International Cooperation and Bureaucratic In-fighting: American and British Economic Intelligence Sharing and the Strategic Bombing of Germany, 1939–41

The pursuit of intelligence on the German economy by the United States Army Air Corps prior to 1942 revealed great gaps in US knowledge of the German economy. This encouraged joint efforts with British Intelligence. The Air Corps exploited sources creatively to find German industrial targets. Its specialized needs persuaded it to try to establish an Air Corps intelligence gathering section. The Air Corps clashed with the Army over access to economic data. Its need for economic intelligence merged with its political goal of making strategic bombing its primary mission. Intelligence gathering efforts ultimately translated into the creation of air warfare strategy.     

The Future of Civil–Military Intelligence Cooperation Based on Lessons Learned in Iraq

As part of the infrastructure for monitoring the movements of Private Security Companies (PSCs) in Iraq, a unique intelligence interface has been constructed to enhance cooperation between the military and PSCs. Using a wide range of existing intelligence-sharing agreements and guidelines for handling classified information, PSC contractors working with the US military have been able to provide unclassified intelligence products to the wider PSC community. Using lessons learned in Iraq as a contractor building this interface, the author explains how institutional difficulties were overcome and argues that the US military should be better prepared to share intelligence with the wide range of organizations it can expect to work with in future unconventional warfare or nation-building operations. Some of the lessons learned in Iraq can also be applied to the US Department of Homeland Security's Regional Fusion Centers, where many of the same difficulties with intelligence-sharing and integration with commercial organizations are being encountered.     

The Theory of Retroactivism: Arab Resistance to Educational and Technological Progress

The article examines the reluctance of Arab culture to ‘Western’ ideas of education and technology. It, first, establishes a conceptual framework for those cultures dominated by ‘retroactivism’—a school of thought that advocates a return to traditions and argues against progressive innovation. The article then puts this framework into practice, addressing the research question: In what instances, if any, do retroactivists accept educational and technological progress? This question was answered by first examining the ways in which a retroactivistic culture approached educational and technological progress. This examination helped generate a timeline of attempts to introduce educational and technological innovations into Arab culture. This timeline shows that Arab culture resists innovation in all its various forms and therefore sustains a retroactivism-dominated way of life. Retroactivists believe in what ‘renewism’ or ‘revivalism’: referring to movements that emerge from time to time throughout history that issue appeals to adhere to old norms and values, using strategies to remind society of the need to return to past ideologies. This means that, although retroactivistic cultures might accept certain innovations, there can occasionally be ‘renewistic movements’ that seek to bring society back to old times, thereby seeking to (peacefully or violently) undermine or eliminate existing innovations.     

Intelligence in Occupied Belgium: The Business of Anglo-Belgian Espionage and Intelligence Cooperation during the Two World Wars (1914–1918, 1940–1944)

During both World Wars, one of the most powerful weapons Belgian citizens possessed in resisting German occupation of their country was the gathering of intelligence on the enemy for the allied armies. But Belgian's first and second secret wars were different in several respects, one of the most important being the relationship between the Belgian secret services in exile and their British counterparts. If the First World War was essentially a story of bitter concurrency between them, the Second was mostly a tale of ‘jealous’ partnership. The relations with the intelligence networks in occupied Belgium formed a delicate but crucial issue, where money played an important role. This article explores these dynamics and how they affected the main mission of gathering intelligence on the Germans.     

Franco-German Intelligence Cooperation and the Internationalization of Algeria's War of Independence (1954–62)

Between 1958 and 1960, the French domestic security and intelligence services came to establish a close, multi-layered, and secret working relationship with their German counterparts. The purpose of this collaborative arrangement was to enlist German support in combating the subversive activities of the Algerian Front de Libération Nationale, whose members had taken refuge in Germany. In particular, the metropolitan authorities sought to impose on their German counterparts some of the same methods of colonial policing and intelligence that characterized their own counter-insurgency in France. These efforts proved counter-productive, however, for in internationalizing the Algerian war, they drew public attention to the colonial nature of France's hold over Algeria.     

