Agents for Stability or Chaos: Conceptualizing Intelligence “Relevance” in Counterinsurgency

Recent discussions among U.S. officials about how the intelligence community can demonstrate its “relevance” to counterinsurgency have been dominated by an ideology that presupposes large-scale military intervention, and in which the role of intelligence is limited to improving analysis in support of current military activities, with little debate of future requirements. This article will highlight a number of alternative conceptions of intelligence “relevance” to counterinsurgency, based on a study of several historical and contemporary U.S. and non-U.S. cases, and by applying a wider definition of counterinsurgency that includes cases where the military plays a subordinate role relative to the intelligence services.     

Shanghai's “Mysterious Westerner”: The Walden Affair And Soviet Military Intelligence Operations In China, 1933–1935

Abstract

During the 1930s, Shanghai was a major center of Soviet espionage. By 1935 Chinese and Japanese agents of the USSR's military intelligence service, the Razvedyvatel'noe Upravlenie or RU, had successfully penetrated key Guomindang, Japanese, and U.S. targets, providing critical intelligence for Moscow and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). These accomplishments collapsed after the detention of RU leader Yakov Bronin (commonly known as Joseph Walden) and several of his Chinese associates in May 1935, the culmination of a series of tradecraft errors and misjudgments. As attempts to establish Bronin's nationality foundered, a classic confrontation developed between Chinese authorities seeking Bronin's immediate rendition and those of the International Settlement and French Concession, both determined to uphold the principle of extra-territoriality. Once Bronin's fraudulent claim to French nationality was exposed he was duly extradited and received a 15–year jail sentence for espionage, leaving RU networks and the parallel intelligence apparatus of the CCP in a disarray from which they did not fully recover until the Sino-Japanese war.     

The Critical Movement Against the 2010–2012 Education Reform in Russia: Networks,Organisations and Parties

Abstract

In 2010, Russian authorities presented a new draft law on education, which immediately became controversial. The essay examines whether user groups (parents) and low-ranking sector employees (teachers) were active in the movement critical of the reform, and how the state responded to the anti-reform movement. The movement consisted of several networks and organisations with no central node. It included teachers, parents and activists from both non-systemic groups and systemic opposition parties. Pressure from below by networks and organisations was combined with pressure from actors situated above in the political system, that is, in the Duma. Since the movement was welfare-oriented rather than fundamentally regime-critical, the Russian authorities tolerated open criticism both from civil society and inside the Duma. Some gains for teachers were won, but the movement’s proposed amendments and demands were generally rejected or only introduced in revised form.     

The Trouble in Mali—corruption,collusion, resistance

The combined force of the 2012 coup in Bamako and the rebellion in the north entailed an unmasking of Mali. What had been presented as a showcase of democracy, good governance, and peace and reconciliation proved to be a facade for institutional weakness and mismanagement. The collusion between regional and national ‘big man’ interests that the crisis revealed showed little if any respect for human security and development. This article will analyse the causes of the crisis and the strategies of key actors, including the Islamist rebels. The consequences of and responses to the conflict will also be addressed before the article ends with some tentative conclusions concerning the future stability of Mali and the Sahel region. The article is based on the authors’ long engagement with Mali, spanning more than a decade, but the most recent material presented is based on a series of in-depth interviews conducted there in February and March 2013.