From Backstage to the Spotlight: Domestic Constraints, Risk Perception, and Strategic Disclosure in International Crises

Why despite great danger, leaders opt for public confrontations during international crises? How do states and their leaders decide how to manage risk of crisis escalation and its domestic legitimacy during international crises? While existing scholarship emphasizes audience cost logic, treating public exposure primarily as a bargaining tool, this thesis reframes the problem by placing regime legitimacy at the center of state survival. I argue that leaders manage information strategically to shield legitimacy while containing escalation, with crisis visibility acting as a dynamic, independent variable that interacts with escalation risk. The interaction of visibility (high/low) and escalation risk (high/low) produces four distinct strategies: reticence, concealment, confrontational disclosure, and calibrated disclosure. This research developed this theory through a three-stage inquiry. First, a critical review of secrecy and crisis-escalation literature reveals their failure to explain why leaders sometimes accept greater military risks to "go public." Second, I construct a framework treating escalation risk and visibility as objective, evolving crisis attributes that leaders must assess. Third, four case studies, Soviet pilots in the Korean War (1950), the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), the EP-3 Hainan Incident (2001), and the Sino-Indian Galwan Valley clash (2020), demonstrate leaders shifting between strategies as visibility and risk evolved. Process-tracing of archival documents, declassified intelligence, media, and diplomatic records shows leaders prioritized domestic legitimacy over bargaining leverage, and carefully calibrated disclosure while facing a vital crisis. By integrating legitimacy concerns into crisis decision-making and establishing visibility as a distinct explanatory factor, this study extends audience-cost theory and offers a nuanced model of escalation control. The framework explains divergent publicity strategies in seemingly similar crises and provides a portable tool for anticipating state behavior in future international crises.