
If you are interested in engaging with experts on the interdependence between economic thinking and national security outcomes, please contact us.
Meet the founders
Joshua Saunders
An experienced economist, Josh has worked across a number of policy domains, including across Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, the Department of Finance, national security agencies, and Victorian Parliament. His experience spans technical and policy, from economic modelling and pricing for telecommunications and competition policy to holding senior economist positions in public sector agencies advising on fiscal policy and taxation, trade, critical infrastructure, cyber, and terrorism, defence economics, and international economic policy. Josh has also spearheaded training of Federal Government policymakers on the use of cost benefit analyses in decision making and the economics of national security . He also has an interest in Australia’s economic integration with East and Southeast Asia, in addition to South Korea’s historical and contemporary approach to managing its economic growth against the backdrop of a complex security and economic environment.
Sam Hardwick
Sam Hardwick is an economist and Research Fellow at the East Asian Bureau of Economic Research, based at the Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University. His research spans trade, investment and geopolitical risk, with a focus on how international institutions shape economic exchange, supply chain resilience and economic security in a more fragmented global economy. Sam has worked on trade, investment, and geoeconomic policy as an adviser at the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet and as a data analyst at the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water. He has also held research and editorial roles with EABER and the East Asia Forum. Sam is completing a PhD on geopolitical risk and the multilateral trading system and holds postgraduate and undergraduate degrees in economics and history from ANU.