What is the role of secrecy in international relations? Does secrecy promote or stymie cooperation among countries? And what role do international organizations (IOs) play in this context? Secrets in Global Governance: Disclosure Dilemmas and the Challenge of International Cooperation by Allison Carnegie and Austin Carson takes on these questions, which are critical for both…
Tag: secrecy
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 15-39 on Connelly, The Declassification Engine
Matthew Connelly’s The Declassification Engine: What History Reveals about America’s Top Secrets explores what it means for Americans to live in a society whose governing institutions are incentivized to keep secrets. The book stems from Connelly’s tenure as lead investigator at Columbia University’s History Lab, in which a team of historians and data scientists spent…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable 15-11 on Wellerstein, Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States
Alex Wellerstein’s Restricted Data is an extensive and impressive study of the organisational production of nuclear secrecy in the United States. The overarching rationale of Restricted Data is to trace the development of the political, social, and organisational mechanisms which limited the spread of the scientific and technical knowledge of the nuclear technology. The aim…
Article Review 152 on “To Disclose or Deceive? Sharing Secret Information between Aligned States.”
States in competition with each other have powerful incentives to engage in deception. Adversaries use deception to convince each other that their resolve is high and that they possess powerful military capabilities.[1] More puzzling is why states that are aligned with each other—which is understood as “a set of mutual expectations between two or more…
Roundtable 12-8 on In the Shadow of International Law: Secrecy and Regime Change in the Postwar World.
Researching covert action is not easy. States pursue such operations to influence events without revealing their handiwork. Doing this successfully requires limiting the number of officials in the know, and enforcing secrecy measures to avoid leaving an incriminating paper trail. The documentary record is deliberately porous as a result, which complicates any effort to test…
Forum 4 on “An INS Special Forum: Implications of the Snowden Leaks”
From the very beginning of the nation’s history, intelligence has been set aside as a conspicuous exception to James Madison’s advocacy of checks-and-balances, spelled out in his Federalist Paper No. 51. The ‘auxiliary precautions’ that this key participant at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 (and later America’s fourth President) — the safeguards he had helped…