About Us

The Centre for Non-Traditional Security Studies (NTS Centre) conducts research and produces policy-relevant analyses aimed at furthering awareness and building capacity to address NTS issues and challenges in the Asia-Pacific region and beyond. The Centre addresses knowledge gaps, facilitates discussions and analyses, engages policymakers, and contributes to building institutional capacity in Sustainable Security and Crises. The NTS Centre brings together myriad NTS stakeholders in regular workshops and roundtable discussions, as well as provides a networking platform for NTS research institutions in the Asia Pacific through the NTS-Asia Consortium.

NTS Centre’s Mission

To conduct rigorous research aimed at advancing the study of Non-Traditional Security (NTS) issues, providing a platform for scholars and policy makers in Asia and beyond to guide NTS policies, and engaging the academic and policy communities to craft informed approaches to NTS challenges.

What are NTS issues?

Non-traditional security (NTS) issues are challenges to the survival and well-being of peoples and states that arise from non-military sources, such as climate change, resource scarcity, infectious diseases, natural disasters, irregular migration, food shortages, people smuggling, drug trafficking and transnational crime.

These dangers are transnational in scope, defying unilateral remedies and requiring comprehensive – political, economic and social – responses, as well as the humanitarian use of military force.

The Growing Importance of NTS Issues:

Source: Compiled from World Economic Forum. (2023). World Risks Report 2023. Cologny/Geneva: World Economic Forum.

Research Programmes

Research in the NTS Centre has been reconceptualised to reflect global changes in the last few years and certainly amid COVID-19. Given these developments, we organise and reflect our research in two components of Non-Traditional Security – Crises and Sustainable Security – found in our region and globally. Recasting NTS Centre’s research around these two research streams underscores the need to address transnational security threats with a whole-of-society approach. It also aims to capture the comprehensive nature of non-traditional security whilst communicating the two streams that our research covers. It puts the NTS Centre on the front foot in terms of organising our research in a structured and consistent way and places the NTS Centre well for exploring external collaboration and partnership opportunities that mirrors NTS Centre’s expertise.