Secrecy Studies

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’.

This is a book review of Benedek Láng's "Real Life Cryptology. Ciphers and Secrets in Early Modern Hungary" (Amsterdam 2018).
As customary for JIPSS journal book reviews, the style is a digest-like review which focuses primarly on aspects relevant to the audience of JIPSS (Intelligence, Propaganda and Security Studies).