Governance

The human tragedy continuing to unfold in Gaza and Israel reminds us how important it is to get strategic forecasting right. While in no way excusing Hamas’ culpability for 7 October, we also cannot dismiss the fact that the failure to anticipate and prepare for such an attack has had grave consequences for communities on both sides of this conflict, undermined efforts to bring peace and prosperity to the region, and affected global interests through the expansion of the conflict to the Red Sea and potentially beyond. 

Intelligence Project team members Maria Robson-Morrow, Katie Tucker, and Judit Gaspar were interviewed on the Business of Intelligence Podcast about their research into corporate intelligence professionals and services.

On October 30, 2023, President Biden issued the Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence, aimed at realizing the benefits of AI, while mitigating critical risks. This article provides an overview of its key national security initiatives and explores issues relevant to implementation.

Calder Walton recounts how Russia and China are using their intelligence agencies to reverse the outcome of the Cold War

A future where A.I.s interpret, apply, and enforce most laws at societal scale like this will exponentially magnify problems around fairness, transparency, and freedom, warn Jonathon W. Penney and Bruce Schneier.

It was the Intelligence Communities job to provide information and the president’s job to use the information to further the nation’s interests and to protect the capabilities that created such advantage. The only duty to national security that Trump retained upon leaving office was the lifelong responsibility not to disclose the information. He’s now being held accountable for his alleged failure to do so, as our system demands.

This paper provides a framework for a program to advance IC ethics professionalization, to better serve the national interest, avoid ethical lapses or moral pitfalls, and strengthen US national security and the Intelligence Community against the risk of politicization. The program would serve as catalyst for national security intelligence officials to better perceive, reflect on, make judgments about, and potentially act on ethical lapses in the midst, in adjacent units, or higher in the chain of command. The program would provide a means for officials to deliberate on real or hypothetical ethical dilemmas, both as individuals or in groups.

In this episode of Pekingology, Freeman Chair Jude Blanchette is joined by Tyler Jost – Assistant Professor in the department of Political Science at Brown University. They discuss how China’s bureaucratic structure and politics impacts leader decision making. 

In a keynote speech delivered during the RSA Conference in San Francisco on April 25, 2023, Bruce Schneier argues that we need to recreate our system of governance for an era in which transformative technologies pose catastrophic risks as well as great promise.

This paper addresses the question of how the Chinese party-state chooses to exercise its economic, financial, diplomatic, military and soft power in the next 25 years will make a great difference to US national security and foreign policy, and to developments in the rest of the world. The paper makes three key points:

The core argument of this paper is that Beijing will likely aspire to pursue an empire-like position globally, not just seek an Asia-Pacific sphere of influence, and that this aspiration will founder. Achieving an empire-like position is both an imperative and is infeasible. The tensions between goal and reality will likely characterize China’s role in the world in coming decades and will be central to the difficulties of US-China relations. Second, there is heuristic value for US policymakers and analysts to consider a 20-year outlook on the rise of China that encompasses China’s pursuit of a global empire-like position. Third, paying close attention to how Beijing organizes its own government, corporate, and non-governmental organizations to seek an empire-like position will provide important signposts emerging tension and trends.