Description
This paper scrutinises the role public reports issued by intelligence agencies play in debates on security issues. Given the secretive nature of intelligence services and the exclusivity of knowledge they work with, the reports perform multiple roles, ranging from enabling accountability to identifying key threats to national security. Building on sociology of knowledge and science and technology studies, we focus on the annual reports of the Czech Security Information Service (SIS), in particular in relation to Russia’s influence in Czechia in 2014-2018. We ask how these reports are utilised in the broader public debate and what political role they are made to play. The elusive and opaque nature of Russian actions spurred diverse competing narratives, in which references to intelligence reports have played a crucial part. SIS reports, in particular, are used as an authoritative and ostensibly undisputable source of facts, apparently proving the ever increasing nature of the Russian threat. We argue against such depoliticised understanding and demonstrate how the public reproduction and interpretation of SIS reports is in fact a deeply political matter, as it contributes to the creation and reinforcement of certain power/knowledge constellations. We show that the reports are used in ways that empower certain actors (including SIS itself) and narratives while delegitimising others – and that their meaning is produced retrospectively in this process. Finally, demonstrating how such security narratives collapse under their own contradictions, we bring politics back by pointing to the residual undecidability regarding Russia’s actions that is obscured in the debate.
