Diversity of thought as ‘mission critical’: Knowledge,politics and power in UK national security policymaking

Abstract

The idea that diversity and inclusion in policymaking institutions is a national security imperative because it enhances ‘diversity of thought’ has proliferated among policymakers in recent years. Building on critical, feminist and postcolonial scholarship arguing that constructions of gender, race and class undergird hegemonic militaristic and colonial approaches to security, this article analyses how the discourse on diversity of thought occasionally challenges, but more often reinforces these hegemonic approaches. Based on interviews with UK civil servants, the article explores how this discourse, and consequent measures to promote diversity of thought by creating a more diverse and inclusive workplace, have developed in the UK national security community, analysing how officials interpret the relationship between demographic diversity and knowledge production. Using feminist epistemologies as a heuristic, the article argues that although some officials view this agenda as a means to challenge militaristic thinking, the commonplace exclusion of structural power analysis places hard constraints on its ability to achieve this end and has enabled its recuperation by far-right anti-equality agendas. Ultimately, the politics of diversity are insufficient to overcome UK national security institutions’ commitment to militarism, which demands attention to the material structures that make militaristic approaches to security appear necessary.

Introduction

The idea that workforce diversity and inclusion enhance national security policymaking and operations has proliferated in recent years: US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken (2021) declared that ‘prioritizing diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility is . . . a national security imperative’, while then-UK National Security Adviser Mark Sedwill argued that ‘diversity and inclusion are mission critical’ (Fair Play Talks, 2019). A plethora of think-pieces extol the national security benefits of workplace diversity, arguing that the overrepresentation of elite-educated, racially and class-privileged men limits critical rigour, producing less effective policymaking (e.g. Jenkins, 2019; Stephenson, 2022; Syed, 2022). This article interrogates this discourse, examining how the concept of ‘diversity of thought’ has been utilised by UK security officials since 2016, when the Chilcot Inquiry into the UK’s participation in the 2003 invasion of Iraq concluded that the disastrous intervention resulted partly from a failure by decisionmakers to challenge each other’s thinking (Chilcot, 2016: 57, 135; HM Government, 2018: 27–29). Senior UK officials subsequently argued that more diverse representation along lines of (for example) gender, race and class would bring more varied perspectives to policy discussions, creating more effective policies. Building on scholarship arguing that the militaristic, colonial and carceral character of hegemonic security practices is undergirded by structures of patriarchy, white supremacy and capitalism (Cockburn, 2010; Neocleous, 2014; Ramji-Nogales, 2022), I explore how policymakers understand the relevance of gender, race and class to knowledge production. I argue that, while some officials promote diversity and inclusion as means to challenge hegemonic approaches to security, the commonplace of exclusion of structural power analysis from this discourse constrains its ability to advance this end and enables its recuperation by far-right, anti-equality agendas.

Critical, feminist and postcolonial literatures argue that the conceptualization and practice of security is profoundly gendered, racialized and classed, and the nation and international system which are to be secured imagined as inseparable from a patriarchal, racial capitalist order (Manchanda and Rossdale, 2021; McQuade, 2018; Peterson, 1992). Scholarship on racial capitalism demonstrates how the unequal global distribution of resources and power established through the colonial expansion of industrial capitalism requires systems of state violence to preserve it (Gilmore, 2022; Walia, 2013). Security institutions, including the war system, policing and bordering, uphold these structures such that security often functions as ‘a euphemism for maintaining a racialized global order and the means for enforcing it’ (Manchanda, 2021: 51). Postcolonial (and) feminist scholarship elaborates the ideological edifices structuring and legitimizing states’ security practices (e.g. Eisenstein, 2007; Khalili, 2011; Razavi, 2021), such that mutually reinforcing discourses and material structures reproduce colonial relations of power (Chowdhry and Ling, 2010; Rao, 2017). For example, integral to the emergence of the nation-state has been ‘the power to exclude and by extension include in racially ordered terms, to dominate through the power to categorize differentially and hierarchically’ (Goldberg, 2002: 9). The state sovereignty that national security practices defend is constituted through this process of racialization, binding together authority, territory and a population defined in racial terms, while demarcating racial (gendered, classed) others against whom the nation must be secured (Nişancioğlu, 2020). Recognizing that state violence in service of ‘national security’ is structured by and productive of race, I understand UK security policies as characterized by militarism and coloniality, wherein the two are co-constitutive. Following recent literature on racial militarism, the article begins from the position that ‘racism and coloniality are not epiphenomenal to or merely “facets” of militarism, but are in fact integral to its functioning’ (Manchanda and Rossdale, 2021: 474; see also Gani, 2021).

Hegemonic security discourses rely on epistemologies that sustain, and are sustained by, racialized, gendered and classed hierarchies; knowledge production within national security institutions is described as manifesting ‘masculinized presumptions’ (Enloe, 2003: 238) and ‘white logic’ (Abu-Bakare, 2022: 228), in which ‘white supremacy has defined the techniques and processes of reasoning about social facts’ (Zuberi and Bonilla-Silva, 2008: 17). For example, feminist and critical race literatures outline how the mantle of ‘objectivity’ is often reserved for knowledges that naturalize the racial and patriarchal status quo, and ascribed to individuals according to their perceived proximity to whiteness and masculinity (Harding, 1993; Mills, 1997; Zuberi and Bonilla-Silva, 2008). Drawing on this literature, the article explores how the terms of what counts as objective and impartial knowledge within UK security institutions reflect and reproduce security thinking that renders their role in preserving the colonial distribution of power and resources as apolitical and unremarkable.

