This edited volume is the product of a NATO funded workshop that was held in December 2007 in Ankara, Turkey on the topic of transnational security cooperation and intelligence sharing. Nearly two years in the planning, the Ankara workshop was particularly designed to bring together leading international scholars, who presented papers offering different theoretical perspectives on security cooperation, and practicing intelligence, military, and police officers, who spoke about their practice-based observations and experiences with international cooperation. The workshop provided a unique opportunity for both groups to exchange ideas, reflect on the various perspectives represented, and all join together in roundtables in which particular issues and themes running throughout the theoretical and experiential accounts could be highlighted and discussed.

The premise of the workshop was designed in recognition of the increasingly accepted idea that intelligence cooperation—domestically between agencies, internationally between states, and transnationally among states, sub-state and non-state actors—is essential in order to successfully counter the evolving transnational nature of security threats. Assuming that the most effective response to transnational threats should be equally transnational, the workshop focused specifically on the question of whether there is evidence of a transnationalization in states’ responses to a transnational security threat like ‘global’ terror.

I would like to thank NATO and Kent University for providing the funds that supported the workshop and this volume. I would also like to thank Dr. Ersel Aydinli, Chair of the International Relations Department at Bilkent University for his academic advising, Dr. Julie Mathews, Director of the MATEFL program at Bilkent University for her editorial support, and my wife Zehra for her lifelong support.

Musa Tuzuner, Ph.D.

Founding Director of Intelligence Studies Research Center

Turkish National Police Academy

Ankara, Turkey