Professor Alexandra Homolar1
1University of Warwick, United Kingdom
Biography:
Dr Alexandra Homolar is Professor of International Security. Alex has taught and researched at universities in Germany, the US, and the UK. From 2022-2024, she held a Leverhulme Research Fellowship for the project 'Populist Fantasyland' and from 2013-2017 she was the Principal Investigator of the ESRC Future Research Leaders project 'Enemy Addiction'. At Warwick, Alex is the academic lead of Speaking International Security at Warwick, the co-lead of the interdisciplinary Research in Global Governance Network, and a member of the Fear Network cross-faculty research group.
Abstract:
The 2023 New Zealand general election brought in a governing coalition between three parties on the right of the political spectrum: The New Zealand National Party, ACT New Zealand, and New Zealand First. Winston Peters, the populist leader of the NZ First party and Foreign Minister in the coalition government under National’s prime minister Christopher Luxon, has openly questioned the country’s commitment to its long-standing independent foreign policy. Signalling a role for New Zealand in the trilateral security pact AUKUS between the US, the UK and Australia, he has pledged to work “ever more closely together” with the US “in the support of shared values and interests” (Peters 2024). Former Labour Prime Minister Helen Clark has warned that this constitutes a “profoundly undemocratic” shift in New Zealand's foreign policy (Clark 2024). Engaging with questions about transparency and public (dis)information campaigns, this paper places the potential move towards the country’s involvement in AUKUS within the analytical context of social licensing for risky projects. It argues that to prevent the erosion of public trust, community consent should be sought for major policy transformations, especially where they represent a significant departure from established domestic norms.