Rhetorical and Critical/Cultural Intelligence Studies

While the role of intelligence is to reduce uncertainty for decision-makers, a role of intelligence scholarship is to highlight uncertainty, that is, open up possibilities for ethical reflection and deliberation that conventional wisdom, institutional inertia, and mainstream research have closed off. Along these lines, this essay argues for the development and use of rhetorical and critical/cultural perspectives within the field of Intelligence Studies. It describes what rhetorical and critical/cultural research entails and explains how associated perspectives benefit the field.     

Organizational Culture and US Intelligence Affairs

Both US intelligence officials and intelligence studies scholars claim that ‘organizational culture’ is a cause of ‘intelligence failure’ and the proper locus of post-9/11 intelligence reform efforts. This essay uses a postmodern perspective to demonstrate how the dominant discourse of ‘organizational culture’ shapes stakeholders' understandings of accountability and what constitutes necessary, correct, or effective intelligence reform. By exploring institutional struggles over the meanings of ‘culture’ and ‘accountability’, this essay calls for reconsideration of the ways US intelligence officials and intelligence studies scholars talk about ‘organizational culture’ vis-à-vis post-9/11 intelligence reform.     

The Requirement of an 'Express Agreement' for Joint Criminal Enterprise Liability: A Critique of Brdanin

The mode of liability known as joint criminal enterprise (JCE)has emerged in the case law of the International Criminal Tribunalfor the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) as a means of assigning criminalliability to individuals for activities carried out by a collective.As a result, the doctrine must be carefully defined so as notto allow it to extend a defendant's liability beyond the appropriatelimits of individual criminal responsibility. In this regard,a recent ICTY Trial Chamber decision in Branin held that, wherea defendant is not alleged to have participated in the physicalperpetration of the crimes charged but to have contributed insome other way to the commission of the crimes by a group, theprosecution must demonstrate that the defendant entered intoan express agreement with the physical perpetrators to committhe crimes charged. The author argues that this ‘expressagreement requirement’ is both conceptually unsound andpractically unhelpful. Conceptually, it would be inconsistentwith core principles of JCE liability to require an expressagreement between a defendant and the physical perpetratorsof crimes, at least in circumstances in which it is allegedthat there existed a structure of two or more overlapping JCEs.Moreover, because this structure allows the accused and thephysical perpetrators to be operating in two separate JCEs,they need not even share a common criminal purpose. On a practicallevel, arguably in a ‘system-criminality’ contextsuch as the one that developed in the former Yugoslavia duringthe time period in question, the organizers of criminal activityare unlikely to enter into express criminal agreements withthose who physically carry out crimes, because existing organizedhierarchies provide much more efficient mechanisms by whichleaders are able to ensure the realization of their criminalplans.