AUKUS ‘behind the scenes’: through the lens of militarised neoliberalism

Abstract

Much of the commentary surrounding AUKUS focuses exclusively on geopolitics and stops short of addressing structural forces of the economic-security nexus that AUKUS has simultaneously reshaped. Advancing the concept of militarised neoliberalism, this paper moves beyond the state-centric focus of ‘realist’ approaches and unpacks the social, political and economic forces that are reconnected through and simultaneously reshape the geoeconomic order. We argue that AUKUS is not simply a security partnership, but rather constitutes a mutation of neoliberalism emerging in the context of bipartisanship. The latter entails state transformation which reconnects business, politics, and military networ..