What is Secrecy Studies?

Secrecy studies is an interdisciplinary field of academic study examining how secrecy operates as a social, cultural, political and organisational practice. It analyses how concealment, often in relation to openness, transparency or revelation, is justified, produced, and maintained across institutional, technological and social contexts, and how these dynamics shape governance, accountability, public and personal life. The field also investigates how secrecy structures knowledge and power, and how practices of concealment influence political decision-making and influence social relations..^[1][2]

 

History and development

 

Secrecy studies has roots in early sociology and ethics scholarship that examined secrecy as a social force, moral dilemma and cultural practice. Foundational contributions include Georg Simmel’s analysis of secrecy as a relational social form and later Sissela Bok’s work on the ethics of concealment and revelation.^[1][2] These early studies established secrecy as an affective, relational and cultural phenomenon embedded in social life. Other key early texts include works by Beryl Bellman (‘The Paradox of Secrecy’, 1981)^[3], T.M. Luhrmann (‘The Magic of Secrecy’, 1989)^[4], David Vincent (The Culture of Secrecy, 1998)^[5], and Michael Taussig (Defacement, 1999)^[6]

 

Since then, research in secrecy studies has expanded across anthropology, history, cultural studies, and organisation studies. Scholars in these fields explored secrecy in relation to secret societies, communication, and intimate life, identifying diverse cultures of secrecy ranging from conspiracy cultures to religious forms of concealment.^{[7][8][9][10]}

 

In political science and international relations, secrecy became central to debates about democratic accountability, intelligence operations, and global security. Research in this area examines secrecy governance, covert conflict, and the politics of transparency, highlighting secrecy’s role in shaping global politics and public trust.^{[11][12][13][14]}

 

More recent interdisciplinary developments in secrecy studies, particularly associated with the influence of our wider group of scholars at SPIN, have brought these two strands of work together to understand how secrecy is political and how political secrecy is cultural.^[15][16]

 

Key concepts

 

Secrecy studies focuses on several core ideas used to analyse how concealment, and its interaction with openness, transparency, revelation, operates across social and political life:

 

• Secrecy: The social and political practice of managing access to information, relationships and decision-making.
• Secrecies: The multiple forms and contexts of concealment that shape interactions between individuals, organisations and states.
• Cultures of secrecy: Shared norms and expectations that govern who may know, who must know and how secrecy is enacted within communities and institutions.
• Secrecy governance: The legal, administrative and political frameworks that regulate concealment, disclosure and accountability.
• Structural secrecy: The ways secrecy produces and distributes knowledge, ignorance and information differently across social, political and economic structures of power, rather than simply limiting access to information. Structural secrecy also recognises that different individuals have access to and can use secrecy in different ways and to varying degrees.^[17][18]
• Secrecy games: Secrecy is often the site of competition between different actors whose ‘games’, from hide and seek to targeted killing, reshape the world.^[19]

 

Areas of study

 

Research in secrecy studies spans multiple domains where secrecy shapes political institutions, organisational practices, cultural life and legal frameworks. These areas outline the main contexts in which secrecy is produced, managed and contested.

 

• Political and legal secrecy: Secrecy in government, intelligence, diplomacy, and security policy and practice. Including the study of the secret ballot, privacy and the postal system, non-disclosure agreements, security classification systems, as well as leaking and whistleblowing.
• Nuclear secrecy: Cold War secrecy, nuclear archives, and strategic ambiguity surrounding weapons programmes.
• Organisational secrecy: Corporate confidentiality, bureaucratic redaction and administrative practices of withholding.
• Psychology of secrecy: The psychological motivations and costs to keeping and sharing secrets.
• Sociology of secrecy: Cultural and relational practices of concealment in everyday social life, including in relation to religion.
• Conspiracy theories: The study of conspiracy cultures and thinking that assume a secret plot or organisation is manipulating events.
• Trade secrecy: Commercial confidentiality, NDAs and legal frameworks governing proprietary information.
• Gender and secrecy: Intersections between secrecy, gender, sexuality and power, including the study of romantic secrecy and phenomena such as gaslighting and catfishing.
• Technological secrecy: Secrecy embedded in infrastructures, digital systems, algorithms and socio-technical environments.
• Scandology: The politics of the revelation of secrets in public life, or scandals.

 

Methods

Research in secrecy studies uses qualitative, archival and interpretive approaches suited to analysing concealed or inaccessible practices, as well as the practices that produce and maintain secrecy across different institutional and everyday settings.

