I’m almost certain it’s written into the DNA of Kings Of War types that shameless self-promotions are a definite no-no… so please excuse this inadvertent act of self-promotion on behalf of myself and my esteemed colleague Mike Goodman of this institutional parish and to those whose papers are linked here.
Responding to the post-Butler moment of reflection and engagement across government, we secured funding from the AHRC and interesting people to write on interesting topics to provide lessons learned from history, arts and humanities. This is the mainstay of this project (which has multiple dissemination routes) and the book that proceeded it, which has disappeared from our side bar >>>> but which is titled ‘Learning Lessons from the Secret Past’, available in all good book shops etc etc. I have been told that I could nab the following text from the online publication series website, which provides links to the first two papers, which I would hope KoW readers would find of interest.
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1. Lessons Learnt: Post-Mubarak developments within the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood (pdf 503kb)
December 2011 – Dr Lorenzo Vidino, Center for Security Studies, ETH Zurich, Part of the ‘Lessons Learnt’ series of AHRC policy publications.
2. Lessons Learnt: “Islamic, Independent, Perfect and Strong”: Parsing the Taliban’s Strategic Intentions, 2001-2011 (pdf 644kb)
January 2012 – Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn, Part of the ‘Lessons Learnt’ series of AHRC policy publications.
The ‘Lessons Learnt’ project was originally funded by a grant from King’s College London. In May and June 2010 Rob Dover and Michael Goodman, with AHRC funding, ran a series of 5 policy seminars on Lessons Learnt from the History of British Intelligence and Security. These were held in partnership with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), the Cabinet Office, King’s College London and The Royal United Services Institute (RUSI).
This current project aims to build upon the 2010 seminars, improving and developing the relationship between researchers and government via the production of research and briefing papers, and seminars held in Whitehall. The primary impact is on improving national security, achieved via academics contributing to the development of the government’s analytical capability.
The project is split into two halves:
• Highlighting historical examples of good analysis.
• Improving understanding of regions of current interest.
Leading academics have been specially commissioned to produce research and briefing papers for a Whitehall audience. This publication series reproduces the reports.”
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Both very interesting papers Rob – thank you for the link.
Glad to see funding still exists in the U.K. for good works(at least for now).
Oh, I like it when academic blogs point out their own work. An academic blog should “self-promote” or else why would I come here? I want to know what academics think about a subject. Makes it easier to make fun of the ideas. (Just kidding….)
‘Lessons’ & ‘Learned’. Well as a former senior military officer I have come to respect these terms as in the last 30 years my experience is that ‘Lessons’ are generally ignored. However, reading these two documents I see lots of observation & analysis but very little lessons and zero evidence of lessons being learned. The only true evidence that lessons have been learned can come from retrospective analysis and I see none here.