ABSTRACT
To explain how Bourdieu’s scholarship provides a different reading to anti-terror intelligence cooperation and Britain’s European connection therein, this chapter first shows how Bourdieusian concepts take a stand against IR-rationalist and institutionalist dimensions of Intelligence Studies and European Studies, including literature on Justice and Home Affairs and UK/EU relations. Building on the growing IR literature that mobilizes Bourdieu for the study of the international, the chapter further addresses the various uses of Bourdieu’s thought in IR and takes position among approaches that reflexively process Bourdieu’s concepts (by building an interactive conversation between theoretical concepts and empirical data), which, the chapter argues, are more accurate than existing approaches in IR’s ‘practice turn’. The chapter eventually puts forward the contribution of Bourdieu’s ‘field’ approach to the study of anti-terror intelligence cooperation as a social space. It approaches anti-terror intelligence cooperation from the angle of the three main dimensions that underpin the concept of field and show how they can also inform the investigation into Britain’s European connection in anti-terrorism intelligence. The chapter thus argues that practices, ‘relationality’ and the entanglement between individuals and their social spaces are more relevant than existing approaches for understanding and explaining intelligence cooperation.