Although some scholars have argued that the inclusion of women, people of colour and other historically excluded groups in security institutions could, if they bring critical perspectives, help challenge hegemonic security discourses (Kronsell, 2005; Otto, 2006; Razavi, 2021), others warn that the diversification of state security institutions merely interpellates historically excluded groups into reproducing and legitimizing coloniality and militarism (Eisenstein, 2007; Khalili, 2011). Like diversity initiatives broadly, efforts to increase diversity in security institutions are critiqued as changing who is at the decisionmaking table without significantly changing what is discussed. Initiatives promoting diversity of thought are among the latest incarnations of this diversity work, aiming to change what gets discussed in security institutions partly in response to the aforementioned critiques. They are, however, typically couched in the neoliberal logic of optimizing human resources (HR) rather than challenging hegemony: among the prominent proponents of the concept is the global management consultancy firm McKinsey and Company, who argue that diversity makes businesses more profitable (Hunt et al., 2018).

In the UK national security community, discourses on diversity of thought concern civil servants’ role in policy formulation and implementation. The UK Civil Service is a permanent bureaucracy: officials are not political appointees who are replaced when governments change, but permanent employees serving successive governments of any political persuasion (Page, 2010). Civil servants are required to be politically impartial, advising ministers of any governing party regardless of their own political views (HM Government, 2015). Their advisory role can give them considerable, if circumscribed, power in policymaking processes: while ministers set policy agendas and make final decisions, civil servants provide evidence to inform decisionmaking, present policy options for ministers to choose from, and highlight risks or benefits of each option (Dowding, 1995; Richards and Smith, 2004). The delineation between ‘politics’ and this advisory role is often blurred, and understandings of what kinds of work or forms of expression are too political for civil servants are fluid (Diamond, 2019; Sausman and Locke, 2004). Scholarship on British politics questions whether a politically neutral Civil Service is feasible, given (for example) their duty of loyalty to the incumbent government, the unrepresentative social backgrounds and class interests of civil servants, or epistemological questions over the possibility of neutrality (Dowding, 1995; Richards and Smith, 2000). As I will elaborate, debates about diversity of thought among national security officials mobilize this ambiguous concept of ‘the political’ in multiple ways, advancing different political ends.

While broader arguments for diversity of thought in decisionmaking are well documented (Cairns and Preziosi, 2014; Diaz-Uda et al., 2013; Syed, 2019), their uptake in national security settings receives only occasional mention in scholarly literature (e.g. Lomas, 2021: 998–999; Van Puyvelde, 2021: 692). In addition to contributing an empirical account of how the diversity of thought agenda has developed in the UK national security community, this article offers an analysis of the theoretical and epistemological claims it makes, and the political ‘work’ this discourse is doing in a moment where the politics of identity are deeply polarizing in the UK and elsewhere. This matters, I argue, because it demonstrates how diversity politics – including in this ‘updated’ form that explicitly seeks to challenge accepted thinking about security – too often function to preserve hegemonic militaristic and colonial approaches to security.

The article originates from a larger study of organizational cultures in UK national security policymaking, involving semi-structured interviews with civil servants working on security policy in the Home Office, Cabinet Office, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Ministry of Defence, and Department for International Development in London from 2017−2018. The article draws on interviews with 17 diversity workers – officials working on diversity and inclusion within national security and adjacent fields, such as HR professionals and those running diversity networks or staff associations for underrepresented groups. Because counter-terrorism policy was frequently cited by participants as an area where diversity and inclusion were particularly needed, I also draw on insights from some of the 18 counter-terrorism officials I interviewed. For the sake of anonymity, I have given all participants pseudonyms and removed identifying details. Interview data is supplemented with analysis of policy documents and public statements by ministers, enabling me to discuss more recent developments in this area and analyse how the concept of diversity of thought has been taken up at the ministerial level.

I first outline the features of the diversity of thought discourse in the UK national security community; how and why it positions demographic diversity within policymaking as a national security concern; and how it is used by civil servants. Drawing on insights from feminist epistemologies critiquing scientific objectivity, I argue that this discourse challenges the formal construction of the bureaucrat as an abstract, objective individual whose gendered, racialized and classed positionality is inconsequential to policymaking. Because the ideas behind this discourse are interpreted in multiple, sometimes contradictory ways by policymakers, I then analyse three articulations of the diversity of thought discourse, which offer distinct theorizations of how diversity of thought can change policymaking. The first articulation draws on elements of feminist standpoint theory and seeks to include the perspectives of marginalized subjects to advance specific critiques of militaristic security policies. The second, which I describe as ‘power-evasive’ (Frankenberg, 1993: 14), protects the foundational conceptualization of the Civil Service as objective and apolitical by obscuring the role of power relations in knowledge production, while the third enacts a defence of existing structural inequalities by framing any discussion of them as ‘too political’ for civil servants. I conclude that, because it is easily and commonly framed in power-evasive ways, the diversity of thought discourse is better placed to preserve prevailing militaristic approaches to national security policy than challenge them. Taking seriously the feminist insight that all knowledge production is shaped by societal power relations would entail abandoning the notion of bureaucracy as the objective, neutral administration of power and constructing alternative institutions for building more just and less violent societies.

