When security speaks: AUKUS, discourse, and the battle of meanings in South Asia

AUKUS has attracted considerable scholarly attention for its implications for Indo-Pacific security, alliance politics, and strategic competition. However, limited attention has been paid to how its regional significance has been discursively constructed from a South Asian perspective. This article examines how The Hindu, Global Times, and Dawn represented AUKUS between September 2021 and June 2025. Combining Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis with Regional Security Complex Theory, the study builds on Oskanian’s intersubjective dimension of external penetration to argue that the regional significance of external security arrangements evolves through a recursive process of discursive negotiation. The findings demonstrate that AUKUS was constructed through contrasting narratives of balancing, containment, strategic autonomy, nuclear non-proliferation, and regional order. Rather than deriving solely from material capabilities, AUKUS acquired strategic significance through the continual reproduction, contestation, and recontextualization of competing security narratives, contributing to scholarship on communication, external penetration, and South Asian regional security.