When Dr. Nadav Morag first began teaching the Comparative Homeland Security course at CHDS in 2005 there wasn’t a textbook available for him to assign to his students. So, he decided to write his own.
“There were a couple of books that dealt with specific countries, but nothing that looked across the board. There weren’t any books that were comprehensive or that looked at a range of democratic countries in terms of various homeland security practices,” he said, adding that he wanted to focus on counterterrorism, policing, defense support for civil authorities, emergency management, critical infrastructure protection, and border security.
“There wasn’t anything like that, so I figured, ‘Well, I’ll bite the bullet and write the thing.’”
That decision led to Comparative Homeland Security, whose third edition was published August 27, 2025. It will be used in the master’s cohorts beginning in 2026, in the Global Threats course.
The book highlights homeland security practices in 11 countries, and examines their successes and failures. It’s being released at a time of significant global change, too.
Since it’s 2011 publication, three historical events demanded attention and are included as updates in this edition: the 2020 global COVID-19 pandemic; Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, and the October 7, 2023 terrorist attack in Israel.
Morag also added a new chapter on hybrid threats, or “gray war threats,” which have escalated since the last edition.
“Peer actors like Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea are attacking critical infrastructure, implementing cyber-attacks, trying to circumvent our democratic system, and attempting to cause all sorts of damage to physical infrastructure like hitting undersea cables to disrupt internet service. Those kinds of things really picked up since 2018.”
“The mission is to help people become better decision-makers and improve policy in the homeland security space. The book contributes to getting them to think differently about policy solutions from outside the US and things they might be able to do to improve policy.”
– Dr. Nadav Morag
The book explores how different countries handle their own homeland security, offering new ways to think about how governments can respond to threats. It includes updates on new laws, institutions, and policies.
In the Global Threats course, Morag and his co-instructors Seth Jones and Paul Smith assign participants a policy memo in which they select a foreign homeland security practice and apply it to a U.S. agency. They must analyze whether the practice fits within U.S. laws and institutions, and then modify it to create a workable U.S. policy.
The purpose of the book is simple: “The mission is to help people become better decision-makers and improve policy in the homeland security space,” said Morag. “The book contributes to getting them to think differently about policy solutions from outside the US and things they might be able to do to improve policy.”
Morag also teaches a course on policy and leadership at CHDS, and serves as professor and Department Chair of Security Studies at Sam Houston University. He says other institutions have adopted the book as well as it helps homeland security professionals learn to deal with today’s complex challenges.
With Comparative Homeland Security, 3rd Edition, Morag continues to support CHDS’s mission to improve homeland security policy through education, critical thinking, and comparative analysis.
“It’s really designed to give people a sense of how much has been done in other countries,” Morag said. “Even among democracies, there are huge differences in how the same threats are handled. That can be eye-opening for students who haven’t had much exposure to international practices.”
