States pursue their cooperative and competitive goals using both public and private policy tools. Yet there is a profound mismatch between the depth, variety, and importance of covert activity and what scholars of International Relations (IR) know about it. This article addresses this gap by analyzing how adversaries struggle for influence within the covert sphere, why they often retreat to it, and when they abandon it. It focuses on secrecy among adversaries intervening in local conflicts and develops a theory about secrecy's utility as a device for creating sustainable limits in war. Drawing on insights about secrecy and face-work from the sociologist Erving Goffman, I show that major powers individually and collectively conceal evidence of foreign involvement when the danger of unintended conflict escalation is acute. Doing so creates a kind of “backstage” in which adversaries can exceed limits on war without stimulating hard-to-resist pressure to escalate further. An important payoff of the theory is making sense of puzzling cases of forbearance: even though adversaries often know about their opponent's covert activity, they often abstain from publicizing it. Such “tacit collusion” arises when both sides seek to manage escalation risks even as they compete for power and refuse to capitulate. The article evaluates the theory via several nested cases of external intervention in the Korean War. Drawing on newly available materials documenting the covert air war between secretly deployed Soviet pilots and Western forces, the cases show how adversaries can successfully limit war by concealing activity from outside audiences. Beyond highlighting the promise in studying the covert realm in world politics, the article has important implications for scholarship on coercive bargaining, reputation, state uses of secrecy, and how regime type influences conflict behavior.
Although the statistical literature on conflict studies has generated strong and consistent findings on the relationship of political irrelevance and dyadic democracy to conflict, scholars have paid scant attention to the interesting theoretical issue of how they matter. The authors argue that additive controls and dropping irrelevant dyads constitute misspecifications of their effects. There are theoretical reasons to believe that the impact of distance on conflict is not sufficiently severe to justify the practice of simply dropping irrelevant dyads. Moreover, they argue that political irrelevance and dyadic democracy, rather than subtracting some constant quantity, interact to impose an upper bound on the probability of conflict initiation. They find both of these arguments to be supported in a reanalysis of a prominent study of dispute initiation.
Scholars have long argued that international organizations solve information problems through increased transparency. This article introduces a distinct problem that instead requires such institutions to keep information secret. We argue that states often seek to reveal intelligence about other states' violations of international rules and laws but are deterred by concerns about revealing the sources and methods used to collect it. Properly equipped international organizations, however, can mitigate these dilemmas by analyzing and acting on sensitive information while protecting it from wide dissemination. Using new data on intelligence disclosures to the International Atomic Energy Agency and an analysis of the full universe of nuclear proliferation cases, we demonstrate that strengthening the agency's intelligence protection capabilities led to greater intelligence sharing and fewer suspected nuclear facilities. However, our theory suggests that this solution gives informed states a subtle form of influence and is in tension with the normative goal of international transparency.
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