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Secrecy, especially state secrecy, has taken on increasing interest for scholars of international relations and security studies. However, even with interest in secrecy on the rise, there has been little explicit attention paid to exposure. The breaking of secrecy has generally been relegated to the role of a mere 'switch', whose internal workings and variations are of little consequence. This article argues that exposure is a significant process in its own right, and introduces a new conceptualization of exposure as a socially and politically constructed process, one that must be 'thickly described' if we are to understand how it occurs and has effects. I differentiate the process of exposure into two distinct aspects, reserving the concept of exposure to refer to releases of information, while introducing the concept of revelation to refer to a collective recognition that something has been exposed. The first part of the article explores existing understandings of secrecy and exposure to demonstrate why a new framework is needed, while the second part applies this framework to a case study of the exposure of the use of torture in the post-9/11 US 'war on terror'.

While torture and assassination have not infrequently been used by states, the post 9/11 'war on terror' waged by the US has been distinguished by the open acknowledgement of, and political and legal justifications put forward in support of, these practices. This is surprising insofar as the primary theories that have been mobilized by sociologists and political scientists to understand the relation between the spread of human rights norms and state action presume that states will increasingly adhere to such norms in their rhetoric, if not always in practice. Thus, while it is not inconceivable that the US would engage in torture and assassination, we would expect these acts would be conducted under a cloak of deniability. Yet rather than pure hypocrisy, the US war on terror has been characterized by the development of a legal infrastructure to support the use of 'forbidden' practices such as torture and assassination, along with varying degrees of open defence of such tactics. Drawing on first-order accounts presented in published memoirs, this paper argues that the Bush administration developed such openness as a purposeful strategy, in response to the rise of a legal, technological, and institutional transnational human rights infrastructure which had turned deniability into a less sustainable option. It concludes by suggesting that a more robust theory of state action, drawing on sociological field theory, can help better explain the ways that transnational norms and institutions affect states.

Although the concept of cultural capital has been widely adopted in sociological studies of culture, education, and stratification, few studies have addressed the processes through which specific instantiations of cultural capital become important in particular institutional locations. This article, based on an analysis of primary documents relating to changes in admissions policies at Harvard College between 1945 and 1965, addresses the question of how nonacademic factors came to have such a significant role in undergraduate admissions at elite American universities. It argues that in relatively autonomous fields such as higher education in the mid–twentieth century United States, cultural capital is shaped not only by the relations of cultural qualities and economic classes but also through specific intra- and extra-institutional struggles within the field in question.

The study of expertise has generally been guided by an assumption that the production of expert knowledge occurs within institutionalized fields of knowledge production. This assumption has shaped both theory development and the selection of empirical cases. As a result, studies have tended to neglect the emergence of knowledge in other contexts. The situation has recently evolved, however, with the introduction of the concepts of 'interstitial' and 'transnational' fields. Yet these advances do not always take account of particular fields of expertise-terrorism expertise is one-in which experts lack control, not just over the certification of their peers, but also over the very object of their expertise and the techniques for producing knowledge about it. The growing attention that has in recent years been given to other forms of expertise is the result both of the multiplication of new relations between experts and states and of the appearance of doubts concerning the 'universalizable' character of assumptions regarding this particular and historical relationship-assumptions upon which older theories of expert fields were based. Adapted from the source document.

Discussions about the meaning of terrorism are enduring in everyday language, government policy, news reporting, and international politics. And disagreements about both the definition and the class of violent events that constitute terrorism contribute to the difficulty of formulating effective responses aimed at the prevention and management of the threat of terrorism and the development of counterterrorism policies. Constructions of Terrorism collects works from the leading scholars on terrorism from an array of disciplines—including communication, political science, sociology, global studies, and public policy—to establish appropriate research frameworks for understanding how we construct our understanding of terrorism