To compete and thrive in the 21st century, democracies, and the United States in particular, must develop new national security and economic strategies that address the geopolitics of information. In the 20th century, market capitalist democracies geared infrastructure, energy, trade, and even social policy to protect and advance that era’s key source of power—manufacturing. In this century, democracies must better account for information geopolitics across all dimensions of domestic policy and national strategy.
Speaker: Tyler Jost, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, International Security Program/Cyber Security Project
Why do interstate crises occur? Existing scholarship posits that states use crises to reveal information about capabilities, resolve, and preferences. This book project instead argues that interstate crisis propensity is in part a function of the design of national security institutions, defined as the rules and procedures for deciding and executing national security strategy. When states design national security institutions that integrate defense, diplomatic, and intelligence bureaucracies into a dedicated forum for deliberation and information sharing—such as the U.S. National Security Council—domestic capacity to reveal information absent a high-stakes crisis improves. However, when states design weak or exclusionary institutions, states are prone to inadvertently miss vital intelligence or send contradictory messages. Institutional inefficiencies in signal reception and transmission increase the probability that states select into interstate crisis.
The book project tests the argument first through statistical analyses that introduce and employ an original cross-national time series dataset on national security institutions across the world from 1946 to 2012. These data include 857 unique decision-making and coordination bodies, as well as 5,339 chief executives, defense ministers, foreign ministers, and senior intelligence advisers. Critically, they describe all known instances of national security councils across the world since World War II. The findings demonstrate a strong, negative relationship between the strength of national security institutions and propensity for interstate crisis. Complementary qualitative analysis illustrates the proposed signaling mechanisms of the theory, leveraging a wealth of new archival and interview evidence from China, Taiwan, India, Pakistan, Russia, and the United States.
Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.
For more information, email the International Security Program Assistant at susan_lynch@harvard.edu.