Assessing the Interactions Between Experts and Practitioners in Security, the Case Study of Think Tanks’ Interaction with NATO

Security organisation such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (hereafter NATO) appears to be the last type of organisation prone to let civil society inside its wall. Indeed, the alliance dealing with ‘high politics’ in Europe would be expected to be more likely to keep private its information sources (Mayer in Steffek et al. 2008). Yet the alliance is not completely exempt of inputs from think tanks and while few authors have undertaken an in-depth analysis of this relation, this paper intends to investigate the ‘inclusion’ of civil society, more particularly think tanks, inside NATO’s decision-making process. In order to overcome the shortfall in the literature, this research examines more particularly NATO’s decisions and policies towards Russia and takes as a case study NATO’s 2016 decision to send four battle groups in the Baltics to ‘deter a newly assertive’ Russia, i.e. the enhanced forward presence (hereafter eFP). This decision takes place in a specific context of ‘information war coming from Russia’, whereby, according to the current literature, think tanks have managed to gain capital and become key sources of information (Kohút and Rychnovská 2018). In other words and drawing upon the literature on epistemic assemblage (Leander, Weaver 2018), the literature on security expertise (Berling, 2015; Bueger and Berling 2015) and the literature combining discourse and practices (Milliken 1999, Neumann 2002, Pouliot 2007), this paper focuses on the role of the expert network at NATO, the representations of Russia that these experts hold, as well as their recommendations of specific policies towards Russia. Building upon dozen interviews with NATO employees and think tanks analysts as well as the analysis of 42 reports produced by think tanks, this paper aims to analyse how and what discourses are produced by think tanks and what practices allow them to be considered as relevant expert network by NATO. In doing so, the research identifies the epistemic and sociological background behind NATO’s policies.