This chapter identifies ten lessons for international relations that emerge from the book.

This chapter grows out of the strain of queer theory that revolves around questions of time. Many thinkers make sense of queer subjects by exploring their complex relationships to the past, present, and future as well as what time signifies in this context. Taking seriously the critical linkage between queerness and temporality, I consider how queer bodies make us aware of time – whether through temporal refusal, embrace, or displacement. I argue that contemporary novelists Mia McKenzie and Robert Jones, Jr., use queer characters to reorient narrative understandings of time and present new possible relationships to time. McKenzie’s The Summer We Got Free (2013) and Jones’s The Prophets (2021) both attend to the past to write Black queer life, and, in doing so, these authors provide meditations on time and the writing of history. Beginning with a consideration of the larger historical context of Black queer writing from the end of the twentieth century, the chapter highlights the narrative questioning of the temporal placement and meaning of the Black queer body and draws a connection between the narrative construction and conceptions of temporality that disrupt prevalent ways of thinking about time. In these texts, time emerges as a queer formation.

As Christianity continued to transition from school churches to the monepiscopate, the role of hiddenness and openness in Christian teaching become an increasingly contested issue. Three writings associated with the so-called Hippolytan school – the Traditio apostolica, the Commentarium in Canticum Canticorum, and De Christo et antichristo – shed light on the tensions between hiddenness and secrecy in baptismal instruction.

This chapter describes the role of economists during Honecker’s consumer-oriented Unity of Social and Economic Policy. Drawing on the example of Erwin Rohde (1927–2010), professor of public finance at Humboldt University, it illustrates the professional practices of university economists including functionary positions, teaching reforms, and research efforts subject to revised plans and institutional control. The chapter argues that this organization resulted in an increasing turn inward that was inherent in the epistemic regime of East German economists and deprived them of a critical role in social discourse. To a large extent, the ongoing reforms had the ideological function of creating political stability through future promises, while the actual strategic activities that were incompatible with this ideology were covered by a veil of secrecy. This is illustrated with the example of the so-called area for commercial coordination.

This chapter explores the cultural significance of the optical telegraph in Ireland. Following the institution of the Chappe télégraphe in revolutionary France, this long-distance communications technology was widely innovated and subsequently adopted by numerous governments including, briefly, the British administration at Dublin Castle. The chapter begins by discussing the promotion, in the Belfast Northern Star, of the telegraph designed by the ‘improving’ Ascendancy landlord, Richard Lovell Edgeworth. It then considers the politics of telegraphic discourse in Ireland in the years leading up to the Rebellion of 1798, with a particular focus on the associations between telegraphy and the United Irish press. Finally, it suggests some points of affinity between Maria Edgeworth’s tale ‘The White Pigeon’ (1800) and her father’s telegraph. In its connection with competing ideas of Irish nationality, security, and surveillance, I argue, the telegraph offers valuable insights into the relations between literature and technology in late eighteenth-century Ireland.

Chapter 5 looks at deliberations. The traditional view of deliberations is that jurors are capable from the moment they are selected to deliberate in a way that yields a fair and just verdict. In contrast, the transformation view recognizes that jurors must perform a task for which they have not volunteered; they must be aware of their personal biases and try not to be swayed by them; they must deliberate to try to reach a unanimous verdict with a group of strangers; and they must decide the facts and apply the law even though both are new to them. However, the experiences they have gone through as jurors have helped to prepare them to deliberate. In addition, the setting and structure of the deliberations help them to maintain the necessary discipline. The jurors are secluded in the jury room; they are required to vote and to give reasons to the group; if unanimity is required they must come to a group understanding; and they must make a decision that has serious consequences. There are features of deliberations that help jurors to assume their role as jurors, such as having a foreperson, a diverse jury, a group deliberation, and the judge's instructions.

This chapter discusses how Saudi women have actively negotiated gender boundaries and expanded their scope through the daily practice of charity work and the networks established among fellow social workers and volunteers. Founded in 1961–2 as a women-only initiative, the First Women’s Welfare Association in Jeddah counts among the oldest extant welfare associations in the kingdom enlisted with the Ministry of Social Affairs. The longue-durée perspective adopted in the chapter pays attention to the changing aspirations of different generations involved with the charity organization.

Although the First Women’s Welfare Association is often considered a "traditional charity" with an "Islamic aid" approach, its focus on single women, female-headed households, and the feminization of poverty transgresses traditional norms in multiple ways. The chapter discusses the charity’s use of donations, zakat and ṣadaqa, food banks, endowments, and shelters for single women and female-headed households. By situating practices of almsgiving within the wider legal and political framework of the zakat tax imposed by the Saudi state, as well as within the context of further legislation targeting money laundering and terrorist financing, the research highlights that religious ideals are subject to interpretation and object to various authoritative claims.

Chapter 5, “Information Wars,” is the opening case study of four intelligentsia-built resistance systems, which consider how the intelligentsia responded to Nazi persecution with projects bent on maintaining national traditions and rebuilding a Polish state. It examines the one that undergirds the rest: underground information creation and trafficking that kept the elite connected and funneled news into and out of the city. In response to the closure of Polish-language press, radio bookstores, and libraries, a number of educated Poles created an underground world of secret newsletters and journals to keep the city informed about occupier behavior and the circumstances of the wider war. This project involved entangled networks of individuals who were brutally punished if caught, and the work of writing, editing, couriering, and reading underground press initiated many Varsovians into anti-Nazi “conspiracies.” Information sourced in the occupied city was not merely for local consumption but was painstakingly smuggled out by a sprawling network of Polish and international couriers toting encrypted information to the states of the Grand Alliance. This chapter argues that the ability of Poles in Warsaw to counter Nazi propaganda narratives with their own information was essential to all later successful opposition.

In this chapter we present our recommendations for how the policy landscape in the U.S. and other liberal democracies should respond to the opportunities and challenges brought on by quantum information science. These recommendations are informed by the four scenarios of quantum futures combined with the understanding of technology capabilities we discussed in Part I. We begin this chapter by putting our cards on the table and presenting our policy goals. We then explore how to achieve these goals using traditional policy levers: direct investments, education, and law. We conclude with a discussion of national security issues.

This chapter develops a selective genealogy of the concept of publicity as it appears throughout the history of political thought, beginning with Plato and ending with Henry Sidgwick. Beyond its intrinsic interest, there is instrumental value to tracing a genealogy of publicity. Two benefits stand out in particular. First, by looking to what the giants of the past had to say about transparency in government, we find a greater diversity of positions than we currently see. Some flatly reject openness in government, embracing opacity in its place. And second, looking to the past shows how the concept of publicity can take on many different forms. Sometimes it refers to being offered justifications for the laws one lives under, sometimes it means that persons must have access to the philosophical theories inspiring the political systems they inhabit, sometimes it is used as a kind of test to probe the morality of public policies, sometimes it means that persons should be able to carefully monitor what public officials are up to, and so on.

This introductory chapter offers an overview of Secret Government: The Pathologies of Publicity. The book is split into two separate and autonomous parts, roughly tracking what I take to be two distinct traditions in political philosophy. Part I is focused on transparency as it relates to questions of institutional design. Part II focuses on publicity as it relates to the political philosophy of John Rawls and the liberal tradition he inspired. In conjunction, parts I and II jointly offer something like a comprehensive philosophical analysis of transparency in government.