Intelligence as raison d’état

Definitions of intelligence – however contestedFootnote ¹⁵ – converge on one point: that spying or espionage is a ‘business as old as recorded history’Footnote ¹⁶; and that this business is firmly tied to the notion of high politics, the world of strategy and war (and its avoidance), to statecraft and its necessities. Sherman Kent, the Yale historian who became a founding figure of the CIA’s analytical tradition, conceived intelligence as a disciplined effort to anticipate danger and prevent surprise – as a tool by which governments could act with foresight rather than reaction.Footnote ¹⁷ Mark Lowenthal’s widely adopted formulation of intelligence as process, product, and institution reproduces the same logic.Footnote ¹⁸ So does the US Intelligence Community’s official definition of intelligence as ‘information gathered within or outside the United States that involves threats to the nation, its people, property, or interests.’Footnote ¹⁹ Amy Zegart is perhaps most revealing: intelligence, she argues, is ‘information that gives policymakers an advantage over their adversaries.’Footnote ²⁰ Here, the word ‘adversaries’ is telling. It presupposes a world structured by permanent enmity – a Schmittian universe of friends and foes in which the existence of the adversary is the foundational political condition, not a contingent one. The raison d’état logic embedded in the definitional literature carries, in this sense, a specific and contestable political ontology.

The empirical record is equally unambiguous, and the raison d’état reading of intelligence has penetrated political culture so deeply that it has become common sense. The Cold War, in Calder Walton’s apt description, was an ‘epic intelligence war between East and West,’ in which both superpowers invested massively in espionage, covert action, and signals intelligence (SIGINT) as existential necessities.Footnote ²¹ Operation RYaN – the joint KGB-GRU effort to detect preparations for a Western nuclear first strike, driven by the trauma of Operation Barbarossa and the doctrine that ‘1941 shall not be repeated’Footnote ²² – epitomized the realist condition of self-help under anarchy.Footnote ²³ After 9/11, the United States remade its entire intelligence apparatus around a single survival imperative, one that authorized torture, rendition, and the suspension of legal constraint under what amounted to a logic of Schmittian exception.Footnote ²⁴ In the Israel–Iran confrontation or shadow war, intelligence functions as realpolitik by other means – assassination, sabotage, and cyber warfare as the means in an existential rivalry prosecuted in the shadows.Footnote ²⁵ That this is so requires, apparently, no justification. Former US Vice-President Dick Cheney infamously described post-9/11 intelligence operations as the executive power’s ‘sort of the dark side,’Footnote ²⁶ while Fareed Zakaria captured the prevailing common sense with bluntness: intelligence is ‘called the world’s second oldest profession for a reason. Everyone does it.’Footnote ²⁷ The raison d’état reading of intelligence is, in short, empirically robust and politically self-evident.

And yet the theoretical silence within realism is equally striking, and it is here that the paradox bites.

Kenneth Waltz’s structural turn located explanatory power at the systemic level, rendering all state-level practices theoretically subordinate.Footnote ²⁸ Intelligence became a second-image phenomenon, subsumed under national security and beneath the threshold of theoretical attention. Because the security dilemma already explains why states compete under anarchy, there appears little analytical reason to theorize the instruments of that competition separately.Footnote ²⁹ John Mearsheimer, the self-described offensive realist, has not engaged questions of intelligence or espionage in his otherwise extensive body of scholarship – a silence that is, on reflection, entirely consistent with neorealism’s structural logic.Footnote ³⁰ The case of Robert Jervis is equally revealing. As Robert Art observed, Jervis ‘almost singlehandedly created the special area of IR theory that blended history, international politics, security, and psychology.’Footnote ³¹ Yet his writings on intelligence – most notably his analyses of the Iranian Revolution and Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction, but also his foundational work on misperception and its consequences for how states read adversarial intentions – stand somewhat apart from his IR-theoretical work.Footnote ³² It is almost as if Jervis, ‘the dean of intelligence studies,’ were wearing two hats, addressing two distinct audiences simultaneously.Footnote ³³

I draw a similar conclusion from the intelligence failures literature. Misperception, strategic surprise, signals in the noise, connecting the dots – all these failures to understand both known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns in politics and IR are not material events explicable at the structural level.Footnote ³⁴ States misread adversarial intentions not because of the structure of the balance of power in the international system but because of how secret information collected through covert means and open-source intelligence is interpreted and communicated within bureaucratic and political contexts that structural realism cannot see. Any new IR attempt at theorizing intelligence that cannot account for these failures at the different yet intertwined unit-levels (political, cultural, bureaucratic, psychological) cannot fully account for the deeply social nature of intelligence as a practice.

Classical realism offers no real corrective. Morgenthau naturalized intelligence as an expression of the struggle for power so thoroughly that it became pre-theoretical. His sole sustained engagement with the subject, a 1967 critique of CIA domestic activities, treated espionage as an institutional danger to democratic governance rather than as a problem for IR theory – fearing, quite rightly, that unchecked intelligence agencies were ‘how totalitarianism starts.’Footnote ³⁵ John Herz, similarly, recalled his wartime service in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) with intellectual fascination (and the occasional frustration and boredom) yet drew no theoretical IR conclusions from it.Footnote ³⁶ For both, intelligence was a fact of political life that required no theoretical elaboration.

The theoretical silence within realism, especially in its neorealist formulation, follows necessarily from its core methodological commitments. The impasse is built into realism’s foundational assumptions – which is precisely why pressing it across its many variants, as the next subsection does, only deepens rather than resolves it.

Many realisms, one impasse

Realism is a broad and venerable tradition in the study of world politics. The literature in political and IR theory on what constitutes realist theory and realist foreign policy, its internal and external boundaries, and analytical and normative limitations, is vast.Footnote ³⁷ Patrick Porter’s recent synthetic defense of it – arguing that realism is moral, realistic, and universal – is a timely and persuasive reminder that the tradition is richer and more philosophically serious than its critics typically allow.Footnote ³⁸ The argument that follows is not a rejection of realism per se, but a critique of its limits on this particular question.

