The Value of Non-Governmental Intelligence: Widening the Field

In the UK, the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) has a poor track record of predicting attack. In the US, official inquiries into 9/11 identified ‘a failure of imagination’ to conceive of a large scale threat to the American homeland. There is a long-standing literature on surprise attack which emphasizes that clues to predict attack often exist but are not pieced together by an intelligence sector which is not structured to look in the right direction. In a world of increasingly fragmented threats and weak signals, it is apparent that much of the challenge in intelligence work now lies not in collection but in managing requirements, setting priorities, and conducting incisive analysis based on the ability to imagine new threats. One solution to a failure of imagination is to widen the range of people who can contribute to the task. Non-Governmental analysis of security issues, whether by academia, civil society or the private sector, can help to identify emerging issues and set priorities. Whilst collection of secret intelligence may always remain the preserve of specialist Government agencies, the rest of the intelligence cycle can benefit from external contributions and open source intelligence. We argue that the process of setting intelligence requirements could be opened to a wider range of actors. In conflict environments, there may be particular value in an open process to identify what each side would need to know about the other to confidently seek peace.     

Future Shock or Future Stability?: Generational Change and the Australian Party System

The stability of the Australian two‐party system has been a long‐running feature of Australian politics. But a question outstanding in the literature is how different generations of Australians contribute to the stability of the Australian two‐party system and how this has changed over time. In answering this question, this article sheds light on generational effects and party system change that better informs us about the sources of voting patterns over a long period of time. Further, this article draws on and builds on the international literature on generations and party systems.     

Conceptions of liberty during the Dutch revolt 1555–1590

Traditionally considered as selfish usurpers of the nation's will on the eve of the Revolution, members of the Ancien Régime parlements resorted to a falsely pre-revolutionary language has long convinced historians in their interpretations. Beyond the semantics associated with the remonstrance – a genre that is suggested here –, this paper wishes to re-insert the parliamentary dialectics against these arbitrary orders of the years 1787–88 into a broader socio-cultural field. Our aim is to show that what was at stake when dealing with the ‘sealed’ letters hinged around power and contestation within the public opinion expressed through various speeches in the Paris and provincial parliaments. The unanimous questioning of these lettres de cachet obviously concealed numerous differences and often illustrated confusion between the pre-revolutionary intentions, as expressed in leaflets, and the parliamentary speeches strongly intent on defending identity privileges. The parlements were, however, the driving force of the campaign against lettres de cachet and thus introduced the French people to what we can call rather a grammar of resistance. If they were the object of general denunciation right from the calling of the Etats généraux in July 1788 as if they had betrayed the Nation, this was because the French people were at the same time experiencing events that suddenly altered their identity along with their contesting of absolutism.