Diversity of thought as a national security issue

Chilcot (2016: 57) identified a tendency towards ‘groupthink’ in the UK national security community, which the government interprets as a dynamic wherein ‘a desire to conform results in unchallenged analysis or decisions’ (HM Government, 2018: 27). ‘Groupthink’ typically describes a situation where group members prioritize group cohesiveness over rigorous analysis, such that they decline to challenge each other’s ideas (Janis, 1972: 9). Efforts to increase ‘inclusion’ – the presence of a culture where people feel free to be themselves and speak their minds – seek to overcome the pressure for conformity stemming from group dynamics. Linking inclusion to ‘diversity’ – recruiting and promoting officials from diverse social backgrounds – extends this analysis, positing that the absence of challenging ideas is a function not only of group dynamics, but of who is admitted to the group in the first place. As one counter-terrorism official, Charlotte, explained:

Just walking the floor, again most of the accents you hear are all the same. Everybody looks the same. And a lot of people probably don’t think that differently. . . . [A]ll my friends who’ve been to [private] school think a similar way ’cause they’ve all been through boarding school. That leaves a certain trace on you. . . . If you said you’ve got more groups of people who’ve all been to boarding school, all went to Oxbridge and are all white, you’re probably going to have more groupthink just because their backgrounds are oftentimes just very similar. (Interview 1)

When referring to ‘groupthink’ here, Charlotte is not (only) describing a pressure to conform but theorizing about how people’s life experiences shape their thinking. Like many interviewees, she argued that a lack of demographic diversity – in terms of social characteristics such as gender, race, class, religion, or (dis)ability – produces decisionmakers prone to thinking similarly.

As Senior Security Adviser Kate Davies (2022) explains, ‘the more we hear from those with different backgrounds and lived experiences, the wider variety of different – and equally valid – viewpoints we hear’. This is known as ‘diversity of thought’, or sometimes ‘cognitive diversity’ (Syed, 2019: 15) – a concept used by HR practitioners to describe how members of an organization value the different knowledge and ideas each member brings to their work (Diaz-Uda et al., 2013). In response to Chilcot, senior UK officials have advocated ‘embracing challenge’ by ‘seek[ing] real diversity of thought, not just shades of mainstream thinking’ (Ministry of Defence, 2017: 62). Interviewees argued that demographic diversity could be a proxy for diverse life experiences, which would in turn bring different knowledge and analysis to policy discussions. The following interviewee’s explanation of why diversity and inclusion were important was typical of many I heard:

It’s all to do with diversity of thought for me. . . . [I]t’s obvious that you need diversity, ’cause it’s the decent thing to do in a sense, but, to make the business case for it, with diversity of thought you get much better policymaking. You get a much better range of options. And to get diversity of thought you need diversity of people. (Interview 2)

Building on this argument, officials formed a National Security Community Diversity and Inclusion Network and produced a toolkit, Mission Critical: Why Inclusion is a National Security Issue and What You Can Do to Help, covering recruitment, retention and inclusive practices, which was endorsed by the National Security Adviser and referenced in the national security strategy (HM Government, 2021: 98). Numbering around 30 officials when I contacted them in 2017, the network had a membership of ‘900 and growing’ by 2021. ¹ The government also established a National Security Shadow Board comprising junior officials from historically excluded groups to scrutinize the deliberations of the National Security Council, and a Government Security Challenge Forum to scrutinize broader security work (HM Government, 2018: 8, 27). In 2019, the Cabinet Office initiated a National Security Culture, Diversity and Inclusion Inquiry, which developed into a continuous programme of ‘learning, reflection and improvement’ to promote inclusive practice. ²

This diversity and inclusion agenda was not universally welcomed within government, as signalled by insider critics’ leaking of Mission Critical to the Daily Mail newspaper. In February 2022, as the government was responding to US intelligence reports anticipating the imminent Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Mail quoted unspecified ‘critics’ in government as arguing that, ‘a culture where “manpower” is offensive and where pronouns and “privilege” are promulgated is far removed from the deadly decisions spooks often need to take’ (Martin, 2022). Far-right cabinet minister Jacob Rees-Mogg lamented that the document would give Vladimir Putin the impression that UK intelligence agencies lacked ‘backbone’ (Elsom, 2022). As I discuss further below, however, as the diversity of thought discourse has been drawn into the so-called ‘war on woke’ in UK politics, it has been adopted by some far-right actors even as it is denounced by others.

In some respects, the diversity of thought discourse challenges the traditional conceptualization of the civil servant as objective and impartial, as required by the Civil Service Code (HM Government, 2015). This conceptualization recalls Weber’s theorization of bureaucracy as ‘eliminating from official business love, hatred, and all purely personal, irrational, and emotional elements which escape calculation’ (Weber, 1968: 975). On this reading, bureaucracy is concerned with the realm of ideas and rationality, and the bureaucrat understood as an abstract individual whose gendered, racialized and classed embodiment is irrelevant to their work. They are a machine-like processor of information, converting research and analysis into policy advice by applying a ‘universal rationality’ divorced from personal preferences or opinions (Walters, 1987: 28). The historical predominance of white, class-privileged men in UK security policymaking demonstrates that race, class and gender have never truly been treated as irrelevant. Rather, the exclusion of anyone not fitting this description rendered the white, male somatic norm invisible: embodiment has been considered irrelevant by and for those whose bodies do not stand out as different (Mills, 1997: 53; Puwar, 2004: 55–57, 133).

