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to be addressed in many ways—the multiplicity of issues and the large number of international actors in the system are just a few. Frequent changes in the political environment, members' preferences and perspectives, as well as uncertainties, are characteristics of political settings that present difficulties to acting on shared intelligence assets, and this is compounded by the very idea of accepting such an enterprise as a permanent feature in the UN. However, these difficulties should not preclude evolutionary changes that would embrace an intelligence capability that is appropriate and viable in such a system. For these reasons, the search for the kind of arrangement that could be acceptable to most, if not all, actors in the organisation is highly challenging yet provides the basis for the study of a system of collective intelligence in specific settings.
A satisfactory discussion of these issues will need to begin by clarifying the idea of a collective intelligence and this is followed by an examination of more practical concerns. First, among these questions are the following:
- a. Should a concept of collective intelligence within the UN system, for example, involve collecting intelligence and handing it to states for independent decision making?
- b. Should states necessarily exchange or make intelligence available to a central pool within the UN?
- c. Should the UN create and maintain its own independent intelligence machinery? Furthermore, established concepts in international politics scholarship about world polity also present a second set of analytical problems, which prompts these additional questions:
- d. Can the dynamics and the nature of social and political interactions within the UN be defined in the same terms as broadly set out in the realist-neoliberal anarchical paradigm? If, as will be shown, such an approach is inadequate for the purpose, then the necessary question would be the following:
- e. Should a UN intelligence structure and process be defined in the same terms as those of state intelligence agencies, for example, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), or similar organisations?