Even if one grants Porter’s three claims in full, and even if one accepts – with Richard LittleFootnote ³⁹ and against Barry BuzanFootnote ⁴⁰ – that classical realism and ES theorization of politics and IR are closer than they might first appear, the realist tradition constitutes an impasse when it comes to intelligence. Across its main variants – structural and classical, offensive and defensive, including neoclassical realism – contemporary realist IR theory either renders intelligence theoretically invisible, reduces it to a single instrumental dimension, or turns it into a problem of political theory rather than international theory.

I press structural realism and its variants first, then classical realism, showing in each case where and why the impasse holds.

With the ascent of Waltz, the theoretical integration of intelligence into the structural realist study of international politics is impossible. A scholar of structural realist bent may have a passing or professional interest in intelligence, may even work in or alongside intelligence communities, but ultimately cannot incorporate it into IR theory without betraying the purity of structural IR theory. The reason runs deeper than methodology alone – much deeper than the familiar point that Waltz’s systemic turn pushes intelligence below the third level of analysis and renders it a second-image phenomenon, indispensable in practice yet invisible in theory. Waltz’s turn to structure is a depoliticization of ‘political’ realism through a consequential evacuation of the contingent and the morally charged dimensions of political life that so-called ‘classical’ political realism has retained.Footnote ⁴¹ What disappears in that evacuation is precisely the kind of practice that intelligence represents. Intelligence is irreducibly political, and intertwined with the deepest forms of power politics, involving stealing secrets, strategic and tactical deception, moral choice, and human agency operating in conditions of existential uncertainty. None of these belong, at least according to Waltz’s behavioral social-scientific framework, at the systemic level of analysis. None can be captured by a parsimonious account of capability distributions under anarchy. Morgenthau, who fiercely opposes the simplification of politics to structural or any other mechanics – what he calls the delusion of ‘scientific man’ – would recognize the problem immediately.Footnote ⁴² Structural realism, in taking out the political, takes out intelligence with it.

Mearsheimer’s offensive realism compounds the problem. For Mearsheimer, states are relentless power maximizers, driven by the anarchic structure of the international system to seek dominance and exploit windows of opportunity whenever they arise.Footnote ⁴³ Intelligence, in this framework, would serve one purpose: to accumulate and project state power; to identify vulnerabilities, adversarial capabilities, and above all else, to create tactical and strategic advantage. That is all it would do, and that is all it would need to do. The striking fact that Mearsheimer has not engaged intelligence or espionage in any sustained theoretical way across an extensive body of IR scholarship is entirely consistent with this logic – there is simply nothing theoretically interesting to say beyond confirming that states use it to get ahead.

Yet this is precisely where offensive realism runs into a contradiction of its own making. Mearsheimer’s world is built around two key variables: military power and the economic base that sustains it.Footnote ⁴⁴ But military power, especially modern warfare, is almost entirely co-dependent on intelligence. Without intelligence, there cannot be any targeting, nor the propaganda, information operations, or the strategic deceptions that war requires.Footnote ⁴⁵ The same applies to economic power. Industrial espionage, technology theft, financial intelligence, sanctions evasion, and economic warfare are not mere add-ons to great-power competition; rather, given the relentless seeking of economic advantages, particularly when it comes to AI, economic power is intrinsically intertwined with a state’s capability – or lack thereof – to wield power.Footnote ⁴⁶ Intelligence, on Mearsheimer’s own terms of relentless power struggles, should be a central component of his account of power. That it is not reveals an internal contradiction at the heart of offensive realism. Like Waltz, Mearsheimer operates at the structural level, and intelligence, as a unit-level practice, simply has no place, even though it should. For what the world of secret power has revealed repeatedly is that states engaged in covert conflict routinely collude with their adversaries for a variety of reasons. One is to keep interventions secret; another is managing escalation through shared concealment rather than maximizing advantage. The secrecy of intelligence, in this account, is even in a realist world a mechanism of mutual restraint and social and communicative practice between enemies.Footnote ⁴⁷ Offensive realism cannot account for any of this.

Defensive realism appears to offer a way out of this impasse. Where offensive realism focuses exclusively on capabilities and power maximization, defensive realism takes intentions seriously. Uncertainty about whether adversaries are genuinely security-seeking or inherently greedy drives the security dilemma, and intelligence that reduces that uncertainty can in principle ease rather than intensify competition.Footnote ⁴⁸ The regularized use of national technical means under the SALT and START arms control regimes is the canonical illustration.Footnote ⁴⁹ Surely, both Washington and Moscow deployed intelligence to spy on one another, but with an important qualification to it. They did so to reassure one another, and to manage the security dilemma cooperatively, and in doing so established a form of institutionalized transparency that already points to something about intelligence far beyond the pure survival logic of raison d’état, most notably offensive realism.Footnote ⁵⁰

Yet while defensive realism can, in principle, acknowledge that intelligence reduces uncertainty about intentions, what it cannot do is theorize intelligence as a practice embedded in the normative and institutional life of international society, with its own rules of conduct, its own social logic, and its own relationship to order and justice. The moment intelligence does more than manage the security dilemma, defensive realism would have nothing further to say. And recent scholarship on how leaders assess adversarial intentions reveals a deeper problem still. Decision-makers do not process intelligence in the clean, rational way defensive realism assumes. They tend to rely on personal impressions, prior beliefs, and face-to-face interactions rather than systematic analysis of available information.Footnote ⁵¹ The gap between what intelligence provides and what leaders actually use to assess intentions is an empirical fact that no contemporary systemic-structuralist realist IR theories – entirely rationalist or social-scientific as they are against Morgenthau’s advice – have the methodological means to theorize.

