Political Secrecy

The expression “Reason of State” belongs to the language and the political culture of the late Renaissance period. Still today this expression is commonly used to mean recourse to force or, at any rate, to exceptional instruments on the part of a subject of political power who acts out of the need to keep personal command and to guarantee law and order within society. Beginning from the early 1980s a wide number of studies questioned the conceptual associa-tion between Machiavelli and reason of state as well as Friedrich Meinecke’s interpretation of ratio status as machtpolitik. This new scholarship described reason of state as an art of government expressing a specific sensibility toward the state and aimed at defining the techniques for its management and preservation. By following this new line of study, the essay examines the relations between de-mocracy and reason of state in order to further an interpretation of contemporary democracies as “emergency democracies”. Demo-cratic reason of state will not be interpreted as the constitutional ex-ercise of exceptional powers in extreme necessity but as the re-course to emergency policies in recurrent and enduring crisis. The article also discusses the relations between reason of state, demo-cratic institutions and global governance in order to debate the role of democratic reason of state within the broader framework offered by security governance international programs.

Neue Untersuchungen zum zählebigsten Dokument des modernen Antisemitismus.
Unter dem Titel »Protokolle der Weisen von Zion« ist eine Schrift bekannt, die die Juden bezichtigt, auf konspirativ-subversive Weise nach der Weltherrschaft zu streben. Entstanden um 1900, dürften die »Protokolle« das noch immer am weitesten verbreitete Dokument des modernen Antisemitismus sein. Bis heute sind die genauen Umstände ihrer Entstehung ungeklärt. Vor allem die Fragen, wer an der Abfassung beteiligt war und welche Absichten dabei verfolgt wurden, sind noch immer offen – und Gegenstand weitreichender, oft phantastischer Spekulationen. Aktuell erzählt Umberto Eco in seinem Roman »Der Friedhof in Prag« eine fiktive Version der Fälschungsgeschichte. Die hier versammelten Essays präsentieren neue Erkenntnisse zur Herkunft und Verbreitung der »Protokolle«. Es werden bislang vernachlässigte Aspekte des ominösen Textes untersucht: seine Resonanzen mit politischen Utopien, aber auch mit den Verschwörungstheorien des 19. Jahrhunderts; die Verwendung der plagiierten Quellen und sein Status als Plagiat; und nicht zuletzt die Struktur eines Textes, der zwar viel zitiert, aber selten gelesen wurde.
Mit Beiträgen u.a. von: Carlo Ginzburg, Stefan Gregory, Richard S. Levy, Cesare G. De Michelis, Ulrich Raulff

Building on previous research published in Secret Manoeuvres in the Dark, corporate and police spying on activists (2012), the author proposes a new field of research called Activist intelligence and covert strategy.

Using exclusive access to previously confidential sources, Secret Manoeuvres showed how companies such as Nestlé, Shell and McDonald’s use covert methods to evade accountability. The author concluded that corporate intelligence gathering has shifted from being reactive to proactive, and identified a seriously under-researched area: the state’s concern with corporate interests, their close cooperation in collecting intelligence on campaigners, and a shared agenda in dealing with dissent.

This paper encompasses an introduction to the published case studies, a definition of the proposed research field, and an exploration of its positioning in a multidisciplinary area as well as its theoretical embedding. The discussion under Methods: Hybrid Projects makes a case for the fusion of journalistic and social scientific approaches to the subject matter.

