Spies Like Us

Jesse Driscoll Caroline Schuster

Abstract:

This collaborative essay attempts to synthesize one of the implications of “extreme fieldwork” that invites a level of detail and intimacy with human subjects, and the cultivation of networks with extra-legal entities, that is really quite unwelcome from the perspective of the security bureaucracy of the host country. Rather than offer a toolkit for ethnographic methods that can accommodate violent or risky fieldwork settings, our analysis raises two uncomfortable issues: 1) for certain research projects, there are foreseeable negative consequences for our human subjects and research collaborators that no amount of care and effort can attenuate, and 2) for certain research projects, the more care and effort one invests, the more likely the researcher will engage in behaviors that approximate spy craft. Our specific call is for situational awareness in research design and mentoring, which we view as both crucial and difficult in academic environments that reward risky ethnography.

Word Count: 8502

Bibliographic note:

[Author A] Jesse Driscoll [email protected] +1 (858) 534-7616

School of Global Policy and Strategy University of California San Diego RBC #1427 9500 Gilman Dr. #0519 La Jolla , CA 92093-0519 United States

Jesse Driscoll is an assistant professor of political science and serves as chair of the Global Leadership Institute at the School. He is an area specialist in Central Asia, the Caucasus and the Russian-speaking world.

[Author B] Caroline Schuster [email protected] +61 2 2105 7043

School of Archaeology and Anthropology Australian National University Ellery Crescent #14 Acton, ACT 2601 Australia

Caroline Schuster is a Lecturer in anthropology at the Australian National University. She is an area specialist in Latin America’s triple-frontier region and is a member of the Gender Institute at the ANU.

Spies Like Us

“It’s going to be tough for her to compete with Somali pirates and Jihadis!” - overheard on the academic job market, 2014

“As the central ritual of the tribe, fieldwork is the subject of considerable mythic elaboration…” - George Stocking (1983: 70)

“…the politics of people-making, involving both force and stories, is always an ongoing as well as competitive politics…” - Rogers Smith (2003: 53)

Slow and painstaking fieldwork is often the only way to uncover hidden dimensions of, and allow deeper engagement with, “dangerous” social worlds. Graduate students who demonstrate a capacity to transverse language and class barriers and convince locals that they are trying to “get the story right” have been traditionally rewarded with professional recognition in the discipline of anthropology, and, to a lesser extent, other disciplines as well.

This collaborative essay is an earnest attempt to synthesize one of the implications of this kind of “extreme fieldwork” that was not obvious to either of us at the early stages of research design, but is now one of the main things that we think about as advisors. Doing a certain kind of work – the work we did to start our careers –invites a level of detail and intimacy with human subjects, and the cultivation of networks with extra-legal entities, that is really quite unwelcome from the perspective of the security bureaucracy of the host country. The categorical confusion between ethnography and espionage is foregrounded for the various actors around the world who follow United States security policy with careful attention and interest – and reasonably so. i The intimacy demanded by ethnography, and the decision to pursue research agendas that involve “dangerous social worlds” (inhabited by criminals, terrorists, rebels, militia members, gangs, and the like) makes the multidimensional relationships and activities of our intrepid young guild members sometimes seem like activists flaunting the inability of state security services to enforce the law. It can, sometimes, raise questions as to our motivations that are not all that easy to answer. It is possible to forget that most of the world’s states also employ huge numbers social scientists in their police and intelligence apparatus. These agents cannot switch field sites if things go wrong. They tend to be less interested in speaking truth to power and more interested in preserving social order. This can make for an adversarial relationship between foreign and local social scientists.

This collaboration grew out of two book projects from early career researchers that ostensibly have nothing in common. One of the authors (A) is a political scientist, trained in Comparative Politics. His book, ([blinded] Warlords hereafter) formally models and empirically documents the process of war termination in Tajikistan and Georgia. Author B is trained in Socio-Cultural Anthropology. Her book, ([blinded] Smugglers hereafter) tracks collective debts across commercial society and smuggling economies on the Paraguayan triple-frontier with Argentina and Brazil. Our shared conversations about disciplinary norms and professionalization practices in political science and anthropology, respectively, flagged for us some commonalities in our research that would not be apparent if one were to simply hold these two books side-by-side. As such, our “ethnography’s kitchen” is the fruit of an ongoing effort to understand and compare research design and ethnographic methods involved in studying social phenomena like militia recruitment and smuggling economies.