By insisting that gender, race and class shape the knowledge that civil servants produce, the diversity of thought discourse subtly challenges this notion of the disembodied bureaucrat. In doing so, it recalls feminist critiques of scientific objectivity, which argue that all knowledge is partial and situated, influenced by experiences, values and interests, which in turn reflect the knower’s location within systems of power (Code, 1993; Haraway, 1988; Harding, 1993). Consequently, the claim that scientific objectivity offers a value-free, disembodied ‘gaze from nowhere’ (Haraway, 1988: 581) is enabled only by concealing the workings of (gendered, racialized, classed) power in knowledge production. The following sections use these feminist insights to analyse three distinct articulations of the diversity of thought discourse, exploring how the epistemological assumptions they rely on, and political imperatives they support, disturb or, more often, reinforce hegemonic approaches to national security.

Diversity discourse as politicizing knowledge production

The language of ‘diversity’ – as opposed to ‘equality’ or ‘justice’ – is widely critiqued by feminists and anti-racists as celebrating difference without committing to the redistribution of power (Ahmed, 2007; Bilge, 2020; Titley and Lentin, 2008). However, as Ahmed (2012: 65) notes, the vagueness of ‘diversity’ as a normative goal sometimes enables its use as a relatively accepted, non-confrontational label under which to pursue more transformative ends. The diversity of thought discourse’s focus on changing the content of policy discussions, and not just who participates in them, is seen by some of its advocates as an opportunity to change how security is understood and pursued. For example, one interviewee, Lisa, hoped that promoting diversity of thought could challenge the militaristic worldview that led to the invasion of Iraq:

[W]hen you’re looking at national security issues, so many of these problems sometimes are connected with gender policy, gender issues, understanding of what, when and how we should use military force. Such a traditionally masculine way of interpreting policy and events and everything. . . . particularly with the Chilcot Report and the Iraq inquiry and everything, I feel that having diversity of thought, whether that is from women or ethnic minorities, or different ages, or different social backgrounds . . . it’s just so important to get in that challenge inherent in how we work with each other. . . . I feel like having that really militaristic approach to policy, which we have had in the past, it’s a tendency of the language and the history, I think; the way in which men have managed the state. (Interview 3)

In contrast with the bureaucratic language of policy effectiveness, Lisa’s explanation recalls that of anti-militarist feminists who draw connections between masculinist institutions and policies that prioritize military power (Cohn, 1993; Enloe, 2003). Rather than critiquing social homogeneity in the abstract, Lisa identifies militarism as resulting (at least partly) from a history of patriarchy. Her analysis echoes applications of feminist standpoint theory that critique hegemonic approaches to security as conceived from the perspectives of racially and class-privileged men (Cockburn, 2007, 2010).

While elaborations of feminist standpoint theory vary, it broadly argues that, although all knowledge is situated and partial, knowledge produced from the locations of socially powerful subjects is more likely to be limited or epistemologically disadvantaged, while knowledge produced from the perspectives of socially marginalized subjects tends to be ‘less partial and distorted’ (Harding, 1993: 56; see also Collins, 2014; Hartsock, 1983). Harding (1991), for example, offers multiple reasons why this view from below might produce less distorted accounts of the world, but emphasizes that the everyday activities undertaken by individuals, shaped by their place in social hierarchies, organize and set limits on the knowledge they produce (Harding, 1993: 54). Based on these activities and experiences, Harding argues, oppressed people have stronger motivations to understand the systems of power that subjugate them, while the powerful have little incentive to expose relations of domination from which they benefit, nor interrogate how their beliefs are shaped by those relations. While standpoint theories sometimes essentialize the experiences of oppressed groups (Bar On, 1993), more persuasive articulations make only claims about probabilities: marginalized positionalities do not guarantee, but ‘tend to’ produce less false knowledge, while socially privileged subjects can learn to think from the standpoints of the marginalized (Harding, 1997: 384, 1993: 58–59, 67).

Standpoint theory offers an analysis of the relationships between knowledge, politics and power that could begin to explain how the demographic composition of the national security community might shape policymaking. The predominance of securocrats who are socially privileged, and their location within government departments, means their knowledge about security is shaped by the experiences and interests of the powerful. Although the extent to which discourses on diversity of thought among UK securocrats drew on such ideas is easily overstated, elements of standpoint theory cropped up often in conversation. For example, in counter-terrorism, the overrepresentation of middle-class white men was problematized by some officials. As two interviewees, Francesca and Sylvia, explained:

For counter-terrorism, when it’s literally a bunch of white people sitting in a room talking about Islamist extremism . . . when it’s predominantly affecting one religious group – then I guess having no representatives who actually understand and have grown up in that kind of culture, that faith, understanding how you can turn people away from radicalization. [. . .] And then the far-right extremism, I guess socio-economic diversity is important: understanding what leads people to become radicalized on either side, right-wing or Islamist. (Interview 4)

