The United Nations and the Rationale for Collective Intelligence ...

of which case study among the thousands of events can adequately describe the main problem of the subject matter then becomes even more challenging.

Embarking on a study for which there appears to be no obvious equivalent poses a dilemma concerning both the framing of the issues as well as choosing among available material. Two examples, among many kindly offered by colleagues, have been to approach the subject from a purely practical point of view, such as an examination of the functions and implications of intelligence in peacekeeping or an analysis of the failure of the international community to anticipate and prevent the atrocities and humanitarian crises in Rwanda and Burundi. Apart from the fact that issues such as the failure to act in situations like those in Rwanda, Burundi, and elsewhere have been widely covered in media worldwide, they do not form part of the answers sought in the present study.¹ Also, if these studies where to be extended, the analysis of the issues involved would inherently belong to a different class of analysis, perhaps under the rubric of intelligence surprises, decision failures, or a postmortem analysis that does not in any manner or fashion address the substantive and conceptual issues anticipated in this book.

To be sure, this book is an effort to define the relationship between intelligence and international organisations, and the main frame of reference is the extent to which both the doctrinal arguments and principles of entities are assumed to be incompatible and present a particular difficulty of cohabitation. The present work, then, is not strictly a study in intelligence theory and practice, nor is it a book on the practicalities of intelligence and peacekeeping operations. This notwithstanding, in addition to many of these issues being necessarily covered at some depth to help the nonspecialist readers follow the discussion and the issues involved, an extensive analysis on intelligence strives to push the boundary of the general understanding of the notion of intelligence as well as invoke scholarly debate on the subject.

The fact that this book is clearly focused on processes as well as examining the theory and practice around which two contradictory and apparently irreconcilable institutions are interfaced supposes that