12 May 2007, The Humanities Research Centre, The University of Warwick, Coventry (Grande-Bretagne)

Programme and registration :

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http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/hrc/confs/spooked/

In 1984, Christopher Andrew and David Dilks identified the study of intelligence as the "missing dimension" in scholarly enquiry, marginalised to a ghetto-like existence in specialist newsletters and airport bookstall literature.

The sensationalist treatment of intelligence in mass-media discourses exemplified by the habitual mole-hunting and smear campaigns deprived the subject of academic credibility, whilst the apparent lack of available source material and obsessively secretive attitude of governments engaged in the Cold War discouraged sustained investigation.

Over the last decade, however, there has been a renaissance of intelligence themes within the broader field of Cold War studies. Exploiting opportunities to "grow their own records", by conducting interviews with practitioners of the intelligence community, as well as using files made available under the new Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), historians and political scientists have demonstrated how the intelligence services exist within a vast and interdependent security matrix; stand at the apex of the UK-USA "special relationship"; and, contrary to popular images of operating in a half-lit parapolitical vacuum divorced from the day-to-day affairs of state, act as crucial interlocutors between different sections of government. At the same time, cultural theorists, employing their own idiom and operating independently of the aforementioned developments, have purposefully moved the frame of investigation beyond the archive; spy fiction, although appearing politically innocent, is shown to bear an ideological burden as well as being a locus for manifold cultural fantasies. Outside of the Academy, intelligence is foregrounded as an essential barrier against that conveniently amorphous entity, state-sponsored terrorism, invoking both fascination and suspicion.

Partaking of and contributing to this recent surge of interest in intelligence themes, SPOOKED seeks to bring together political and cultural approaches to intelligence, which so far have been somewhat compartmentalised. This is reflected in the genuinely interdisciplinary affiliations of the speakers :

• Richard Aldrich ( Nottingham, The Hidden Hand);
• Christopher Andrew ( Cambridge, The Mitrokhin Archive);
• Anthony Glees (Brunel, The Stasi Files);
• Stephen Dorril ( Huddersfield, Smear);
• Philip Murphy ( Reading, Intelligence and Decolonisation);
• Philip Davies (Brunel, M16: The Machinery of Spying).

Collectively they will attend to the representations of intelligence found in literary and filmic portrayals as well as offering fresh empirical insights on the work of the secret and security services in practice.