SPIN at the BISA 2025 50th Anniversary Conference
Secrecy and the (re)making of the global (dis)order
Convenor: Elspeth Van Veeren, University of Bristol
Chair: Jamie J. Hagen, University of Manchester
Secrecy, and the perception of secrecy, has transformed the world in ways that have been radically overlooked and even consciously erased. From the Cold War to today, a period characterised by a significant expansion of government and corporate secrecy, the emergence of new global actors and new information technological developments, and now an era of mounting crisis and distrust in traditional knowledge and information centres, secrecy as political culture, sets of practices, and relational and organising force is far more pervasive and important for understanding (global) politics than currently examined. Understanding today’s global politics means understanding disinformation, gaslighting, and white ignorance as much as security classification, intelligence operations, and transparency.
This panel therefore brings together papers that trace the multiplicity of ways in which secrecy, and associated ways of ‘unknowing’, have shaped the world around us, from everyday to planetary scales. Secrecies as we contend operate, for instance, beyond the narrow or ‘thin’ view of secrecy as ‘tool’ of statecraft. Instead, secrecies are entangled with ‘revelation’, transparency and openness. They shape identities, social relations, cultures, economies, political institutions, and security landscapes, all of which are essential for understanding global politics and its histories. Finally, as these papers contend secrecy is a governing feature of different political orders and reproduces structures of power and (dis)orders of inequity along racial, gendered, sexual, and class lines.
To better understand our past, our current moment of ‘polycrisis’, and to better equip ourselves and our discipline for the future we therefore offer a number of ways to engage in a more nuanced and complex understanding of secrecy and its essential roles in reproducing global politics.
The Paranoid Style in Liberal Politics: Conspiracy Theories and the Crisis of Liberal International Order
Jamie M. Johnson, University of Leicester
Owen D. Thomas, University of Exeter
Victoria M. Basham, Cardiff University
Contemporary international politics is defined by a so-called crisis of liberal international order. A central feature of this crisis is the erosion of epistemic sovereignty; the loss of a shared register through which authoritative interpretations and statements about the world can be made. From QAnon to covid denialism, populist actors stand accused of propagating conspiracy theories that defy liberal norms and reduce the complexity of global politics to simplistic and divisive accounts of malign plots by global elites. This conforms to traditional approaches to conspiracy theories in which they are described as psychological pathologies of individuals (or networks of like-minded individuals) located at the political fringes. Contrary to these traditional accounts, this paper argues that a feature of this contemporary moment is the prevalence of conspiracy theories at the heart of liberal order itself. Responding to unexpected setbacks or disruptions of liberal order has prompted liberal commentary to make sense of these events: from the election of Donald Trump to Brexit. We argue that liberal commentary has tended to account for such events in conspiratorial terms. As a result, the crisis of liberal international order has been rendered intelligible as a result of secret and nefarious actors: from hostile foreign powers to shady transnational networks. Crucially, such modes of story-telling amount to a collective act of denialism and exoneration: in which responsibility for crisis is externalised onto illiberal others, thereby exonerating the liberal self. In an age of poly- and perma-crisis, this amounts to a catastrophic failure of imagination that forecloses the potential for imagining new and more just orderings of global politics.
Aliens Exist: Exploring Secrecy and Revelations through UFOs/UAPs, National Intelligence, and Blink-182
Louise Pears, University of Leeds
Anna Miller, University of Leeds
This paper examines the intersection of security, knowledge, power, and popular culture, focusing on how security information is concealed and disclosed. On June 25, 2021, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released the “Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena,” also known as the UFO report. It detailed 140 cases of “unexplained” unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs) and suggested they might pose a threat to US flight safety and national security. The report, based on a 2019 hearing which referenced three videos initially released by the New York Times and To The Stars Academy of Arts & Sciences (TTSAAS), led by Tom DeLong of the pop-punk band Blink-182. DeLong celebrated his involvement with merchandise that said “Tom was f****ing right: aliens exist”. Yet in the report various explanations for the UAPs were proposed including classified US military projects or technology from foreign entities like China or Russia, but excluding extraterrestrial life. This paper explores how DeLong, a known conspiracy theorist and singer of “Aliens Exist,” became part of a US military disclosure and its implications for the dissemination of information. Ultimately, it seeks to enhance our understanding the complex relationships between culture, knowledge, power, and security.
