Stepping Out of Our Security Routines

And Doing Away with Institutional Myopia and Tunnel Vision

21 April 2020

Matej Kandrík

Marcin Król Fellow

Politics and policies regarding defence and security still think about the world too much in terms of their own agenda, rather than taking a comprehensive approach. We have to change how we think about and how we “do” our security and defence systems.

The ongoing COVID19 pandemic should be seen as a great window of opportunity to step out of our routine way of thinking. Now, before the shock is absorbed, it is a good time to search for different perspectives.

This text advocates for a holistic point of view and a comprehensive approach when it comes to security and defence. While there is nothing especially new nor revolutionary about this, it not reflected in our polities, politics and policies.

In order not to sink into theoretical arguments, let us pinpoint several real-world examples of how desperately we need to rethink our traditional sectoral perception of security. More importantly, we should abandon so-called institutional myopia, by which the author means the tendency for a one-sided self-perception of a particular institution as being the only relevant and overemphasising the importance of its agenda.

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Matej Kandrík

Marcin Król Fellow

Matej Kandrík is a Marcin Król Fellow 2022/2023 and a cofounder of Adapt Institute and a PhD candidate in Political Science with a specialisation in Security and Strategic Studies at Masaryk University in Brno, Czechia. In 2016 he did a research stay at the National Defence University of Poland. He collaborated as a research fellow with the German Marshall Fund of the United States and the International Republican Institute as a Transatlantic Initiative fellow. Currently, he is participating in CEU Democratic Institute Leadership Academy. His research interests include comprehensive defence, paramilitarism in Central Eastern Europe and strategic communication.

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