Scholars of international relations (IR) have a long tradition of treating uncertainty as an inalienable characteristic of the anarchical environment, in which modern states operate. Yet, it is important to remember that states have agency when it comes to creating uncertainty--uncertainty is strategic . Insufficient attention paid to the strategic origins of uncertainty has led most of the IR scholarship to overlook a host of phenomena related to the instrumental use of secrecy by states. The three essays that comprise this dissertation examine the motivations behind the strategic use of secrecy and its effect on conflict in three different realms. In "The Dark Side of Democratic Advantage: International Crises and Secret Agreements," Phillip Lipscy and I explore the motivations of leaders to resolve international crises through the use of secret agreements. We argue that leaders who place a high value on public outcomes, such as democratically elected officials, face incentives to secure public victories at the cost of private concessions to the adversary. Conversely, leaders who care little about public outcomes, such as personalist dictators, have incentives to demand private concessions in return for publicly backing down. The theory contributes to explaining important empirical puzzles, including democratic and autocratic peace and the tendency of democracies to seemingly win international disputes. Case studies, including the Cuban Missile Crisis, and quantitative evidence lend support to our predictions.
In "When Omission is Admission: Concealing Military Capabilities" and "Hide Your Strength and Bide Your Time: Secrecy and the Security Dilemma," I use formal bargaining models to examine incentives to reveal or conceal military capacity. Military capabilities are potentially observable, which means that concealing them often requires overtly denying observers access to information. Thus, observers can often infer unfavorable information from secrecy, which leads to an equilibrium, in which all types disclose information, no matter how unfavorable it is. In the models, uncertainty can only be generated when those who are stronger than others believe choose to conceal capabilities, thereby foregoing any bargaining advantages that can accrue due to transparency. In the first of the two essays, I discuss two factors that can cause both secrecy and war: incentives to conceal "sensitive" information and domestic political costs of transparency. In the last essay, I argue that secrecy can also be instrumental in avoiding conflict: e.g. I show that concealing large power shifts can alleviate the security dilemma that they otherwise induce. To illustrate my findings, I use examples from European history in the 19 th and 20 th centuries.
