Why Do We Need a New Research Agenda for the Study of Intelligence?

Why do we need a new research agenda to study contemporary intelligence? This is in essence the question to which the recently published book Problematising Intelligence Studies aims to respond. The ambition to revisit and recast the study of intelligence is pressing in order to address an analytical problem currently facing intelligence studies (IS). Its exaggerated focus on states’ intelligence services and their performance, combined with modes of inquiry that largely ignore the plethora of social actors and practices that currently make up intelligence, means that much of what is going on in intelligence today largely escapes the focus of IS. To address this issue, the book aims to shape a renewed research approach and agenda. This article outlines this approach in more detail.¹

Empirically, the project departs from the observation that contemporary intelligence has shifted, being not only, or necessarily at all, about the common intelligence services and their usual assignments and enemies. First, the general role and mandate of intelligence services across the world has expanded greatly, especially following 11 September 2001 (9/11) and the so-called War on Terror, enabling them to gather information on not only other states but also nonstate groups and individuals everywhere. In parallel with new counterterrorism mandates, their technological capabilities to intercept personal communications have also grown tremendously.

Second, intelligence services have permeated other fields and come increasingly into contact with other kinds of actors and practices. The Snowden leaks in 2013 revealed how the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) worked directly with information technology (IT), telecommunications, and social media firms as well as transnational partners to collect personal data. The 2016 San Bernardino case illustrated, conversely, how the Federal Bureau of Investigation struggled with legal obstacles and Apple’s end-to-end encryption measures to access private communications for criminal investigation purposes. As these and other examples demonstrate, intelligence work has come to intersect increasingly with the private sector, the Internet, international and domestic lawmakers, as well as political institutions for democratic oversight. In short, more and more actors have taken up positions in relation to intelligence, sharing stakes regarding how it ought to be done.

Third, the conventional “community” of intelligence and national security services are not alone in conducting information gathering on presumed threats and supposedly suspect individuals. Equally involved today are law enforcement agencies, border security actors, surveillance companies, IT specialists, counterradicalization organizations, and other public and private institutions conducting various forms of intelligence collection.

Hence, citizens increasingly encounter intelligence work in their everyday lives, with intelligence-gathering activities being done by, and affecting, many more people than before. When people move in public spaces, visit their doctor, attend school, travel internationally, or spend time on social media, they are—often unknowingly—finding themselves in virtual or physical spaces of intelligence collection. Equally, when people encrypt their communications, cover their laptop web cameras, or refuse apps to trace their locations, they act in resistance of contemporary intelligence.

The transition from Cold War concerns, such as geopolitical competition, state secrets, spies, and double agents, to a broadening range of emerging “problems” and new security legislation has given rise to a new “problematization” of intelligence. No longer simply about espionage or secret information gathering to inform military strategy and foreign policymaking, intelligence has diversified and become increasingly connected to, and understood as, surveillance, policing, counterterrorism, population management, border checks, and more. New actors have entered, and challenged, the boundaries of intelligence in this regard. It has spread out to a growing number of unconventional sites that are not immediately seen as spaces of intelligence activity, such as prisons, banks, and hospital environments. The scope of “targets” has similarly expanded to cover all kinds of individuals, groups, conducts, flows, and mobilities deemed “out of the ordinary” or potentially threatening. Here, intelligence is seen as the solution to make these threats knowable and governable, to enable anticipatory action.

The expansion and heterogenization of intelligence irremediably question how intelligence has been understood and conceptualized so far in IS. This highlights the other side of the problem: an observed discrepancy between practices of intelligence on the ground and the available knowledge in IS to make sense of these. IS as an intellectual project is not sensitive enough, it seems, to the social and practical elements of intelligence. Starting from this gap, the analysis of the people and practices behind intelligence is the immediate point of departure for the new analytical approach presented here. This is where the main alternative to IS lies.

Intelligence does not exist in a vacuum. It only makes sense in the immanence of social configurations, relations, processes, and dynamics where it is embedded. Hence, the study of intelligence should start from empirical observation of these social elements. To understand how intelligence operates today, analyses must go beyond the common state-centric perspective in IS, which takes for granted that state services and their geopolitical interests are the only relevant objects of inquiry. Rather, intelligence should be reconstructed as an open-ended social phenomenon and field involving all those who have a stake in the conduct of intelligence, make claims of having intelligence authority, and are drawn into or affected by intelligence practices.² This renders seemingly peripheral actors and forms of expertise beyond the conventional services, such as police intelligence actors or private cybersurveillance companies, equally relevant for understanding how contemporary intelligence works.

The same analytical move also deessentializes the very practical logic of intelligence. It can no longer be taken for granted that the sole purpose of intelligence is that of a “function” for, or extension of, the state and its foreign policymaking. Rather, by widening the scope of analysis to highlight logics of action and competing stakes and conducts, it becomes possible to better understand that intelligence is something under constant contestation and in a process of transformation. This allows for posing questions concerning what intelligence expertise is today, who are its current intelligence professionals, and what they actually do—without falling into old assumptions that the answer to such questions automatically has to do with state secrecy and national security.

In the remainder of this article, this approach will be developed and explained in greater detail. The next section further illustrates how intelligence actors have multiplied in recent years and repositioned intelligence alongside other practices in the larger field of security professionals. Next, intelligence is constructed as a “transversal field,” illustrating how tracing a multiplicity of intelligence actors and practices across empirical sites requires a transdisciplinary engagement with debates far beyond IS. In the final section, further demonstrating the need for a new approach, central assumptions in established IS are drawn out to argue that this scholarship is fundamentally ill-equipped to develop critical knowledge about the social, political, and technological transformations and core problems of/with intelligence today.

THE DIFFUSION OF INTELLIGENCE PRACTICES AND PROFESSIONALS

In this section, two significant developments and their implications are highlighted: the expanding operations of conventional intelligence actors on the one hand, and the diffusion of intelligence practices to new and other actors beyond the usual services, on the other.

Intelligence services have been deeply involved in the diffusion of intelligence gathering into everyday spheres of human activity. As revealed by whistleblower and former NSA contractor Edward Snowden in June 2013, intelligence services have long been conducting mass surveillance and collection of private communication data in our everyday digital environments in the name of national and homeland security. The secret documents leaked by Snowden revealed details about the enormous scale and reach of U.S. digital surveillance: the NSA was systematically collecting emails, phone records, text messages, social media posts, and more, of individuals from around the world, ranging from high-level state officials to “ordinary” citizens. Much of NSA’s surveillance has been carried out in direct collaboration with foreign services like the United Kingdom’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) or the German Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), and some programs have relied heavily on commercial partnerships with telecommunications providers and social media companies.³