• Ethnographic methods are used to study how secrecy operates within organisations, communities and professional environments through lived practices and interactions.
• Archival research examines historical and institutional records to understand how secrecy is formalised through classification systems, bureaucratic procedures and record-keeping.
• Freedom of Information(FOI) analysis includes requests for government documents and disclosure practices to reveal how secrecy is negotiated, justified and challenged within public institutions.
• Science and Technology Studies(STS) approaches examine how secrecy is embedded in technological systems, expert cultures and infrastructures of information control.
• Discourse analysis includes analysing documents, media representations and official communications to identify how secrecy is framed, rationalised and contested.

 

Relation to other fields

Secrecy studies intersects with several established interdisciplinary fields that examine information, knowledge, and power, including surveillance studies, agnotology, curiosity studies, and intelligence studies.

 

Additional resources

• Secrecy and Society (academic journal)
• Our Writing page

 

References

1. Simmel, Georg (1906). “The Sociology of Secrecy and of Secret Societies”. American Journal of Sociology. 11 (4): 441–498. ISSN 0002-9602.
2. Bok, Sissela (1982). Secrets: On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation. Pantheon books.
3. Bellman, Beryl L. (1981). “The Paradox of Secrecy”. Human Studies. 4 (1): 1–24. ISSN 0163-8548.
4. Luhrmann, T. M. (1989). “The Magic of Secrecy”. Ethos. 17 (2): 131–165. ISSN 0091-2131.
5. Vincent, David (1998). The Culture of Secrecy: Britain, 1832-1998. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-820307-0.
6. Taussig, Michael T. (1999). Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative. Stanford University Press. ISBN 978-0-8047-3200-0.
7. Costas, Jana; Grey, Christopher (2014-10-01). “Bringing Secrecy into the Open: Towards a Theorization of the Social Processes of Organizational Secrecy”. Organization Studies. 35 (10): 1423–1447. doi:1177/0170840613515470. ISSN 0170-8406.
8. Birchall, Clare (2021-04-06). Radical Secrecy: The Ends of Transparency in Datafied America. U of Minnesota Press. ISBN 978-1-4529-6493-5.
9. Birchall, Clare (2006-08-01). Knowledge Goes Pop: From Conspiracy Theory to Gossip. Routledge. ISBN 9781845201432.
10. Urban, Hugh B.; Johnson, Paul Christopher (2022-02-14). The Routledge Handbook of Religion and Secrecy(1 ed.). London: Routledge. doi:4324/9781003014751. ISBN 978-1-003-01475-1.
11. Thompson, Dennis F. (1999-06-01). “Democratic Secrecy”. Political Science Quarterly. 114(2): 181–193. doi:2307/2657736. ISSN 0032-3195.
12. Shils, Edward (1996-02-01). The Torment of Secrecy: The Background and Consequences of American Security Policies. Bloomsbury Publishing PLC. ISBN978-1-4617-2060-7.
13. Goldman, Jan; Maret, Susan (2008). Government Secrecy: Classic and Contemporary Readings. Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN9781591586906.
14. Roberts, Alasdair (2006-01-30). Blacked Out: Government Secrecy in the Information Age. Cambridge University Press. ISBN978-1-139-44892-5.
15. Potolsky, Matthew (2020-12-18). The National Security Sublime: On the Aesthetics of Government Secrecy (1st ed.). Routledge. ISBN9780367671228.
16. Walters, William (2021-05-03). “State Secrecy and Security : Refiguring the Covert Imaginary”. Taylor & Francis. doi:4324/9781315268972/state-secrecy-security-william-walters. Archived from the originalon 2024-12-16.
17. Van Veeren, Elspeth (2019-10-21). “Secrecy’s subjects: Special operators in the US shadow war”. European Journal of International Security. 4(3): 386–414. doi:1017/eis.2019.20. ISSN 2057-5637.
18. Lundborg, Tom (2021-12-01). “Secrecy and Subjectivity: Double Agents and the Dark Underside of the International System”. International Political Sociology. 15(4): 443–459. doi:1093/ips/olab014. ISSN 1749-5679.
19. Van Veeren, Elspeth; Stevens, Clare; Senu, Amaha (2024-04-22). “Secrecy games, power, and resistance in global politics”. Review of International Studies. 52(2): 413–430. doi:1017/S0260210524000275. ISSN 0260-2105.

 

 

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