Secrecy games, like Wittgensteinian language games, are an important feature of our social and political landscape. According to Karin Fierke, language games are ‘a set of practices based on rules within which [agents, actions and objects] are constituted in relation to one another’ (1996: 469) and are a prominent feature of international politics (see also Fierke, 2010). Nuclear arms treaty negotiations and nuclear deterrence, for example, are ‘games’ with conventions and established patterns of behaviour that shape the constitution, behaviour and relations of key actors (Fierke, 2010; Skonieczy, 2015). These games have shared rules and end goals that constrain but do not completely limit action. Such games can also shift and change over time as driven by developments in, for example, new technologies, in the way that they are played in different contexts, or through the innovation of actors, whether, for example, dominant state actors, or resistant ones (Fierke and Nicholson, 2001).
Secrecy games, then, are specific games that ‘centre social relations and patterns that ‘play’ with the ‘web of tactics’, the composition or choreographies involving the binaries of hiding/unhiding, concealing/revealing, visible/invisible, covering/uncovering, sensing/unsensing, and knowing/unknowing’ (Van Veeren at al, 2024). Or, as Michel de Certeau suggests,
Secrecy is not only the state of a thing that escapes from or reveals itself to knowledge. It designates a play between actors. It circumscribes a terrain of strategic relations between the one trying to discover the secret and the one keeping it, or between the one who is supposed to know it and the one who is assumed not to know it (de Certeau, 1992: 97).
Secrecy games are therefore part of the web of practices that make secrecy, including its security politics, possible. Therefore, when we pay attention to the moves and counter moves of secrecy games, we can see how secrecy as a set of practices, and even identities (Van Veeren (2019), emerges as a product of these games. A secrecy games approach, in other words, ‘reveals’ or draws fresh attention to the diverse and even pluralising actors, the interactions, the changing rules, and the ‘rival knowledges’ (Senu, 2021) produced by secrecy. Studying secrecy as a game, therefore, enables a focus on secrecy in flux, as an emergent product of these secrecy games, subject to the movement and change, accident and contingency, across space and time, and less under the control of singular, intentional actors that is most often is presented as associated with secrecy.
Take mazes, for example, as a form of secrecy game where the spatial is an essential feature. Mazes involve maze-runners as well as maze-makers as actors. Within this ‘game’, maze-runners are pitted not only against other maze-runners but ultimately against the maze, or maze-maker. The game of a maze is therefore played out as a relation between these different actors and their capacities to manage the unknowabilities (or secrets) of the maze. And, where ‘winning’ is always in relation to successfully running the maze (maze-runner) or preventing/forestalling a successful run (maze-maker). For example, maze-runner and maze-maker compete over the relative skill level at designing versus navigating a maze.
Secrecy (and even secrecies), therefore, is far more fluid and non-linear than current work on secrecy has emphasised to date. Rather than a view of secrecy as a fixed strategic tool, the ‘games’ of secrecy and the different spatial and temporal ways in which secrecy ‘play’ occurs, can help us to understand how secrecy evolves and shifts over time, and enables an account of how differently empowered actors contend and (re)shape secrecy.
Further Reading
Fierke, K.M. and Nicholson, M. (2001) ‘Divided by a Common Language: Formal and Constructivist Approaches to Games’ in Global Society, 15(1), pp.7-25.
Van Veeren, Elspeth, Clare Stevens and Amaha Senu (forthcoming) ‘Secrecy games, power and resistance in Global Politics,’ Review of International Studies.
Walters, William (2021). State Secrecy and Security: Refiguring the Covert Imaginary. Routledge.
References
de Certeau, Michel (1992) The Mystic Fable. Vol. 1. University of Chicago Press.
Fierke, K.M. (1996) ‘Multiple Identities, Interfacing Games: The Social Construction of Western Action in Bosnia’ in European Journal of International Relations, 4(4), pp. 467–497.
Fierke, K.M. (2010) ‘Wittgenstein and international relations theory,’ in Moore, C. and Farrands, C. (eds.) International Relations Theory and Philosophy: Interpretive Dialogues. Routledge: Abingdon.
Fierke, K.M. and Nicholson, M. (2001) ‘Divided by a Common Language: Formal and Constructivist Approaches to Games’ in Global Society, 15(1), pp.7-25.
Senu, Amaha (2021) ‘Stowing Away via the Cargo Ship: Tracing Governance, Rival Knowledges, and Violence En Route’, in Pezzani, Lorenzo, Charles Heller, and William Walters (eds), Viapolitics: Borders, Migration, and the Power of Locomotion, (Duke University Press), pp.84-104.
Skonieczny, Amy (2015) ‘Playing partners: Expectation, entanglement, and language games in US foreign policy’ in International Relations, 29(1), 69-95.
Van Veeren, Elspeth (2019) ‘Secrecy’s subjects: Special operators in the US shadow war,’ European Journal of International Security, 4:3, pp.386-414.
Van Veeren, Elspeth, Clare Stevens and Amaha Senu (forthcoming) ‘Secrecy games, power and resistance in Global Politics,’ Review of International Studies.