Objective. This study seeks to show how authoritarian secrecy complicates the reliable identification of the inner power configuration in dictatorships. This topic is relevant to recent research on autocratic regime subtypes and institutions. Methods. The study pursues a theoretical and conceptual analysis of the implications of heteronomous structures of authoritarian power for: the opportunity and motive of autocrats to employ secrecy; the reliability of indirect types of evidence, such as the observable presence of institutions, legislation, or the regime's self-presentation through media, speeches, and interviews; and the production and preservation of direct sources. Results. I find that autocratic secrecy presents considerable obstacles for studying the highest levels of authoritarian power; that indirect forms of evidence are equivocal sources; and that, ultimately, we need to know how dictatorships actually operate to reliably classify regimes. Conclusions. Secrecy creates method-ological problems for the study of autocracies that are largely absent in the study of democracies. After having been seemingly displaced by the third wave of democratization, the comparative analysis of authoritarian regimes reemerged in recent years as a vibrant subfield in comparative politics. This new research is notable in its ambition and scope: whereas earlier work on authoritarianism generally centered on individual cases or comparisons specific to a region, the present work is broadly comparative and a major line of inquiry seeks to develop nothing less than a general theory capable of explaining different types of nondemocratic rule and their dynamic properties as a function of internal institutional power configurations. 1 This new research agenda thus returns to a classical problem within political theory, which concerns how the prince-in this context, the authoritarian ruling body-acts to maintain his standing as a ruler. Unlike earlier formulations that emphasized force, the recent literature suggests that institutions, particularly legislatures, political parties , and elections, may enable some authoritarian regimes to confront threats that might undermine their continued rule. In the process, these studies critically reelaborate a central finding of the literature on transitions-that internal divisions undermine authoritarian regimes-by exploring how subtypes of authoritarianism can create elite cohesion and avoid divisive schisms. Despite the considerable variety in method and arguments in this subfield, scholars generally agree that institutions matter in nondemocratic regimes. To this end, researchers have elaborated various typologies that discriminate regimes according to their internal power configurations and institutional characteristics, as well as sophisticated theories

This article sets out a framework for studying the power of secrecy in security discourses. To date, the interplay between secrecy and security has been explored within security studies most often through a framing of secrecy and security as a ‘balancing act,' where secrecy and revelation are binary opposites, and excesses of either produce insecurity. Increasingly, however, the co-constitutive relationship between secrecy and security is the subject of scholarly explorations. Drawing on ‘secrecy studies’, using the US ‘shadow war’ as an empirical case study, and conducting a close reading of a set of key memoirs associated with the rising practice of ‘manhunting’ in the Global War on Terrorism (GWoT), this article makes the case that to understand the complex workings of power within a security discourse, the political work of secrecy as a multi-layered composition of practices (geospatial, technical, cultural and spectacular) needs to be analysed. In particular, these layers result in the production and centering of several secrecy subjects that help to reproduce the logic of the GWoT and the hierarchies of gender, race and sex within and beyond special operator communities (‘insider’, ‘stealthy’, ‘quiet’, and ‘alluring’ subjects) as essential to the security discourse of the US ‘shadow war’.

The evocation of a personal research path focused on the issue "State Secret" is an opportunity to make an analytical review of its peculiarities and difficulties. It is even more necessary that such an issue is a blind spot in the social sciences field. One will draw a comparison with works stemmed from the anglosphere and evoke the issue of the material available despite secrecy, then this article provides provisional findings linked to a research dealing with the "Secret State" in the United States, France and UK.

Atomic energy developed from 1940 as a subject shrouded in secrecy. Identified successively as a crucial element in military strategy, national status and export aspirations, the research and development of atomic piles (nuclear chain-reactors) were nurtured at isolated installations. Like monastic orders, new national laboratories managed their specialist workers in occupational environments that were simultaneously cosseted and constrained, defining regional variants of a new state-managed discipline: reactor technology. This paper discusses the significance of security in defining the new subject in the USA, UK and Canada – wartime allies with similar political traditions but distinct trajectories in this field during the Cold War. The intellectual borders and content of the subject developed differently in each country, shaped under the umbrella of secrecy by disparate clusters of expertise, industrial traditions, and national goals. The nascent cadre was contained until the mid 1950s by classified publications and state-sponsored specialist courses. The early context of high security filtered its members and capped enduringly both their professional aspirations and public engagement.

