Science Diplomacy study: Implementing research security in Denmark
Research security is raising questions in universities about how international engagement is assessed, what knowledge needs protecting and how responsibility for assessing risk is defined and taken on. This is the focus of a new study by AIAS Science Diplomacy Fellow Rachel Fishberg published in the journal Policy Reviews in Higher Education.
Research security has emerged as a central framework for managing geopolitical risk in international scientific collaboration. Policies on research security place new responsibilities on scientists to manage risk while bringing intelligence professionals into academic domains, raising questions about scientific autonomy and authority.
The recent study ‘Implementing Research Security in Denmark: The Emergence of Research Security Professionals’ is one of the first that look at what is happening with research security in Danish universities, and the first article to come out of the research that Science Diplomacy Fellow Rachel Fishberg has been undertaking during her Science Diplomacy fellowship at the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies (AIAS).
In the study, Rachel Fishberg together with colleague Hedvig Ördén (Department of Communication, Lund University, Sweden) study how universities are putting research security into professional practice, focusing on the people taking on this work and on how they navigate between the concerns of researchers, university leadership and the intelligence services.
The study includes interviews with research security staff and draws on media debates, policy documents and guidelines that were introduced following the establishment of the Danish Security and Intelligence Service’s Centre for Innovation and Knowledge Security.
‘With limited guidance to draw on, staff across Danish universities began learning from one another and building a professional community as they worked out how to handle the new responsibilities of putting research security into professional practice,’ Rachel Fishberg explains.
Controversial poster campaign accelerating research security engagement
Fishberg and Ördén’s study also discuss PET’s poster campaign, a campaign by the Danish national security and intelligence service, and how the controversy around this campaign accelerated universities’ engagement with research security and helped shape the emerging role of research security professionals.
‘These developments reflect a wider change in relations between science and the state, becoming institutionalised within Danish universities through new and rapidly developing professional roles and responsibilities for administrative staff, researchers and research leadership,’ Fishberg concludes.
Scientific article
‘Implementing research security in Denmark: the emergence of research security professionals’ by Hedvig Ördén and Rachel Fishberg in: Policy Reviews in Higher Education, 29 October 2026:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23322969.2026.2751602
Funding
Rachel Fishberg has received funding from the AIAS Science Diplomacy Fellowship programme funded by Aarhus University Research Foundation and Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies (AIAS) at Aarhus University.
Contact
Rachel Fishberg, AIAS Science Diplomacy Fellow
E-mail: rfish@ps.au.dk
Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies, AIAS &
The Danish Centre for Studies in Research and Research Policy,
Department of Political Science
Aarhus University
Denmark