Intelligence tradecraft and the pre-crime approach to EU internal security governance

EU internal security policy has been in recent years progressively focused onprevention of threats and risks. The 2010 Internal Security Strategy for the EUhighlighted the need for prevention and anticipation conceived as a proactiveintelligence-led approach to EU internal security. A pre-crime framework has beenwidely applied in fields like security studies, police science, criminology, ethics,political sociology and political geography, owing to its inherent explanatorypower. The core element of pre-crime approach is the selection and identificationof the most probable among abstract risks and dispersed threats, and the profiling,or sorting out, of particular social groups or individuals posing presumablyimminent threats. This paper aims at inserting the concept of intelligencetradecraft into the pre-crime analytical framework and verify the usefulness of such an approach to the study of EU internal security governance. The paper will focus on ‘intelligence process’ and ‘intelligence product’, i.e. how the stakeholders of EU internal security policy construct, modify and develop ‘products’ allowing for a better risk management and threat assessment in thecontext of precautionary and anticipatory attitudes towards EU securitygovernance.