Our discussions underscored a taboo subject: That some of the status that both of our respective disciplines confer to the type of work that we did was based on a risky gamble. The gamble would not be so morally dubious if it were not the case that the real harms would be borne not by us (the researchers), but by local affiliates. Both of our disciplines have factions that see themselves as edgy dissident intellectuals. Cultivating a professional voice and reputation requires that junior scholars quickly decide whether they want to “brand” themselves in opposition to the state and/or align themselves with local movements for social justice. What both of us have noticed is that there are no professional incentives (that we can detect) to discipline over-correction in a progressively more anti-state direction by the next generation of scholars. We do not see this drift as a problem, in and of itself, for scholarship in either of our disciplines.ii But if the kinds of research practices that this ethos engenders can be harmful, in the aggregate, to our human subjects and research associates residing in weak and semi-authoritarian states, then it is important that we confront that possibility head- on. The nub of the concern that motivates us is that a lot of people in our generation, chasing a certain kind of prestige (which are exemplified by both Warlords and Smugglers), are conducting research in a way that could contribute to the perception that academics working on topics relevant to security studies are, in most functional and relevant respects, NATO or U.S. spies conducting information operations.

The problem grows more ethically problematic as soon as one recognizes the simple fact that a function of our social privilege is that we (the scholars) can leave, but that our collaborators and informants are going to continue to live in these societies, and will be virtual hostages. In the social settings we know well, crimes that carry long jail sentences (espionage, treason, and the like) can be charged retroactively. Neither practices of informed consent nor the multifaceted “rapport” approach advocated by Tittensor (2016) are sufficient to address this particular harm. An interdisciplinary conversation on how to address the incentives that are pushing graduate student researchers towards very risky behaviors may be long overdue.

We are both junior scholars and are uncomfortable generalizing beyond our own meandering experiences. But our general sense (at least among our age cohort, but probably among older folks in both disciplines as well) is that the most common way of dealing with the kinds of double-binds that are inherent in ethnographic research, when it occurs against a backdrop of surveillance and authoritarian political systems, is to be satisfied with an ex post facto sense of relief that everything turned out alright. Some of us, in our honest moments, also share, at with each other, a sort of sheepish sense of having gotten away with something. We would not experience (sometimes, after the fact), a guilty sense of longing for the rush that came from escaping close scrapes if the scrapes had not actually been close. Especially given the prestige and policy-relevance attached to scholarship that describes/models social worlds that are widely stereotyped as unruly, corrupt, or ungovernable, it might be worthwhile to wonder, in a public forum, whether the current incentive structure is adequate -- or ought to be -- and if the current regime is going to be sustainable. As the epigraph makes clear, there is a perception (which, in our view, is basically correct) that the job market rewards extreme fieldwork that presses on the state-defined boundaries of governable spaces. If this is true, disciplines may be overdue for a high-profile collision with state security services in badly- governed states that will share many relevant characteristics of a hostage crisis.

Our essay is organized into two parts. First, we consider some of the specific issues that come from studying dangerous social worlds. To illustrate the limits of simply relying on something like field-site specific intuition for the political and ethical terrains on which we operate – and to highlight the second-order harms associated with a very common reliance on our informants to help us stay out of trouble – we employ some simple game theory to probe the implications of confrontation and activism by academics temporarily living in authoritarian regimes. Our purpose is twofold: We hope to sound a note of caution about the quest for relevance that leads many researchers to conduct ethnography in dangerous social worlds, and also consider how these issues both emerge out of the intimacy of fieldwork and simultaneously challenge ethnographic sensibilities. In the second section, we suggest that while many ethnographers rely on something akin to “situational awareness” (which we call “spider sense” among ourselves) to navigate the dilemmas of fieldwork in difficult settings, we advocate for situational awareness in two other specific domains that more rarely discussed. First, we recommend mentoring relationships with early career researchers. Second, we suggest that the concerns we raise in this essay be incorporated into project design and methodology. Critically engaging with two features of ethnography—its complicity with local political dynamics and its social justice impulse—before conducting fieldwork can enhance the situational awareness of ethnographers engaged in participant observation in situ among communities whose survival probably depends on remaining illegible from the state. We conclude with a brief speculative warning about what is incentivized by the current regime.

