ABSTRACT
National Security Cultures has two primary goals. The first is to understand the impact of national security cultures on four categories of national security governance policies: assurance (post-conflict interventions), prevention (preconflict interventions), protection (internal security) and compellence (military intervention). The second is to assess the barriers and opportunities for collective action among the major powers in the provision of global and regional security governance. The study is predicated upon two assumptions: first, states can no longer be treated as homogeneous actors; and second, regional and global security governance is an (impure) collective good. The first assumption brings forward the problem of reconciling state structure and the agency of national elites in the definition and execution of security policies, particularly within a comparative framework. The second recognizes that security governance represents a bundle of policies which may individually or jointly exacerbate or mitigate the problem of collective action.
