Intelligence, the state, and the competitive epistemic ecosystem of strategic knowledge

This Master's Thesis analyses the structural transformation of the intelligence function in the twenty-first century, departing from the hypothesis that the state's historical monopoly over the production of strategic knowledge, sustained by a technological asymmetry rather than by any de iure exclusivity, has given way to a competitive ecosystem in which private, commercial, civic and corporate actors produce, validate and contest the intelligence formerly attributed exclusively to the state. The research articulates, to this end, the Model of Epistemic Competition in Intelligence (MECI), organised around three axes, production, legitimation and regulation, and applies it to a set of contemporary empirical cases: the Bellingcat phenomenon (MH17 and Skripal), the war in Ukraine, the Lebanon pager operation of September 2024, the Pegasus and Palantir Gotham cases in Spain, and corporate intelligence. The conclusions validate the central hypothesis of functional displacement, functional gain in the legitimation axis and regulatory fragmentation without substitution, and propose a normative characterisation of the state as integrator and validator of an epistemic ecosystem that it no longer monopolises.