Description
This book adopts a critical lens to look at the workings of Western intelligence and intelligence oversight over time and space.
Largely confined to the sub-field of intelligence studies, scholarly engagements with intelligence oversight have typically downplayed the violence carried out by secretive agencies. These studies have often served to justify weak oversight structures and promoted only marginal adaptations of policy frameworks in the wake of intelligence scandals. The essays gathered in this volume challenge the prevailing doxa in the academic field, adopting a critical lens to look at the workings of intelligence oversight in Europe and North America. Through chapters spanning across multiple disciplines – political sociology, history, and law – the book aims to recast intelligence oversight as acting in symbiosis with the legitimisation of the state’s secret violence and the enactment of impunity, showing how intelligence actors practically navigate the legal and political constraints created by oversight frameworks and practices, for instance by developing transnational networks of interdependence. The book also explores inventive legal steps and human rights mechanisms aimed at bridging some of the most serious gaps in existing frameworks, drawing inspiration from recent policy developments in the international struggle against torture.
This book will be of much interest to students of intelligence studies, sociology, security studies, and international relations.
The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Didier Bigo, Emma Mc Cluskey and Félix Tréguer
1. From radical contention to deference: A sociogenesis of intelligence oversight in the United States (1967-1981)
Félix Tréguer
2. Transformations of the transnational field of secret services: The Reasons for a systemic crisis of legitimacy?
Didier Bigo
3. The code of silence: Transnational autonomy and oversight of signals intelligence
Ronja Kniep
4. From abuse to trust and back again: Intelligence scandals and the quest for oversight
Emma Mc Cluskey and Claudia Aradau
5. An analysis of post-Snowden civil society accountability
Bernardino León-Reyes
6. Transversal intelligence oversight in the United States: Squaring the circle?
Arnaud Kurze
7. The anatomy of political impunity in New Zealand
Damien Rogers
8. Liberty, equality, and counter-terrorism in France
François Thuillier
9. Intelligence oversight collaboration in Europe
Thorsten Wetzling
10. Torture and security service mass surveillance
Elspeth Guild and Sophia Soares
