Rethinking Intelligence: Critical Perspectives on Security, Ethics and Institutional Practice
type: CreativeWork
description: This thesis reexamines intelligence as both practice and object of inquiry in contemporary security frameworks. Grounded in Critical Intelligence Studies (CIS), it challenges state-centric, positivist assumptions, and argues that intelligence is a socially embedded, ethically charged process. Methodologically, the critical overview adopts a reflexive, concept-led mapping of three interrelated projects onto the micro, meso, and macro dimensions of the Intelligence-Security Tension and deploys that vertical schema to organise the chapters. Project 1 analyses crowdsourced crisis-mapping in Libya, showing that ostensibly “open” data still demand rigorous source-protection norms at the micro (ethical) level. Project 2 investigates the cultural and bureaucratic disconnect between intelligence analysis and security policy in a diplomatic security context, highlighting meso-level institutional barriers. Project 3 tests the assumption that larger intelligence capacity inevitably yields better security, employing partial least-squares structural-equation modelling to expose macro-level contradictions when effectiveness is measured through a human security lens. Considered together, the three studies demonstrate how intelligence can simultaneously enable and undermine security objectives. Synthesizing their insights, this thesis proposes a vertically integrated model linking information stewardship, institutional receptivity, and human security impact. Practical recommendations follow for source-protection protocols, intelligence-policy integration, and the metrics by which success is judged. The work therefore calls for an accountable, people-centred, and critically engaged intelligence paradigm suited to twenty-first-century security challenges.
abstract: This thesis reexamines intelligence as both practice and object of inquiry in contemporary security frameworks. Grounded in Critical Intelligence Studies (CIS), it challenges state-centric, positivist assumptions, and argues that intelligence is a socially embedded, ethically charged process. Methodologically, the critical overview adopts a reflexive, concept-led mapping of three interrelated projects onto the micro, meso, and macro dimensions of the Intelligence-Security Tension and deploys that vertical schema to organise the chapters. Project 1 analyses crowdsourced crisis-mapping in Libya, showing that ostensibly “open” data still demand rigorous source-protection norms at the micro (ethical) level. Project 2 investigates the cultural and bureaucratic disconnect between intelligence analysis and security policy in a diplomatic security context, highlighting meso-level institutional barriers. Project 3 tests the assumption that larger intelligence capacity inevitably yields better security, employing partial least-squares structural-equation modelling to expose macro-level contradictions when effectiveness is measured through a human security lens. Considered together, the three studies demonstrate how intelligence can simultaneously enable and undermine security objectives. Synthesizing their insights, this thesis proposes a vertically integrated model linking information stewardship, institutional receptivity, and human security impact. Practical recommendations follow for source-protection protocols, intelligence-policy integration, and the metrics by which success is judged. The work therefore calls for an accountable, people-centred, and critically engaged intelligence paradigm suited to twenty-first-century security challenges.
author: Stottlemyre, Steven
language: eng
date published: 2026
date modified: 2026-07-24T04:40:03Z
provider: University of South Wales
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of South Wales