International Missions as a Way to Improve Civil–Military Relations: The Spanish Case (1989–2015)

At the end of the twentieth century (after a long history of coups d’état, a military uprising, a civil war, and a four-decade dictatorship) the Spanish public had serious doubts about the democratic nature of the armed forces. In 1989, the Spanish armed forces first took part in an international mission. Now, after 25 years of continuous active participation in overseas missions, public opinion polls rank the armed forces as the second most trusted institution in the country. International missions have contributed to (1) modernizing the Spanish armed forces; (2) changing the mentality of the Spanish military; and (3) improving Spanish society’s perception of the armed forces’ role. All in all, the armed forces’ performance abroad has helped improve domestic civil–military relations.     

The Making of Bletchley Park and Signals Intelligence 1939–42

The article argues that signals intelligence was an organizational accomplishment in the sense of requiring a) the establishment of an independent organization and b) that this organization combine cryptanalysis with intelligence analysis, traffic analysis and interception. This was not pre-ordained but the outcome of specific conflicts and decisions at Bletchley Park during the first three years of the Second World War which transformed the Government Code and Cypher School from a cryptanalytical bureau to a fully-fledged signals intelligence agency. Detailed archival evidence is presented in support of this claim.     

The Greek General Election of 2009: PASOK – The Third Generation

The policy networks model recently has become a more frequent analytical tool of EU policy analysts. In a recent article, Hussein Kassim offers a sceptical view about its applicability to the EU. Kassim fails to make explicit the key variables — or internal characteristics of policy networks ‐ which help to explain policy outcomes. However, his own analysis echoes many of the assumptions of the model: that policy networks are rife in the EU because they facilitate informal bargaining amid fluid policy processes, that networks provide order amid extreme institutional complexity and frequent change, and that the hard work involved in identifying EU policy networks is worth the effort. The policy networks model requires further testing and refinement at the EU level, but it remains the most analytically powerful approach on offer.     

Does the Involvement of Global Civil Society Make International Decision-Making More Democratic? The Case of the International Criminal Court

The negotiation and contents of the Statute for an International Criminal Court (ICC) were strongly influenced by global civil society actors. After examining definitions of global civil society, this article will consider whether and why such involvement of non-governmental actors in international negotiations should be considered desirable. In particular it will assess, in the light of the ICC negotiations, to what extent global civil society democratizes international decision-making processes, considering as elements of democracy: transparency, equality and deliberation, representation and participation. While concluding that this is only very partially the case, the final section will suggest that the tortured democracy question is not the only justification for global civil society involvement in international fora. It will discuss the much overlooked and by no means unproblematic ‘ethical contribution’ of global civil society and offer a qualified defence of more international law, with more global civil society participation, on this basis.     

What's the Harm? The Ethics of Intelligence Collection

Abstract

As the professional practice of intelligence collection adapts to the changing environment and new threats of the twenty-first century, many academic experts and intelligence professionals call for a coherent ethical framework that outlines exactly when, by what means and to what ends intelligence is justified. Reports of abuse at detention centres such as Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, the ever increasing use of technological surveillance, and the increased attention on the use of torture for intelligence collection purposes have all highlighted a need to make an explicit statement about what is and what is not permissible intelligence practice. In this article an ethical framework will be established which will outline under what circumstances the use of different intelligence collection activities would be permissible. This ethical framework will first underline what it is about intelligence collection that is ‘harmful’ and, therefore, should be prohibited under normal circumstances. The ethical framework then outlines a set of ‘just intelligence principles’, based on the just war tradition, which delineate when the harm caused can be justified. As a result, this article outlines a systemic ethical framework that makes it possible to understand when intelligence collection is prohibited and when it is permissible.     

Symposium: The Contribution of Laclau’s Discourse Theory to International Relations and International Political EconomyIntroduction

This symposium explores the value of Poststructuralist (or Political) Discourse Theory (PDT) for the analysis of world politics. PDT was originally developed by the late Argentine political theorist Ernesto Laclau, in early works together with Chantal Mouffe, and has entered the margins of International Relations (IR) in recent years, mainly by bringing in poststructuralist concepts that had previously been ignored by the more critical strands of theorizing. Against this background, the introduction (1) discusses the disconnect between PDT and research on world politics, primarily in IR, as well as PDT’s potential contribution, (2) provides an overview of PDT’s central theoretical tenets, in particular with respect to its social ontology and its theoretical concept of change, and (3) introduces the contributions to the symposium.     

