Decolonizing Global Intelligence

From September 11 to the calamitous withdrawal of United States troops from Afghanistan, Western intelligence has failed to negotiate the largest military and humanitarian crises across the world. This book proposes to decolonize global intelligence from the peripheries of the Global South and put forward a new intelligence practice of ‘inclusive statecraft’.

It shows how dominant Western intelligence systems have failed to protect the very ideas they promised to uphold and the discrepancy between the West’s ‘Responsibility to Protect (R2P)’ liberalist doctrine and the realist on-the-ground complex reality as observed by the ‘Failure to Protect (F2P)’ scholarships. Drawing theoretical insights and empirical (both historical and contemporary) materials from a wide array of case studies of Western and non-Western intelligence settings and practices as well as their interactions, it argues that the next generation of global security and intelligence practitioners will necessitate genuine interracial, non-anthropocentric and cross-cultural inclusivity, especially the capability to take the non-Western intelligence cultures and their realist strategic thoughts seriously.

This book will not just add new knowledge to the larger field of security and intelligence studies, but will also pioneer the relatively underdeveloped fields of comparative intelligence cultures, and interstellar intelligence/cultural studies. It will be indispensable for policymakers, bureaucrats and government officials.

Pak Nung Wong (D.Phil Oxon) teaches politics and international relations at the Department of Politics, Languages and International Studies, University of Bath, United Kingdom. His books include Post-Colonial Statecraft in South East Asia: Sovereignty, State-Building and the Chinese in the Philippines (2024), Techno-Geopolitics: US-China Tech War and the Practice of Digital Statecraft (2022), Logic of the Powers: Towards an Impact-Driven Practice of Futurist Statecraft (2022), Destined Statecraft: Eurasian Small Power Politics and Strategic Cultures in Geopolitical Shifts (2018) and Discerning the Powers in Post-Colonial Africa and Asia: A Treatise on Christian Statecraft (2016). He is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of the peer-reviewed journal Bandung: Journal of the Global South. His research interests are statecraft and geopolitics in the Indo-Pacific region.