📋 A Note on Our New Name: From "Ujasusi Blog" to "Ujasusi | Intelligence & Security Analysis"
A brief editorial note on what is changing, what is not, and why the rename reflects what this publication has become.
After several years publishing under the name Ujasusi Blog, the publication is today being renamed to Ujasusi | Intelligence & Security Analysis. The domain remains ujasusi.com. Your subscription, archive access, and paid tier status are unaffected. Nothing in the editorial approach, publishing cadence, or analytical register changes. This note explains the reasoning for readers who want to understand the decision, and sets out what to expect going forward.
🔍 Why the Name Changed
The word “blog” is no longer accurate to what this publication is or does. In the mid-2000s, when the term emerged, a blog was a personal web log — a format of individual reflection, commentary, and informal writing. That is not what Ujasusi has been for some years now. The publication has grown into a specialist analytical platform covering intelligence services, security affairs, and geopolitics, serving more than five thousand subscribers across analytical, academic, policy, and journalistic audiences.
“Blog” undersold that reality. It placed the publication in a category — personal diarising — that misdescribed both the work and the readership. The new name corrects that mismatch. Intelligence & Security Analysis accurately names what the publication actually produces: news, analysis, and commentary on intelligence services and security affairs, written from the perspective of a former practitioner working with open-source methodology.
The Ujasusi element remains unchanged. The Swahili word for espionage has carried this publication from its inception, and the recognition built around it — on the domain, across social media, in academic citations, in subscriber memory — remains the anchor of the brand. The rename extends the identity rather than replacing it.
📊 What “Intelligence & Security Analysis” Signals
The phrase is deliberately constructed. Each element does work.
Intelligence names the primary subject matter: intelligence services as institutions, their operations, their politicisation, their relationships with political authority. TISS, DGIS, the Mossad, the CIA, the SVR, Pakistan’s ISI, China’s MSS, and the broader architecture of African intelligence services all fall within this scope.
Security names the adjacent domain this publication has always covered: terrorism and counter-terrorism, political violence, transnational repression, internal security operations, and the wider security architecture of African states. The Africa Terrorism Monitor, the Tanzania Political Risk Tracker, and coverage of the post-election crisis all sit within this remit.
Analysis names the register. This publication is not a news wire reproducing other outlets’ reporting. It is an analytical operation producing interpretive work — briefs, long-form analysis, investigative pieces, strategic assessments, and commentary. The word sets expectations accurately.
The ampersand pairing also serves a disambiguating function. “Intelligence” alone has acquired competing meanings in the current moment — artificial intelligence, business intelligence, and cognitive intelligence. Pairing it with “security” resolves the ambiguity toward the national security sense, which is the sense relevant to this publication’s work.
📡 The Ecosystem Around the Rename
Ujasusi | Intelligence & Security Analysis remains the English-language flagship. The two sister platforms are unchanged:
Barua ya Chahali continues as the Swahili-language adaptation, carrying core analysis to East African readers in Kiswahili sanifu. For Swahili-reading subscribers, Barua offers the same analytical rigour reframed for regional context rather than direct translation.
JasusiTV continues as the Swahili video platform on YouTube, covering the same beats in video format with minute-by-minute narration in Kiswahili sanifu. The channel serves readers who prefer video and East African audiences for whom video circulates more effectively than written analysis.
Together, the three platforms constitute a multilingual, multi-format intelligence publishing operation. The renaming of the English flagship does not affect the sister platforms’ names or positioning.
📬 What Readers Should Expect
Nothing in the editorial approach changes. The analytical standards — rigorous OSINT methodology, British English throughout, institutional primary sources wherever possible, practitioner-perspective inference where the record permits, 1,500–2,500 word pieces with a free and paywalled tier — remain as they have been.
The rename is not a rebrand in the deeper sense. It is a correction: bringing the masthead into accurate alignment with what the publication has already become. The work itself has been “Intelligence & Security Analysis” for some time. The name now says so.
🧭 A Final Word
Specialist publications earn their readerships slowly, through consistent analytical quality over time. Ujasusi has been fortunate to build a subscriber base that includes serious readers — analysts, researchers, journalists, policy professionals, and fellow practitioners in the intelligence and security field. The new name is, in part, an acknowledgement that the publication’s readership is no longer well-served by a masthead that described it as a blog.
The work continues as before. New subscribers are welcome. Existing subscribers need do nothing. The archive remains at ujasusi.com.
Thank you for reading.
— Evarist Chahali
Editor, Ujasusi | Intelligence & Security Analysis