Description:

Please join the International Relations Speaker Series as they host Professor Isabella Bellezza, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University. 

Abstract: Should states reveal secrets to shape public opinion during international crises? While existing work emphasizes the advantages of state secrecy for managing escalation, governments are increasingly experimenting with transparency–disclosing intelligence to rally support against rivals. We call this practice preemptive disclosure. We investigate the extent to which such disclosures are likely to persuade the public to support costly foreign policy and personal actions. We test our expectations in a pre-registered, two-wave survey experiment simulating a Chinese invasion of Taiwan and find that, among the US public, preemptive disclosure effectively shifts perceptions but does little to support for costly countermeasures. Our findings contribute to debates about the strategic role of secrecy in international relations and offer policy-relevant insights for practitioners weighing whether to gamble with transparency in an increasingly saturated and fragmented information environment.

Isabella Bellezza is a political scientist whose work bridges international security and international political economy. Her research explores policing, political networks, and strategic secrecy in world politics. Her current book project examines how, when, and why border agencies cooperate to police global trade and travel and what that cooperation achieves. The project is based on her dissertation, which won Brown University’s 2025 Joukowsky Family Foundation Outstanding Dissertation Award. Beyond the book, Bellezza’s ongoing projects investigate how political networks impact the distribution of public resources, the promises and pitfalls of disclosing national security intelligence to the public, and the drivers of U.S. foreign police assistance. Previously, she was a Fulbright Scholar, Boren Award recipient, and a pre-doctoral fellow at Brown’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. Bellezza received a Ph.D. in Political Science from Brown University and a B.A. in Political Science from Swarthmore College.