Exceptionalising China knowledge: academic exchange, decisionism, and the securitisation of knowledge exchange with China in Australia

Abstract How does the securitisation of knowledge exchange cross the threshold from discursive reframing into the suspension of routine governance rules? This article examines the securitisation of Australia–China academic exchange between 2017 and 2025 and develops a three-layered analytical framework to answer this question. The first layer, discursive securitisation, captures the reframing of China knowledge as suspect knowledge through a securitising coalition of intelligence agencies, politicians, and media actors. The second, administrative securitisation, traces how this discourse was translated into institutional filtering through visa scrutiny, grant vetting, and compliance mechanisms, gatekeeping the evolution of China knowledge in Australian society and politics. The third layer identifies a qualitatively distinct step in increasingly intensified knowledge (re)production fields, where ordinary academic norms were displaced by anticipatory, category-based exclusion, while distributed decisionism disperses accountability and insulates exclusionary decisions from meaningful public deliberation. The article argues that the Copenhagen School accounts for the first two layers but cannot explain the decisive institutional acts that characterise the third. Drawing on Carl Schmitt’s logic of decisionism, it advances discussion around securitisation with a concept of “exceptionalisation” as a bridging concept that names the threshold at which securitised issues are removed from normal, routine and procedural governance. The Australian case reveals a paradox: exceptionalising China knowledge erodes the very expertise on which informed security policy depends. The article contributes to securitisation theory by specifying how and when securitisation becomes something else.