Neoclassical realism comes closest among post-classical realist IR theories to taking and theorizing intelligence seriously. By incorporating domestic politics, leader perceptions, and state-society relations as intervening variables between systemic pressures and foreign policy outputs, it opens analytical space that pure structural realism forecloses.Footnote ⁵² Intelligence could enter this framework as privileged information that shapes how diplomats and foreign policy executives read systemic pressures and mobilize domestic coalitions in response – Western threat disclosures about Russian and Chinese capabilities designed to build public and legislative support for defense spending being a contemporary illustration.Footnote ⁵³ A recent neoclassical realist analysis of Australia’s policy evolution to the challenge of Chinese foreign direct investment tells the same story. Intelligence agency concerns proved pivotal in driving the policy change, yet the framework could only accommodate them as information flowing into the foreign policy executive, not as a practice worthy of theoretical attention.Footnote ⁵⁴

However, neoclassical realism treats intelligence merely as a transmission belt. It inherits structural realism’s materialist assumptions even as it opens the domestic political level, and those assumptions impose the same ceiling. States spy not simply because a reductionist combination of systemic pressures and domestic politics makes them pursue covert actions, but because states care about whether their behavior would violate international law and about their normative standing as legitimate members of international society.Footnote ⁵⁵ Intelligence is part of a societal argument, not a purely materialist one, and lies therefore entirely outside the analytical reach of Waltzian-style realist IR theory, which puts parsimony before anything else.

The impasse, in other words, runs through the entire body of systemic-structural realist IR theory. So-called ‘classical’ realism – which never made Waltz’s materialist turn and retained the political, normative, and critical dimensions that structural realism evacuated – might appear to offer something different; and it does, but not in the way one might expect.Footnote ⁵⁶

If one follows Richard Little’s lead that classical realism and ES theorization are closer than they might first appear, then classical realism might be expected to do better on intelligence than its Waltzian-style successors.Footnote ⁵⁷ And while in one sense it could, the impasse holds. Morgenthau and Herz – the two towering figures of mid-twentieth-century classical realism, both German-Jewish émigrés shaped by the experience of survival and exile – were so preoccupied with diplomacy and reform as the master instruments of statecraft that intelligence was of no IR-theoretical concern. Morgenthau’s world of Politics among Nations was organized around peace through diplomacy, and Herz’s around escaping the security dilemma he had himself identified and finding ways for humanity to survive.Footnote ⁵⁸ When Morgenthau did engage intelligence directly – his 1967 critique of CIA domestic activities – he turned not to IR theory but, not surprisingly, to democratic theory, fearing that unchecked intelligence agencies were ‘how totalitarianism starts.’Footnote ⁵⁹ Herz recalled his OSS service with some intellectual curiosity and fascination, yet drew no IR-theoretical conclusions from it whatsoever.Footnote ⁶⁰ For both, intelligence was a fact of political and international life that has led to no further theoretical elaboration. Classical realism’s analytical and normative energies run toward the twin questions of war and peace, of human survival and global reform, rather than how the practice of spying has shaped international society – that question belongs to ES theorization of world politics.

From survival to international society

Realism, pressed across its main variants, reveals a common ceiling. And the ceiling is both theoretical and methodological, and empirical, as intelligence in practice has long outgrown what any realist IR theory framework can – or could possibly – theorize. Intelligence serves survival and mutual restraint, and the tacit regulation of Cold War and today’s superpower competition. After 9/11, the very states that invoked raison d’état most aggressively found themselves entangled in normative and legal controversies that no survival logic could resolve. In the Israel–Iran confrontation, covert operations unfold within implicit rules of engagement, thresholds of escalation, and calculations of legitimacy that realism simply cannot see. Intelligence, in the real world, is already a societal practice.

Realism’s impasse is therefore not so much a failure of individual realists or variants, but one inbuilt into that IR tradition’s assumptions. A methodological framework built around survival, material power, and anarchy as master concepts cannot capture what intelligence does in international society. It cannot ask what norms govern intelligence practice, what role intelligence plays in sustaining or undermining international order, or under what conditions intelligence serves justice rather than merely power. Yet these are questions that a serious IR theory must be able to answer – and ES theory is equipped to ask and answer.

Intelligence as raison de système

If realist IR theory would view intelligence as an instrument of survival in a world without overarching authority, the ‘societal approach’ understands it as a rule-governed practice that helps to sustain order within that same anarchy.Footnote ⁶² For the Grotian rationalist, the problem of international life is not merely how to survive, but how to coexist and build and maintain the institutional practices that make coexistence durable. States may compete, but they also recognize that unrestrained competition threatens the very system upon which their security depends. Rationalism therefore places emphasis on diplomacy, international law, and other primary institutions as mechanisms through which states communicate, regulate behavior, and manage risk.Footnote ⁶³

The conceptual key is Adam Watson’s notion of raison de système, the recognition that it ‘pays to make the system work.’Footnote ⁶⁴ Where raison d’état captures the logic of survival, raison de système captures the willingness of states as legitimate members of international society to invest in the shared rules and institutions that make orderly coexistence possible, even at some cost to short-term advantage. Watson’s concept has typically been applied to diplomacy and great-power management, but, as I suggest, it can be, and should be, extended to the practice of stealing secrets. Intelligence, through this societal lens, is one of international society’s primary practices, understood as an ordering practice through which states manage strategic and political uncertainty, sustain communication across adversarial divides, and produce and reproduce the shared understandings of legitimate and illegitimate conduct that give international society its normative texture.

This conceptual reframing is not merely theoretical and methodological. The history of intelligence is intimately connected to diplomatic history and the history of war, each of which – diplomacy and war – the ES has long recognized as a primary institution in the history of international society.Footnote ⁶⁵ That connection is very real. Intelligence supplies the informational foundation on which diplomacy depends and shapes the conduct of war by defining threats and battlefields. To say that intelligence is bound up with diplomacy and war might therefore suggest that if those practices carry primary institution status, the question of whether intelligence shares in that status becomes a serious theoretical question; this article does not resolve that question but opens it.

The Cold War illustrates the ordering dimension of intelligence. The superpower rivalry was, rightly described, an ‘epic intelligence war between East and West.’Footnote ⁶⁶ Yet wars have goals and rules, and even within that intelligence war, spying served as a mechanism of systemic stabilization. Through the regularized exchange of information (overt or covert) and the maintenance of predictable channels of contact, intelligence helped to sustain what might be called a ‘negative or precarious peace.’Footnote ⁶⁷ Tacit understandings about what counted as acceptable espionage – mutual tolerance of surveillance satellites, diplomatic listening posts, the unspoken rules governing the treatment of captured operatives – reflected the existence of an informal code of conduct among adversaries.Footnote ⁶⁸ This code was neither codified nor was it acknowledged publicly, but it was a shared normative framework generated by repeated interaction and sustained by the recognition that its collapse would cost both sides more than its maintenance. In the most strategic contexts – the management of nuclear deterrence – intelligence practices contributed to order by reducing the likelihood of miscalculation.