How are we meant to fundamentally understand some of this when all of us have learnt about the Koran via textbooks or seminars and things like that? So I can quote bits and talk about bits and defend my own. But I haven’t lived it, I don’t feel it, I’m not from those communities. So inherently we’re coming at it from an unconscious bias, different angle. . . . I’m conscious that we all think like liberal middle-class people, which is great in terms of agreeing something, but you’re not necessarily quite agreeing the right thing. (Interview 5)

Neither interviewee explicitly interprets the whiteness or middle-classness of most securocrats as locations within systems of oppression, rather than mere differences from communities most often targeted by counter-terrorism activities, nor do they advance an anti-militarist critique like Lisa’s. However, the idea that the racialized and classed experiences of securocrats limit their perspectives was a recurrent theme among interviewees. Francesca’s and Sylvia’s arguments for recruiting people of colour and working-class people into counter-terrorism to counteract these deficits ³ also evoke important critiques of standpoint theory and its applications.

Calling on minoritized individuals to share knowledge on behalf of a marginalized group can assume some ‘authentic’ experience shared by all or most members of the group, giving each the authority to speak about that ‘community’ as though it were a coherent entity (Minh-ha, 1989: 86–94; Táíwò, 2022: 70–74). Of course, experiences vary according to many factors, including individuals’ locations in multiple, intersecting systems of power: there is no authentic experience of being a woman or a Muslim from which to generate knowledge claims (Bar On, 1993; Grant, 1992). While some officials acknowledged this point, others appeared to expect those who had entered policymaking roles – often helped along by an elite education and other social advantages – to represent a whole demographic. Although some individuals from historically excluded groups resisted the burden that such expectations create (see also Minh-ha, 1989: 89; Puwar, 2004: 62–63), others embraced the role and sought to demonstrate the value of diversity by making declarations on how people of their demographic think or behave.

The most strident articulations of this theorization of diversity of thought, such as that given by Lisa above, connect the elitist, white, patriarchal history and culture of national security institutions with their militaristic and colonial worldviews, thereby reasserting the political nature of knowledge production. My interviewees would not describe diversity of thought as a political agenda: in Civil Service speak, ‘the political’ references party politics, with which civil servants are forbidden from engaging, and I do not suggest they are contravening this requirement. Rather, whereas officials are expected to evaluate policy effectiveness in relation to stated national security objectives, regardless of their own view on the rightness of those objectives, this articulation of the diversity of thought discourse gestures toward a normative position opposing ‘that really militaristic approach to policy’, as Lisa put it, which it identifies as systematically reproduced by patriarchal security institutions.

The proposed solution of including individuals from historically excluded groups in policy discussions is insufficient; given the absence of an authentic standpoint, people of colour will not necessarily offer an analysis of the racialized assumptions and impacts of security policy, nor women a feminist analysis, nor working-class people an anti-capitalist one. Moreover, Civil Service recruitment and promotion procedures, and the imperative to remain ‘apolitical’ (discussed further below), mean that anyone holding views understood as too critical of existing national security policies or the incumbent government would likely be selected out of policymaking roles or deterred from expressing such views in the first place. Indeed, this somewhat anti-militarist articulation of the diversity of thought agenda was only expressed to me in private interviews, never in the meetings I observed, and has never made it into official policy documents. One interviewee, Dana, expressed similar frustrations with diversity initiatives:

You just think, ‘You’ve just recruited people who are just like you. They’re just [a] different skin colour or different gender.’ So is that actually diversity? . . . There are some people in senior positions from an ethnic minority or Muslim background. But those people tend to be . . . like everyone else. I find that people are recruited if they’re friendly or they have opinions that seniors like and want to hear. (Interview 6)

While this situation could be interpreted as resulting from diversity without inclusion, those hoping the diversity of thought agenda will produce more transformative change must contend with how the material and political interests that security institutions serve limit their tolerance for critique (Catignani and Basham, 2021; Jackson, 2016). Any attempt to expose the inevitably political character of knowledge production that examines the social location of individual knowers, but not how policymaking institutions’ positions within global power structures limits their willingness to accept ‘diverse’ thinking, will struggle to understand and address those limitations.

Diversity discourse as ‘apolitical’

Although a few officials hoped diversity of thought would challenge militaristic or colonial approaches to security, more interviewees explained its value in terms of making policies more effective at achieving the government’s existing objectives. When asked how demographic diversity would improve policymaking, many theorized that more policy options would be considered. As one interviewee, Douglas, explained:

I think if it wasn’t diverse then I think you’d be in real problems. I think if you then have two rooms which were separated, one with a diverse group and one with a non-diverse group, I could bet your bottom dollar having seen working groups here and working groups elsewhere where it’s not white, middle-class background males with a specific training, specific background, [the non-diverse group] will come up with answer C whereas [the diverse group] will come up with answer A, C, B, D, F, G, Z. (Interview 7)

If all knowledge is situated, Douglas’s suggestion makes sense: subjects who are differently socially located are, on balance, more likely to offer diverse ideas to policy discussions, in an environment where everyone feels able to speak freely. However, when officials described the process of deciding between those policy options, the idea of the bureaucrat exercising a gaze from nowhere re-emerged. One diversity worker, Sam, described how diversity and inclusion would change decisionmaking:

