Dilemmas of the Terrorist Underworld: The Management of Internal Secrecy in Terrorist Organisations

The secret and its social organisation are of course vital for terrorists. In particular, members of terrorist organisations usually have to deal with complex processes to conceal information from outside actors (external security) but also from other members (internal security). However, scholars have paid relatively little attention to this dark side from an analytical and theoretical standpoint. The practice of secrecy in terrorism deserves particular attention at the ‘meso’ level of analysis, related to organisations; unlike most ordinary organisations, terrorist organisations have to manage particularly demanding trade-offs due to their clandestine nature. This analytical contribution aims to explore how internal secrecy within terrorist organisations affects two crucial organisational dimensions – internal communication, and coordination and control. In doing so, it also critically assesses two well-developed asymmetric information approaches, signalling theory and agency theory, showing that these analytical frameworks could shed new light on the study of secrecy management in terrorist organisations, provided that they are disconnected from a reductionist assumption of individual behaviour as invariably utilitarian and atomistic. In addition, drawing upon Simmel’s classic interpretation of ‘secret societies’, the article argues that a fruitful interpretation of internal secrecy in terrorist organisations should include the critical role played by social trust.