The FVEY intelligence alliance raises this logic from the bilateral to the systemic level, and in doing so makes visible the full institutional ambition of intelligence as raison de système. Comprising the United States, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, the FVEY arrangement originated in wartime SIGINT cooperation but evolved into a deeply embedded framework for information sharing, coordination, and collective surveillance.Footnote ⁶⁹ The FVEY is, within ES theorization, a secondary institution because what these five countries, over time, have institutionalized is a formalized practice that both reflects and reinforces the primary institutions of diplomacy, war, and great-power management.Footnote ⁷⁰ The FVEY institutionalizes the raison de système impulse to make the international system work through trust, rules, and shared purpose in the very shadows of conventional foreign policy conduct.Footnote ⁷¹

However, the FVEY also reveals the normative tensions that intelligence as raison de système cannot escape. The FVEY is an exclusive arrangement, descended from an Anglo-Saxon strategic culture, and yet its members champion a rules-based international order grounded in liberal values. This dual identity – particularist in membership, universalist in aspiration – makes the FVEY an especially revealing site for examining the interplay between order and justice in contemporary international society. Its post-9/11 history, in which FVEY cooperation extended to extraordinary rendition, mass surveillance, and practices that tested the limits of legality and legitimacy, demonstrates the ease with which raison de système can collapse back into raison d’état when institutional norms are under pressure. Yet the FVEY’s response to Russia’s 2022 full-scale military invasion of Ukraine tells the other half of the story. The unprecedented declassification of intelligence in the months preceding and following the invasion was in large part a FVEY operation to uphold the norms of international society.

Taken together, and against purely realistic accounts, the Cold War informal code and the FVEY demonstrate that intelligence is a practice through which states produce, sustain, and at times contest the shared norms and institutional arrangements that constitute that society. Whether this practice has crystallized sufficiently to warrant the designation of primary institution is a question that requires more sustained historical and analytical inquiry. What the societal approach establishes is that the question is serious – and that the practice of intelligence, examined through the lenses of diplomacy and international law respectively, is precisely where its answer must be sought.

Order and the intelligence–diplomacy nexus

To begin with diplomacy, I argue for a three-position analytical framework that maps the relationship between intelligence and diplomacy with increasing theoretical ambition.

The first position treats intelligence and diplomacy as distinct practices that interact contingently but remain institutionally and conceptually separate. I take this position seriously before rejecting it, because it represents the conventional wisdom that the argument must displace. The second position moves beyond the conventional view by arguing that intelligence functions as the covert register through which diplomatic functions are performed when the official register is unavailable or insufficient. This position has a distinguished intellectual pedigree and is already sufficient to establish what I call the minimalist claim: that ES theorization is the uniquely appropriate home for intelligence in IR.

The third position is the most demanding, and the one toward which this section builds. I argue that intelligence and diplomacy are not two practices that happen to overlap, nor one practice subordinate to the other, but two faces of a single coin whose value is international order. On this reading – which I call the maximalist claim – the designation of diplomacy as a primary institution of international society already implies a claim about intelligence that ES theorization has not yet made explicit but cannot avoid making without theoretical inconsistency. I do not fully resolve the question of which position to prefer here; that resolution depends on a further dimension of the argument, developed in the next section, that the diplomatic evidence alone cannot supply.

First, the conventional view holds that intelligence and diplomacy are distinct practices with distinct logics, cultures, histories, people, institutional homes, and normative frameworks. The CIA is not the State Department. MI6 is not the Foreign Office. Stealing is not negotiating. A spy is not a diplomat. On this account, intelligence and diplomacy interact – intelligence informs diplomatic judgment, diplomatic cover enables intelligence operations – but the interaction is contingent rather than structural, and neither is theoretically dependent on the other. This position has the virtue of institutional accuracy, as intelligence and diplomatic services are, in most states, formally separate bureaucracies with separate mandates and chains of command. The problem, however, is that institutional separation does not mean conceptual separation or independence. The fact that the CIA and the State Department occupy different buildings tells us nothing about whether the practices they house are theoretically distinct. And once the question is posed at the level of practice rather than organization, the conventional view begins to crumble. It cannot account for the cases examined below, and the first position, in short, keeps intelligence theoretically marginal.

The second position represents the first genuinely revisionist claim I advance in this section. It argues that intelligence functions as the covert means through which diplomatic functions are performed when the official register is unavailable or insufficient. This position has a distinguished intellectual pedigree that I draw on deliberately. When the Dutch diplomat Abraham de Wicquefort, writing in 1681, described the ambassador as simultaneously ‘a messenger of peace on one hand and like an honorable spy on the other,’ he was anatomizing a function.Footnote ⁷² The French diplomat François de Callières, whose manual of diplomatic method remained authoritative into the eighteenth century, was equally direct: ‘The two primary goals of a negotiator are to conduct his master’s business, and to discover the business of others.’Footnote ⁷³ Secrecy, on this account, is not the antithesis of diplomacy but its norm. ‘Secrecy is the weapon of negotiation,’ in de Callières’s phrase, without which the ambassador could neither protect his own position nor penetrate the intentions of those across the table.Footnote ⁷⁴ Intelligence and diplomacy share a common genealogy and address the problem of the management of uncertainty under anarchy, woven together at the level of the ambassador’s own office, where representation and espionage are not sequential or separate functions but simultaneous ones.Footnote ⁷⁵

Cases confirm this reading. When the CIA and MI6 facilitated the disarmament of Libya’s weapons of mass destruction program between 2001 and 2003, intelligence officers conducted the negotiations that produced a diplomatic outcome – Muammar Gaddafi’s public renunciation of WMD – that no official diplomatic channel could have achieved without prejudicing the result.Footnote ⁷⁶ This case is particularly instructive because the intelligence services did not support the diplomacy but were the diplomacy. Israel’s use of Mossad as a sustained alternative diplomatic channel – conducting negotiations, delivering messages, and managing relationships with states that officially do not recognize its existence – represents the same logic institutionalized as permanent practice.Footnote ⁷⁷ In both cases, the intelligence services perform diplomatic functions that the official context forbids, yet do so not as a further deviation from international order but to maintain it.