Snowden’s revelations of Western services’ intrusive practices generated a worldwide realization that intelligence-gathering activities concern not only political and military elites, but all of us. It became a stark reminder that what is at stake in intelligence work is not merely “national security” but, at the same time, civil and human rights, democracy, privacy, integrity, subjectivity, trust, and obedience.⁴ Intelligence activities hence generate a stake for all those who see in such actions something else than, or even opposed to, “security.” This has, among other things, made Internet users increasingly aware (and wary) of intrusive technologies deployed by intelligence services online. Penney’s analyses of Wikipedia traffic and user data after the 2013 revelations, for instance, indicate a significant increase of a “chilling effect” online, particularly around surveillance-related topics.⁵ The Snowden documents also intensified debates among legal and parliamentary actors on how to monitor and regulate intelligence activities. As a result, recent legal cases and rulings in the European Court of Human Rights have found the NSA’s, GCHQ’s, and BND’s domestic and international monitoring, interception, and bulk collection of personal communications illegal and/or in breach of privacy rights.⁶ These rulings, as well as the regulation of European intelligence and security cooperation in the post-Brexit world, have shown how legislators, parliamentary committees, privacy groups, and oversight bodies are now all increasingly involved in establishing the definitions of and boundaries for intelligence cooperation, digital surveillance, and counterterrorism.⁷

Legal actions have highlighted the increasingly central role of lawyers and prosecutors when challenging the violent effects of intelligence activities.⁸ Indeed, central to the expanding practice of today’s intelligence services are so-called extraordinary renditions programs. Here, legal findings and rulings have shed light on services’ use of “enhanced” (illegal) interrogation techniques, including torture, on suspected terrorists as well as their relative impunity enabled by the tacit complicity of a segment of politicians justifying their activities in the name of “national security.”⁹ In addition to physical violence is the symbolic and sociopolitical violence toward ethnic or religious minorities; for instance, Muslim communities are contrived to “cooperate” with local security authorities as they conduct embedded surveillance.¹⁰

Beyond government agencies dedicated to national security intelligence and beyond their adversaries from the parliamentary and legal fields, there is a still-increasing number of profession(al)s entangled with intelligence. The specializations and dispositions of those who do and produce intelligence, particularly for counterterrorism purposes, have multiplied and shifted from spies and military strategists to police officers, border guards, data analysts, IT and computer specialists, surveillance companies, prison officers, and others. “Once the work of an insular and carefully selected few,” as Karen Lund Petersen and Vibeke Schou Tjalve write, “intelligence production is now a networked, partially open and extensively public–private enterprise.”¹¹ In addition, more and more “unprofessionals of security”—be they ordinary citizens, nurses, or teachers—are now obliged to act as intelligence agents themselves by, for instance, reporting “unusual” behavior or incidents.¹² This highlights the everyday dimensions of intelligence gathering, and how it is collected through mundane practices of street-level surveillance and policing. For example, counterterrorism intelligence has come to increasingly involve the citizen itself, reconfiguring intelligence work into a “shared responsibility” to report people, behaviors, or objects that appear “suspicious” or “out of place.”¹³ Here, sensitive information is generated not from undercover sources, but directly from vigilant citizens in public spaces voluntarily performing a kind of “participatory policing.”¹⁴ This problematizes notions of intelligence “objectivity” because citizen reports, potentially based on prejudice, fears, and xenophobia, are treated as legitimate evidence for police-driven operations. In the United States, for instance, citizen reporting is coupled with “official intelligence” and criminal records in so-called fusion centers operated by local and federal law enforcement.¹⁵ Similar issues also permeate more formalized forms of everyday intelligence collection, such as the United Kingdom’s Prevent Duty, which, without seriously considering the consequences of racial prejudice, obliges everyone employed in the welfare sector to serve as counterradicalization agents.¹⁶

The diffusion and expansion of intelligence practices have also resulted in the increased involvement of software developers and coders, information and communication technology specialists, data analysts, and engineers; that is, technologically skilled professionals who have all become positioned closer and closer to the core of intelligence operations. The type of solutions and equipment traditionally employed by services for human surveillance and communications interceptions are no longer enough, as intelligence work today relies on advanced and experimental technologies associated with digital surveillance.¹⁷ This includes new means for generating intelligence, such as algorithms and machine learning; means for storing and sharing intelligence transnationally, such as clouds and interoperable databases; and means for silently collecting data, such as spyware and hacking programs. The emergence of digital technologies, such as data mining software, computerized devices, and large-scale databases, has cast the net wider, enabling a more extensive and intrusive coverage of data flows. At the same time, it requires a larger presence of specialists. The increasingly central role of technological experts has altered the image of what constitutes the contemporary intelligence professional.

The intensified technologization of intelligence has, moreover, pushed intelligence far beyond the simple cycle of collection, analysis, and dissemination to security policymakers. In a unique ethnographic exploration into the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center, Bridget Rose Nolan shows how this work is much more complex than just “connecting the dots.” Observing the daily life of intelligence analysts within the organization, she demonstrates that their day-to-day work is marked by contradictory ends where they often must cope with data overload while having inappropriate access to the relevant technological systems (i.e., databases).¹⁸ In sum, doing intelligence today could mean anything from informing high politics and producing risk assessments, to dealing with the mundanities of the everyday labor of law enforcement, to managing vast databases involving intricate computerized surveillance solutions.

The connection of intelligence to law enforcement, counterterrorism, and surveillance is the effect of a gradual entanglement of intelligence with the myriad of sites that compose the broader field of security professionals. Indeed, the introduction of intelligence in new spheres of human activity cannot be explained only by evolving post-9/11 threat perceptions alone but needs to be linked to the larger political and bureaucratic struggle between the 1990s and 2000s, resulting in a gradual mission change for security professionals, as well as a redistribution of their budgetary, human, and technical resources.¹⁹ The shifting role of intelligence actors mirrors the general transformation of security practices across most Western societies in this regard, reorganizing their core stake from a narrow one (counterespionage) into a far wider one (counterradicalization, fighting organized crime, cybersecurity, electronic surveillance, migration control, and more). By extension, this shift has led to the rise of a preemption logic, which means practitioners aim to anticipate, rather than respond to, terrorism and other criminal acts.²⁰ Intelligence has established itself as the central means by which to conduct this kind of preemptive security, which involves data collection through upstream monitoring of movements, communications, and behavior, as well as intelligence sharing among actors.²¹

The expansion of intelligence beyond its traditional spheres of activity has effectively extended the chains of interdependencies among those associated with intelligence work, transforming it into an increasingly “transversal” phenomenon. The transversal dimension is here generated in how actors who may be traditionally separated or have different historical trajectories—such as police authorities and national security services—are now bound together by their shared stake in contemporary intelligence. The fact that actors from different sectors—state/nonstate, public/private, civil/military—are embedded in shared struggles to say, perform, promote, constrain, or contest intelligence shows that they are not acting in isolation from one another, but as interdependent allies or adversaries. If intelligence was a relatively autonomous practice during the Cold War, it is now characterized by increased cross-boundary cooperation and fierce struggles over intelligence jurisdiction, authority, and expertise. How, then, should this be studied?

INTELLIGENCE AS A TRANSVERSAL FIELD OF ACTORS AND PRACTICES

To study contemporary intelligence, the present analytical and methodological approach takes people, practices, and relationships as the immediate point of departure and hence as the most relevant units of analysis. Its focus lies in the hands and minds of those doing intelligence, regardless of where to understand how intelligence is performed today. Similarly, it also accounts for the lives and bodies of those who become targeted or affected by the performances of intelligence.