NSA? Spionage? Noch nie davon gehört. Im Begriff des Geheimnisses verbergen sich Aporien der Aufklärung, Spuren magischer Weltverhältnisse, machtpolitische Arkana und nicht zuletzt messianische Versprechen von Offenbarung, Entdeckung, Lösung und Befreiung: Der Blick hinter die Kulissen der Macht in der journalistischen Rhetorik, die Obduktion der kleinsten Dinge und der Einblick in die verborgensten Zusammenhänge der physikalischen Welt im Large Hadron Collider, die verschlüsselten Botschaftsdepeschen, die ärztliche Schweigepflicht, Betriebsgeheimnisse, Zaubertricks, kriminelle und subversive Kommunikation, Tabus, die Idee des Privaten, das Expertenwissen – diese Reihe lässt sich augenscheinlich endlos weiterführen und man stellt schnell fest, dass eine Rede über das Geheimnis an und für sich nicht möglich zu sein scheint. Eine pauschale Rede vom Geheimnis an sich liefert sich einem (meistens gerechtfertigten) Pathosverdacht aus. Das Geheimnis erweist sich in diesen Fällen als oszillierender, polarisierender Kampfbegriff, der immer wieder in der Literatur hervorragt und von Georg Simmel als eine der größten Errungenschaften der Menschheit, von Friedrich Nietzsche als Beginn der Kultur und von Wilhelm Emrich als Element jeder großen Dichtung beschrieben wird. Diese polemischen Überhöhungen des Geheimnisses bieten für zeitgeistige Kommentare genügend Projektionsfläche, die aufgrund ihrer integrativen Unschärfe oft auf einem feuilletonistischen Niveau verhaftet bleiben, insbesondere wenn sie sich mit aktuellen Themen wie Transparenz und Datenschutz verbinden. Bei näherer Betrachtung dessen, was als geheim bezeichnet wird, zeigen sich hingegen wiederholt die Bedingungen der Unzugänglichkeit des Untersuchungsgegenstandes Geheimnis – ein Phänomen der Begriffsarbeit, das jede philosophische oder undisziplinierte Methode begleitet, die nach der Unvollständigkeit des eigenen Themas sucht. Das dekonstruktive Prinzip der genealogischen Untersuchung verwandelt das Geheimnis in ein unbekanntes Objekt X, das als Thema lediglich vage durchklingt, vor allem aber in seiner Varianz erscheint. Das Geheimnis bleibt ein Phantasma, das sich immer wieder an verschiedenen Orten auskristallisiert.

La disparidad de componentes Miscelânea de Foios (c. 1577) tiene un elemento aglutinador en la denuncia del desgobierno de D. Sebastián y la amenaza que para Portugal representa Felipe II. La yuxtaposición de estos elementos preexistentes crea entre ellos secuencias con significados nuevos. El aparente caos se revela así lleno de secretos y de claves para descubrirlos. Ambas coronas son atacadas también en la alusión a temas nefandos: aquello de lo que no se puede hablar. Entreleemos así referencias acalladas a la acusación de parricidio que ya pesaba sobre Felipe II por la muerte de D. Carlos; a la homosexualidad de D. Sebastián, borrosamente inscrita en el fondo de un complejo y falso horóscopo, así como en oblicuas alusiones a la relación del rey con su confesor. Tampoco falta la melancolía suicida del rey, que aquí se revela y oculta en alusiones lo bastante inteligibles como para que algún texto fuera posteriormente, y con vehemencia, tachado. The many, disparate components of the Miscelânea de Foios (c. 1577) find a common aim in denouncing King Sebastian’s government and the threat that Phillip II of Spain posed to Portugal. The juxtaposition of these preexisting elements creates brief sequences with new meanings, so that what at first sight seems to be a chaotic mix reveals itself to be a chestfull of secrets and keys to unveil them. Both crowns are attacked by way of allusions to their nefarious secrets: those that cannot be spoken about: hushed references to accusations of parricide against Phillip II, allusions to king Sebastian’s homosexuality, hidden at the bottom of a fake horoscope and behind complex mythological comparisons. Also present is the young king’s melancholic, suicidal character, an allusion to which was picked up by one reader who vehemently tried to erase it.

