"[...] This series thus proposes to unpack the concepts of transparency and volatility across three major arenas of international affairs: security, diplomacy, and development. Each issue-area features two essays, each focusing on different aspects of transparency and/or volatility. Two additional essays (by Gerald Hyman and Joseph Siegle) examine the ramifications of the growing interplay between issue-areas in the information age. Some authors situate their research within the context of academic literature, while others are more focused on policy and/or operational contexts. Taken together, the papers in this series seek to usefully organize the issue under inquiry in order to render it manageable and understandable to a wider scholarly, policy, and practitioner audience.
While this paper series uses transparency and volatility as a framework for examining international relations in the information age, it does not necessarily place information and communication technologies at the forefront of the analysis. While some papers do focus on ICT, the purpose is not to minutely examine new forms of technology and their impact. Rather, the premise for this series is that ubiquitous global communication flows have, over time, created an encompassing information environment that nurtures transparency and volatility as pervasive conditions and/or guiding norms." (Introduction, page 4)