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Preface
Since the end of the Cold War, events such as the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks (9/11) and the subsequent war on terror, the idea of intelligence sharing has been promoted as a mechanism to avert future crisis and catastrophic events as well as a means for managing international conflicts or supporting effective world security. Despite the growing importance and urgency of this conception, there has been very little or, at best, cursory efforts to explore the concept in-depth. A lack of scholarly efforts to ground the notion of collective intelligence within a rigorous intellectual framework creates a vacuum in the study of intelligence and limits an increasing need to push the scholarly investigation in intelligence and collective decisions beyond the familiar frame of reference, which currently centres on intelligence functions, history, requirements, and doctrines. It is no wonder, then, that there is an entrenched misunderstanding of the notion of collective intelligence, as well as its relevance to the United Nations (UN), as both a decisional and planning tool, and debates about these issues seem to be both misplaced and anecdotal. Furthermore, the absence of a consistent theory on the notion of