Roots of counterterrorism: contemporary wisdom from Dutch intelligence (OUP)
Event description:Roots of counterterrorism: contemporary wisdom from Dutch intelligence (OUP)
The dominant narrative in intelligence studies portrays the evolution of intelligence from Cold War times to the present as one of increasing complexity. Immediately after the Second World War, a relatively simple and symmetric security regime emerged, during which communism emerged as a centred, delineated, knowable threat. Terrorism, which became the dominant threat after 9/11, was the ultimate asymmetric threat, which required intelligence organisations to reinvent themselves. This narrative ignores the fact that Western intelligence and security services have countered terrorism before, in particular from the end of the 1960s onwards.
In this presentation, I would like to explore how the Dutch security service, the Binnenlandse Veiligheidsdienst (BVD) perceived of terrorism and political violence and what kind of repertoires of action they developed when countering it. I will show how prevention did not become the name of the game. Instead of preventing ticking bombs from going off, the Dutch security service launched intelligence investigations into the suspected perpetrators of attacks (using their intelligence resources to help the police find the culprits), among others. Through this analysis, I would like to reflect on what this tells us about the perceived core functions of intelligence more generally.
Speaker's bio: Dr. Constant Hijzen is an affiliated researcher in Intelligence Studies at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs Leiden University (the Netherlands). From 2016 to 2021, he was assistant professor and head of the research group of Intelligence and Security of the Institute of Security and Global Affairs at Leiden University, whilst also working for the Institute for History at the same university. He is currently the official historian of the General Intelligence and Security Service in the Netherlands. In his dissertation, he focused on the interaction between the Dutch security service and their political, bureaucratic, and societal context. In 2017, he received a research grant from the National Coordinator for Counterterrorism and Security for a research project on intelligence and counterterrorism. He was also affiliated as an advisor to the Review Committee for the Dutch intelligence and security services, to the national police, and he was president of the Netherlands Intelligence Studies Association between 2018 and 2023. Constant is also a member of the editorial board of Intelligence and National Security.