The title of this piece is meant to evoke at least three sources. The first – and perhaps the only obvious one – concerns the ability of holograms to display parallax, a shifting of visual viewpoint that allows a three-dimensional image to reveal background objects behind those in the foreground. This parallax view is a unique feature of holograms as visual media. A second allusion is to the American film The Parallax View (1974, director A. J. Pakula), a rather paranoid thriller focusing on conspiracy theories concerning government and corporations. To a casual observer, the bare details of the military origins of holography suggest just such cynical and centrally-directed development, although I hope to dispel such simplistic ideas here. And a third passing reference is to the book The Parallax View (2006) by Slavoj Zizek, a wide-ranging and deep exploration of duality in political views, ontological interpretations and scientific methods, among other topics.
Zizek’s theme, as well as Pakula’s, is relevant to my approach, which focuses on a parallax of both practice and intent. During the first successful decade of holography, conflicting viewpoints developed between distinct communities: the militarily-guided engineers who invented practical holography, and the later imaging scientists and artisans who stressed three-dimensionality and other attributes instead of the original goal of optical image processing. I argue that distinct groups of users had different perceptions of what holography is and what it is for.

Covering a wide range of public discourse from 2003 to 2010 about CIA agent Valerie Plame, this essay contributes a novel rhetorical theory of secrets. By contrast to other critiques of the Bush-era secrecy that focus on policies the administration kept concealed from the public, I suggest that rhetoric is the means by which subjects figure the secret, to be understood as knowledge in the fact that the subject cannot know. To make this argument, I draw on the theoretical tools of psychoanalysis and the rhetorical tropes of repetition, caesura, and synecdoche.

The exchange between Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig on the status of halakha is a well known, but also frustrating fixture in scholarship. For rather than responding to Rosenzweig's critique, Buber seems to retreat in silence, claiming to be "unable to speak" about his position on Jewish Law. Scholars have generally tried to explain Buber's failure to respond on philosophical and biographical grounds. What I propose, by contrast, is to revisit the question of Buber's silence and secrecy from a hermeneutical standpoint, arguing that Buber engaged in a deliberate strategy of concealment that constituted its own form of response. The hermeneutics of silence discloses a call for religious renewal that follows a state of Dialogvergessenheit, but which cannot be made audible. Neither dialogue nor its remembrance can be commanded. While Buber struggles with his Nichtredenkönnen, he also stands in a tradition of secretive hermeneutics-the Jewish hermeneutics of sod.

De onde vem o direito dos Estados de gerar e guardar segredos? Se os segredos não podem ser evitados e, por conseguinte, os quisermos ‘democráticos’, quais serão os processos pelos quais um segredo se torna legítimo? Este estudo pretende explorar as nuances que envolvem o sigilo e a transparência no campo da defesa nacional – envolvendo, por conseguinte, as Forças Armadas.

The Gerald Aylmer Seminar 2015 - 'Secret Histories'
Friday, 27th February 2015
The Wolfson Conference Suite
The Institute of Historical Research, Senate House.

Hosted by The Royal Historical Society, The Institute of Historical Research, The National Archives and The British Library

Using Hannah Arendt as our guide, we examine the imperfect and at times curious mechanisms through which state projects enact an aura of secrecy and deception. To date, International Political Sociology (IPS) has paid strikingly little attention to the workings of secrecy and deception in politics. Arendt's contributions to international political sociolo-gies of state secrecy are threefold. First, Arendt's reflections on lying and secrecy occur across a wide historico-philosophical field, generating insights that a focus on liberal democracy alone cannot. Second, Arendt draws our attention to important variations in the arts of secrecy and deception , and their ethico-political implications. Third, Arendt highlights the limits of traditional scholarly methods for research on lying and secrecy and offers an important tool that we conceptualize as a twist. We demonstrate these three contributions through a case study of a foggy Anglo-American intelligence project called Cobra Mist.