Ethnography Against A Backdrop Of Persistent State Surveillance

Warlords and Smugglers both grew out of dissertation projects. Both researchers make explicit attempts to embed themselves in rich sub-disciplinary literature on the ethical issues inherent in participant observation in difficult places.iii It is beyond the scope of our ambition to review all of the issues relevant to fieldwork in our respective books, suffice to say that when both of us began our projects we were both much younger, more naïve, and more idealistic than we are today. To be clear from the outset, neither of these projects was conceptualized or framed as “engaged” research (Low and Merry 2010; Aiello 2010).

Author A employed ethnographic methods to “go native” in both Georgia and Tajikistan. He (believes he) achieved his primary goal, which was to understand (and then model) the peace processes in a way consistent with locals understandings. In practice, this meant collecting many not-for-attribution anecdotes, slowly sifting truth from the vapor of nuance and street stories, and proceeding very slowly under the watchful eye of state security personnel. For Author B, observing how microfinance loans were packaged, sold, and put to use in a local context awash in money—much of which flowed through illicit or contraband exchange networks—involved carefully cultivating the trust of both borrowers and lenders. Research proceeded by slowly tracing the pathways of circulation that stitched different sectors of commercial city together into temporary alignments often through systems of formal and informal credit. By necessity, the work involved licit and illicit border crossing. Without signaling a wider commitment to supporting the mundane and everyday livelihood activities of economic actors who make their lives in the gray interstices of state legal regulations, this sort of research would not have been possible.

Obviously both projects were explicitly frontier-seeking, by which we mean that, in the research design stage, both authors deliberately opted for field sites where reach of the state power was very weak. In both cases this choice was conscious and deliberate; in both case it was made with advisors’ consent. As the authors matured as scholars one of the ironies of this naïve initial choice became apparent: That even if the state presence is invisible, that is not the same thing as non-existent, and the state is most violent and coercive in the spaces where disciplinary mechanisms of control are weak. The shadow of violent state coercion can cast a long shadow and leave lasting scars. Over months that turned into years, we both improvised strategies to collect the data to assemble a compelling argument that would be legible to the standards of political science or anthropology. In both cases – and we suggest this is likely a more generalized phenomenon – ethnographic research proceeded through a mix of complicity with selected state and embassy patrons and commitments of local actors. Neither would have been possible if we had not projected to our human subjects a credible signal that the projects were informed by shared notions of social justice activism. Put differently: We are both pretty sure that we got good data because people believed that we were unusually committed to trying to get the story right. That crucial level of intimacy is what made studying dangerous social worlds plausible in Tajikistan and Paraguay, and sufficiently compelling in later analysis for both projects to be publishable.

We wish to emphasize that we do not have definitive answers about why the choice to perform dangerous fieldwork compelled us so strongly as young scholars. Our purpose is only to draw some more general lessons out of those research design decisions, especially as they animate graduate research. We speculate that what is not happening is that today’s world is more unstable, and that this world demands more risky projects to answer ever- more-pressing security-related questions. Historians of social science fieldwork methods such as George Stocking (1983:73–74) have carefully tracked the figurations of gendered and racialized privilege that equate fieldwork with adventure, especially as anthropology coalesced first and foremost as a natural science in the age of colonial exploration. These archetypes predate current geopolitical concerns. For instance, A. V. Kinner’s (1976 [1949]) early typology of archetypal – and romanticized – fieldwork figures distinguished between “hairy chested” and “hairy chinned” archaeologists. Rather than celebrating the treasure- hunter vs. the epigrapher – tropes that predictably yield “Indiana Jones” – anthropological fieldwork may overcorrect towards ‘hairy chested’ ideals in the context of a self-perceived feminized discipline. Meanwhile, in political science, the diminished prestige of area studies knowledge, and the increased prestige associated with “hairy chinned” mathematical arcana and data analysis can make the appeal of “hairy chested” fieldwork in comparative politics very powerful.iv All that is to say that the particular nexus of career decisions that inspire first research projects inevitably emerge within the context very specific set of disciplinary histories and concerns. Since we are often talking about extremely ambitious and risk- acceptant young scholars in their mid-20s, this can make for a host of motivated misperceptions, romantic ideals, and exploratory blurring of identities as we “preform brave fieldwork excellence” for different audiences.

