Beyond the Ivory Tower? Security Studies Scholarship in Denmark and Norway

ABSTRACT This article examines how academic national security expertise in Denmark and Norway translates into public visibility and engagement opportunities. While a largely US‐centred literature on the practitioner–academic gap in national security identifies persistent obstacles to policy relevance—often locating responsibility either within the academic profession or among policymakers—there is limited systematic evidence on how these dynamics operate in small, high‐trust democracies. Drawing on an original dataset combining bibliometric indicators and national media coverage, a survey of leading security scholars, and a set of qualitative interviews, the article analyses how patterns of public voice and engagement are structured across institutional affiliation, geography, seniority, and gender. The findings show that security scholars in Denmark and Norway express strong commitment to public dissemination and policy engagement and generally perceive the policy environment as receptive. However, access to sustained public visibility and policy dialogue is unevenly distributed and shaped less by disciplinary orientation or scholarly motivation than by institutional geography. Informal networks, proximity to political and media centres, and weakly institutionalised organisational support systematically advantage scholars located in capital‐based institutions, while constraining those positioned elsewhere. By comparing Denmark's restrained centralism with Norway's centralised pluralism, the article demonstrates how national institutional configurations condition who speaks, who is heard, and who remains silent in national security policy debates.