Description
Freelance and online education have rapidly expanded in recent years, accelerating the speed and scale at which specialised knowledge is produced, accessed and circulated globally. This paper examines the effects and dynamics of this proliferation in the now larger and growing market for intelligence education and intelligence analysis, where private vendors, freelance educators and informal learning groups and platforms increasingly compete with traditional academic and other institutional programmes. The paper battles with the boundaries, limits, opportunities and risks of the proliferation and commodification of epistemic knowledge in intelligence, and the transformative, as well as destabilising impacts to contemporary knowledge distribution of intelligence and security topics. It raises questions over the decentralisation of intelligence education and training, authority of knowledge and the validation of expertise in a field that so far developed under secular epistemic communities. The study future casts potential scenarios of collaboration and dissent amongst traditional and non-traditional educational providers and stakeholders in intelligence. Ultimately, it reflects on the evolving role of academic and teaching programmes in Intelligence Studies, considering how pedagogical and methodological practices are now called to adapt to the shifting epistemic cultures described in this paper.