Given anthropology’s longstanding critiques of the cultural universalisms and Eurocentic notions of the self embedded in rational choice notions of game theory,v and political science’s equally pointed critiques of non-systematic sampling (and overall skepticism with non-positivist hermeneutic approaches and “me-search” generally), we struggled to find a common language to describe the dilemmas of researching dangerous social worlds. After some time, our compromise has been to turn to what anthropologists would call a ‘thought experiment’ disciplined by game theory. As we proceeded, we realized that this was actually an important corrective against existing—and in many ways complementary—fieldwork handbooks that focus on the “effort to…maximize skillfully handling the situation” (Sluka 2012:292) in contexts such as Belfast, or specific techniques where “extreme caution is needed, not only when doing research, but when carrying out the daily business of living and working as well”(Goldstein 2014:1) in El Alto.

Rather than offer a toolkit for ethnographic methods that can accommodate violent or risky fieldwork settings, the following thought experiment raises two uncomfortable issues:

a) for certain research projects, conducted in certain badly-governed parts of the globe, there are foreseeable negative consequences for our human subjects and research collaborators that no amount of care and effort can attenuate, and

b) for certain research projects, the more care and effort one invests, the more likely the researcher will engage in behaviors that approximate spy craft.vi

By populating these dangerous social worlds with not just researchers and their informants, but also state security apparatuses, we conceptualize ethnographic research as an equilibrium of strategies between opposing interests. Thomas Schelling (1966:18) compared bargaining in the shadow of violence to a game of chicken, where two cars speed towards each other to see who swerves first. Most of the time at least one player swerves. But sometimes players both miscalculate the resolve of their opponent and a collision occurs. The strategic setting is a reminder that sometimes each player prefers not to yield to the other, but both structure their strategies to avoid the worst possible outcome that occurs when neither yields.

A Game

Imagine that a strategic contest is taking place in a weak autocratic state. The rule of law in this imagined state is weak. The laws of this state are poorly-written and selectively enforced. At a minimum, there are no meaningful protections for civil liberties. At a maximum, vaguely-worded crimes like sedition, espionage, insulting the president, criminal collusion, or witnessing (but not reporting) crimes can all carry long jail sentences if prosecuted. Of course, mostly they are not; society would cease to function if every possible transgression went to court. The decision of whether to prosecute transgressions of poorly- written laws, and extract rents from looking the other way, is the banal first-order problem of police work.

The first strategic actor in the contest is a bureaucrat working somewhere in the middle-tier of a national security bureaucracy (generically male). The second actor is a foreign-born academic, holding a passport from a distant wealthy democracy, who is residing temporarily in the weak state (generically female).

A key feature of the psychology of the foreign-born academic is that she believes that she has more in common with poor citizens of this state than she has in common with the government of the state, which she sees as fundamentally corrupt and illegitimate.vii She honestly believes that whatever she is doing is right. She may live off of academic grants from her home state or institution, or may be employed by a NGO or international organization, but ultimately she thinks of herself as a researcher: She has journeyed far from her home in order to record true facts about the politics that she observes. The academic herself also lives in a self-generated bubble of legal and social privilege, and is not in that much danger of being charged with anything in the host country. Even if she were, in most cases she could just flee the jurisdiction, buying a one-way ticket out of the country and avoiding these charges.viii Interview subjects, by contrast, cannot just take their passport and fly away.

