Why have foreign policy-makers been often caught by surprise in recent years? Have contemporary security threats become genuinely more difficult to anticipate, track and analyse or are decision-makers and analysts just slow to learn from experience? A new research project named INTEL is looking at these questions as it investigates the intelligence production and use in the foreign policies of the UK, Germany and the European Union during the cases of Arab Spring, the rise of ISIL/Daesh, and the Russia/Ukraine crisis. The project team asks what intelligence producers should have known, what decision-makers should have learnt, and under what conditions successful learning takes place in distinct European settings of intelligence production and decision-making. The project aims to reinvigorate the study of learning in foreign policy-making and suggest ways in which these three actors can better anticipate and understand contemporary security threats.

The project teams consists of Professor Christoph Meyer (Principal Investigator), Mike Goodman (Co-Investigator) , Dr Aviva Gutmann, and Dr Nikki Ikani (both Research Associates). The 30 months project is funded by the UK Research Council for the Social Sciences (ESRC) and is due to conclude at the end of 2020. The project is supported by a high level advisory board consisting of senior practitioners and academics with experience of these three quite different systems. In addition to interviews, it envisages holding workshops with practitioners in the three capital cities to arrive at a shared understanding of how “good learning” looks like and how to realistically improve the foreign policy-making process.

Professor Meyer has worked extensively on European foreign and security policy and chairs a research group on European Foreign Policy at King’s. Previously, he led the FORESIGHT project on early warning and conflict prevention and was workpackage leader on an EU-funded project on the media and violent conflict (www.infocore.eu). Before his academic career he worked in foreign affairs journalism including for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. He has been active in policy debates through opinion pieces published in the Financial Times, the Guardian and the International Herald Tribune.