The Ankara meeting of autumn 2021 in the context of Ukraine sharpens the argument even further. As Russian forces massed on Ukraine’s borders, then-CIA Director William Burns – a career diplomat before he became Director of Central Intelligence – traveled to Turkey for a direct meeting with his Russian counterpart Sergei Naryshkin. No communiqué was issued, no agreement reached. What was performed was intelligence as diplomatic signaling, as a channel through which Washington conveyed, with the authority that only a direct senior exchange could carry, that the costs of invasion had been assessed and would be enforced.Footnote ⁷⁸ The choice of an intelligence channel over a diplomatic one was not a failure of diplomacy. Rather, it was a deliberate deployment of covert power for a purpose – credible communication under conditions of maximum tension – that the official diplomatic channel could not serve. Burns’s dual identity, as one of America’s most accomplished diplomats and its intelligence chief, personifies the empirical and theoretical point: that the practices converge in the person, just as they converged in the office of the ambassador four centuries earlier.

My claim is that the second position is stronger than the first one, and I hold that it is already sufficient to establish the minimalist claim of this section. To theorize intelligence in the realm of IR, what is required is to see a practice that is both covert and constitutive, and simultaneously a violation of sovereignty and a condition of international order. The foundational ES logics of raison de système as well as primary and secondary institutions map directly onto the practice that the second position describes. The minimalist claim requires nothing more than to acknowledge that any conceptualization of diplomacy as a primary institution of international society is incomplete without some form of intelligence theorization through which diplomatic order is sustained. On this second view alone, the ES is the necessary theoretical home for intelligence in IR.

However, there is a need to push further than that. The minimalist position treats intelligence as shadow diplomacy – as derivative, as subordinate, as the covert auxiliary of the primary diplomatic function.Footnote ⁷⁹ The third position rejects that binary hierarchy, and I want to suggest that intelligence and diplomacy are not one practice but two faces of a single coin, and that the coin is maintaining international order.

On the position two reading (minimalism), diplomacy is the primary practice, and intelligence is merely one of its covert means. On the position three reading (maximalism), both practices are expressions of a single deeper logic: the management of international order under conditions of anarchy, uncertainty, and mutual surveillance. Neither is prior, neither is derivative, as both diplomacy and intelligence are instantiations of the same imperative – the imperative, in Watson’s terms, to make the system work for the members of international society ( raison de système ) – and what makes them differ from one another are the means through which that imperative is discharged.

The Ukraine declassification campaign of 2021–2022 is perhaps the most powerful available illustration of this logic in operation. From late 2021 through the opening months of the full-scale invasion, the United States and its allies conducted an unprecedented campaign of pre-emptive intelligence disclosure through intelligence and public channels, releasing assessments of Russian military planning, operational intentions, and disinformation strategies before the events they feared would occur or described had occurred, respectively. The purpose was tripartite: to deter the invasion by demonstrating that its operational premises were transparent; to consolidate alliance cohesion by giving partners a shared intelligence picture; and to pre-empt the disinformation narratives through which Russia had managed the information environment in 2014.Footnote ⁸⁰ What makes this case theoretically decisive for the maximalist position is the disclosure itself plus what the decision to disclose reveals about the logic governing it. Intelligence services exist, institutionally, to accumulate (read: steal) advantage through secrecy. The decision to declassify – to sacrifice informational advantage for diplomatic and systemic effect – represents a deliberate subordination of raison d’état logic to raison de système logic.Footnote ⁸¹

The tension between the institutional intelligence imperative to protect sources and methods and the contingent political imperative to use intelligence for collective ends is a defining tension of intelligence cooperation, for states that share secrets to sustain international order must sacrifice the very secrecy on which their intelligence power depends.Footnote ⁸²

The theoretical consequence of the third position is why I call it the maximalist claim. If intelligence and diplomacy are two faces of the same ordering coin – if you cannot have the diplomat without the spy, as Wicquefort, de Callières, and four centuries of practice consistently demonstrate – then the designation of diplomacy as a primary institution of international society already implies a claim about intelligence that the ES cannot avoid without theoretical inconsistency. Whether that claim can be sustained depends not only on the diplomatic evidence examined here but on whether international society has generated, around the practice of intelligence, a normative and legal structure commensurate with its ordering function. That is a question the diplomatic argument cannot answer alone. It is to that question, and to the strongest available external corroboration of the maximalist claim, that the next section turns.

The Grotian corroboration: A lex specialis

Connecting the Grotian notion of Ubi societas, ibi ius – where there is society, there is law – to intelligence matters, which, no doubt, include dark aspects such as lying, betraying, stealing, killing, must be fanciful. But ES theorization from Manning to Bull to the present generation has always insisted that international law and international society developed hand in hand and are historically and logically inseparable.Footnote ⁸³

In this section, I ask whether the emerging international law of intelligence bears out the Grotian notion and what the answer – I argue that it does – tells us about intelligence’s status in international society. The legal argument presented here provides corroboration of the maximalist claim advanced in the previous section. I proceed in three steps: mapping the current state of the legal debate; showing that the legal debate, on its minimalist reading, makes the ES framework not merely useful but necessary; and showing that the legal debate, on its maximalist reading, makes the primary institution claim for intelligence theoretically possible.