For that matter, neither can the security bureaucrat. He is older, more conservative, and probably a bit resentful of the privilege that allows the globe-trotting young social scientist to do what she does. He has a personal, psychological, and professional interest in preventing the academic from accomplishing her task. A good day for a security bureaucrat is a day in which he can provide evidence that their labor contributed directly to squashing a story that might damage state interests. A good day for the activist academic is a day in which a story that might damage the interest of the elite is promulgated globally on a platform that is not easily censored, such as a peer-reviewed academic journal or a website housed in a different country. So the values at stake really are zero-sum: One's gain really is the other's loss.ix

The game begins when a major unexpected event that reveals something embarrassing to the regime about the political economy of the weak state. It might be a massive financial scandal, the use of violence to suppress dissent, or any number of other things. The academic knows that her activities are being monitored by the security bureaucrat and faces a basic choice: to “Escalate" the process of investigation or “Ignore" the event. Escalation involves gathering data, conducting interviews, and perhaps seeking grants or assisting in other ways with indigenous activist efforts. Ignoring the event means just that -- spending intellectual, financial, and political resources elsewhere, and sending a signal to subordinates to do the same. To simplify matters and highlight essentials, assume that the choice-set for the security bureaucrat is to either “Enforce" the law as written or “Ignore" the activist's activities. The security bureaucrat is player one, and his payoffs are listed first. The activist academic is player two, and her payoffs are listed second.

The simple scenario is the one in which the security bureaucrat “Ignores" the activities of the activist academic, and the academic “Ignores" the action-causing event. Nothing happens. The status quo ante payoffs for (I,I) are (0,0).

What happens if the security bureaucrat “Ignores" the activities of the activist academic, but the academic “Escalates" the investigation into the details of the crisis? In the mind of the academic, she is doing what she came there to do. The story will come out a little faster, a little more credibly, than would have been possible if the academic had just stayed home in the ivory tower. On the other hand, it is embarrassing for the security bureaucrat. Privileged transnationals are, after all, flaunting their role and “getting away with" activities that would be flagrantly illegal if they were actually citizens of the country. Payoffs for (I,E) are (-α, α).

If the security bureaucrat “Enforces" the law while the activist academic chooses to “Ignore" the political crisis, what is observed? The activist academic might get “spider sense” that she is being watched. Some of her research assistants might report an unusual amount of interest in their activities. But because the academic does not pursue the story the harassment fades. Within the bureaucracy, perhaps reports are written to superiors documenting the intimidation, with the implied claim that foreign troublemaking was deterred by the active vigilance. The bureaucrat derives psychological satisfaction from a job well-done. The academic pays some cost associated with being bullied. Payoffs for (E, I) are (α, -α).

What happens if the security bureaucrat “Enforces" the law at the same time that an activist academic chooses to “Escalate" the investigation? Only in this case is there a direct clash of interests. The foreign-funded academic's privileged guest status is in danger of revocation, and the state security services of the country are being challenged on their sovereign turf. Neither can easily back down. The kinds of escalation that are in the activist academic's toolkit involve transnational media campaigns and the leveraging of informal networks that link embassies, universities, and foreign capitals globally.x The problem is that all of these public efforts produce evidence that is confirming of the theory that the activist academic was a spy, or building a fifth-column network, all along. The academic may be forced to leave the state – though this is not the end of the academic's ability to “tell all" in book or media form. In order to show that the security agency has the upper hand, and deter future activities of the same kind, the academics' trusted research assistants and their families may be targeted for reprisals. But the story is still not over. The crisis has escalated. At some risk of repetition: Crimes like espionage carry long prison sentences, so embassies and foreign governments, staffed by liberals, will become involved. Someone within the elite will go looking for a scapegoat. The bureaucrat who set the whole enforcement apparatus in motion may be targeted. The incident will follow his career, and likely define it. Payoffs for (E, E) are (-ɣ, - ɣ).