Intelligence is not something preconceived or fixed but about the actions of professionals for whom intelligence is either a daily activity or an issue into which they are drawn as part of their work. Treating it as such renders possible a sociologically and anthropologically grounded analysis that grasps the granularity of intelligence labor, the “craft” involved, the variety of actors developing it, and the objectives of their work. The institutions, norms, policies, legislations, technologies, and other means that make up intelligence do not exist in a vacuum but are determined by the actions and relationships of social actors. Paying attention to precisely these actions and actor relations, intelligence is conceptualized as a “field.”²² Developed primarily through the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, a field refers to a heterogeneous social space of positions, held by a variety of actors who share stakes associated with a certain organized practice, and whose relations and struggles among each other reframe the core meaning and logic of that practice.²³

The intelligence field, then, would refer to the particular space of actors struggling around what intelligence means, how it should be done, what counts (or not) as intelligence expertise, and so on. Actors would include those who have had a long history of doing and defining intelligence work, who are as such instinctively associated with the practice and its established socioprofessional conventions. Actors would, however, also include newcomers possessing emerging forms of intelligence expertise, as well as professionals who are not immediately seen as doing intelligence, yet interface with it when they contest, resist, monitor, or control it.

Despite their different backgrounds and positions in the field, they all share the same struggle; namely, acquiring authority and resources (or what Bourdieu calls “capital”) to influence and shape the practical logic of intelligence. Whether this logic should be about geopolitically outsmarting other states or about preemptive strikes against individual terrorist suspects, or whether intelligence should be about pursuing threats via trusty old analog measures or new and technologically advanced ones are examples of authority claims to be resolved through field struggles. Not anyone can have a say on these issues, of course, but the field has boundaries. To cross these boundaries and enter the field, new actors must first be recognized by others as legitimate “players” or stakeholders of intelligence practices. Some fields in society, like those of politics, art, literature, education, economics, and government, have long historical trajectories and therefore rather established conventions or implicit criteria for what it takes to become recognized as a legitimate actor in the field. Other fields, like that of intelligence, are less autonomous from other fields, and therefore have more porous boundaries. To enter the game of intelligence, actors can mobilize a combination of material or immaterial resources to gain recognition.²⁴ For instance, a company like Amazon may use its technological capital by developing a cloud-based database solution for conventional intelligence services like the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and thereby become recognized as a new authority in the field.²⁵ A law enforcement agency like Europol may convert the symbolic capital provided by state spokespersons into legitimate claims that intelligence should not be mainly about espionage, but preventing large-scale organized crime. Entrances of new actors in the field hence disturb its configuration and shift the distribution of authority, transforming intelligence practice as such.

A field perspective with analytical sensitivity to struggles to cross its boundaries and gain recognized authority is well equipped to capture the expansions and transformations of intelligence, and what we refer to above as its transversal dimensions. Accounting for these struggles allows us to see the multiple and competing forms of intelligence authority today.

Indeed, it cannot be analytically assumed that the intelligence field consists of a limited number of (state) actors interested in a limited form of (national) security. Who and what makes up the field must be observed empirically. Hence, a field analysis is necessarily an open-ended sociological approach—as opposed to analyses of “professions” that tend to have more formalized boundaries inscribed in legislation.²⁶ It makes visible how actors drawn toward or forced into the intelligence field come from various places in society, sometimes far beyond the Intelligence Community (IC) of government services. Tracing these professional trajectories is a means to explore actors’ (often multiple) positions and circulations across social sites and professions, and how intelligence has taken over certain social sites.

The methods available for a field analysis of intelligence are many. Quantitative approaches, such as multicorrespondence analysis, to make visible the structure of positions of various intelligence actors, can be fruitfully combined with qualitative approaches like ethnographic observations and semistructured interviews to shed light on the everyday experiences of those doing intelligence. Regardless of specific method, focus should lie on capturing the empirical details that enable one to reconstruct intelligence as an analytical object in a reflexive rather than presumptive way. This entails basing one’s investigation not on received knowledge nor on a priori theorization but on broad empirical observations, all the while maintaining a critical distance from dogmas and assumptions in established literature.

FROM TRANSVERSAL FIELD ANALYSIS TO A TRANSDISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVE

Constructing intelligence as a transversal field of struggle necessarily brings the analysis into contact with a variety of empirical sites that have, in turn, been studied academically from a variety of perspectives. In fact, the most illuminating reflections on contemporary intelligence have arguably been developed outside of IS. Surveillance studies, most notably, includes key scholarship where intelligence work is often connected to, and talked about as, digital mass surveillance in a post-9/11 world. Here, studies have investigated the involvement of intelligence services in global surveillance programs and the covert collection of personal data, as well as the implications of the Snowden revelations.²⁷ Others have looked at intelligence logics in U.S. and UK police work and fusion centers as well as intelligence sharing in the operation of “smart borders.”²⁸ Relatedly, police studies and criminology include investigations on intelligence-led policing, intelligence gathering in prisons, and financial intelligence in the policing of “suspicious” money flows.²⁹ In critical security studies, and particularly the so-called Paris School, scholars have covered intelligence practices in French law enforcement and the intermingling of intelligence services with other “managers of unease.”³⁰ Science and technology studies have looked at the construction of data by intelligence practitioners as well as the technologization of intelligence-led predictive policing and profiling.³¹ In political sociology, studies have covered the role of intelligence and secrecy in terrorist interrogations and trials.³²

Scholars in the above fields and subdisciplines have all addressed intelligence from innovative theoretical and ontological perspectives that have rarely, if ever, been utilized in IS. Indeed, they have approached contemporary intelligence by studying its actors and practices, and thereby generated findings that are fundamentally different from those in IS. However, the problem is that their investigations have mainly remained isolated from each other due to a lack of cross-disciplinary interaction. Nor have they seriously engaged with and problematized assumptions and debates in IS.

To reach a broader and more impactful understanding of intelligence, we insist that these transversal analytical lines of investigation into the field of intelligence should be better connected to each other through a transdisciplinary perspective. International political sociology (IPS) is one such area of scholarship in international relations (IR) that promotes and adopts this kind of transdisciplinary perspective. Drawing on sociological and practice-oriented approaches in the study of international and political phenomena, IPS scholars have in fact already made several important contributions to our overall understanding of contemporary intelligence. For instance, Didier Bigo’s work has delivered key insights into transnational intelligence cooperation and “shared secrecy.”³³ He has also, together with scholars like Liam McVay, connected intelligence with policing practices and the field of criminology more broadly.³⁴ Hager Ben Jaffel has also drawn on an IPS approach in her work and showed, among other things, how British counterterrorism intelligence to a large extent is about police cooperation with European internal security services.³⁵

Breaking with received knowledge on intelligence and instead following logics of action across empirical and scholarly lines, this analytical approach problematizes some core assumptions in intelligence studies (IS). IS has historically gone furthest in examining intelligence but it has, nonetheless, as recalled by Myriam Dunn Cavelty and Victor Mauer, insufficiently reflected on epistemological and ontological shifts incurred by post–Cold War developments.³⁶ The way in which IS scholars have historically conceived of and narrowed down intelligence with certain definitions and assumptions poses several problems. Perhaps the most ensnaring assumption is that intelligence services’ main aim is to predict hostile state behavior and secure states’ advantage on the world stage—a strategic conception of intelligence that gained prominence after World War II (WWII) and during the Cold War under the impetus of intelligence professionals themselves, and particularly so in the United States and United Kingdom. This focus on statecraft and strategic knowledge has gradually established IS’ core function into one of developing usable knowledge for improving the performance of intelligence services. To be sure, IS has still contributed to our general knowledge about intelligence activities, not least from a historical viewpoint. There are a wealth of studies in IS as well as military history that offer key details on the intelligence services during WWII, the Cold War, and other significant periods in world politics, as well as on alliances such as the U.S. and UK services’ so-called special relationship. However, there is a relatively high degree of discrepancy between existing categories of understanding in IS and the intelligence practices on the ground today.

