ABSTRACT
By comparison with other social sciences the academic study of intelligence 1 is young. It has been dominated to date by Anglo-American work with primarily an historical focus, especially in the UK, and more work examining issues of organisational structure and process in the US. In the last fifteen years this has been supplemented by an increasing body of writing about other countries, especially those in Eastern Europe, Latin America and South Africa where regime change has been accompanied by some process of democratisation. Therefore what we have is an increasingly rich array of accounts of national intelligence systems including fascinating insights into processes of transition. Analyses of single agencies, companies, countries and even non-governmental organisations involved in intelligence will always provide the bedrock for intelligence studies but even where these accounts are collected together they may amount to no more than juxtaposition. Although Glenn Hastedt pointed out fifteen years ago that the comparative study of intelligence was but a fledgling, 2 it is still the case that too much writing is structured with too little thought given as to how it might facilitate comparison. This chapter does not attempt a comprehensive review of the intelligence literature but draws on social science literature more generally in order to identify major issues and suggest a way forward.