Figure 1: “The Real Worst-Case Scenario”

To minimize notation and highlight essentials, assume that psychological states are symmetric: Good days (α), bad days (-α) and the very very bad, worst-possible-day-of-all days (-ɣ ) for the academic registers exactly as (dis)satisfying for the academic as the security bureaucrat.xi The best outcome is to play E at the same time that other player chooses I for the α payoff. The next-best outcome is for both players to play I. Barring that, playing I while the other player plays E is avoids the worst possible outcome, which is both playing E.

To begin, let us analyse the game in a one-shot setting. The game is high-stakes, one-time only, and not repeated; each crisis is unique. Strategies are chosen simultaneously, since each actors commits to a strategy without certain knowledge of what the other player is doing at the time that costly investments are made. There are two pure strategy Nash equilibria: (E, I) and (I, E). If one player is committed to confrontation, the other player ought to back down rather than avoid a head-on collision that would be costly to both players. If one player can infer that the other player plans to play “Ignore," however, then they can increase their payoffs by seizing the opportunity to play E (Enforce or Extort). Both actors are careful to choose the timing of their Escalation or Enforcement, however, since both really want to avoid the worst-possible outcome (-ɣ). Call the equilibrium (E, I) -- in which the security bureaucrat gets away with bullying the academic -- a “Self-Censorship" equilibrium, which emphasizes the psychological costs paid by the activist. Call other equilibrium (I, E) -- in which the academic gets away with publishing material that is damaging to the indigenous elite, and the security bureaucrat does not take the bait -- the “Symbolic Confrontation" equilibrium.

Game theory provides no insight into which of the two equilibria actors will coordinate upon. It is likely to be context (and personality) specific. Part of what it means to become acquainted with a site means learning how much it is appropriate to expect one will get away with, what kinds of calculated risks are worth taking with one’s own safety (and others…), what counts as a “normal” level of attention from state security services, and where the state has drawn “red lines” to deter people from asking certain kinds of questions.xii It is consistent with the observation from many young scholars, back from the field and writing up notes, that we “got away with something” in the field.

The other solution concept that is relevant to the conversation is a mixed strategy equilibrium, in which each side plays a strategy designed to make the other player indifferent between her strategies. One player's mixed strategy must be a probability distribution that makes the other player willing to literally flip an unweighted coin; the other player does the same. If -ɣ=-100 and α=2, a mixed strategy equilibrium in which each player would “Ignore” 49 times out of 50, and “Escalates/Enforces" one time in 50. If both players implement this mixed strategy, more than 19 times out of 20 the response to an unexpected crisis will be for both the activist and the security bureaucrat to ignore it. About 2% of the time, either the activist or the bureaucrat will play E while the other ignores. An academic will Escalate at the same time a bureaucrat stakes his reputation on Enforcement only very, very rarely.

First, notice that the vast majority of the time, in the mixed-strategy equilibrium, the result will be (I, I) because both players are conservative and wary of the (E,E) outcome. Second, notice that the expected utility for both players in playing the game in this way is negative.xiii Games of chicken bear some resemblance to games of Russian roulette, in that most of the time absolutely nothing happens, but they are certain to be extremely high costs if the game is played over and over again indefinitely. Engaging in them sends a strong signal about one's willingness to absorb costs. Both the activist and the security bureaucrat earnestly believe that they are protecting innocent people. That the game is being played at all suggests that they are motivated by honor -- which manifests as academic accolades for one player and promotion within a security hierarchy in the other. Third, note that most of the costs of confrontation are paid by people other than the security bureaucrat or the academic activist.

Why Extreme Fieldwork?: Awareness of Privilege & And The Impulse To Fight Injustice

Many political scientists and anthropologists, especially in their idealistic early years, see themselves as “roving ombudsmen,” volunteering time to produce scholarship that will make the suffering of powerless people, and the excesses of unaccountable governments, more legible. One way to do this is to transform rich ethnographic data into monographs that capture the nuance and complexity in the social worlds of criminal organizations or illicit economies – especially when these social groups are the targets of national and transnational security apparatuses. Active involvement and sustained intimacy with marginalised and misunderstood groups may not be an end unto itself in all cases, but a lot of stories would not be recorded at all if it was not for patient participant observation by ethnography.

