Farewell Paul Abels as Professor
On 25 May, Professor Paul Abels retired as professor by special appointment. Abels has been working as Professor by special appointment Governance of Intelligence and Security Services at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs since 2017.
During his farewell, speeches were made by Edwin Bakker, Beatrice de Graaf, and Pieter-Jaap Aalbersberg. Abels himself gave a farewell lecture on the applied value of intelligence. According to Abels, we need to assess the means and possibilities the government has available to recognise and eliminate threats to our national security in the current complex information society on a fundamental level. A government should be able to operate incisively. If it should be decided that only intelligence and security services are allowed to operate in this manner, their name should be changed to General or Military Pre-Information Service. They should then also be given the broader task of continuously monitoring the social discourse via open sources and provide their conclusions to those parties that have been filling the vacuum that politics and services have ignored – whether deliberately or due to restrictions, until now.
Abels will now devote himself entirely to historiography, an area in which he received his PhD in 1994 and has marked it out as a second career.