Tracking Security — Development Nexus in the Official Documents of Bilateral Donors

This paper continues a series of publications on theoretical aspects of security-development nexus. Drawing on the idea of context-oriented approach to conceptualizing the nexus, it formulates the basics of a novel methodology of tracking the ‘nexus’ in an official discourse of key bilateral donors using quantitative content analysis. The uniqueness of this approach consists in composing disjoint sets of keywords for different type of documents depending on the issuing agency. The paper makes an argument that the nexus can be identified by a number of secondary attributes. The key task is to assess the extent to which the unconventional terms (alien to the traditionalist discourse on security and development) are being used in the documents issued by development agencies (ministries) and defense ministries (and chiefs of staff) respectively. Additional task is to assess the extent to which certain terms considered to be characteristic of the ‘nexus’ paradigm are being incorporated in the official documents developed by the government as a whole or by separate agencies — alone or jointly with other bodies. The proposed methodology allows to account for a dualistic nature of the ‘nexus’ and a bidirectional character of its constitutive linkages, on the one hand, and make an objective comparison of the various government agencies’ willingness to adopt a more holistic understanding of their own mission. If thematic quantitative analysis is complemented by an identification of semantic linkages between separate text units within the selected documents and by qualitative methods, the dividends of applying content analysis to studying the security-development nexus can increase substantially.