I think, as well as challenging some of the options on the table, it might help to broaden the set of options because people would apply different lenses to these particular problem sets. So, you might have a bit more variety of the options, but I’m still not massively convinced that you’d have hugely different conclusions reached. Because, like I said, most of the time they are the most sensible conclusion to reach, and you still have the ministerial layer to all of this official machinery anyway. (Interview 8)

I read Sam’s argument that a more diverse set of officials would probably reach the same judgement about ‘the most sensible conclusion’ not as suggesting that groupthink would pressure both groups into conforming around a particular option, but as arguing that there is a singular, objectively most sensible option, reached through a common logic that all those present would apply. Rather than problematizing this logic as a particularistic one produced by a culture steeped in white, middle-class masculinity, he apparently assumes that all rational observers presented with a common set of facts will evaluate them similarly.

The Civil Service Code lists objectivity among its four core values, explaining that ‘“objectivity” is basing your advice and decisions on rigorous analysis of the evidence’ (HM Government, 2015). Officials must ‘provide information and advice . . . on the basis of the evidence, and accurately present the options and facts’ and ‘take decisions on the merits of the case’ (HM Government, 2015). In common with scientific objectivity, then, the official Civil Service view suggests that objective decisionmaking is achievable through value-free assessments of empirical evidence. Objectivity is closely linked to another core value, impartiality, which means ‘acting solely according to the merits of the case and serving equally well governments of different political persuasions’ (HM Government, 2015). An impartial civil servant does not ‘allow your personal political views to determine any advice you give or your actions’ (HM Government, 2015). Both definitions assume each ‘case’ has ‘merits’ that present themselves unmediated to the civil servant and can be adjudicated without reference to the individual’s values, interests, or biases. The definition of impartiality further places political views in the category of the ‘personal’, which can and must be separated from any assessment of facts.

The self-understanding of the Civil Service as politically neutral is sustained through this binary opposition between acting objectively and impartially by following the evidence and acting on one’s personal feelings or political opinions. Officials are understood as ‘“good empiricists”, untainted by ideological preferences’ (Richards and Smith, 2004: 786). In contrast, recognizing officials as situated knowers would highlight how they draw on prior knowledge to make ‘judgement calls about relevance, plausibility, coherence, consistency and credibility’ of evidence – knowledge shaped by each official’s social location (Alcoff, 2007: 44). Whereas the Civil Service Code regards political ideology as undermining objectivity, the feminist epistemologies discussed here regard all knowledge production as political due to its enmeshment with power relations. Not all interviewees shared Sam’s view that considering more options would not change the final policy decision, yet they often used similar language to describe how decisions are made. In this articulation of the diversity of thought discourse, although securocrats are expected to bring their experiences as gendered, racialized and classed subjects to the table when suggesting policy options, the process of selecting from those options is framed as one of objectively sorting through ideas, accepting or rejecting them based on a neutral, disinterested process. Prior recognition of the securocrat’s knowledge as situated is seemingly put back under the table, quietly reinstating the idea that policymaking requires a view from nowhere.

This move results, I suggest, from a tendency of the diversity of thought discourse to frame gender, race and class as aspects of identity or difference rather than locations within systems of power, slipping into what Frankenberg (1993: 14) calls ‘power evasiveness’. The term describes ‘modes of talking about difference that evaded questions of power’ (Frankenberg 1993: 149); whereas in ‘colour-blind’ or ‘colour-evasive’ discourses the speaker claims not to notice or care about racial difference (Bonilla-Silva, 2006; Frankenberg, 1993: 142–149; Williams, 1998), power-evasive discourses allow selective acknowledgement of race as an axis of difference, but not a structure of power (Frankenberg, 1993: 149–157). Successive UK governments have promulgated power-evasive framings of racism as individual prejudice, in contrast with more radical anti-racisms (Elliott-Cooper, 2023; Sivanandan, 1985). Britain’s Black Power movements, for example, have identified racism as an outcome of the normal functioning of state institutions working to maintain the conditions for the exploitation of racialized communities, first in the colonies and then on the mainland (Elliott-Cooper, 2023). Contrary to this structural account, and disconnected from histories of colonialism, state narratives more often frame racism as individual intolerance to cultural diversity in multicultural Britain, which can manifest in public institutions as ‘an outlier or fault in an otherwise non-racist system’ (Elliott-Cooper, 2023: 105). This latter understanding has been promoted throughout the public sector, for example in trainings on racism awareness (Sivanandan, 1985) and unconscious bias (Bourne, 2019). Tendencies toward power-evasiveness in the diversity of thought discourse therefore reflect a history of more concerted and pervasive state rejection of left critiques of structural injustices, in relation to race and wider inequalities.

When discussing recruitment, securocrats frequently recognized structural inequalities as barriers to entering the Civil Service; yet, when discussing how difference shapes knowledge production, recognition of power imbalances was often lost. Sam frames diversity as providing ‘different lenses’ that offer ‘variety’ to policy thinking, but securocrats rarely acknowledged how the experiences of marginalized groups might offer vantage points for better understanding systems of oppression, including those that security policies reinforce. Many diversity workers argued, like Francesca and Sylvia above, that the views of minoritized groups are especially important to policy discussions that particularly affect them, such as on counter-terrorism or immigration. However, this did not precipitate sustained recognition of the role of power relations in knowledge production, nor was thinking from the lives of the oppressed prioritized.

Power-evasive thinking is detectable in the insistence by some officials that diversity of thought could be, or has been, achieved without attention to social inequalities. For example, Sam argued that the range of government departments in national security already provided significant diversity of thought:

We underestimate, I think, a bit, the diversity within the national security community . . . Because my sense is, if you’ve had a sterling career in GCHQ, ⁴ it would be really very different to someone who’s had a career in the Foreign Office. . . . Your experiences will be different, the way you look at problems will be different. What’s seen as important to you when you’re looking at a problem would be very different. When we look at the statistics or the data in the usual way that you’d look at it when you’re looking at [diversity] – gender, ethnicity, working class, etc. – I’m sure there are a whole load of other axes you could put on it where actually you think that’s really quite diverse, and it’s really quite a mixed community. (Interview 8)

Unlike the first articulation discussed above, this version of the diversity of thought discourse breaks from notions of representation as repairing historical injustices. Comparing departmental differences to gender, race and class elides the former with systems of power that have shaped how national security is understood and pursued over centuries. As I have already argued, hegemonic conceptions of national security, statehood and sovereignty entail profoundly racialized, gendered and classed assumptions about what counts as security, who the state provides security for, and who threatens it (Goldberg, 2002; Nişancioğlu, 2020; Peterson, 1992). Although government departments hold somewhat differing worldviews due their different mandates, those views all emerge from powerful positions at the heart of the British state. Because it omits recognition of how power shapes knowledge production and insists on the possibility of objectivity, this articulation of the diversity of thought discourse cannot account for or address how the operation of (gendered, racialized, classed) power reproduces the militaristic orientation of national security policies. Reducing race, gender and class to forms of difference that produce diverse policy options to be accepted or discarded through ‘value-free’ calculation misses how the terms of what is considered objective and value-free are all but dictated by those very systems of power.

Diversity discourse as redefining ‘the political’

As aforementioned, while some ministers fear that efforts to promote diversity of thought emasculate the British state, others have embraced the concept, treating it as an apparent alternative to equality-driven agendas. For example, when a journalist highlighted the lack of Black MPs in the Cabinet in 2020, minister Matt Hancock argued: ‘It’s diversity of thought that’s the really important thing when you’re taking those big decisions around the cabinet table’ (Besanvalle, 2020). Used in this way, promoting diversity of thought can resemble an effort to push beyond tokenism, but in fact serve to deflect questions of structural injustice altogether. No civil servant I interviewed downplayed the significance of demographic representation so unreservedly, yet a wider ministerial backlash against identity politics and structural power analysis has had knock-on effects for civil servants.

After the 2019 General Election further empowered right-wing Conservatives, and particularly after the escalation of Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, the government forcefully opposed any recognition of (particularly racial) inequalities as structural or institutionalized. In 2020, equalities minister Kemi Badenoch denounced critical race theory – which analyses how racism structures social systems – as ‘political’ and ‘getting into [public] institutions that really should be neutral’ (Nelson, 2020), while the government-appointed Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities (2021) concluded that claims of structural or institutional racism in the UK often lack ‘objective foundations’ (2021: 36). In response to the Commission’s conclusions, the government’s Inclusive Britain report called for public sector institutions to recognize the ‘diversity of opinion’ on matters of race and ‘ensure that language seeks to encourage unity and inclusion, rather than division and grievance’ (HM Government, 2022: 87). Inclusive Britain commits the Civil Service to ensuring ‘careful delineation of ideas and views which are more political’, arguing that, ‘It is never appropriate to promote political ideas or groupings, or communicate in divisive language which singles out any community in a negative way’ (HM Government, 2022: 87). The 2022 Civil Service diversity and inclusion strategy further emphasizes a need to ‘ensure political views do not influence Civil Service advice or actions’, arguing that, ‘the boundaries between debates which are about the workplace and debates which are about society can sometimes be blurred and we all must be mindful to prevent well-intentioned initiatives and communications straying into matters of public policy’ (Civil Service, 2022: 11).

The inference that debates about the workplace and those about society can and should be separated implies that diversity work should not name structural societal inequalities. The careful wording of these warnings about ‘more political’ ideas that encourage ‘division and grievance’ could apply to, for example, racist anti-immigration rhetoric as much as critiques of white supremacy. Yet statements by ministers evidenced that it was left-wing ideas that they were anxious to silence, from a Cabinet Office memo banning ‘woke speakers’ from Whitehall events (O’ Dell, 2021) to Rees-Mogg (2022) declaring that civil servants should not use the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag. In contrast to the idea that to get diversity of thought you need diversity of people, ministerial critiques of diversity workers as ‘woke commissars policing our thoughts’ positioned ‘the left-wing view on race, gender and sexuality’ (Braverman, 2022) that allegedly pervaded their work as threatening diversity of thought, and those holding right-wing views as victims of oppression.

