Sistemas nacionais de inteligência: origens, lógica de expansão e configuração atual

• Published in: Dados (Rio de Janeiro) Vol. 46; no. 1; pp. 75 - 127
• Main Author: Cepik, Marco
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro 2003
• Subjects: bureaucracy; institutions; intelligence services; state-building; war
• ISSN: 0011-5258; 0011-5258; 1678-4588
• DOI: 10.1590/S0011-52582003000100003

This article analyzes the formation of national intelligence systems in the modern state and the basic causes of institutional differences even among countries from the same constitutional tradition, like the United Kingdom and the United States. Considering intelligence systems as a sort of bureaucracy typically associated with the state's coercive core, one can trace their origins to three different historical matrices: 16th and 17th century European diplomacy, the Napoleonic form of war management at the turn from the 18th to the 19th century, and 19th and 20th century counterrevolutionary political policing. Following a logic of expansion and functional differentiation that is simultaneously horizontal and vertical, current national intelligence systems display great organizational complexity and dilemmas in their institutionalization which provide good examples of the virtual impossibility of complete democratization of the state in the contemporary world.