March 15th – 18th I attended the International Studies Association’s Annual Convention in Montreal, Canada together with our research group. We organised a panel on “Future challenges for the intelligence and security services” which I co-chaired with Dr Cris Matei of the Naval Postgraduate School. The panel included four presentations:
Intelligence as Policy Impact – is it measurable?
by Per Thunholm (Centre for Total Defence, Swedish Defence University)
Hybrid Threats and the Intelligence Community
by Bjorn Palmertz (Research Institutes of Sweden, RISE)
Current operations intelligence and intelligence assessments: information flows and the tension between quality and speed
by Niklas Nilsson and Mikael Weissmann (Swedish Defence University)
Future threats: what is to be expected?
by Mikael Weissmann (Swedish Defence University)
On 21-22 September, we organised an international workshop on “Case Studies of Russian Warfare and Influence” with participants from Georgia, Ukraine, Serbia, Latvia, the United States and Sweden. The aim of the workshop was to take a holistic approach to how Russia conducts warfare and influence against countries in its immediate surroundings, i.e. against states at the intersection between the East and West.
The findings of the workshop will be part of a forthcoming book on “Russian Warfare and Influence: Small States in the intersection between the East and West” (Bloomsbury Academic). We here focus on the small states at the intersection between the East and West as actors and stakeholders and are interested in how they operate and react based on their specific conditions, rather than on the modus of major powers.