This third articulation of ‘diversity of thought’ takes the power-evasive framing further by explicitly defining the analysis of structural power relations – particularly, though not exclusively relating to race – as too political for civil servants. By implication, analyses of identity that evade or reject power analysis are apolitical and unremarkable. Guidance on promoting diversity of thought therefore becomes an instrument for reinterpreting the requirement for impartiality to reinforce the status quo. By positioning diversity workers as overlords, this articulation posits a different power hierarchy, albeit one lacking a structural analysis. This rhetoric may have been espoused largely to generate headlines, and it is unclear how its incorporation into Civil Service strategy documents has been received or operationalized. However, research already demonstrates that analyses of structural racism are habitually negated by officials in counter-terrorism policy spaces, for example – a norm which these developments may reinforce (Abu-Bakare, 2022; Wright, 2024).

Conclusions

This article has examined discourses promoting diversity of thought among UK national security policymakers, wherein officials and ministers differently articulate the politics of identity and knowledge production. I have argued that, by recognizing knowledge as situated and shaped by lived experiences, the diversity of thought discourse partially challenges traditional conceptions of the bureaucrat as a disembodied thinker providing a view from nowhere. However, while some officials hope to advance an emancipatory politics that thinks from the lives of marginalized subjects to critique militaristic security practices, the diversity of thought discourse is more often framed in power-evasive ways that reinstate the notion of objective, apolitical knowledge production and obscure its imbrication with gendered, racialized and classed power relations. Increasingly, Conservative ministers used the diversity of thought agenda to enforce a version of Civil Service impartiality that, paradoxically, attempts to stifle critiques of structural inequality. The codified requirement for bureaucratic objectivity and the predominantly power-evasive character of the diversity of thought discourse – like diversity discourses generally – make the latter liable to be used in ways that frame hegemonic approaches to security as apolitical, rather than exposing how they arise from and uphold patriarchy, capitalism and white supremacy. Though I have not examined how well theorizations of diversity of thought account for the policy failures to which they purport to respond, it seems unlikely this discourse can adequately explain how the colonial and militaristic logics leading to UK participation in the invasion of Iraq prevailed, at least when theorized in power-evasive ways.

Public institutions should be open to all, and foster cultures in which even radical critique is welcomed. However, including historically excluded groups, even alongside efforts to promote diverse thinking, is insufficient to overcome national security institutions’ commitment to militarism. How policymakers have taken up ‘diversity of thought’ predominantly reflects their institutions’ material and ideological investment in a militaristic and colonial notion of national security whose hegemonic status renders it invisible, apparently apolitical and banal. The ideas and practices upholding it are therefore implicitly positioned beyond the scope of efforts to embrace challenge following the Chilcot Inquiry.

This account of the diversity of thought discourse represents yet another example of a critical discursive intervention being evacuated of any (in this case even slightly) radical content when taken up by powerful institutions (e.g. Elliott-Cooper, 2023; Táíwò, 2022). Asking why this story repeats itself invites us to consider the interests that such institutions serve. Although this article focuses on how discourses challenge or legitimize hegemony, aligning with previous calls to couple discursive analyses in security studies with materialist approaches (e.g. Hudson, 2015; Machold and Charrett, 2021; Manchanda and Rossdale, 2021), I suggest that explaining the limits of diversity initiatives requires an account of the material structures that appear to necessitate security practices. If, as the literatures outlined in my introduction argue, ‘security’ functions primarily to maintain racialized, gendered and classed processes of capital accumulation and the colonial distribution of resources and power (McQuade, 2018; Neocleous, 2014), it is unsurprising that diversity initiatives have not salvaged an emancipatory approach to security from institutions not set up to advance this end. Arguably, proffering structural power analysis is increasingly taboo for UK officials precisely because it highlights how government policies maintain these violent inequalities. Alternative approaches, drawing on literatures on racial capitalism as well as post-, de- and anti-colonial traditions, are being explored in, for example, scholarship on abolishing ‘security’ (e.g. Kundani, 2021; Machold and Charrett, 2021; Manchanda, 2021; McQuade, 2018; Ramji-Nogales, 2022), which argues that reforms to security institutions have served to preserve and legitimize their work protecting racial capitalism, and advocates constructing alternative, life-giving institutions to address social inequalities that make security practices appear necessary. Whereas contemporary abolitionist theory and practice often targets policing, prisons and borders (Gilmore, 2022; Kaba and Ritchie, 2022; Walia, 2013), its application to broader ‘national security’ raises questions for further exploration around, for example, what it would mean to abolish interior ministries such as the UK Home Office or the National Security Council.

Taking seriously the concept of situated knowledges also demands rethinking how the knowledge decisionmakers rely on should be produced: not only who is in the room when this happens, but what it is for. As Patricia Hill Collins (2014: 270–271) explains:

Alternative knowledge claims are rarely threatening to conventional knowledge. Such claims are routinely ignored, discredited, or simply absorbed and marginalized in existing paradigms. Much more threatening is the challenge that alternative epistemologies offer to the basic process used by the powerful to legitimate knowledge claims that in turn justify their right to rule.

Accepting that objectivity is illusory, and that all knowledge is political, challenges the liberal conception of a neutral bureaucracy and the power relations it preserves (Ferguson, 1984; Jones, 1993), raising questions for further investigation. What would it mean for decisionmakers to replace objectivity with a conceptualization of knowledge as situated and imbued with power relations? What would policymaking processes premised on justice rather than impartiality look like, and who would participate in them? Alternative institutions require alternative epistemologies – ones that do not deny the imbrication of knowledge with power relations, but treat knowledge production as a central component of a liberatory political praxis.