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, from economic modelling and pricing for telecommunications and competition policy to holding senior economist positions in public sector agencies advising on national security, defence, and international economic policy. With two decades of experience, including in training of policymakers on the economics of national security, Josh identified the need for a more systematic, nuanced, and joined up approach to discourse on how economics can be central to targeted and balanced national security practice - and crucially how fragile our economic prosperity can be. Identifying the need for leadership in this area, he co-founded CSEN to drive this outcome. He 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.