SPIN is delighted to welcome new speakers to our next SPIN Panel Session of 2026. This is a second opportunity to hear further details on chapters planned for our forthcoming SPIN Secrecy Studies volume.
On 22nd April, 3-430pm (UK time) we will be joined by:
Nicolo Miotto and Dr. Nina Klimburg-Witjes (Vienna)
Dr. Daniel de Zeeuw (Amsterdam)
Chair: Dr Elspeth Van Veeren
The event will be held online, via Zoom. Please email secrecyresearch@gmail.com for an invite link.
More details on the talks:
Nicolo Miotto and Nina Klimburg-Witjes (Vienna) ‘Behind Closed Doors: Navigating Secrecy in the Study of Wargames’
Wargaming refers to structured simulation exercises used to model and rehearse potential future conflicts, crises, or strategic decisions. Wargames operate in liminal spaces between transparency and opacity, openness and secrecy, limited access and confidentiality, e.g., from the use of Chatham House Rules to the intentional design of ambiguous scenarios. Linking work from Science & Technology Studies (STS) and Critical Security Studies (CSS) (Rappert, 2015, 2019; Van Veeren, 2019; Klimburg-Witjes et al 2022), we explore the methodological challenges and opportunities that arise when researching such controlled environments as laboratories of in/security. The analysis builds on interviews with wargame designers and facilitators, as well as direct observations of selected wargames on nuclear-decision making, cyber- and space security at international organizations and think-tanks. Mobilising STS and CSS work on inscription devices (Akrich & Latour, 1992; Pelizza &Aradau, 2024), we conceptualise wargames as sociotechnical artefacts that carry scripts, understood as configurations of embedded assumptions about security and related crisis scenarios. We look at secrecy as a constitutive and performative element of wargames’ scripts, shaping how knowledge is produced, shared, and withheld as well as how actors engage and perform specific roles and characters. Rather than viewing secrecy solely as an obstacle, we argue for a reflexive methodological stance that accounts for the performative dimensions of concealment, ambiguity, creativity and selective disclosure. In doing so, this chapter contributes to broader discussions on how researchers can critically engage with practices that are simultaneously staged for observation and protected from public exposure.
Daniel de Zeeuw (Amsterdam) ‘The tragedy of the leak’
Digital networks and devices, as Wendy Chun reminds us, are inherently “leaky”, as the openness of wireless signals precedes their subsequent closure in the name of security. Less a subject in possession of political or moral agency like the traditional whistleblower, the “leak” connotes its own objective status as a technical operation that can be unintended as much as intended. As such the leak exceeds the political framework of the public-liberal hero that the whistleblower depends on, akin more to a computational-martial-masculine “hacker” imaginary of loopholes and backdoors that can be penetrated and exploited. This is true even when leaking has obviously become integral to whistleblower practices in the 21st century. Central to this chapter is the claim that the leak is paradoxical, insofar as its political efficacy simultaneously relies on trust in the power of publicness as a liberating medium of truth (e.g. increasing democratic accountability and transparency), while at the same time the perceived “authenticity” of leaked data feeds off an often cynical mistrust of the public sphere as a polluted site of strategic communication, political spin, and mis- or disinformation. I argue it is this idea of the public sphere as polluted to which the epistemic purity of secret or private data contrasted (the leak as a computational gesture “dramatizing” this contrast). We can clearly see this in WikiLeaks – much criticized – resistance to any “moderation” or “curation” of leaked documents, preferring to release them in their original form. The leak plays on this paradoxical trust/mistrust in the public sphere on the part of its various publics. A similar tension is present in the public sphere’s other, collectively imagined as a “covert sphere” (Melley). On the one hand, the secret (corporate or governmental) domain is one of dark machinations of power that would not withstand public scrutiny; yet the documents it produces about itself and allow it to function are more “true” or “real” than the dissimulated versions of it that circulate in public. Taken together, this chiasmic constellation produces what I call the tragedy of the leak, namely that the becoming-public of information simultaneously tends to erode the aura of secrecy that secures its epistemic validity. It also thereby renders the leaked information vulnerable to being weaponized, i.e. subject to the same forms of strategic manipulation that are supposed to be absent from the leaked data. In many ways, the transformation of WikiLeaks during the long 2010s is the story of this tragedy. What was initially welcomed as a new form of journalism for the digital age (e.g. in the case of the collateral damage video), by 2016 had become (in the case of the DNC email leak) part of a Russian scheme to interfere with the US presidential election, fueling conspiracy narratives like Pizzagate and QAnon. The chapter will discuss various other cases that embody this problematic and how to navigate it in the current context of intensifying public “information warfare”.
Bios:
Nicolò Miotto is a PhD student at the Department of Science and Technology Studies at the University of Vienna. His doctoral research integrates Science and Technology Studies and Critical Security Studies to examine how threat perceptions, military space technologies, and sociotechnical imaginaries shape visions of outer space. He also works as a Project Assistant at the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) Conflict Prevention Centre, where he supports projects on arms control and the non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and their means of delivery.
Dr Nina Klimburg-Witjes is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Science and Technology Studies at the University of Vienna. Her work sits at the intersection of STS and critical security research, where she explores infrastructures of in/security (space, cyber and sensors) and the nexus of security and innovation policies and discourse. In 2022, she was awarded an ERC Starting Grant for her project FUTURESPACE, which examines ideals and tensions of European integration and imagined futures of Europe in Space through an interdisciplinary ethnographic lens. She has been published in Geopolitics, STHV, Science as Culture, and Science and Engineering Ethics, and she is a member of the Austrian Academy of Science and a founding member of the Social Studies of Outer Space network
Dr. Daniël de Zeeuw is assistant professor in digital media culture at the University of Amsterdam. His research and teaching focus on fringe online subcultures, Internet histories, conspiracy theories, disinformation, and digital warfare. He is currently writing a book on how information has been imagined and instrumentalized as a force.
All welcome!