THE PROBLEMS WITH IS

A transversal field analysis, coupled with a transdisciplinary outlook, makes it clear that knowledge production within IS needs to be fundamentally problematized. The IS discipline is, and always has been, dominated by Anglo-American scholars and practitioners associated with mainly Western state bureaucracies. Since the 1950s, IS’ research agenda developed to a large extent from the relationships between practitioners and academics and their common socialization in universities, at conferences, and in other professional associations. This fostered a community of multipositioned practitioner-scholars—or pracademics—who have also become IS’ authoritative figures by being vested with insider knowledge. Scholars, in turn, gave credence to and legitimized their professional know-how, assumptions, and claims by reinforcing their value or at least leaving them largely unquestioned.³⁷

Notable pracademics include Sherman Kent, former CIA analyst and history professor at Yale University in the 1970s. Usually acknowledged as the founding father of IS, his monograph Strategic Intelligence for American World Policy is an example of research produced to aid the training of strategic analysis.³⁸ Arthur Hulnick, also a former CIA professional, served as an associate professor in IR at Boston University where he first joined as a CIA officer-in-residence. In the United Kingdom, Sir David Omand, former UK security and intelligence coordinator and director of the GCHQ, has been visiting professor at King’s College London since 2005, where he has been teaching intelligence and providing training to intelligence analysts while publishing widely on the subject.³⁹ Recently, the University of Nottingham appointed Sir John Sawers, former head of the Secret Intelligence Service, as honorary professor to share his “expertise from the world of politics practitioners with students and staff.”⁴⁰ In parallel, it has been a common practice to commission British historians to produce “sponsored” histories of intelligence and security services.⁴¹ Some key examples include the “official” histories of the Joint Intelligence Committee and the history of British intelligence during WWII by Sir Harry Hinsley.⁴² This has been described as a “policy of indoctrinating academics,” further sustaining the strong interdependencies between intelligence services and certain parts of academia.⁴³

This long history of endogamy between intelligence scholars and practitioners has had highly visible and lasting effects on the categories of understanding about intelligence in IS. First, the dominance of Anglo-American scholars has made IS predominantly populated by analyses focusing on the politics and experiences of intelligence services from Britain, the United States, and the Five Eyes allies, who are then viewed as blueprint models to account for intelligence everywhere.⁴⁴ Second, intelligence has typically been understood as a mere function for the state, as a tool and extension of its foreign policy and military capabilities. This has not only reduced analyses of the social dimension of intelligence to relations between state bureaucracies and policymakers but also defined the only relevant stake in intelligence as state interest. Third, and relatedly, IS has been strongly characterized by an assumption that its own core purpose is to improve the performance of state services and make intelligence analysis more effective. This functionalist scholarly disposition and tendency toward “usable” research has cemented ideas that not only intelligence work but also intelligence scholarship should serve national security and assist in strategic policymaking.⁴⁵

Some IS scholars, like Peter Gill and Mark Phythian, have questioned this strategic representation of the discipline and pointed toward how it has diversified to include discussions on intelligence oversight, covert action, and nonstate actors.⁴⁶ Other work has also addressed intelligence failure, ethics, accountability, counterintelligence, intelligence theory, and intelligence liaison.⁴⁷ From this perspective, intelligence is, Gill and Phythian argue, “a pre-eminently social and political phenomenon, not simply a technical discipline.”⁴⁸ However, their stance does not include a break with the functionalist and state-centric disposition that has characterized the discipline. Despite a diversification of topics, they believe policy relevance and practical necessities should still be at the heart of intelligence research; or, in their own words, “[I]ntelligence studies should, of course, be relevant to intelligence practice; this is not an argument for irrelevance.”⁴⁹

The “intelligence cycle”—a model describing the collection, analysis, and dissemination of intelligence—further illustrates the functionalist disposition in IS. It has been established as the dominant conception of understanding intelligence in practice.⁵⁰ It likely dates back to a U.S. Army training manual released during WWII, entitled Intelligence Is for Commanders,⁵¹ and has since then become a pervading pattern in thinking about intelligence, from Sherman Kent’s Strategic Intelligence for American World Policy to more contemporary scholarship.⁵² It is considered that the cycle best explains how intelligence professionals understand their work and accurately reflects the “professional world of intelligence.”⁵³ While an essential concept, it has equally received considerable criticism for its failure to capture fully how intelligence works outside of the framework of American (and British) national security.⁵⁴ Technological change and post–Cold War threats are the main aspects disrupting the idea of the cycle. Kristan J. Wheaton went as far as to suggest we “kill” the intelligence cycle, “a WWII era relic that is way past its sell-by date.”⁵⁵ That said, and despite being contested by professionals themselves for inaccurately conceiving intelligence production, the cycle has not been abandoned by mainstream scholars but continues to drive research agendas on intelligence.⁵⁶

Narrow conceptions of intelligence as a cycle have been contested by a handful of reformist voices in IS who want to “fix the spy machine” and “prepare it for the 21st century.”⁵⁷ Some want to reformulate intelligence as “simply what services do” by acknowledging, for example, other practices such as record keeping, data storage, or cooperation with private contractors.⁵⁸ Analyses of international intelligence cooperation and information exchange have equally called into question state-centric frameworks, while other IS scholars have sought to breach the limits of the Anglosphere to address intelligence beyond Anglo-American experiences.⁵⁹

Yet efforts to expand the empirical meaning of intelligence have not been followed by the necessary renewal of analytical approaches to intelligence. Despite some claims of interdisciplinarity, IS continues to be a field dominated by military historians, including those former practitioners–turned-official-historians and political scientists.⁶⁰ Scholars that have sought to interweave intelligence more closely with IR have typically limited themselves to state realism and its variations.⁶¹ As noted, prevailing definitions of intelligence are underpinned by strong state-centric assumptions, going hand in hand with IR realist ontologies.⁶² Structural realism is even said to provide the “… foundation from which the practice of intelligence arises” because it is “the framework that best describes the world as seen, implicitly or explicitly, from the point of view of the intelligence professional and at least some leading figures in the IS field.”⁶³ Unsurprisingly, IS scholarship grounded in “theor[ies] from the margins” is in the minority.⁶⁴ Only a few studies draw on sociological approaches, cultural studies, ethnographic methods, or other approaches that could capture the messy social realities behind intelligence practices.⁶⁵ These moves represent nascent initiatives to diversify IS and make it more comprehensive. At the same time, other currents, such as feminist or postcolonial studies, are virtually excluded from IS.⁶⁶ The overall timid expansion of the field can be explained by the gatekeeping effects of those mainstream approaches and scholars who tend to shut down alternative or critical insights.⁶⁷ As such, IS remains a largely uncritical discipline.

