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.     

On the Edge of Solidarity: The Burqa and Public Life

Dislike among European publics for the Islamic full veil and the desire to ban it are often ascribed to nativist "Islamophobia." This article questions that assumption. It argues that, in political terms, the wearing of the burqa and niqab is inconsistent with Western norms of equality, the backbone of the citizenship ideal; and that, in social terms, the full veil erects a partition to interpersonal understanding and reciprocity. While the constitutional duty to protect religious freedom is a good argument in favor of tolerating the full veil, the practice of wearing it is at the edge of solidarity and injurious to the democratic public sphere.     

Election Inversions,Coalitions and Proportional Representation: Examples of Voting Paradoxes in Danish Government Formations

When collective choices are made in more than one round and with different groups of decision makers, so‐called ‘election inversions’ may take place, where each round produces different majority outcomes. In this article, two versions of such compound majority paradoxes are identified that are particularly, but not exclusively, relevant for systems of proportional representation with governing coalitions: the ‘Threshold Paradox’ and the ‘Federal Paradox’. The empirical relevance of the paradoxes is illustrated with examples from two Danish elections (in 1971 and in 1990), where a majority of the voters voted for one bloc of parties, but a majority of the seats fell to another.     

Gibraltar at the United Nations: Caught Between a Treaty,the Charter and the “Fundamentalism” of the Special Committee

On account of Spain's long-standing claim to the sovereignty of the British Overseas Territory of Gibraltar, “the Rock” remains one of sixteen non-self-governing territories on the United Nations list awaiting decolonization. This article examines the principles of self-determination and territorial integrity adopted by the United Nations in consideration of the issue of decolonization as they have been applied to Gibraltar, together with the consequences for the parties concerned. With the fiftieth anniversary of the first United Nations Resolution on decolonization on the horizon and the recent adoption by Gibraltar of what is considered to be a non-colonial constitution, the article suggests that it is timely for the United Nations to consider taking a more flexible approach to Gibraltar's status that would put to one side Spain's claim but allow Gibraltar to be removed from the UN list.     

Utilizing Ostrom’s institutional analysis and development framework toward an understanding of crisis-driven policy

Policy Sciences - This paper examines the institutional dynamics of policymaking in a crisis. Crises have been termed a “perceptual category,” events that at least seem to be...