Cybersecurity, Trust, and Subterfuge at the Interfaces of Secrecy (Infra)structures
Clare Stevens, Cardiff University
Threats to the cyber security of systems usually rely on subterfuge to undermine trust in systems. To gain access to a digital system, the programmer of an exploit must trick the human user, or the system, into thinking that the code has legitimate authority for access. Here, ‘trust’ is predominantly viewed as a social or a psychological accomplishment, a matter of fooling humans who are often designated as “the weakest link”, or as a technical matter of verifiable engineering standards. However, this is a one-sided perspective. By comparing contemporary cyber operations with cryptography practices during WW2, this paper will show how trust is also profoundly mediated with and by ‘things’ as much as bodied labour, to highlight a more structural account. By shifting away from purely intentional conceptions of subterfuge and trust, such an approach will sketch how arrangements of humans and machines are each productive parts of the machineries of knowledge and secrecy production. The richer and less agent-centred theorisation of trust and subterfuge proposed by this paper can thus challenge some of the novelty claims of contemporary cybersecurity discourses, whilst also contributing to recent more structural accounts of secrecy and cognate concepts.
Scheming Like a State: The Political Logic of Cunning Intelligence
Sam Forsythe, Peace Research Institute Frankfurt / Goethe University Frankfurt
In recent years international politics has become increasingly preoccupied with the problems and potential of ‘secret statecraft’—the exercise of state power through hidden, deceptive, subversive or manipulative means. Yet despite the urgency and continuity of these issues across a range of conflicts and crises, existing critical scholarship lacks a satisfactory theoretical framework for understanding the underlying logic that connects these practices to broader questions of security, power, and political rationality.
This paper develops a critical genealogy of metis, or ‘cunning intelligence’, arguing that this ancient notion is alive and well, hidden within practices of security and tacitly operationalized as a political logic that has been misunderstood in critical security scholarship. While theorists influenced by James C. Scott and Michel de Certeau tend to reduce metis to tactical practices and local knowledge, this paper argues that cunning represents a strategic logic of ‘manipulative power’, a general mode of adversarial rationality made salient by recent technological, geopolitical, and sociopolitical changes.
Through a critical genealogy and a pragmatic concept analysis of cunning concepts and discourses, the paper reveals cunning as a distinctive political logic—a normative approach to judgement and action under adversarial conditions—one requiring forms of knowledge, skill and reasoning distinct from those governing forceful coercion or diplomatic persuasion. Operating through mechanisms of detection, reversal, and deception, cunning problematizes traditional Western conceptions of security, power, reason and political knowledge. This theoretical intervention moves beyond existing accounts that locate cunning merely at the level of practice or tactical resistance, or exclusively within authoritarian politics, instead revealing the hidden role of cunning in Western political epistemes.
By explicating its intellectual history and theoretical structure, this paper argues that cunning has reemerged as a central logic of contemporary international politics, with profound implications for the practice, norms, and critical study of international relations.
Femininum Suspectum: Suspicion, Secrecy, and Insecurity and the Reproduction of the Global Gender Order
Elspeth Van Veeren, University of Bristol
Feminist theorising has a long history of thinking through secrecy. This work however is often implicit and contained within ongoing conversations around the division of the public and private, the silencing, invisibilisation, and marginalisation of women’s voice, labour, and knowledge, and the relegation and sequestration of women and sexuality to the intimate and domestic sphere, which is nonetheless publicised and policed when deemed transgressive. The histories of women’s persecution and gender-based violence, as well as the struggles for greater rights are also intertwined with secrecy. Therefore, to better understand the interconnections of role of secrecy within crisis and (dis)order requires, as this project contends, a reclaiming of feminist theorising and its insights into the role of gender and sexuality in (re)making the world through secrecy. Feminised subjects have a troubled relationship with secrecy as a force and it is this relationship that this paper sets out to interrogate. To do this, this paper proposes first, to undertake a re-reading of three key strands of feminist theorising to better understand the relationships between secrecy and (dis)order. Second, it recovers the longer history of the development of a specific transgressive feminine subject, the suspicious feminine (femininum suspectum) that inhabits different abject figures in Anglo-American history. Third, it brings these insights into conversation with secrecy studies. Bringing these strands together, the paper offers a three-part framework for understanding gender and secrecy, inequality and disorder.