CAN IS BE “CRITICAL”?

Nevertheless, some have taken the initiative to formulate critical approaches to intelligence—grouped together under a common label, critical intelligence studies (CIS). For instance, Hamilton Bean advances a “rhetorical and critical/cultural perspective” to examine the knowledge–power nexus constitutive of intelligence practices.⁶⁸ Informed by critical security studies, Peter de Werd understands criticality as “a self-reflexive attitude that problematizes the essence and workings of ‘intelligence’ within a sociopolitical context.”⁶⁹ This line of research, which seeks to interrogate the concepts and canons underpinning classical IS, is a worthwhile contribution to the study of intelligence. In a recently published special issue, the leaders of this project define its goal as one of “reveal[ing] the workings of and struggles for power within and among intelligence organizations and between those organizations and other social and political organizations and institutions.”⁷⁰ The attention given to the social and relational tissue of intelligence generates commonalities and bridges between CIS and the present research agenda.

However, even the diverging IS scholarship cited above—from reformist views to recent critical lines of inquiry—fail to seriously reformulate debates on intelligence because they remain prisoners of the doxa of IS. Put differently, despite their intents, these accounts remain attached to many of the common-sensical views and core stakes that have for so long structured the IS field and underpinned the academic debates therein. Although the CIS project exhibits a number of benefits, it nonetheless seeks to “improve” intelligence-related policy debates by reaching a “more visible and influential position within IS.”⁷¹ It hence has little intention, it would seem, of moving beyond IS’ disciplinary boundaries, breaking with its core assumptions, or challenging its history of close association with state bureaucracies.

Even critical efforts tend to maintain a functionalist mindset, reproducing the supposed aim of IS as one of improving policymaking and intelligence services’ ability to “serve sovereign powers.”⁷² This position has been reasserted by the CIS editors as follows: “Critical intelligence studies does not necessarily need to come at the expense of intelligence effectiveness.”⁷³ In this sense, investigating intelligence and investigating for intelligence are not considered as incompatible, as they envision CIS as “not a definitive ‘divorce’ but as a space where reflexive and critical approaches can accentuate how the study of and for intelligence might productively influence each other.”⁷⁴ Similarly, in a recent article by Samantha Newbery and Christian Kaunert, they argue that even critical scholarship should “aid the practice of intelligence.” To “increase the real-world applicability” of CIS, they suggest replicating the emergence of critical security studies in which they understand the “critical” move as simply analyzing the “broadening and widening” of the concept of security (or intelligence), not, for example, critiquing ethical aspects or the violent effects of such practices.⁷⁵

Further hollowing out the meaning of “critical,” the CIS project welcomes scholars “maintaining ‘realist’, ‘positivist’, or ‘objectivist’ foundations for knowledge” to contribute to the development of CIS.⁷⁶ With such a welcoming attitude, what does it entail to be critical, if anything at all? With the refusal to break with functionalist aims and mainstream orientations, CIS become a paradox: one is apparently to be simultaneously critical and uncritical. The research approach presented in this article is therefore neither strictly IS nor CIS. Rather, this project wants to offer a true alternative, one that reflexively problematizes the core of this practitioner-oriented discipline. Its overarching purpose is not functionalist studies for intelligence but analyses of intelligence work and its effects, broadly understood. Its point of departure is therefore the study of the people and practices that are relationally entangled with intelligence. Its contribution is broad and transdisciplinary in scope, drawing on the rich plurality of scholarly traditions throughout the social sciences. This is what sets this approach apart from IS and CIS altogether.

IS, including its few dissenting voices, fails to recognize how intelligence work has been historically maintained by IS scholarship. Indeed, IS has served as a source of recognition for intelligence professionals and pracademics, rendering legitimate their claims to power and authority as well as their services’ (sometimes violent) practices of obtaining and withholding secret information. IS scholarship, in turn, has never seriously called into question the long-term implications of the direct intervention of state actors in the production of knowledge on intelligence. If anything, the strong presence of bureaucratic know-how and state-subsidized knowledge in IS scholarship has rather naturalized state power as well as the associated symbolic claims, assumptions, and categories that support it, generating and sustaining an orthodoxic knowledge on intelligence.⁷⁷ In effect, who and what constitutes intelligence outside the IC becomes largely irrelevant to most parts of IS scholarship. Most strikingly, it does not dissect intelligence to explore its people, practices, and relationships in depth. The IC and the cycle are instead preconstructed homogenizing categories that ignore the differentiation among social actors and crafts involved as well as the definitional struggles around their meaning. Nor has IS scholarship abandoned its functionalist analytical framework, despite attempts to enlarge its scope. The long heritage of functionalism and state-centrism in IS unfortunately undermine the supposed openness and criticality in recent initiatives to expand the field beyond its original nucleus. If studies of intelligence were in fact driven by a genuinely problematizing and multidisciplinary attitude, one would expect to see more, for example, sociological, anthropological, ethnographic, and other types of approaches in (C)IS, as well as more heterogeneous sets of methods and analytical techniques, including observational fieldwork, field notes, discourse analysis, oral history, biographical interviews, prosopography, inter alia. It is by developing a transdisciplinary, reflexive, and sociologically inspired analytical approach, autonomous of IS, that new and alternative forms of knowledge can be produced and contribute to our general understanding of contemporary intelligence.

CONCLUSION

The book Problematising Intelligence Studies sought to redress identified problems in IS and lay the ground for a new research agenda for the study of contemporary intelligence. While IS has certainly advanced knowledge on intelligence in many ways, especially from a historical viewpoint, existing literature has not sufficiently kept track of the ways in which intelligence is done today, by whom, and how it affects our societies and everyday lives. To be sure, many of the actors and practices currently entangled with intelligence are not entirely new. Law enforcement personnel, computer specialists, prison guards, security companies, and others have all been around for some time. What has changed, though, is the problematization of intelligence in the twenty-first century, which has increasingly connected intelligence logics to counterterrorism, law enforcement, and surveillance, as well as techniques of governmentality involving flow management and anomaly detection—in short, security practices that are no longer just about state-on-state competition and counterespionage. This aggregation and multiplication of ways of “doing” and “being” generate other practical senses than those underpinning conceptions of intelligence in policymaking and national security. Acknowledging these developments, this research agenda seeks to address intelligence at its core, to study its social dynamics, workings, and inner life, and to complement a partial picture of intelligence produced in IS that favors only certain actors, stories, and understandings while silencing others.

