International relations as a discipline and security studies as a subdiscipline are experiencing renewed interest in the power and politics of secrecy. Although historians, especially those of “the secret state” and of intelligence agencies, have continued over the years to produce accounts of the covert deliberations and actions of governments, international relations and, more specifically, security studies have focused in large part on the overt and public ways in which power manifests on the global stage. As these two new US-focused books demonstrate (along with new books such as William Walters’s State Secrecy and Security: Refiguring the Covert Imaginary, 2021, and Marieke De Goede, Esmé Bosma, and Polly Pallister-Wilkins’s Secrecy and Methods in Security Research: A Guide to Qualitative Fieldwork, 2019), a more detailed, more nuanced, and in-depth approach to secrecy as a force within security studies and, more broadly, international relations is not only warranted but also can, in new ways, significantly challenge long-held disciplinary “truths” and introduce new actors, practices, concepts, and methods of interest for international relations.

In Covert Regime Change: America’s Secret War, Lindsey A. O’Rourke argues that to understand the US approach to regime change as a goal and instrument of foreign policy, covert regime change, as a particular subset of regime change, needs closer examination. Using a case study approach that quantitatively maps out the relative success and failure of different covert regime operations conducted by the United States during the Cold War (1947–89), O’Rourke concludes that covert regime change operations most often resulted in failure, even though they were frequently used by the United States: the analysis identifies 64 cases of covert versus 6 overt operations. This failure occurred either because the United States was “unmasked” as the actor, the regime change did not hold, or the action itself was a failure. Moreover, O’Rourke’s analysis provides evidence that states targeted for regime change were more likely to become authoritarian and unstable after the intervention. When covert regime change operations did work, it may be because those targeted were “weak states, democracies, and American allies” (p. 10), conditions already tilted in the United States’ favor, and there was minimal US involvement. In other words, not only did US Cold War covert regime change operations not work as US foreign policy tools but also the evidence and analysis provided in Covert Regime Change undercut, in new ways, both democratic peace theory and the realist claim that the domestic makeup of a state does not matter.

Like Covert Regime Change, Austin Carson’s Secret Wars: Covert Conflict in International Politics offers a set of rich empirical case studies of US actions during the Cold War from which to develop new thinking about the role of secrecy in security studies. In Secret Wars, Carson argues that domestic pressures for war are often the reason for a “complicit” silence between states, even states at war, as a means to prevent limited wars from escalating. Drawing on sociologist Ervin Goffman’s dramaturgical approach, however, Carson goes further than O’Rourke in answering the “why question”: Why did the US government favor covertness as a policy approach? Carson’s approach is to conceive, not without precedent, of interstate relations as divided between the public “frontstage” of mass media events and publicly accessible state actions and a private “backstage” of state officials. As such, Carson joins a number of international relations scholars (see for example, Didier Bigo, “Pierre Bourdieu and International Relations: Power of Practices, Practices of Power,” International Political Sociology, 5 [ 3], 2011; Rebecca Adler-Nissen’s Bourdieu in International Relations: Rethinking Key Concepts in IR, 2013; and “Stigma Management in International Relations: Transgressive Identities, Norms, and Order in International Society,” International Organization, 68 [ 1], 2014) who draw on sociologists such as Goffman and Bourdieu to make sense of interstate relations. These analyses understand such relations as a realm governed by social relationships and using concepts such as stigma, practice, field, performance, and habitus. Secret Wars focuses on the “backstage” of these social relations where, Carson argues, states are better able to both communicate with other states and avoid the dangerous tendency to posture for domestic audiences. Moreover, rather than the backstage consisting of the world of private diplomatic talks, Carson proposes that covert action itself becomes a tool for communicating state intent. The backstage consists of a sphere where state military and intelligence actions, from covert air operations to cyberespionage, are scrutable only to those with advanced intelligence capabilities. State actors, as Carson demonstrates, therefore often choose to maintain a “cooperative silence” with states that might otherwise be understood as adversaries. Using covert action, as Carson suggests, may signal a desire for limited war to (those select) observers, as does any complicit silence or the maintenance of an “open secret” of involvement.

