Democracy and the depth of intelligence sharing: why regime type hardly matters

Secrecy in International Relations and Foreign Policy

“…They theorize that states tend to keep sensitive compliance-related information secret, including intelligence information that could reveal sources and methods and thereby damage a state's national security if it were revealed. For this reason, only states with very close personal ties and strong reputations tend to share intelligence with one another (Brown & Farrington 2017). States cannot simply provide their conclusions about other states' compliance with norms and laws, because they have incentives to misrepresent their information and/or may reach the wrong conclusions (Walsh 2009, Jervis 2010, Rovner 2011, Yarhi-Milo 2013a, Brown et al 2019).…”

Circulation, not cooperation: towards a new understanding of intelligence agencies as transnationally constituted knowledge providers

“…One emerging finding from several projects is that international intelligence relations are most stable when they are initiated due to internal agency interests, rather than on command from external policy makers. 42 For example, Björn Fägersten writes:…”

“…In a 2017 article, Jonathan Brown and Alex Farringdon addressed the puzzle that neither a shared strategic rationale (i.e., the standard cooperation argument), nor shared governance norms explain the large variety of international intelligence relations. 70 Answering Adam Svendsen's call 'to turn to less obvious bodies of ideas that focus on information exchange', Brown and Farringdon use sociological research on communication to argue that the depth of intelligence relations hinges on personal ties and on how these develop in terms of mutual expectations:…”