Founded in 2010, the Harvard Law School National Security Journal (NSJ) is a student-edited, online journal dedicated to advancing scholarship and fostering rigorous dialogue in the field of national security. Over the past several decades, the scope and urgency of national security issues have expanded dramatically. As then-Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow expressed in her article introducing NSJ, the September 11 attacks marked a pivotal moment in American history, propelling the threat of terrorism to the forefront of public consciousness and highlighting the urgent need for national security legal and policy expertise.
Yet this was not an isolated development. Rather, it reflected deeper transformations already underway. The end of the Cold War had shifted global dynamics from state-centric rivalries to increasingly complex threats posed by actors unconstrained by national borders. The collapse of the Soviet Union left nuclear materials vulnerable to exploitation, creating opportunities for rogue states and terrorist organizations. Meanwhile, innovations in information technology now provide powerful tools for intelligence gathering, but they also enable terrorist recruitment, coordination, and training. At the same time, mass migration driven by economic hardship, conflict, and climate change heightens competition over scarce resources and increases the risk of instability.
These evolving challenges underscore the need for sustained scholarly analysis of national security’s legal and policy dimensions. Yet much of the academic engagement with these issues has been dispersed across journals of international law, public policy, and related disciplines. Such diffusion of thought impedes the generation of reflective dialogue and productive dialectic. NSJ seeks to consolidate and elevate that discourse by convening a diversity of perspectives in one forum, with the goal of meaningfully informing policy and practice.
As an online journal, NSJ is committed to providing a unified, timely platform for analysis and debate in this fast-evolving field. We publish well-researched scholarship from academics and practitioners alike, and we encourage responses that build on or challenge previously published work. For more information on submissions, please click here.
NSJ is a non-partisan and unbiased source that does not necessarily support the views of its articles. The field of national security is often divisive, but NSJ endeavors to provide a source of information where a broad diversity of views are welcome and given balanced weight.
Permission to Copy: The articles in the Journal may be reproduced and distributed, in whole or in part, by nonprofit institutions for educational purposes including distribution to students, provided that the copies are distributed at or below cost and identify the author, the Harvard National Security Journal, the volume, and the year of the article’s publication.