Collective Discussion: Toward Critical Approaches to Intelligence as a Social Phenomenon

Abstract

This collective discussion proposes a novel understanding of intelligence as a social phenomenon, taking place in a social space that increasingly involves actors and professional fields not immediately seen as part of intelligence. This discussion is a response to the inherent functionalism in Intelligence Studies (IS) that conceives of intelligence as a cycle serving policymakers. Instead, our interventions seek to problematize and break with this notion of the cycle and show what an alternative study of intelligence would look like. In the first part of the discussion, we situate our intervention in the broader fields of IS and International Political Sociology. Espousing a transdisciplinary approach, we build our four interventions as transversal lines cutting through a social space in which agents with differing stakes participate and reframe the meaning and practice of intelligence. Intelligence professionals not only have to reckon with policymakers, but also increasingly with law enforcement agents, representatives from the science and technology sector, judges, lawyers, activists, and Internet users themselves. Each move takes a step further away from the intelligence cycle by introducing new empirical sites, actors, and stakes.

Bourdieu the ethnographer: Grounding the habitus of the ‘far-right’ voter

“…Later generations also invoked the fighting spirit of Bourdieu’s scholarship as a ‘combat sport’ to study how symbolic violence is enacted around (in)security problems in less obvious spaces. EU research and development into border technologies (Martin-Mazé, 2020; Martin-Mazé and Perret, 2021), the academic discipline of Intelligence Studies (Ben Jaffel and Larsson, 2022; Ben Jaffel et al, 2020), and the field of humanitarian professionals (Beerli, 2018) are some of the most striking examples of new social spaces and protagonists being studied, whereby a specific meaning of security is imposed and deemed legitimate.…”

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“…Adequate knowledge about incidents, their etiology, and the available management options enables recognition of the threats and acceptance of necessary strategies during public health emergencies. Consequently, community preparedness and mental readiness seem to be some of the most important elements in successful policy implementation [20,[29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44]. It is therefore evident that investing in local empowerment by establishing educational initiatives, proper communication, and timely information are all necessary steps to counteract misinformation and to promote successful implementation of public health strategies, which will further attenuate the pandemic.…”

Reconfiguring the Relationship Between Intelligence Professionals and the Public: A First Step Towards Democratising New Zealand’s National Security?

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