Covert Action: National Approaches to Unacknowledged Intervention - Paperback

Covert action is usually told as an American story. This collection runs it across twenty countries and several eras instead.

What the comparison buys

Once the same practice is traced through different regimes, the patterns stop looking like national character and start looking like structure.

The scope is wide on purpose: propaganda, economic and political subversion, paramilitary work, and the operations states will never admit to.

Who it is for

An edited academic volume, assembled by intelligence historians and international relations scholars. Historians, political scientists and people writing policy are the readership.

From the publisher

A comparative international perspective challenges conventional narratives about unacknowledged intervention

"Covert action" is generally understood as politically motivated and plausibly deniable interference by one state in the affairs of another state. It includes propaganda, political or economic subversion, paramilitary action, and assassinations. Covert action is the most consequential and controversial form of secret statecraft, and it has become a ubiquitous feature of international politics. However, it is often sensationalized or seen through a narrow, US-centric lens.

Covert Action challenges this conventional narrative and redefines secret statecraft by offering a groundbreaking comparative international perspective that explores the practice of unacknowledged intervention across twenty countries and a range of eras. Bringing together leading scholars from around the world, this volume moves beyond the American, and wider, anglosphere perspectives to examine covert action practices across states, regime types, and time.

This book will be important reading for historians, political scientists, and policymakers, and it provides a foundational study of the hidden mechanisms of international power. It takes a global perspective and thus transforms the understanding of how nations truly interact behind the scenes, revealing covert action as a complex form of international statecraft.

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