Intelligence Prioritisation in an Age of Mid-Tier Powers

This book examines how UK intelligence and national security priorities can best inform foreign policy strategy in the emerging geopolitical order.

It analyses the impact on the UK intelligence community of an emerging world order characterised by an unbalanced multipolarity, in which mid-tier powers use diverse levers of power autonomously, leveraging greater influence than previously. In particular, the book uses the requirements and priorities processes to analyse which structures have best served UK decision-makers. A new framework is also employed to investigate the cost-effectiveness of different categories of intelligence requirements, and case studies at the national and transnational levels are used to examine the range of actors now relevant to policy outcomes. The book considers these in the context of the increasingly globalised and networked world order, and asks what sort of requirements system can best deal with the resulting complexity and uncertainty, and whether current UK processes are adequate. It thereby provokes wider questions about strategy and what support UK governments might need when crafting policy.

This book will be of interest to students of intelligence studies, foreign policy, British politics and International Relations.