In legal debates on intelligence, the conventional starting point in international law is what Simon Chesterman has called the ‘legal penumbra’ of espionage, whereby intelligence occupies a zone of deliberate legal ambiguity, neither clearly permitted nor clearly prohibited by international law, and of deliberate moral ambiguity in terms of international legitimacy.Footnote ⁸⁴ States spy. States know that other states spy, and international law has little, if anything at all, to say about it – let alone to attempt regulation. This extralegal position treats intelligence as a political fact that law cannot or should not address. In purely descriptive terms, it is quite an accurate position: there is no treaty on peacetime espionage, no explicit customary prohibition, no international court that has directly adjudicated the legality of state intelligence operations. However, descriptive accuracy is not the same as theoretical adequacy because a practice so ancient, so deeply embedded in the conduct of IR, and so consequential for its ordering, cannot be satisfactorily left in permanent legal silence – and the Grotian position, as Asaf Lubin has shown, is already being borne out in the direction of legal development, which now speaks more richly and with greater precision in times of peace than in times of war.Footnote ⁸⁵

The second position – generalism – argues that intelligence is already fully subject to existing general norms of international law: sovereignty, the Vienna Conventions on diplomatic relations, human rights law, the UN Charter. On this reading, no specialized framework is needed because the general framework already applies and, in most cases, prohibits. The problem, as Lubin has shown in the most comprehensive legal treatment of the subject to date, is that generalism produces a conclusion that states manifestly reject in practice: if general international law applied strictly, virtually all peacetime intelligence activity would be illegal.Footnote ⁸⁶ However, in the real world, states do not behave as if they believe this to have any meaning, let alone coercive legal consequences, and the gap between the generalist position in international law and state practice in IR is too large to be explained away.

Which brings the legal debate – and IR theorization of intelligence – to the third position: specialization, which is Lubin’s own. The argument is that intelligence has generated, through state practice and opinio juris, a specialized customary regime – what Lubin calls the International Law of Intelligence – that is distinct from and not reducible to general prohibitive rules.Footnote ⁸⁷ This regime is organized around the principles of necessity, proportionality, and efficacy, and structured through a tripartite framework – jus ad explorationem, jus in exploratione, and jus post explorationem – governing the authorization and decision to resort to espionage, governing its conduct, and governing the consequences of intelligence operations, respectively. What is important is that the lex specialis claim does not merely describe current law, but that it makes a normative argument about what the law should recognize given what intelligence actually does in IR, for the international order. Lubin is explicit that intelligence has a functional role in sustaining that order: international organizations, such as the UN, NATO, and the IAEA, depend on member-state intelligence they cannot themselves produce, and the architecture of international peace and security depends, in ways that cannot be wished away, on the continuous flow of intelligence among states.Footnote ⁸⁸ The Grotian notion is clear: intelligence is generating its own body of international law because international society requires it to.

What the three-position taxonomy reveals, for the purposes of ES-style theorization of intelligence, is that the legal debate about intelligence presupposes an IR argument that it cannot itself supply. The extralegal position presupposes that intelligence is a political fact, but it offers no account of what kind of political fact, what social function it performs, or why that function might generate legal consequences. The generalist position presupposes that intelligence is a sovereign violation, but it cannot explain why states have consistently declined to treat it as one, or why the practice persists and deepens precisely among states most committed to a rules-based international order. The specialization position presupposes that intelligence is a practice with a distinctive social function that warrants distinctive legal treatment, but it offers no social-theoretical account of what that function is or why it is distinctive.

That social-theoretical account is what ES theorization can provide. The raison de système argument establishes that intelligence is not merely a tool of national power that states use within international society but a practice through which international society constitutes and sustains itself. The intelligence–diplomacy argument establishes that this practice is structurally internal to the primary institution of diplomacy, and that the ordering function of intelligence has been recognized, in practice if not in theory, for many centuries. Together, these arguments supply the IR theory foundation that Lubin’s legalistic position requires. In doing so, the ES is not merely one theoretical option for understanding intelligence in international law (and IR), it is perhaps the only framework that can provide the social-theoretical ground on which a serious legal account of intelligence must stand. I use Lubin’s position, therefore, in terms of a mutual foundationality: Lubin’s project of an International Law of Intelligence needs, at least as I see it, the societal approach to explain why intelligence warrants specialized legal treatment; and the societal approach toward intelligence (for which I am arguing) needs the International Law of Intelligence to demonstrate that its theoretical claims have legal consequences that states and courts must eventually confront.

Yet Lubin’s lex specialis argument does more than corroborate the minimalist claim of intelligence being a deeply social practice in international society that warrants going beyond any realist orthodoxy. For the lex specialis position is twofold: that intelligence warrants specialized legal treatment, and that intelligence is a necessary precondition for the functioning of the broader legal and political order. If international organizations depend on member-state intelligence to function, and if the architecture of international security, war, and peace, depends on continuous intelligence flows among states, then intelligence is a practice that international society requires for its own functioning; and the practice of intelligence that international society requires for its own functioning is, by the ES’s own definition of primary institutions as deep and relatively durable social practices that shape the character of international society, a candidate for that designation.Footnote ⁸⁹

The Grotian foundation returns with full force. If ubi societas ibi ius – and if intelligence is constitutive of the society that generates that law – then Lubin’s account of International Law of Intelligence is the legal expression of what the societal approach has been arguing all along: that intelligence belongs not at the margins of international society but at its center, and that, therefore, IR theorization of intelligence in general, and in terms of the societal ES approach in particular, is long overdue.

I want to be precise about what the maximalist claim does and does not assert. It does not claim that intelligence has already achieved primary institution status, nor that the historical and comparative inquiry required to establish such a claim has been completed. What it claims is that the convergence of the IR argument developed here and the legal argument developed by Lubin makes the primary institution question unavoidable. When IR theory and international law, proceeding independently and by different methods, arrive at the same recognition – that intelligence is constitutive of the order both disciplines study – the most parsimonious explanation is that the practice is doing exactly what the convergent arguments say it is doing. The societal ES approach is the only IR tradition whose foundational commitments make that convergence not merely visible but theoretically intelligible. Whether the primary institution designation for intelligence can ultimately be sustained is a question that requires sustained historical and analytical inquiry well beyond the scope of this article. What this article establishes is that the question is serious, that the societal ES approach is the right framework within which to pursue it, and that the Grotian notion and prediction with which this section opened – where there is society, there is law – has already begun, in the emerging international law of intelligence, to be fulfilled.

