The Logic of Cunning: Deception & Inquiry in International Politics

This research project explores how the logic of deception can shape the politics of international security. Conceived as the process by which truth-seeking practices are defeated through the secret manipulation of signs, inferences, and arguments, deception can be seen as the key problem underlying issues of disinformation, information operations, digital propaganda and influence campaigns, which are widely thought to endanger not only national and international security but the conceptual foundations of democracy itself.

Yet despite the apparent urgency, policy makers struggle not only to understand the practical problems of deception but are unable to conceptualise it beyond vague, jargonistic definitions. At the same time, theories of deception that inform security practices are drawn uncritically from historical doctrines of intelligence, secret statecraft, and strategic theory. However, seen in their historical context, many of these ideas gave rise to significant political misperceptions and undemocratic practices, from the hallucination of external and internal enemies to the securitisation of social and even cognitive processes.

This project argues that the tendency for deception inquiries and counter-deception efforts to result in self-defeating outcomes is not simply a historical accident, but a product of the conceptual and phenomenological character of deception itself, which takes place at a complex semiotic level and involves hypothetical reasoning that is difficult to analyse using political logics of force or traditional scientific epistemologies.

Addressing both historical and conceptual problems this project i) reconstructs the conceptual history of deception in US security from the Cold War to the present, adopting a critical-genealogical approach to understand how fear of deceit can shape political and scientific thought; ii) draws on the pragmatist philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce to develop a theoretical and methodological framework that can clarify the semiotic and cognitive dimensions of deception while serving as a normative framework for evaluating the success of inquiries into and theories of deception.