ABSTRACT
John Gaddis, in an essay which Donald Watt found altogether too pessimistic, seemed encouraged at least by the progress made since the mid-1980s in intelligence studies and the proliferation of university courses and serious journals devoted to them. 1 Others, Stafford Thomas for example, have made similar claims. 2 Gaddis, in effect, identified an intellectual community, in the Kuhnian sense, being created, flourishing, and going about its business in a coherent, consensual way. That may be so, but what is more remarkable and regrettable is the failure to integrate intelligence studies, even in a primitive way, into the mainstreams of research in international relations. That is less so with respect to international history. If one sees international history, therefore, as a central part of the field of enquiry that is international relations (for it is a field of enquiry and not a discipline), the depiction is flawed. But if one subscribes to the more orthodox view, so prevalent in the United States, that international history is peripheral to the study of international relations, dominated as it is by political scientists of various stripes, the depiction is accurate. Indeed, it provides one of the clues as to why there exist not competitive solitudes exactly, but two almost distinct, discrete communities, devoted, respectively, to the study of intelligence and the study of international relations. Intelligence studies have been and remain a very modest part of the intellectual agenda of the international relations community, even though international politics and security affairs have long dominated that agenda.
