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This book offers a new research agenda for intelligence studies in contemporary times.

In contrast to Intelligence Studies (IS), whose aim has largely been to improve the performance of national security services and assist in policy making, this book takes the investigation of the new professionals and everyday practices of intelligence as the immediate point of departure. Starting from the observation that intelligence today is increasingly about counter-terrorism, crime control, surveillance, and other security-related issues, this book adopts a transdisciplinary approach for studying the shifting logics of intelligence, how it has come to involve an expanding number of empirical sites, such as the police, local community, prison and the Internet, as well as a corresponding multiplicity of new actors in these domains. Shifting the focus away from traditional spies and Anglo-American intelligence services, this book addresses the transformations of contemporary intelligence through empirically detailed and theoretically innovative analyses, making a key contribution to existing scholarship.

This book will be of much interest to students of intelligence studies, critical security studies, foreign policy, and International Relations.

Contemporary research on so-called Nordic branding has provided crucial insights into the social power of states and how various actors use and circulate ‘progressive’ nation brand tropes for political and commercial goals. Hitherto, the literature on Nordic branding has focused on a wide range of substantive issues, among other things, human rights, gender equality, social welfare and foreign aid, but considerably less attention has been paid to the topic of security. The present article adds to a small but established literature on how the security sphere is increasingly entangled with nation branding. In the Nordic region, we argue, the latter is particularly evident in the case of Sweden – one of the world’s largest per-capita arms exporters in the post-Cold War era but also a country known and often revered for its peaceful and progressive image. Focusing on the case of Sweden, the article contributes to knowledge of how defence industry-related actors (both public and private) draw on and frame nation branding tropes to sell and legitimise their products and services to both insiders (domestic constituents) and outsiders (the global security market).

Throughout history, military officers’ standing in society has been maintained through the establishment and reforming of military academies. Gradually infusing officer education with academic standards and scholarly ideals has helped secure the corps’ status as a legitimate profession. Drawing on Norbert Elias and Pierre Bourdieu, this article explores the “academization” of officer education in Sweden over 200 years. It finds that academization processes have been prominent in the military officer field, first, during 19th-century struggles to establish a state-organized educational system and war science discipline for the emerging profession, and second, during post-Cold War struggles to reinstate the military’s legitimacy and status by integrating officer education in the university sector. It argues that academic capital has been drawn on instrumentally in the officer field, as a means to endow the corps with a wider credibility and, more broadly, justify the existence of violent professions in peaceful societies.