Rethinking Intelligence: Critical Perspectives on Security, Ethics and Institutional Practice
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.
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