This is achieved by mobilizing an analytical approach that scales down to focus on the less visible yet most relevant units of analysis: social actors and their practices. Indeed, intelligence does not function by itself—it is what people make of it through their relations and struggles in a social space or field. This analytical approach begins with empirical observation of who makes up the intelligence field. As shown, it is populated today not only by the actors traditionally seen as doing intelligence, but also by new and emerging actors who claim intelligence expertise, as well as organizations and individuals who encounter intelligence work when they contest it or become its targets. By insisting on reconstructing the field a posteriori according to the observations of practices on the ground rather than according to predefined conceptions and definitions, it becomes possible to take a step away from IS and allow for a more diverse ontology of intelligence. As discussed, intelligence is not in any way inherently linked to or defined by the historically most common government services. Rather what is (and is not) intelligence depends on the concerns, interests, and stakes at play among the recognized players in the current configuration of the intelligence field.

When constructing the field of contemporary intelligence, its transversal and boundary-crossing characteristics become immediately noticeable. Never before have intelligence actors and practices had such an expansive reach into different societal sectors. With the diffusion of intelligence-gathering logics in digital environments, everyday spaces, public infrastructures, and private businesses, more and more people are now affected by the intelligence practice. These observations are further supported by, and feeding into, the transdisciplinary mindset behind this research approach. Some of the most promising analyses of contemporary intelligence have been made in disciplines beyond IS—like surveillance studies, critical security studies, and criminology—and so these bodies of scholarship need to be better connected and engaged in constructive dialog.

Mobilizing these strategies for the study of intelligence, Problematising Intelligence Studies illustrates how to break with the discipline’s historical Anglo-Americanism, its long traditions of reinforcing state ontologies, and its deeply functionalist dispositions that limit the question of intelligence to one of improving intelligence services and assisting policymakers. This intellectual position is not about serving the state or perfecting intelligence practice but about conducting research on intelligence practices and formulating critical conclusions about their effects. In doing so, this project contributes to parts of IS, but does not “belong” there.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hager Ben Jaffel

Hager Ben Jaffel is a Lecturer in International Relations at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. She holds a Ph.D. in International Relations from King’s College London. She is the coeditor of Problematising Intelligence Studies (Routledge, 2022), and author of Anglo-European Intelligence Cooperation (Routledge, 2019). The author can be contacted at [email protected].

Sebastian Larsson

Sebastian Larsson is an Assistant Professor at the Department of War Studies and Military History, Swedish Defence University (SEDU). He holds a Ph.D. in War Studies from King’s College London. He is cochair of the SEDU Critical War Studies Research Group. Larsson is the coeditor of Problematising Intelligence Studies (Routledge, 2022) and Nordic Societal Security (Routledge, 2020). The author can be contacted at [email protected].

Notes

1 This article builds on several extracts and direct quotes of the book’s introduction and conclusion chapters; see Hager Ben Jaffel and Sebastian Larsson (eds.), Problematising Intelligence Studies: Towards a New Research Agenda, (London: Routledge, 2022).

2 Hager Ben Jaffel, Alvina Hoffmann, Oliver Kearns, and Sebastian Larsson, “Collective Discussion: Toward Critical Approaches to Intelligence as a Social Phenomenon,” International Political Sociology, Vol. 14, No. 3 (2020), pp. 323–344.

3 Ewen MacAskill and Gabriel Dance, “NSA Files: Decoded—What the Revelations Mean for You,” The Guardian, 1 November 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/nov/01/snowden-nsa-files-surveillance-revelations-decoded, BBC News, “Edward Snowden: Leaks that Exposed US Spy Programme,” 17 January 2014, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-23123964

4 Zygmunt Bauman, Didier Bigo, Paulo Esteves, Elspeth Guild, Vivienne Jabri, David Lyon, and R. B. J. Walker, “After Snowden: Rethinking the Impact of Surveillance,” International Political Sociology, Vol. 8, No. 2 (2014), pp. 121–144.

5 Jonathon W. Penney, “Chilling Effects: Online Surveillance and Wikipedia Use,” Berkeley Technology Law Journal, Vol. 31, No. 1 (2016), pp. 117–182.

6 BBC News, “Court Curbs German Spy Agency’s Bugging Abroad,” 19 May 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-52725972; Owen Bowcott, “GCHQ Data Collection Regime Violated Human Rights, Court Rules,” The Guardian, 13 September 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/sep/13/gchq-data-collection-violated-human-rights-strasbourg-court-rules; Charlie Savage and Jonathan Weisman, “NSA Collection of Bulk Call Data is Ruled Illegal,” The New York Times, 7 May 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/08/us/nsa-phone-records-collection-ruled-illegal-by-appeals-court.html.

7 Hager Ben Jaffel, “Britain’s European Connection in Counter-Terrorism Intelligence Cooperation: Everyday Practices of Police Liaison Officers,” Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 35, No. 7 (2020), pp. 1007–1025; Sophia Hoffmann, “Arab Students and the Stasi: Agents and Objects of Intelligence,” Security Dialogue, Vol. 52, No. 1 (2020), pp. 62–78; Ronja Kniep, Lina Ewert, Bernardino Léon Reyes, Félix Tréguer, Emma McCluskey, and Claudia Aradau, “Towards Democratic Intelligence Oversight: Limits, Practices, Struggles,” Review of International Studies (2023), pp. 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210523000013

8 Anneliese Baldacinni and Elspeth Guild (eds.), Terrorism and the Foreigner: A Decade of Tension around the Rule of Law in Europe (Brill, 2007); Elspeth Guild, Security and European Human Rights: Protecting Individual Rights in Times of Exception and Military Action (Nijmegen: Wolf Legal Publishers, 2007).

9 Lisa Stampnitzky, “Truth and Consequences? Reconceptualizing the Politics of Exposure,” Security Dialogue, Vol. 51, No. 6 (2020), pp. 597–613; Cherif Bassiouni, “The Institutionalisation of Torture under the Bush Administration,” Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law, Vol. 37, No. 2 (2005), pp. 389–425; Michelle Chwastiak, “Torture as Normal Work: The Bush Administration, the Central Intelligence Agency and ‘Enhanced Interrogation Techniques,’” Organization, Vol. 2, No. 4 (2015), pp. 493–511.

10 Fahid Qurashi, “The Prevent strategy and the UK ‘War on Terror’: Embedding Infrastructures of Surveillance in Muslim communities,” Palgrave Communications, Vol. 4, No. 17 (2018), pp. 2–13.

11 Karen Lund Petersen and Vibeke Schou Tjalve, “(Neo) Republican Security Governance? US Homeland Security and the Politics of ‘Shared Responsibility,’” International Political Sociology, Vol. 7, No. 1 (2013), p. 30.

12 Francesco Ragazzi, “Countering Terrorism and Radicalisation: Securitising Social Policy?,” Critical Social Policy, Vol. 37, No. 2 (2017), pp. 163–179.

13 Petersen and Tjalve, “(Neo) Republican Security Governance?,” pp. 1–18.

14 Sebastian Larsson, “A First Line of Defence? Vigilant Surveillance, Participatory Policing and the Reporting of ‘Suspicious’ Activity,” Surveillance & Society, Vol. 15, No. 1 (2017), pp. 94–107.

