In discussion: Andrew Neal

BISA is run by a board of trustees who make up our Executive Committee. They have expertise and interests that represent the main areas of our activity and a breadth of experience from the wider world. We hope this interview series will help you get to know them a little better. This time it's the turn of Professor Andrew Neal who is the academic freedom lead for BISA — a new position created following member feedback. He is based at the University of Edinburgh.

Tell us a bit about yourself and where you are from.

I’m from north London, born to a Greek Cypriot mother and working-class English father. I grew up with what I see as an immigrant work ethic that encouraged hard work at school. I see that as shaping my route into academia. I liked studying and found it intrinsically rewarding. However, the years of Greek lessons were something I did not enjoy and eventually I was allowed to give up when I got a D grade for my GCSE, probably the worst academic grade I’ve ever received!

I see north London as shaping my liberal left outlook, and I see my coming of age as very much part of the 1990s liberal left era of Brit Pop and New Labour (before it all soured). In my teenage years, plan A was music: I spent a year at the now-defunct London Music School in Wapping studying guitar, and I very nearly went to university for a pop music degree. At the last minute I changed my mind, having had a small taste of the music industry and the musical life and realising it wasn’t for me. Plan B was academia, and here I am. At least I got all that out of my system, so I’m not in any way a frustrated rock star. I’ve lived in Edinburgh for nearly 20 years now, having moved here for my first permanent university position. I’d been introduced to Edinburgh by a musician friend, and it was always a dream to live here. I feel very lucky.

You’re the new academic freedom lead for BISA. Why is this role important to you, and what do you hope to achieve during your term?

When I saw this role come up, I noticed because I’ve done a bit of work in this area, and I was already thinking about standing as a BISA trustee, having served on the BISA thesis prize committee for a couple of years. Several years ago, I’d looked at the Prevent Duty through research I’d done in critical terrorism and security studies, and was then involved in debates around the risks posed by its implementation in universities. While a highly problematic policy, some institutions seemed to be overinterpreting it to hinder any terrorism related research, discussion or speaking events, while other colleagues seemed to be overinterpreting the negative effects it would have. As a researcher, my instinct was to look carefully at the legislation, the guidance, and the parliamentary debates that led to it, in order to find out what powers it created but also what its limits were. It was clear to me that academic freedom was, on paper, strongly protected in all areas of Prevent, and that we as an academic community had strong grounds to push back if necessary. I helped draft our School Prevent implementation policy with this in mind, and also did some minor publishing on the topic. Academic freedom is not my core area of expertise by any means, but I felt I probably knew more about it than the average person, and that I had something to offer our academic community. I’ve also just finished a three and a half year role as director of postgraduate research programmes in social and political science at my university, and have gained some experience in working in teams and supporting colleagues and students, which I thought would transfer well.

I hope to bring a level-headed, well-informed sense of service to the academic freedom trustee role, looking after the interests of all our members and our discipline.

What is your main area of research and how did you get into it? What are you currently working on?

I’m aware that from the outside my academic path looks a bit erratic but for me there is a clear thread running through it. Two years ago, I was promoted to Professor of International Security, and security has always been the central concern of my work. I began my PhD a week after 9/11 happened and was already working on critical security topics, so I found myself working in a growing and energetic area of academia with some inspiring peers, friends and colleagues in the UK, Europe and Canada. My work began very much steeped in political theory, and my first publications were on Foucault and the application of his work to critical security topics. Later I got more interested in political practice around security, and I spent most of the 2010s studying parliamentary security politics in the UK. I think this was deeply unfashionable after a trendy start to my career, but it seemed like work that needed to be done when parliament kept voting for more and more problematic counter-terrorism laws.

In the 2020s, I’ve been looking at national security documents, and more recently, doing so with computational text analysis tools. To me, the thread running through all this is still the study of security through discourse, and Foucault is still my main inspiration for doing that.

You led a project that has created what may be the largest database of national security and defence documents ever assembled - The National Security and Defence Documents Dataset (1987-2024). How are developments in data science, for example Large Language Models (LLMs), changing the way that scholars study critical security discourse?

I got curious about national security documents when I was studying UK security politics and started collecting them. It snowballed when I realised more and more countries were publishing them, and no one had noticed let alone explained it. There was no central repository or record of these documents, and finding them was difficult. As my collection built up, it also became increasingly challenging to read and analyse them – the collection is now around 700 documents and 22 million words. The rise of AI has been enormously helpful. I can now use AI-led web search tools to find new documents, and have been developing ways to harness LLMs to analyse the texts themselves. This needs lots of caution – I’ve had to learn basic coding skills, statistics, computational text analysis conventions (already quite established in American political science), and adapt them to the LLM era. The rise of ‘vibe coding’ has helped, which means I can build analytical tools through dialogue with AI instead of trying to code them directly. Analysis might involve, for example, building a panel of 10 LLMs to categorise sentences from the documents, testing multiple LLM prompts for their different effects, experimenting with different forms of statistical and human validation, and lots of bug and error hunting. If critical poststructuralist computational text analysis in security studies was not a thing before, I’m hoping I can make it one. I’ve been offering introductory sessions to students, BISA colleagues and various others, and I’m hoping to open up these tools to others.

Is there anything else we should know about you?

Lots of people know I’m a keen cyclist, and catching up with people at conferences normally involves being asked the question ‘How’s the cycling going?’. The thing is, I’m cycling much less than I used to, having moved past my midlife-crisis-middle-aged-man-in-Lycra phase! I do still ride though, I love the social side, the sense of adventure, and meeting people from real life who I would never meet otherwise.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash