EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Defense Transparency: Seeking a Definition for a Paradoxical Concept

Jon Lindsay

Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, Working Paper Series from Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, University of California

Abstract: Most people believe that transparency improves governance, by improving trust in relations between governments and their people as well as with other governments. The devil, as always, is in the details. The paradox of transparency is that the metaphor conveys unproblematic revelation of true information, yet in practice the provision of believable, relevant information takes a lot of institutional and political work to achieve. Transparency in international security is more problematic because relationships between the information, its referent, and context of interpretation can be especially complex considering the multiple channels of information competing for attention and authority. This brief proposes a definition of “defense transparency” that takes these complexities into account, drawing on a pragmatic notion of communication between particular information sources, messages, and receivers, the normative goal of which is to enhance collective security.

Keywords: Social and Behavioral Sciences; transparency; paradox; governance; security (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-10-01
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/3485013j.pdf;origin=repeccitec (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cdl:globco:qt3485013j

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, Working Paper Series from Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, University of California
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lisa Schiff ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:cdl:globco:qt3485013j