Speakers
Description
Today both the empirical focus of scholarly enquiry and the conceptual framing of intelligence studies still remain firmly rooted in the experiences of the Anglosphere and liberal democratic political tradition, the US primarily, but also the UK and the Five Eyes Alliance (Van Puyvelde & Curtis, 2016). With probably the sole exception of the Soviet/Russian intelligence, interest in “other” intelligence systems was sporadic and concerned only specific episodes (for instance: Israel before the 1973 war, and covert assassinations against the PLO, Italian, Dutch and Norwegian “Stay-Behind” systems).
Only recently scholars have ventured into the terra incognita of the so-called “elsewhere”, that is outside the anglosphere, and started to more systematically study other conceptions of intelligence building on the pioneering work of Bozeman (Bozeman 1989) as well as to map and compare empirically the structure and operations of other intelligence services (Davies and Gustafson, 2016). Scholarship of this kind however remains thin.
This panel expands on this line of inquiry in intelligence studies by exploring the understudied issues of success, failure and effectiveness (Bar- Joseph and McDermott, 2017) in historical perspective in different geographical cultural and operational milieux during the 20th century: Italy, Latin America, Israel and South Africa. Its purpose is to distil an initial corpus of knowledge on these topics by assessing outcomes in different realms of operational activity (strategic warning, counter-terrorism, military intelligence and internal security) and identifying key variables that determined those outcomes.
| What discipline or branch of humanities or social sciences do you identify yourself with? | History/Political Science |
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| If you are submitting an Open Panel proposal, have you included all four abstracts in attachment? | Yes, I have included all required information (see below). |
| Are you a PhD student or early-career researcher? | No |
