Of Mazes, Complex Space and Secrecy Games in Security Politics

Current spatial approaches to security politics of the city, and the ways in which state and resistance actors engage with the city and its ‘clutter’, do not do enough to account for the role of complexity in these spaces and their politics; for the role of secrecy and the ‘unknown’; or even for their ‘allure’ and popularity of this form. As this chapter argues, mazes are a spatial form that offers a way to account for this complexity, the role of unknowability, the overall appeal of this form and the social and security relations that are produced as a result. Mazes are a complex spatial form that populates our world conceptually and practically, and yet is underexamined in security studies, critical geography and cultural studies. This chapter therefore ‘unravels’ the maze, its form and its politics. It explores how the maze operates spatially, how space interacts with the temporal and the epistemological, as well as explaining the social relations and ‘allure’ produced through mazes through a discussion of mazes as spatial ‘secrecy game’, including in relation to counter-terrorism operations. Mazes matter in security politics and it is important we add them to our stable of analytic approaches.