Deception & Inquiry in International Security: The logic of epistemic struggle from the Cold War to cyber conflict

In recent years ‘de­ception’ has become a central problem of international security, underlying issues from disinformation and pro­paganda to information manipulation, cyber subversion and in­fluence campaigns. Yet despite a general political consensus that de­ception undermines the production of reliable political knowledge, it re­mains a surprisingly marginal and over­looked political con­cept. While authoritarian states em­brace deceit as a powerful weapon of statecraft, liberal demo­cratic governments increasingly see it as a strategic threat, a danger to the founda­tions of the state, society, and the interna­tional order – even to human reason and truth itself. Yet even in democracies there are influential argu­ments that deception is a necessary instrument of power that no state can afford to re­nounce. This suggests that both our practical and theoretical struggles to inquire into international de­ception might have profound consequences for security, democracy, and the study of inter­national politics.

This project investigates the relation between international de­ception and the search for political knowledge. Asking why and how deception became a central problem of se­curity but failed to be­come a political concept, it combines archival research with conceptual analysis, tracking the hidden history of Anglo-American de­ception concepts from their emergence in the Cold War to their proli­fera­tion in the present. Through four case studies of international ‘epistemic struggle’ – intelligence contests, strategic com­petitions, diplomatic crises, and cyber conflicts – it argues that deception be­came a central – yet hidden – problem of security as international actors weaponized the conduct of po­litical inquiry, systematically exploiting the methods of truth-seeking in the search for ad­versarial power. Drawing on international relations theory, intelligence studies, and the pragma­tist philosophy of science, the project explains why political science in parti­cular struggles to solve the epistemological and methodological problems of de­ception, and why these intellectual traps are becoming in­creasingly central to the conduct of international security.

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