The robustness of the optimal weighted majority rule to probability distortion

This study identifies the optimal collective decision rule in a dichotomous symmetric setting, allowing for probabilities distortion as originally assumed by Tversky and Kahneman (Journal of Risk and Uncertainty 5(4):297–323, 1992). We show that previous results that identified the weighted majority rule as the optimal one, and did not consider subjective probabilities, are robust to such distortion in the sense that neither the rule nor the weights are changed.     

British Intelligence and the Jewish Resistance Movement in the Palestine Mandate, 1945–46

At the end of the Second World War, British and Zionist interests came into conflict over the issue of Jewish immigration to Palestine, which raised the broader issue of what sort of National Home could exist within the British Mandate. As a result, in 1945–46, the three Jewish armed groups in the Mandate, the Haganah, Etzel and Lehi, started a loosely coordinated armed struggle against British rule. Even the moderates in the Jewish Agency rejected their former partner against Hitler, Britain, and used force against it in order to achieve their political goals. This article assesses British intelligence on these developments, and demonstrates that it failed to anticipate or even to understand the threat until the destruction of the King David Hotel. The article demonstrates that these mistakes occurred because British intelligence relied heavily on the intelligence organs of the Jewish Agency itself for intelligence about political threats within Palestine. The article assesses this intelligence failure, and its heavy costs. However, it denies that bad intelligence caused British failures in the Mandate. On the contrary, that failure stemmed from deeper problems of policy.     

What Drives Reforms in International Organizations? External Pressure and Bureaucratic Entrepreneurs in the UN Response to AIDS

This article explores organizational dynamics that go with the design and implementation of public administration reforms within the United Nations (UN) system. It focuses on management reforms carried out in the UNAIDS Programme, which brings together 10 UN agencies to combat the worldwide HIV/AIDS epidemic. The article suggests that understanding these reforms requires questioning the exposure of UN administrations to pressures emanating from their environment and at the same time, investigating the intentions of bureaucratic entrepreneurs who promote and drive reforms within the UN system. The empirical development demonstrates that the swift incorporation of the external pressure into a reform process in the mid‐2000s cannot be dissociated from the active support of some UN agencies who have had a common interest in shifting institutional arrangements inside UNAIDS to expand their bureaucratic authority. In conclusion, the article suggests analyzing reforms within international administrations as social processes driven by both coercion and opportunities.     

How Do Advocacy Think Tanks Relate to Academic Knowledge? The Case of Norway

Think tanks often present themselves as contributors to a more reflective and informed political debate and their policy advice as based on knowledge and research. Yet, they also claim to be alternatives to university research and research institutes and often use knowledge and expertise to pursue explicitly ideological agendas. How do think tanks handle this balancing act of knowledge provision and ideological commitment? How do they relate to academia and what characterizes their approach to academic knowledge? The paper explores these questions through an investigation of the three main advocacy think tanks in Norway, based on an analysis of their organization, activities, staff and publications, and through interviews with think tank staff. The paper describes the specific ways in which these think tanks gather and utilize knowledge, and how they position themselves relative to academia. It also reflects on possible explanations for this pattern and on its normative implications.     

The policy impact of unified government: evidence from 2000 to 2002

Do the outcomes of government action differ between periods of unified and divided government? Using “event study” methodology, this articles addresses the question by looking at sudden shifts between divided and unified government—Bush v. Gore, the Jeffords switch, and the 2002 election. The results show that oil and gas stocks (i.e. Republican “constituent firms”) rose abruptly as Republicans took unified control, while renewable energy stocks (i.e. Democratic “constituent firms”) fell. The pattern reversed, however, when Democrats took back control of the Senate. These outcomes call into question non-partisan theories of law making.