Description
Senior decision-makers' lack of receptivity to politically inconvenient or surprising intelligence is often identified in postmortems as a key factor behind a failure to take preventive or early action against threats. The paper aims to develop a new theory for understanding European decision-makers' receptivity to such knowledge claims made by intelligence analysts and other government officials. It does so by drawing on the empirical results of process and knowledge claim tracing across three cases (ISIS, Arabellions and Ukraine) and three actors (UK, Germany, and the EU). The theoretical framework can help us to better conceptualise the factors that shape the dynamic interplay and tension between the the knowledge claims made and who made them, the nature of the intelligence-policy nexus, as well as the political sphere. It combines variables from four strands of academic inquiry, which are rarely brought together: (i) cognitive-psychological factors related to cognitive and motivational biases against such knowledge claims, some of these vary between individuals given their personality traits and professional socialisation, (ii) organisational-cultural factors inherent in foreign policy bureaucracies that act as (dis)incentives to high or low receptivity, (iii) political drivers arising from the distribution of power within each specific system, and finally, (iv), contextual or situational factors arising from system capacity and agenda competition. The framework is helpful not just to explain when to expect high resistance to such knowledge claims, including warnings, but also gives practitioners more realistic options on how and when receptivity can be increased in the short, medium and long-term.
