Chapter 5 focuses on the domain of international trade. In this chapter, we claim that states often withhold economic information that is essential for adjudicating trade disputes because they fear harmful reactions by market actors. We demonstrate that properly designed international organizations can ameliorate this problem by receiving and protecting such information. After formalizing our theory, we assess our hypotheses using new data on information sharing with the World Trade Organization. We show that key reforms designed to safeguard sensitive information increased the provision of this information and boosted trade cooperation in relevant industries. We conclude by discussing how solving this pervasive issue puts international trade institutions in tension with the normative goals of transparency and accountability.

We argue in Chapter 4 that states often seek to reveal intelligence about other states’ violations of international rules and laws but are deterred by concerns about revealing the sources and methods used to collect that intelligence. Properly equipped nuclear international organizations can mitigate these dilemmas, however, by analyzing and acting on sensitive information while protecting it from wide dissemination. Using new data on intelligence disclosures to the International Atomic Energy Agency and analysis of the full universe of nuclear proliferation cases, we demonstrate that strengthening the agency’s intelligence protection capabilities led to greater intelligence sharing and fewer suspected nuclear facilities. However, our theory suggests that this solution gives informed states a subtle form of influence and is in tension with the normative goal of international transparency.

The effectiveness of transitional justice is hotly debated. We highlight a largely overlooked source of such war crimes evidence: intelligence provided by third-party states. We argue that such countries often wish to provide this information but withhold it to avoid revealing intelligence sources and methods. The adoption of confidentiality systems by war crimes tribunals can ease this tension. Courts can integrate national intelligence to gain insights into culpability for atrocities while protecting sensitive details. However, supplying states will constrain their disclosures based on their political interests. We analyze US intelligence disclosures to war crimes tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. Drawing on newly reviewed archival materials, elite interviews, and secondary sources, we show that confidentiality protections elicited considerable intelligence disclosures when the United States had a political interest in prosecuting the case, thus increasing arrests and indictments.

The introduction provides motivation for our study, describes our approach to studying secrecy, outlines the contribution of our theory, and describes the plan of our book.

In Chapter 3, we provide an overview of sensitive information in global governance and important historical context. The chapter first describes new data on the confidentiality features of a sample of 106 IOs. We review variation in the frequency and form of such protections and show that measures to protect various forms of sensitive information are surprisingly common and vary in interesting ways. The chapter then describes the rise of the norm of transparency in diplomacy and global governance after World War I, which then deepened with the end of the Cold War. This is juxtaposed with early examples of IOs experimenting with confidentiality and sensitive information. The chapter concludes by explaining how changes in technology and broader cooperative goals have generally led to efforts to integrate sensitive information into IOs, despite the resulting tension with transparency.

In Chapter 8, we discuss the downstream impliactions of our argument and its scholarly, practical, and normative contributions. We first return to the themes of transparency and power, and assess our empirical findings and the related research. We analyze how the presence of a confidentiality function in an international organization (IO) may influence power dynamics and institutional transparency, and derive implications for understanding how IOs can manage such tensions. We also synthesize lessons from existing research on path dependence as well as findings from our four empirical chapters to reflect on the likely origins and decline of confidentiality systems. The chapter then discusses the broad relevance of our theory for other empirical domains and briefly reviews extensions to peacekeeping, international finance, cybersecurity, and environmental issues, which suggest the wide applicability of our framework. We conclude by analyzing the implications of our claims for scholarship on international politics.

In Chapter 7, we focus on the domain of foreign direct investment (FDI). We claim that states often refrain from sharing sensitive economic information, even though it can be important to adjudicating investment disputes. We demonstrate that properly designed IOs, such as the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), can ameliorate this problem by receiving and protecting sensitive information. We assess our hypotheses using new data on specific pieces of information shared – along with information withheld – from this institution. Specifically, we pair a measure of redactions in publicly released panel reports with qualitative case evidence. We show that key reforms designed to safeguard sensitive information increased the provision of this information and boosted FDI, especially in areas where sensitive information is particularly common. We conclude the chapter by discussing how solving this pervasive issue puts international investment institutions in tension with the normative goals of transparency and accountability.

Chapter 2 presents our core concepts, develops our theoretical logic, and derives hypotheses for empirical testing. The chapter defines our key terms and discusses the scope conditions on our theory. We then elaborate on what kinds of information are considered sensitive in our framework and describe the kinds of problems that can arise when such information is necessary for understanding compliance-related questions. We next expand on the necessary features of IOs’ confidentiality systems, providing concrete examples. The chapter concludes by developing our two core empirical expectations about the effect of confidentiality systems on the frequency of disclosures of sensitive information and on international cooperation.