Whispering to the prince: Academic experts and national security policy formulation in Brazil, South Africa and Canada

This thesis posits three sets of factors governing academics' participation in security policy formulation processes at the national level. These are policymaker attributes such as uncertainty; academics' qualities such as specialised knowledge, institutionalised prestige and specific forms of argumentation; and the normative resonance of experts' inputs with policymakers' expectations. The argument follows a triple progression: from structural to ideational factors; from the notion of value-free science to embrace of self-conscious policy advocacy; and a progression of types of input mirroring the advancement of the policy process.; Uncertainty, which opens the policy process, can be either domestic (largely normative) or international (largely structural) in origin. Specialised knowledge comes in both practical and theoretical form, with the latter consisting of the knowledge typical of academic experts in security studies. Prestige derives either from the status of an academic's discipline or of her status within it. Finally resonance represents the overlap in values and worldviews between the target audience of policymakers and the inputs submitted by experts included in the polity process.; These claims were tested through extensive field research covering the policy processes in Brazil, South Africa and Canada. In Brazil, the study investigates the time period covering the issuing of the country's first defence policy document of the democratic era---the Politica de Defesa Nacional, the creation of the Ministry of Defence, and the convocation by that body of an Experts' Commission tasked with revamping the country's defence policy. The South African chapter deals with the first post- apartheid government's attempts to formulate a security policy; the focus is on the efforts of the ANC-leaning academic Military Research Group and the 1996 Defence White Paper. Finally, the Canadian study focuses on the conceptual genesis of the concept of human security with that country's foreign ministry in the mid-1990s.; Situated at the confluence of several avenues of research, the investigation provides important insights into policy relevance, the relationship of theory and practice; the role of outside actors in policy processes, and the interplay between the normative and scientific commitments of social scientists.