15 Torin Monahan and Andrew N. Palmer, “The Emerging Politics of DHS Fusion Centers,” Security Dialogue, Vol. 40, No. 6 (2009), pp. 617–636.

16 Amna Kaleem, “Citizen-Led Intelligence Gathering under UK’s Prevent Duty,” in Problematising Intelligence Studies: Towards a New Research Agenda, edited by Hager Ben Jaffel and Sebastian Larsson (London: Routledge, 2022), pp. 73–95.

17 Tereza Østbø Kuldova, “Artificial Intelligence, Algorithmic Governance, and the Manufacturing of Suspicion and Risk,” in Compliance-Industrial Complex, edited by Tereza Østbø Kuldova (Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland, 2022), pp. 115–151.

18 Bridget Rose Nolan, “Information Sharing and Collaboration in the United States Intelligence Community: An Ethnographic Study of the National Counterterrorism Center,” (PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2013), pp. 19–33.

19 Ben Jaffel, “Britain’s European Connection,” pp. 1007–1025.

20 Marieke de Goede, Stephanie Simon, and Marijn Hoijtink, “Performing Preemption,” Security Dialogue, Vol. 45, No. 5 (2014), pp. 411–422.

21 Didier Bigo, “Shared Secrecy in a Digital Age and a Transnational World,” Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 34, No. 3 (2019), pp. 379–395.

22 Ben Jaffel et al., “Collective Discussion,” pp. 323–344; Didier Bigo and Laurent Bonelli, “Digital Data and the Transnational Intelligence Space,” in Data Politics: Worlds, Subjects, Rights, edited by Didier Bigo, Engin Isin, and Evelyn Ruppert (London: Routledge 2019), pp. 101–122.

23 Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc J. D. Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), pp. 17, 97.

24 Ibid., pp. 100–101.

25 https://aws.amazon.com/federal/us-intelligence-community/

26 Andrew Abbott, The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

27 Bauman et al., “After Snowden,” pp. 121–144; David Murakami Wood and Steve Wright, “Before and After Snowden,” Surveillance & Society, Vol. 13, No. 2 (2015), pp. 132–138.

28 Anthony Bolton Newkirk, “The Rise of the Fusion-Intelligence Complex: A Critique of Political Surveillance after 9/11,” Surveillance & Society, Vol. 8, No. 1 (2010), pp. 43–60; Karine Côté-Boucher, “The Diffuse Border: Intelligence-Sharing, Control and Confinement along Canada’s Smart Border,” Surveillance & Society, Vol. 5, No. 2 (2008), pp. 142–165.

29 Nina Cope, “Intelligence Led Policing or Policing Led Intelligence? Integrating Volume Crime Analysis into Policing,” British Journal of Criminology, Vol. 44, No. 2 (2004), pp. 188–203; Mike Maguire, “Policing by Risks and Targets: Some Dimensions and Implications of Intelligence-Led Crime Control,” Policing and Society: An International Journal of Research and Policy, Vol. 9, No. 4 (2010), pp. 315–336; James Sheptycki, “The Police Intelligence Division-of-Labour,” Policing and Society, Vol. 27, No. 6 (2017), pp. 620–635; Nicolas Sallée and Gilles Chantraine, “Observer, Consigner, Tracer: Les Usages d’un Cahier Électronique Controversé en Établissement Pénitentiaire pour Mineurs,” Sociologie du travail, Vol. 56, No. 1 (2014), pp. 64–82 ; David Scheer, “Prison Intelligence in France: An Empirical Investigation of the Emergence of Counter-Radicalisation Professionals,” in Problematising Intelligence Studies: Towards a New Research Agenda, edited by Hager Ben Jaffel and Sebastian Larsson (London: Routledge, 2022), pp. 96–113; Anthony Amicelle and Vanessa Lafolla, “Suspicion-in-the-Making: Surveillance and Denunciation in Financial Policing,” The British Journal of Criminology, Vol. 58, No. 4 (2018), pp. 845–863; Anthony Amicelle, “Naissance d’une Agence de Renseignement: Droits d’entrée Dans les Univers de la Finance et de la Sécurité,” Culture et Conflits, Vol. 114–115, No. 2 (2019), pp. 171–197.

30 Laurent Bonelli, “Un Ennemi ‘Anonyme et Sans Visage,’” Cultures & Conflits, Vol. 58 (2005), pp. 101–129; Laurent Bonelli and Francesco Ragazzi, “Low-Tech Security: Files, Notes, and Memos as Technologies of Anticipation,” Security Dialogue, Vol. 45, No. 5 (2014), pp. 476–493; Didier Bigo, “Security and Immigration: Toward a Critique of the Governmentality of Unease,” Alternatives, Vol. 27 (2002), pp. 63–92.

31 Minna Räsänen and James M. Nyce, “The Raw is Cooked: Data in Intelligence Practice,” Science, Technology and Human Values, Vol. 38, No. 5 (2013), pp. 655–677; Mariele Kaufmann, Simon Egbert, and Matthias Leese, “Predictive Policing and the Politics of Patterns,” The British Journal of Criminology, Vol. 59, No. 3 (2019), pp. 674–692.

32 Stampnitzky, “Truth and Consequences?,” pp. 597–613; Antoine Mégie and Ariane Jossin, “De la Judiciarisation du Renseignement: Le Cas des Procès de Djihadistes,” Hermès La Revue, Vol. 76, No. 3 (2016), pp. 50–58.

33 Bigo, “Shared Secrecy in a Digital Age and a Transnational World,” pp. 379–395.

34 Didier Bigo, “Rethinking Security at the Crossroad of International Relations and Criminology,” The British Journal of Criminology, Vol. 56, No. 6 (2016), pp. 1068–1086; Liam McVay, “Tracing Pre-Emptive Intelligence-Led Policing (ILP): Immigration, Classification Struggles, and the Expansion of Intelligence Logics in British Policing,” in Problematising Intelligence Studies: Towards a New Research Agenda, edited by Hager Ben Jaffel and Sebastian Larsson (London: Routledge, 2022), pp. 48–70.

35 Ben Jaffel, “Britain’s European Connection,” pp. 1007–1025.

36 Myriam Dunn Cavelty and Victor Mauer, “Postmodern Intelligence: Strategic Warning in an Age of Reflexive Intelligence,” Security Dialogue, Vol. 40, No. 2 (2009), pp. 123–144.

37 Trine Villumsen Berling, “Science and Securitization: Objectivation, the Authority of the Speaker and Mobilization of Scientific Facts,” Security Dialogue, Vol. 42, No. 4–5 (2011), pp. 385–397.

38 Sherman Kent, Strategic Intelligence for American World Policy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1949).

39 David Omand, Securing the State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

40 https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/politics/people/honorary-professors.aspx

41 Christopher Baxter and Keith Jeffery, “Intelligence and ‘Official History,” in Intelligence Studies in Britain and the US: Historiography since 1945, edited by Christopher R. Moran and Christopher J. Murphy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), pp. 290–305.