“Political Secrecy and Theatricality in Marlowe and Shakespeare” traces the transformation of the concept of political secrecy in Early Modern Britain and Europe, focusing on the role of dramatic literature in shaping the modern category of “intelligence.” At the outset of Early Modernity, a concept of political secrecy rooted in a political theology conceived secrets as the mystical possession of the sovereign, his so-called arcana imperii. By the late 17th century, the heterodoxies of the Reformation, upheavals of Early Modern science, and economic imperatives of Empire together shifted that concept’s epistemological locus away from sovereign authority. Political secrecy now marked the efforts of state administrators, accountants, and intelligencers to oversee information networks involving quantifiable data, concrete facts, the calculation of probable outcomes. Accompanying this transition was a debate among scholars and law clerks about the ability of mathematics, in particular Euclidean ideas about data, to accurately represent reality – a debate whose relevance has persisted into the 21st century era of Big Data. Crucially, the thinkers who contributed to this discourse, ranging from Francis Bacon to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, repeatedly resort to the language of poetics and drama to contend with political secrecy’s central conundrum: that the structures of political secrecy are by definition inaccessible to public discourse and thus require mimetic modeling to be fathomed. Theater becomes a laboratory of choice for thinking through these epistemological reconfigurations.

My analyses are buttressed by the close interweaving of Early Modern theater with the stakeholders in the debates surrounding political secrecy. Bacon turns to playwrighting to address statesmen and legal scholars at the Inns of Court, themselves practitioners of political secrecy. Meanwhile, the dramatically expanded information and intelligence networks of the early Empire intensify intercultural exchanges with Northern Africa, a feedback loop that brings the Arabic mathematical texts fueling the debate surrounding data to Oxford. Similar forays into the Americas and Asia provide the impetus for Leibniz to invent binary mathematics, the basic structure of data computation, which he hopes to use as a diplomatic tool in negotiations with sovereigns globally, especially China. Inspired by Bacon, Leibniz declares the premier medium of political epistemology to be a species of theatrum mundi: the ever-shifting flood of intelligence is distilled into rows of data, which are carefully staged as tables on memorandum pages, presenting themselves like the scenes and acts of a play that allows the sovereign to “apperceive the whole realm, as if at one glance.”

I consequently assert that Early Modern British drama stages rituals of ceremony, processions, masques, and plays that both adjudicate and make visible the boundary between the concept of secrecy in theory and the hidden world of its implementation. In my analysis, I focus on the figure of the Absent King in the Earl of Huntington plays by Anthony Munday and the Coronation Procession of James I., on Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus with its emphasis on amassing knowledge at all costs and the frailties of arcane knowledge; on the circulating, cryptic letter in Edward II that appears to implicate or kill everyone who handles it; and finally on the contrast between the Ghost’s certainties and the prince’s doubts in Hamlet, the former exemplifying the arcana imperii, and the latter typifying the constant weighing of probabilities inherent in the modern concept of intelligence. Ultimately, my analysis demonstrates that in the Early Modern period, literary modes of thought are not simply interpolated into debates in the emerging field of information science, but represent a quintessential feature of them.

Post-truth regimes are disconcerting to the extent that they confuse the distinction between true and false and thus obfuscate and obstruct political debate. And they dismantle the secret, by imitating its habit: they constantly make claims while leaving us to guess what exactly the true content is – or whether there is any content at all. In an imagined world without secrets, there would be no curiosity or confidentiality, no sincerity or trust, and no political possibility of thinking otherwise. Analysis of the logic of secrecy, the article argues, helps us to revisit the established confidence in our culture in the force of truth, and to confront a challenge post-truth regimes pose: that to establish truth involves affective force. Contrary to the common belief that truth – and secrecy – is something to be revealed, a Foucauldian reading suggests that to mobilize truth requires both truthfulness and a moment of creation. Truth relies on the secret but will always only emerge on the surface.

Concealed managerial ignorance (CMI) is a dark secret that protects managerial authority, a terra incognita that evades customary research methods. A longitudinal semi-native ethnography of automatic processing plants and their parent inter-kibbutz cooperatives by a management-educated ex-manager untangled the dysfunctional rule of outsider executives who concealed their ignorance by detachment from knowledgeable employees or/and by seductive-coercive control. Both practices retained ignorance by vicious distrust cycles of secrecy, mistakes, and failures, but total failures blocked vulnerably involved mid-level managers whose vulnerable involvement created high-trust local cultures through virtuous trust and learning cycles. Successes empowered them, so that ignorant superiors, who felt threatened, suppressed them, and they left. New outsider replacements were recruited, opted for CMI, failed, and replaced by new knowledgeable outsiders who succeeded, were empowered, and suppressed, and so on; this seesawed prolonged rule by dysfunctional ignorant executives. CMI by outsiders was found to be widespread, supporting the critique of distant leadership and the premise of managerial knowledge portability. The findings point to the potential of ethnographying executives missed by anthropologists and the need for studies of distrustful practices, while in practice offering new yardsticks for assessing candidates for executive jobs.