The societal approach, as this section has argued, is a well-equipped theoretical home for intelligence in IR, much better than realist IR theory, but going beyond ES is a test of whether it is also a sufficient one, and what the primary institution horizon demands of both the ES and its critics.

Intelligence as raison d’humanité

Intelligence is not only a tool of survival or an instrument of order. It can also be a practice of justice. At first glance, approaching intelligence from the perspective that Wight called Kantian revolutionism – the body of IR theory broadly associated with Kant, world society, something resembling a world of humans,Footnote ⁹⁰ the moral purpose of international order – appears counterintuitive. Intelligence is, after all, widely seen as the archetype of a proto-Westphalian state system based on sovereignty, self-interest and nothing but survival at any cost. However, it is precisely this tension between what intelligence in practice is, ought to be, and can be, that makes looking beyond the ordinary so valuable, both empirically and theoretically.

The whole set of intelligence tools used to spy, steal, conceal, and manipulate can also expose atrocity, prevent conflict, and uphold the rule of law. When used to warn of atrocities, to guide humanitarian intervention, or to document war crimes, intelligence contributes to ‘saving strangers,’ thereby attempting to morally expand international society beyond the rigid strictures of the sovereign state.Footnote ⁹¹ In such contexts – and it should be noted that whether intelligence agencies are directed by their governments toward such ends (or any other ends) is primarily a question of political will – secrecy need not contradict justice; in fact, it can make justice possible by uncovering what would otherwise remain hidden without using the intelligence tools required to uncover or, literally, to unbury them.Footnote ⁹² Alongside raison d’état and raison de système, this possibility or logic introduces a third kind of reasoning – what may be called raison d’humanité, reflecting the conviction that the responsible use of intelligence can serve humans and humanity as a global collective rather than any state or nation.Footnote ⁹³

The most direct empirical cases involve the use of intelligence in the documentation and prosecution of mass atrocities. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia provides a lesson in intelligence-justice cooperation. Unable to gather reliable evidence from active war zones, the tribunal relied on the capabilities of national intelligence services, out of which came Rule 70 – a procedural innovation allowing states to share sensitive material without compromising sources or methods. In the trial of Slobodan Milošević, Washington waived confidentiality to permit the testimony of former NATO commander General Wesley Clark, whose account helped link the Serbian leader to the Srebrenica genocide.Footnote ⁹⁴ Beyond the courtroom, the pursuit of indicted war criminals through Operation Amber Star combined CIA, MI6, Delta Force, and SAS assets in a clandestine NATO-led manhunt that pioneered techniques later used in counterterrorism.Footnote ⁹⁵ More recently, in July 2023, the United States under the Biden Administration announced it would share intelligence on Russian atrocities directly with the International Criminal Court, which was a historic departure from Washington’s traditional wariness toward the Court, and a signal that accountability for war crimes had become a shared strategic interest to uphold the norms regulating war.Footnote ⁹⁶

What these cases establish is not that intelligence has become a humanitarian practice, but that it contains a humanitarian possibility that existing IR theory has no framework to theorize. The tension between that possibility and the survival and order logics that dominate intelligence in practice is not a defect of the raison d’humanité argument but its core. Intelligence agencies guard their secrets as the final frontier of state sovereignty, while international society requires transparency. The proceedings against Radovan Karadžić, who claimed an undisclosed immunity deal with US officials, illustrate the collision directly, when his defense demanded access to American intelligence under Rule 70, and Washington refused on national security grounds.Footnote ⁹⁷ Solidarist ES theorization is valuable here precisely because it sits in friction with the survival and order logics that constitute the practice. The objection that humanitarian intelligence cooperation may ultimately serve state interest rather than genuine solidarist purpose does not refute this argument. That raison d’humanité is perpetually pulled back toward raison d’état and raison de système is precisely what makes it the most demanding and least reliably realized of the three logics, and precisely why its theorization requires a framework capable of holding all three in view simultaneously rather than collapsing them into one.

Whose survival, whose order, whose humanity

Situating intelligence across three logics – raison d’état, raison de système, and raison d’humanité – reveals a practice that is at once more complex, more socially embedded, and more normatively consequential than the conventional IR silence on the subject allows. Yet the framework is not without blind spots, and it is the task of critical and radical approaches to name them.Footnote ⁹⁸

The most important challenge comes from International Political Sociology, and in particular from the body of work associated with Hager Ben Jaffel, Sebastian Larsson, and their collaborators.Footnote ⁹⁹ The study of intelligence, they argue, has been historically structured around the interests of state intelligence agencies and the demands of policymakers, producing theories for intelligence rather than theories of intelligence.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ From that perspective, even most sociologically sophisticated accounts of intelligence – including ES-inflected ones – would remain prisoners of a state-centric and functionalist ontology. The consequence is an analytical framework that takes the state-centric organization of intelligence as a given, naturalizes it, and in doing so fails to interrogate how that organization was historically produced, whose interests it serves, and what it excludes.

This critical critique has genuine bite when applied to the ES framework. Working within the triadic mapping of intelligence – survival (realism), order (rationalism), humanity (revolutionism) – theorizes what intelligence does for states, for international society, and for humans. But it does not ask who benefits from this arrangement, or how the very categories of survival, order, and humanity are politically constructed. Whose survival counts? Which international order? Humanity as defined by whom, and from where? The ES framework risks remaining deeply embedded in a particular – largely Western, largely liberal – experience of intelligence practice. The Anglo-Western FVEY world is the implicit referent; other traditions and experiences appear, if at all, as footnotes.Footnote ¹⁰¹

The critical tradition also draws much-needed attention to the expanding social space of intelligence – potentially well beyond the state agencies that conventional and ES-oriented accounts foreground. Ben Jaffel and Larsson show that intelligence, understood as a social phenomenon, involves a heterogeneous field of actors: police forces, border agencies, private contractors, technology firms, international lawyers, civil-society organizations, and even ordinary citizens enrolled as informants through counter-radicalization programs.Footnote ¹⁰² This expansion is both a correct empirical observation and a theoretical challenge because it asks whether, if intelligence is this plural, this contested, and this pervasive, any framework that centers the state intelligence agency as its primary unit of analysis can claim to capture it adequately.

