A new research article from Lauren Sukin and her colleague Kathryn Hedgecock (United States Military Academy) called “Implausible Deniability and Escalation in the Gray Zone” in Security Studies finds that generally, states use deniability—obscuring which actors took which actions—to limit the extent of accountability for their aggression in the international system.
Using survey experiments among US military cadets (N = 735), they examine how two strategies of deniability common to the gray zone—cyber operations and the use of proxy organizations—influence willingness to respond with force. Scholars have debated whether these strategies are escalatory. The article instead argues that the use of deniability strategies makes escalation more likely but also lowers the intensity of the escalation that occurs. Understanding how deniability operates in the gray zone will be increasingly significant as states continue to shift from traditional combat to an environment of strategic competition in the gray zone.