42 Michael S. Goodman, The Official History of the Joint Intelligence Committee. Volume I: From the Approach of the Second World War to the Suez Crisis (London: Routledge, 2014); Baxter and Jeffery, “Intelligence and ‘Official History,’” p. 291.

43 Michael S. Goodman, “Studying and Teaching about Intelligence: The Approach in the United Kingdom,” Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 50, No. 2 (2007). https://www.cia.gov/static/Studying-Teaching-Intel-UK_6.pdf

44 Richard Aldrich and John Kasuku, “Escaping from American Intelligence: Culture, Ethnocentrism and the Anglosphere,” International Affairs, Vol. 88, No. 5 (2012), pp. 1009–1028.

45 Peter Gill and Mark Phythian, “What Is Intelligence Studies?” The International Journal of Intelligence, Security, and Public Affairs, Vol. 18, No. 1 (2016), pp. 5–19; Stephen Marrin, “Improving Intelligence Studies as an Academic Discipline,” Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 31 No. 2 (2016), p. 66.

46 Gill and Phythian, “What is Intelligence Studies?,” pp. 5–19.

47 Damien Van Puyvelde and Curtis Sean, “‘Standing on the Shoulders of Giants’: Diversity and Scholarship in Intelligence Studies,” Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 31, No. 7 (2016), pp. 1040–1054; Miron Varouhakis, “What is Being Published in Intelligence? A Study of Two Scholarly Journals,” International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence, Vol. 26, No. 1 (2012), pp. 176–189.

48 Gill and Phythian, “What is Intelligence Studies?,” p. 8.

49 Ibid., 15.

50 Marrin, “Improving Intelligence Studies as an Academic Discipline,” p. 66.

51 Robert Glass and Philip Davidson, Intelligence Is for Commanders (Harrisburg, PA: Military Service Publishing Company, 1948).

52 Loch K. Johnson (ed.), Essentials of Strategic Intelligence (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger Security International, 2015).

53 Mark Phythian, “Intelligence Theory and Theories of International Relations: Shared World or Separate Worlds?” in Intelligence Theory: Key Questions and Debates, edited by Peter Gill, Stephen Marrin, and Mark Phythian (London: Routledge, 2009), p. 55.

54 Peter Gill and Mark Phythian, “From Intelligence Cycle to a Web of Intelligence: Complexity and the Conceptualisation of Intelligence,” in Understanding the Intelligence Cycle, edited by Mark Phythian (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 21–42.

55 Kristan J. Wheaton, “Let’s Kill the Intelligence Cycle,” Sources and Methods, 20 May 2011, https://sourcesandmethods.blogspot.com/2011/05/lets-kill-intelligence-cycle-original.html

56 Arthur S. Hulnick, “What’s Wrong with the Intelligence Cycle?,” Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 21, No. 6 (2006), pp. 959–979.

57 Arthur S. Hulnick, Fixing the Spy Machine: Preparing American intelligence for the Twenty-First Century (London: Praeger, 1999); Len Scott and Peter Jackson, “The Study of Intelligence in Theory and Practice,” Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 19, No. 2 (2004), pp. 139–169.

58 Mark Stout and Michael Warner, “Intelligence Is as Intelligence Does,” Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 33, No. 4 (2018), pp. 517–526; John Ehrman, “What Are We Talking about When We Talk about Counterintelligence?,” Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 53, No. 2 (2009), https://www.cia.gov/static/toward-a-theory-of-ci.pdf; Thomas Hammond, “Intelligence Organisation and the Organisation of Intelligence,” International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence, Vol. 23, No. 4 (2010), pp. 680–724; Damien Van Puyvelde. Outsourcing US Intelligence: Contractors and Government Accountability (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019).

59 Richard Aldrich, “Global Intelligence Co-Operation Versus Accountability: New Facets to an Old Problem,” Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 24, No. 1 (2009), pp. 26–56; Adam Svendsen, “Connecting Intelligence and Theory: Intelligence Liaison and International Relations,” Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 24, No. 5 (2009), pp. 700–729; Aldrich and Kasuku, “Escaping the Anglosphere,” pp. 1009–1028; Hoffmann, “Arab Students and the Stasi,” pp. 62–78.

60 Gill and Phythian, “What Is Intelligence Studies?,” pp. 5–19.

61 Jennifer Sims, “Defending Adaptive Realism, Intelligence Theory Comes of Age,” in Intelligence Theory: Key Questions and Debates, edited by Peter Gill, Stephen Marrin, and Mark Phythian (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 151–165.

62 Peter Gill, “Developing Intelligence Theory,” Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 33, No. 4 (2018), pp. 467–471.

63 Phythian, “Intelligence Theory and Theories of International Relations,” p. 61.

64 Hamilton Bean, “Intelligence Theory from the Margins: Questions Ignored and Debates Not Had,” Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 33, No. 4 (2008), pp. 527–540.

65 Sophia Hoffmann, Noura Chalati, and Ali Dogan, “Rethinking Intelligence Practices and Processes: Three Sociological Concepts for the Study of Intelligence,” Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 38, No. 3 (2022), pp. 319–338; Christopher Richard Moran and Andrew Hammond, “Bringing the ‘Social’ in from the Cold: Towards a Social History of American Intelligence,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs, Vol. 34, No. 5 (2021), pp. 616–636; Pepjin Tuinier, Thijs Brocades Zaalberg, and Sebastiaan Rietjens, “The Social Ties That Bind: Unraveling the Role of Trust in International Intelligence Cooperation,” International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence, Vol. 36, No. 2 (2023), pp. 386–422; Simon Willmetts, “The Cultural Turn in Intelligence Studies,” Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 34, No. 6 (2019), pp. 800–817; Nolan, “Information Sharing and Collaboration in the United States Intelligence Community”; Gunilla Eriksson, Swedish Military Intelligence: Producing Knowledge (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016).

66 For a general overview, see Bean, “Intelligence Theory from the Margins,” pp. 527–540.

67 Ralf G. V. Lillbacka, “Realism, Constructivism, and Intelligence Analysis,” International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence, Vol. 26, No. 2 (2013), pp. 304–331.

68 Bean, “Intelligence Theory from the Margins,” pp. 527–540.

69 Peter de Werd, “Critical Intelligence Studies? A Contribution,” Journal of European and American Intelligence Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2018), p. 109.

70 Hamilton Bean, Peter de Werd, and Cristina Ivan, “Critical Intelligence Studies: Introduction to the Special Issue,” Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 36, No. 4 (2021), p. 468.

71 Bean, “Intelligence Theory from the Margins,” p. 528.

72 de Werd, “Critical Intelligence Studies?,” p. 110; Stout and Warner, “Intelligence Is as Intelligence Does,” p. 523.

73 Bean, de Werd, and Ivan, “Critical Intelligence Studies,” p. 467.

74 Ibid., p. 469.

75 Samantha Newbery and Christian Kaunert, “Critical Intelligence Studies: A New Framework for Analysis,” Intelligence and National Security (2023), p. 1. https://doi.org/10.1080/02684527.2023.2178163

76 Bean, de Werd, and Ivan, “Critical Intelligence Studies,” pp. 469–470.

77 Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power.