Description
In recent years international politics has become increasingly preoccupied with the problems and potential of 'secret statecraft'—the exercise of state power through hidden, deceptive, subversive or manipulative means. Yet despite the urgency and continuity of these issues across a range of conflicts and crises, existing critical scholarship lacks a satisfactory theoretical framework for understanding the underlying logic that connects these practices to broader questions of security, power, and political rationality.
This paper develops a critical genealogy of metis, or 'cunning intelligence', arguing that this ancient notion is alive and well, hidden within practices of security and tacitly operationalized as a political logic that has been misunderstood in critical security scholarship. While theorists influenced by James C. Scott and Michel de Certeau tend to reduce metis to tactical practices and local knowledge, this paper argues that cunning represents a strategic logic of 'manipulative power', a general mode of adversarial rationality made salient by recent technological, geopolitical, and sociopolitical changes.
Through a critical genealogy and a pragmatic concept analysis of cunning concepts and discourses, the paper reveals cunning as a distinctive political logic—a normative approach to judgement and action under adversarial conditions—one requiring forms of knowledge, skill and reasoning distinct from those governing forceful coercion or diplomatic persuasion. Operating through mechanisms of detection, reversal, and deception, cunning problematizes traditional Western conceptions of security, power, reason and political knowledge. This theoretical intervention moves beyond existing accounts that locate cunning merely at the level of practice or tactical resistance, or exclusively within authoritarian politics, instead revealing the hidden role of cunning in Western political epistemes.
By explicating its intellectual history and theoretical structure, this paper argues that cunning has reemerged as a central logic of contemporary international politics, with profound implications for the practice, norms, and critical study of international relations.
