A series of investigations, especially in the United States and Britain, has focused attention on the performance of national intelligence services. At the same time, the onset of an era of terrorism has highlighted the role of intelligence in trying to detect and prevent possible terrorist acts. In many countries, intelligence services have expanded and been reorganized, or both, and new training programs for intelligence have sprung up around the world.

In these circumstances, it seemed propitious to take stock of the underlying intellectual substructure of intelligence. What is the current state of research on and relevant to intelligence? This is the question addressed by this book. The project that spawned it was conducted by the Centre for Asymmetric Threat Studies at the Swedish National Defence College, with funding from the Swedish Emergency Management Agency. The purpose of the book is primarily to assess the state of research. However, that purpose runs beyond pure understanding because the book's premise is that for intelligence, as for other areas of policy, serious intellectual inquiry is the basis for improving the performance of real-world institutions. The volume explores intelligence from an intellectual rather than an organizational perspective. Our ambitions do not run to systematically covering the various applications or “subdisciplines” of intelligence (e.g., foreign, domestic, counterespionage, counterterrorism, and covert operations) in the way that most traditional accounts of intelligence do.