These are serious challenges, and the raison d’humanité argument advanced here is itself vulnerable to the charge because the solidarist potential of intelligence – its capacity to serve justice and accountability – has been realized almost exclusively through the capabilities and decisions of Western state agencies, operating within institutional frameworks designed to protect their sources and methods first. International criminal justice depends on intelligence, but intelligence has consistently conditioned that dependence on its own terms.

The critical tradition’s challenge to ES theorization is permanent and productive. Its questions of whose survival, whose order, and whose humanity the triadic mapping serves will need to be asked as intelligence practice evolves, as new actors enter the field, and as non-Western intelligence cultures demand theoretical attention on their own terms. The ES approach advanced here does not claim immunity from that interrogation.

What it does claim, however, is that interrogation is not dissolution. The critical insight that intelligence is more plural, more contested, and more socially pervasive than any state-centric account can fully capture is compatible with – indeed, requires – a prior account of what the institutional core of that practice is, how it became durable, and what normative structure it has generated across international society. Without that account, the critical tradition has no stable object to critique. ES theorization provides that object, while critical and radical approaches may sharpen it, and the tension between them is the productive tension of IR theorization that takes its subject seriously.

That tension has one further consequence. The question that critical approaches cannot answer – whether the practice of intelligence has acquired sufficient depth, durability, and normative structure to warrant the designation of primary institution – is precisely the question that ES theorization is equipped to ask.

Stealing secrets: The primary institution hypothesis

The concept of primary institution, as re-modeled within ES theorization by Barry Buzan and refined in collaboration with Robert Falkner, designates those deep, evolved practices that do not merely regulate international society but constitute it.Footnote ¹⁰³ Primary institutions are not designed purely functionally; they emerge through the accumulated practice of political communities across time, acquiring normative structure, shared expectations, and a resilience that formal organizations rarely match. The canonical examples – sovereignty, diplomacy, war, international law, the balance of power – share one defining feature: they are practices without which international society, as an anarchical society, would not exist.

This article has argued that intelligence, once rescued from realist orthodoxy, warrants sustained ES theorization – what the preceding sections called the minimalist position. It has also advanced the maximalist claim: that intelligence and diplomacy are two faces of a single ordering coin, and that Lubin’s lex specialis argument supplies the legal corroboration that the IR argument alone cannot. Together, these positions generate a question that neither can individually answer: whether intelligence has acquired sufficient depth, durability, and normative structure across international society to warrant designation as a primary institution. The four criteria that ES theorization has developed for establishing such status suggest the question is serious.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

First, the collection and use of secret information about adversaries is not a product of the modern state system but predates Westphalia by millennia. Across Barry Buzan’s three eras of world history – the hunter-gatherer era, the conglomerate agrarian and pastoralist empires, and the modern eraFootnote ¹⁰⁵ – espionage stands out as one of the few practices to have endured and adapted continuously. From the Mari letters of ancient Mesopotamia to Kautilya’s Arthashastra, from the Ottoman barīd to the Cold War intelligence architectures of both blocs, the underlying logic of managing uncertainty through stealing secrets has proved among the most durable in political history.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Whether we like what intelligence services do at a certain point in history or not, one would be hard-pressed not to acknowledge that what we have here in international society is a near-universally accepted practice – a global norm of secrecy.

Second, the development of secondary institutions – I think here of the FVEY, NATO intelligence structures, the EU’s Intelligence Analysis Centre (INTCEN) and Intelligence College in Europe, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation’s Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure, the African Union’s Committee of Intelligence and Security Services of Africa – demonstrates that intelligence practices have been formalized into rule-governed cooperative arrangements across different political and normative orders.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ These are not merely functional agreements because they embed intelligence work and sustained cooperation within shared epistemic cultures, classification systems, and accountability frameworks that reproduce the practice across generations of (member) states.

Third, intelligence has been internalized within states as a structural principle of governance and a marker of political legitimacy. Permanent intelligence agencies – in East and West, as well as in the Global South – are political and bureaucratic expressions of the state’s relationship to knowledge, uncertainty, and sovereignty. As Michael Warner observes, secrecy has acquired ‘prevalence and institutional endurance’ precisely because it has become normal rather than exceptional.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ It has become a routine feature of modern political administration across liberal, authoritarian, and postcolonial orders alike.

Fourth, intelligence does not operate in isolation from other primary institutions, such as diplomacy, war, and international law. At a minimum, stealing secrets sustains diplomacy by supplying the information that makes negotiation and deterrence possible, and at a maximum it becomes the diplomacy vis-à-vis another state. Intelligence makes war possible, and it shapes the conduct of war by structuring perceptions of threat and capability, influencing both the initiation and the limitation of force. And, finally, the practice of intelligence has generated a specialized body of international law produced not by deliberate legislation but by the evolution of norms around what states may and may not do in the intelligence domain. Primary institutions are exactly those practices that generate their own normative frameworks through societal evolution rather than purely functional design, and intelligence has done exactly that.

The stakes of the designation are analytical and normative. Primary institutions carry normative weight, and they do ‘have normative impact: we judge actors and behaviours against compliance with the aspirations primary institutions create. Primary institutions make possible naming “bad” actors and “misbehaviour.”’Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Whether intelligence qualifies as one helps establish whether we can name states that violate its norms and hold them accountable.

The objection that this risks conceptual inflation of the primary institution category deserves a direct answer.Footnote ¹¹⁰ The warning of having too many is legitimate. Primary institution status should not be awarded to every ancient and widespread practice. The real test is all at once: longevity, universality, and constitutive role. Intelligence meets that test. International society’s capacity to manage uncertainty, sustain deterrence, conduct diplomacy, prosecute war, and enforce international law all depends, in ways that cannot be wished away, on continuous flows of secret information among states. A practice upon which the functioning of every other primary institution, especially diplomacy and war, depends is not a candidate for the margins of ES theorization but for its theoretical core. Whether the practice of intelligence meets the full criteria for primary institution status requires the kind of sustained historical and comparative inquiry that lies beyond the scope of this article. What this article has done is make that inquiry possible and necessary.