INA 3301

Context, Culture, and Intelligence: The International Dimension

3301 Context, Culture, and Intelligence: The International Dimension (3-0). The intelligence profession is particularly complex because it focuses by definition on foreign threats. Unfortunately for intelligence analysts, this requires that they understand not just other cultures and how their norms and values affect their approach to resolving policy issues or conflicts, but also how historical and other kinds of contextual factors influence how they might respond to American engagement and pressure in a given situation. This course gets at the heart of these complexities through the use of historical case studies and a careful focus on the ways in which context and culture drive the intelligence analysis process and make it a very complex and uncertain endeavor.

Units: 3.0