What we feel is missing in self-aware methodological missives on ethnographic practices is an appreciation that there are good reasons to collect detailed data on marginalized sub- communities that have nothing at all to do with the liberal sentiments expressed in the paragraph above. Sometimes the knowledge that we collect is seek-and-destroy. A lot of people who acquire language skills and area expertise do so in the earnest hope of getting an academic job, but know that other professional avenues are available to them based on their acquired expertise. The War on Terror is unlikely to be a passing phase, and the governments in the West are going to continue to wonder what is going through the heads of very angry subalterns. Because all of this is true, in the future it is going to be very difficult for paranoid security bureaucrats in brittle authoritarian regimes to distinguish between tourists, activists, journalists, instigators, and academics. We are worried that our academic communities may be overdue for a high-profile incident in which it is relatively clear that it was the researchers’ intervention that caused someone to be targeted, injured, or killed. If a cascade of unexpected confrontation—as outlined above in the game of chicken—ends in violence, it is possible that it is going to be demonstrably due to the labour of a bright, ambitious, and idealistic scholar who has “gotten too close” to the real story and convinced everyone involved she is a spy.

It is tempting to think that this problem would go away if only students were made aware that going to stateless spaces is dangerous. Both of our experiences suggest that this optimism is quite likely to be misplaced. The dissertation prospectus that eventually led to Smugglers was conceptualized as an empirical effort to document how life works in the smuggling networks that traversed the Tri-Border Area. In a discussion of methodology (post- candidacy, prior to fieldwork in Ciudad del Este), a senior advisor asked wryly if the plan was to “find” Paraguay’s contraband economy “by standing on a street corner with a machine gun to ply your trade as a participant-observer.” Much later, when an unexpected encounter in the field gave the author the opportunity to conduct interviews with smugglers and gangsters, she decided that doing so would put her network at risk. There is no question that proximity to these networks lent a richness and depth to the theory-building that could not be replicated without ethnography. The fact that doing this kind of work draws attention and accolades accrue to those few of us who demonstrate an ability to do it – to have actually worked in a famously lawless space – is also surely part of the attraction.xiv

The dissertation prospectus that led to Warlords was similarly self-aware (about a desire to use one’s 20s to go “find the edge” of governed spaces) and also similarly naïve (about how difficult it would be). The decision to spend extended months conducting fieldwork in Tajikistan in the years when NATO forces were attempting to stabilize Afghanistan (just across a very porous border) raised reasonable questions about the true motives and identity of this well-networked young security studies scholar. Improvising an answer to the question “how are you supposed to do ethnography when your methods are convincing absolutely everyone – including your friends and love ones – that you are a spy” posed challenges and questions beyond anything that anyone at Stanford’s IRB knew how to give good advice on. But formal and informal advice was sought throughout the process. More than once between 2005 and 2008, advisors provided explicit warnings that the risks that he was taking his safety that were far, far out of proportion to any possible professional gain. In the end, after returning to the United States and coming to understand that he was not crazy to fear that there was a demand for his microdata from within the national security apparatus of his government, human subjects concerns led the author to destroy some of his field notes (in which his anonymous subjects had named other people’s names – one of many problems that his degree-granting institution’s IRB professionals simply never considered).xv

There is nothing extraordinary about our shared experiences of “growing up” in the field.xvi We are certain that most early-career scholars, holding their first book, look back at the version of themselves that received initial grant funding and IRB approval as dangerously naïve. What was vital in both of our cases was a sense of situational awareness, cultivated over many years at great personal cost. Crucially, this awareness was also supplemented by mentoring that explicitly engaged with the trade-offs between research transparency, the protection of human subjects residing in authoritarian or unstable regimes, and the potential public goods associated with either activist or investigative journalist sensibilities. This is a different type of situational awareness than the field-site informed intuition that certain neighbourhoods in Ciudad del Este or Dushanbe are safe, or that certain fieldwork contacts will be friendly rather than hostile. Rather than bounding the ethical space of risk and consent to the interactional context of ethnographer and informants in situ, we regard as absolutely essential to also cultivate a conversation within the discipline regarding the ethical dilemmas that come from social misunderstandings of the professional aims of the ethnographer. If our experiences are any guide, 20-somethings are quite poorly prepared to navigate these waters alone. If it were not for the help of our advisors, the same intrepid spirit that was so necessary for us to manage difficult fieldworks situations, and the same energy to be recognized for our excellence, could have gotten someone seriously hurt.

