‘Everyone knew what was happening‘: the paradoxes of state secrecy and its making

This article focuses on official means and practices related to British state secrecy. In highlighting some of the tensions, paradoxes and continuing colonial characteristics of UK state secrecy practices, it calls into question understandings of secrecy associated with authoritarianism. It attempts to speak to the murky mobilisation of secrecy and its antidotes as imposed and deployed by the British state. This piece focuses on state documentation, knowledge and violence in understanding the making and contradictions of secrecy. It argues that, while it is crucial to trace, expose and undermine the state‘s practices of secrecy, we should also be aware of the dangers of reproducing or depending on its knowledge systems, or making them central to the exposing of British violence, or other accountability efforts.