Putting a Little More 'Time' into Strategic Intelligence Analysis

摘要

Insights and models from the subfield of political development—timing and sequencing, temporality and long-term processes, and intercurrence—can improve the work of strategic intelligence analysts by enhancing discontinuity and opportunity analysis, enriching conceptual schema and imagination, and mitigating a number of problematic cognitive biases. Broadly, a strong grounding in key concepts of political development will help analysts engage in more complex and integrative thinking, a factor which has been found to be a positive determinant of accuracy in forecasting. Scholars of political development are concerned with many of the same kinds of questions, issues, and interests as strategic analysts. Political development, a subfield of political science often but not exclusively associated with American politics, takes up questions of transformation and discontinuity in political systems, institutions and leadership, public policy, and social and public movements. In explaining and anticipating change, political development looks to underlying historical and temporal structures, connecting past to present in the search for uncertain futures. This is a deviation from much political science scholarship, which is often focused on order, stability and equilibrium.2 Political development also brings a longer-term, more contextualized perspective than other subfields of political science. Thus, political development can be an important complement to other theories used to educate and inform strategic intelligence analysts.