Intelligence

Intelligence agencies have reorganised themselves in response to a new globalised threat environment and increased digitalisation. Questions like the non-detection of the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001 and the misreading of intelligence of Iraq’s WMD program sparked this movement. More recently, the fall of Kabul in 2021, the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and the Hammas attack on Israel in 2023 have raised questions about the nature of intelligence knowledge, the field’s methods for analysis, and the politicisation of the intelligence agencies and their assessments. Furthermore, the field has seen an influx of private actors, both companies and individuals, providing intelligence and risk analysis to companies and states, blurring the boundaries between intelligence and risk analysis. In turn, this has opened the field to academia.

Half the course is devoted to discussing the technical, political, and ethical challenges that arise from these developments, including questions of democratic accountability, transparency and responsibility. The other half will centre on a one-day simulation exercise in which the students will be challenged to produce an intelligence estimate for a political decision using the field’s methods.

This exercise will contain four stages: (1) definition of intelligence needs, (2) open-source intelligence gathering, (3) analysis using the field’s methods, and (4) presentation of findings. The purpose of this simulation is that students get a first-hand impression of the field's methods, allowing them to reflect critically on them afterwards.

Handing in the presentation of the findings is mandatory to be accepted for the exam.