Yes, cultural security can indeed be considered as a component of national security. Cultural security refers to the protection and preservation of a nation's cultural heritage, identity, values, and traditions. It encompasses the idea that a nation's cultural assets and diversity are essential elements of its overall security and well-being.

Here's how cultural security can be seen as a component of national security:

In summary, cultural security is closely intertwined with national security by contributing to social cohesion, stability, diplomacy, resilience, and economic well-being. It is a multi-faceted concept that recognizes the importance of cultural heritage in shaping a nation's overall security and success.

Dear Georgios,

I am glad that you posed this question because it suggests that many scholars in the field of national security are being taught something that no longer reflects the basis of international law, treaties and the definition of national security, and indeed the key principle within the U.N. Charter and basic treaties from the post WWII period that are continually reaffirmed. The more important question you should be asking is "Why has our field strayed so far from its initial principles that we no longer even recognize its original precepts and basis under international law?" Culture, "sovereignty" and "sustainability" are exactly what we seek to protect and we measure resources to be protected and define needs by looking at how resources interact with cultural preferences, so they are inextricably intertwined in the concept of survival/security.

Cultural rights formally exist on two levels in international law; those of preferences of individual nation-states, which are the basic actors in the international system and who have the right under every treaty to protect national interests which are defined in terms of cultural preferences (including economic agreements and political/economic blocs), and then rights of included minorities within and across nation states (some 6,000 remaining cultures today, though most are endangered) as affirmed in the U.N. Genocide Convention and that have been key components of work under additional human rights treaties (from the Child Rights Convention to Declarations on Rights of Indigenous Peoples to treaties on sustainable development that imply protections of cultures in their environments since cultures are interlinked with adaptations to environments within various UN agencies).

If you want to get a quick start on the legal background and the context of cultural protections and how to better actualize these secuity rights, take a look at pieces like mine on my ResearchGate page on "Why We Need a Cultural Red Book for Endangered Cultures" (to help define key attributes of cultures and the threats to them), one on the "Prisoners Dilemma of Sustainability" and my International Treatise on International Development Law with several indicators for applying development law and protecting cultural security. You might also look at my piece on "Is Economics in Violation of International Law?" to explain how current applications of economic goals have sought to eliminate cultural protections from the international dialogue, which might explain why you also do not find them in your international security studies.

Probably part of the failure of this recognition of cultural rights today is not just that globalization has been seeking to reverse much of international law and is putting us all at risk, but that major global powers have so embraced a form of globalization/neo-colonialism that not only erases cultures and their security in their environments but have chosen the same paths for themselves, such that they can no longer even define what their own distinct cultures are anymore, beyond perhaps the national language, and they no longer have the ability or recognize the importance of long-term sustainable development planning that includes planning to protect their own cultural values in their own environments. (I recently published a piece that is an example of this using Vietnam and how they can't really define themselves and identity anymore beyond just their language, but the issue is mostly the same elsewhere.)

My Ph.D. field, Anthropology, used to have the role of helping to define and measure cultural differences and how they worked (or failed to achieve, sustainability, such as in colonial/imperial cultures) and to then work to promote their future sustainability and survival as part of the discipline's applied work. This work has now been almost entirely erased in favor of eliminating culture and pretending it no longer exists while claiming to promote a "diversity" that no longer even reflects "culture". Probably this is also why you cannot find Anthropologists who do this in programs on national security, working on questions of peace, protections, cultural restoration and survival.

More people need to be asking the question you are asking if we are all going to survive, so thanks for initiating this conversation.

Best,

David Lempert, Ph.D., J.D., M.B.A., E.D. (Hon.)