Hager Ben Jaffel from KCL and Sebastian Larsson from Swedish Defence University will talk about their book published in 2022.
About this event
Event description:
Brief event description: In today’s unruly and unpredictable world, intelligence practices have moved far beyond the conventional operations of intelligence services, beyond espionage and national security, and into the areas of counterterrorism, surveillance, and policing. It has become a heterogeneous practice, overlapping more and more with the broader field of security, and involving a multiplicity of professionals such as data analysts, law enforcement, and border guards, as well as a range of actors who are not immediately seen as ‘doing’ intelligence yet interface with it when they come to define or contest it, such as politicians, lawyers, and whistle-blowers. At the same time, traditional intelligence services remain important, but their priorities have increasingly shifted from extracting or protecting state secrets to sharing data in old as well as new transnational networks and conducting mass surveillance on citizens across the globe using advanced digital technologies. These broad social and political transformations of intelligence challenge its conventional ‘problematisation’ in Intelligence Studies (IS). Indeed, IS have for long been restricted by a narrow state-centric and functionalist research orientation, largely overlooking the expanding range of intelligence actors, practices, and effects. This calls for a new critical research agenda for the study of intelligence based on a transdisciplinary and reflexive approach. In this seminar, we will present this approach and research agenda as well as discuss its promises and challenges.
Speakers' bios:
Hager Ben Jaffel is a Lecturer in International Relations at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. She is the co-editor of Problematising Intelligence Studies (Routledge, 2022), and author of Anglo-European Intelligence Cooperation (Routledge, 2019).
Sebastian Larsson is an Assistant Professor at the Department of War Studies and Military History, Swedish Defence University (SEDU). He is the co-editor of the books Problematising Intelligence Studies (Routledge, 2022) and Nordic Societal Security (Routledge, 2020). He is also co-chair of the SEDU Critical War Studies Research Group.