Informed by an analysis of the Spanish Civil War but focusing predominantly on conflicts with US involvement during the Cold War period (including the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan), Secret Wars draws together the secondary literature and new US state documents to demonstrate this pattern of “collusion.” In particular, Carson argues that this collusion was based not on operational need, but rather on the desire by officials to prevent conflict escalation driven by adversaries or by “hawkish” domestic publics. In other words, Secret Wars offers a new way to interpret covert action that is, at first glance, counterintuitive: covert action is “valuable in part because it is observable to the adversary” (p. 13) and because, for Carson, it is a means to avoid the domestic pressures that may lead to a larger, more protracted conflict. Therefore, like O’Rourke’s Covert Regime Change, Secret Wars makes a strong case for understanding the influence of domestic calculations on the likelihood of escalating conflict. In contrast, however, Carson stresses that secrecy is sometimes used successfully to achieve foreign policy aims.

Combined, these books offer a set of rich empirical case studies and thoughtful provocations in terms of thinking security through secrecy: that secrecy, rather than being used to isolate decision-makers from those opposed to war, is also used to limit the influence of those favoring war; that actions carried out and interpreted as secret function as a form of “elite” interstate communication; and that covert action is favored, even against allies, though it may rarely work. Across both books, the seductive power of secrecy as a policy tool, a form of communication, and a way to constitute the (US) state as a benign actor on the “frontstage” (Covert Regime Change) and “backstage” (Secret Wars) is apparent. Rather than interpreting covert regime change as a policy success or failure on narrow operational grounds, covert action works (or does not) in other interesting ways.

Both Secret Wars and Covert Regime Change therefore offer new ways of thinking about secrecy in conflict. Both also suggest more essential questions that center around secrecy and its power. For example, if covert regime change is so ineffectual and even counterproductive as a foreign policy tool, why did it continue to be used to the extent that it was? Equally, why would adversaries trust each other or trust secrecy as “backstage” communication, enough to engage in a collusion of silence? In short, how might understanding secrecy itself as productive, as that which is alluring, seductive, and constitutive, help develop a greater understanding of these conflicts and of international relations? In other words, both books, despite making the case for the role of domestic politics and even, in the case of Secret Wars, for the social role of secrecy, remain too wedded to the realist framework and its limitations to make full sense of the covert and its role in international relations.

Instead, this discipline of International Relations might profitably make even greater use of sociological approaches to secrecy and the idea that secrecy is also a way to constitute or “brand” the self or the state. Such an approach would allow for the development of additional important questions and objects of analysis: Could covert regime change, even failed instances, be appealing because they also help brand a leader and a state in a particular way? Could these conspiracies of silence also be due to a shared sense of a transnational elite with common interests not only in limited war but also in sustaining their communities, maintaining secrecy, and avoiding scrutiny? In other words, what would it mean to extend understandings of the power of secrecy through its social power in security studies and in international relations? As O’Rourke demonstrates, covert regime change was as likely to be used against allies, including democratic ones. Using covert means made it easier on the “frontstage” for the US state to publicly constitute itself as a law- and norm-abiding international actor while on the “backstage” pursing a more interventionist foreign policy (see also Ruth Blakeley’s State Terrorism and Neoliberalism: The North in the South, 2009). Making more and better use of the sociological literature (beginning with Georg Simmel, “The Sociology of Secrecy and of Secret Societies,” 1906, American Journal of Sociology, 11 [4], 1906; and Sissela Bok, “Secrecy and Openness in Science: Ethical Considerations,” Science, Technology, & Human Values, 7 [1], 1982) on the ways in which secrecy constitutes actors and the practices they engage in as rational and legitimate would, as a first step of many, enrich international relations’ and security studies’ understanding of the power of secrecy and by extension open up new avenues for empirical work and the development of new concepts and methods.