Every piece of national security writing enters a crowded and uneven landscape. Some readers arrive with professional expertise or academic insight, others with lived experience, and many with only fragments of context picked up along the way.
At Nat Sec Press, we start from the assumption that your work will be read by more people, and in more ways, than you can fully anticipate.
Thinking clearly about audience is how authors retain control over meaning as their work moves outward.
Work published in this space is read routinely by:
- Practitioners
- Researchers and students (including minors) building methods, theory, and evidence
- Policy advisors and legislators translating analysis into government policy and social programs
- Journalists and civil society interpreting findings for wider publics
- Communities and individuals living with the downstream effects of harm and/or security decisions
Your work may begin in one lane, but it rarely stays there.
Audiences overlap—and read differently
A practitioner skims for relevance and applicability.
A researcher looks for rigour, methodology assumptions, and limits (they'll also skim your footnotes and references).
A policymaker looks for clarity, trade-offs, and consequences.
Someone affected by the topic may read with lived experience, not analytic distance.
Good national security writing recognises that the same paragraph can land very differently depending on who encounters it.
That doesn’t mean writing defensively or diluting your work. It means being intentional about:
- How claims are framed
- What context is provided
- Where uncertainty is acknowledged
- What is reproduced versus summarised
We prioritise readers who understand consequences
At Nat Sec Press, we give particular weight to audiences who carry risk, exposure, or harm as a result events or security policy and practice—even when they are not the intended audience.
That includes people who may encounter your work indirectly:
- Within impacted communities (including victim-survivors, their families and communities)
- Through media coverage
- In training or operational settings
- In legal, regulatory, or institutional contexts
- Long after the original research moment has passed
Writing with these readers in mind does not equate to sympathy or advocacy. It is about accuracy, care, and foresight.
Clarity is not simplification
We encourage authors to write accessibly—but not shallowly.
Strong work:
- Explains why something matters, not just that it does
- Defines terms without assuming insider knowledge
- Separates evidence from interpretation
- Signals where judgement calls are being made
This helps readers move faster and helps non-expert readers avoid misinterpretation.
Your reader is part of your methodology
Audience awareness is not a marketing concern—it is a methodological one.
Choices about:
- Tone
- Structure
- Examples
- What is included or excluded
all affect how knowledge is taken up and used. In national security contexts, those downstream uses can matter as much as the analysis itself.
What this means for authors
When you’re writing for Nat Sec Press, we encourage you to ask:
- Who might read this beyond my immediate peers?
- What assumptions am I making about knowledge, power, or distance?
- Could this be misunderstood—or misused—without added context?
- Am I writing about people, or past them?
You don’t need to write for everyone.
But you do need to know who else might be reading.
That awareness is part of publishing responsibly in a field where ideas do not stay on the page.