Exploring the intense and common critique of secrecy articulated by the Federalists' opponents both before and after ratification, this article sheds new light on the way in which the Constitution left open the question of what it meant to represent the people in government. The article traces how concerns about secrecy were amplified in the early republic, becoming a primary discourse in which Federalist policies were contested and serving as glue that bound former Antifederalists with Democratic-Republicans who had championed ratification, most notably James Madison. The article also examines debates about secrecy to underscore their centrality to the conception and construction of representative democracy. Attitudes about secrecy reflected underlying beliefs about the role of a representative and what made him legitimate as such. By asking why critics identified secrecy as threatening, the article uncovers the way in which political procedures were both reflective and constitutive of ideas about representative government, how it should work, and what made it legitimate.

Across subfields of political science, groups in subordinate power positions often have incentives to feign satisfaction with the status quo, in order to avoid punishment from more powerful actors. Consequently, subordinate actors’ cooperative public discourse is widely considered non-credible “cheap talk.” In contrast, we argue that for dissatisfied groups, misrepresenting preferences through cooperative public discourse involves significant costs and risks. To minimize the risk that proscribed goals will be discovered, subordinate actors must restrict even private discourse. Yet political groups and organizations rely on internal communication to achieve the intragroup coordination necessary to develop and implement policies. Refraining from proscribed discourse therefore constitutes a costly signal that carries some degree of credibility. Our argument has broad implications both for signaling theories and for the empirical measurement of actors’ preferences, which generalize across subfields of political science. These implications are illustrated by empirical applications to U.S. foreign policymaking, China’s international relations, and U.S. Supreme Court decisions.

ABSTRACT Post-truth regimes are disconcerting to the extent that they confuse the distinction between true and false and thus obfuscate and obstruct political debate. And they dismantle the secret by imitating its habit: they constantly make claims while leaving us to guess what exactly the true content is – or whether there is any content at all. In an imagined world without secrets, there would be no curiosity or confidentiality, no sincerity or trust, and no political possibility of thinking otherwise. Analysis of the logic of secrecy, the article argues, helps us to revisit the established confidence in our culture in the force of truth, and to confront a challenge post-truth regimes pose: that to establish truth involves affective force. Contrary to the common belief that truth – and secrecy – is something to be revealed, a Foucauldian reading suggests that to mobilize truth requires both truthfulness and a moment of creation. Truth relies on the secret but will always only emerge on the surface.

Résumé. Rumination, secret et vengeance… Trois termes qui, à première vue, ne paraissent entretenir entre eux qu’un rapport distant, brouillé, mais qui ne s’en trouvent pas moins inscrits au cœur de la violence terroriste ayant frappé la France ces dernières années. Pour élucider leurs liens étroits et complexes, cette étude retient pour échantillon les attentats jihadistes perpétrés entre 2015 et 2020.

Abstract. Ruminating, secrecy and revenge – at first sight, those three terms only seem distantly and obscurely related. Nevertheless, they lie at the core of the terrorism that has hit France over the past few years. This article will illuminate the complex and narrow links among them, basing itself on the Islamist attacks carried out between 2015 and 2020.

How can we understand the role of secrecy in the making of the European Union’s Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP)? This article analyses the nature of secrecy and questions some of the main assumptions surrounding the concept. In this respect, it argues that secrecy may be of functional necessity for policy-makers and actually compatible with good governance. Moreover, we must not put too much stock in transparency alone in that the relationship between secrecy and transparency is not zero-sum ‒ historically, transparency has sometimes been an instrument of control and domination. The article considers the case of the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) to shed light on what kind of secrecy exists in the foreign policy area, and argues that this is mainly a combination of functional and compound secrecy.