The formal exercise above is geared towards drawing the attention of ethnographers to the possibility of a low-probability but high-cost (E,E) outcome, but a second disadvantage is, in many ways, just as serious. Affiliation with activists is going to remain tempting for a lot of people who imagine themselves to be part of a transnational movement for social change. The problem is that our challenge to social order is sometimes understood violently, whether or not we intend it that way. Both of us found that university business cards did not offer diplomatic immunity or unlimited access, but they weren't exactly cheap talk, either. When we were understood to be a neutral, scholarly observer we believe we received more access and better data. Affiliations with activists or NGOs who are “against the state," and studying sensationalist phenomena like pirates, warlords, and contrabandistas comes with a similar set of negative consequences. Field notes can be confiscated. Emails can be read without one's knowledge or permission. Working on politically sensitive topics invites scrutiny about your true motives -- and that scrutiny can have real, tangible, negative effects on the lives of your interview subjects. When we can credibly present ourselves as scholars, and not activists or spies, we are almost certainly at our safest. So are our human subjects.

In Conclusion: Between “Do No Harm” and “See No Evil”

The simple conclusion is that the next generation of ethnographers ought to reconsider “extreme fieldwork,” stay away from dangerous places. (“Everyone under the age of 35: look inward about who you are trying to impress.”) But this would be disingenuous. Tellingly, our collaboration began when we were in residence at a prestigious interdisciplinary post-doctoral research center that awards positions based on fieldwork of precisely this nature.xvii Academia is a cold and impatient world. The marketplace of ideas is going to continue to be extremely crowded. Most of the theoretical debates that form the canon of the anthropology of finance and the political science literature on civil war violence grapple with structures of disciplinary and juridical power. Ambitious students are going to keep trying to write dissertations that have a non-zero probability of turning into impactful “first books.”

What this means, probably, is that there is both a supply and a demand for “extreme” research. Young people across disciplines understand, intuitively, that we only have one first project. The good fruit is likely out on a limb. Grant funding and prestigious research positions continue to grow for ethnographic research in dangerous social worlds, both because they are understudied and because they are marketable. The academic job market is a cruel barometer for what kind of work is valued by tenure-track-granting institutions. The incentives are relatively clear for the next generation of researchers. The result may be a generation of research designed to blur the line between anti-regime activism and qualitative social science knowledge production. Many are complicit in perpetuating misunderstandings.

Our specific call is for situational awareness in research design and mentoring. We believe that it is crucial to supporting the kind of research we value—detailed, empirically grounded, sensitive to community based concerns, built out of local idioms, theoretically rigorous— while also grappling with the non-zero probability that affiliation with the ethnographer could get the local research assistants into serious trouble. What does this situational awareness entail?

1) From the point of view of those people who staff security bureaucracies, the core strategic problem is the utility function of the activists/researchers. There are a lot of young people running around the world armed with technological gadgets and IRB documentation that they believe gives them a right to meddle. Our research suggests that this may not end well. We suggest that rather than leaving these decision-making criteria up to personal choices and ethical dilemmas for the early career researcher (who will anyway have to re-negotiate understandings gradually over the course of the project and their training), that this should involve a wider discussion with colleagues and mentors. This may sound like a simple and obvious statement. However, we argue that this sort of mentoring is neither systematic nor universally implemented (as opposed, say, to IRB approval). 2) Consider from the very start of the project what sorts of questions are plausible and off limits—not because of feasibility in the field, but because of a situational awareness for how ethnography is emplaced into dangerous social worlds. This ought to be made explicit in dissertation proposals and ethnographic methods workshops. 3) We could all profit from spending more time seriously contemplating the doppelgängers that ethnographers engage in fieldwork settings: security personnel, military officials, bureaucratic gatekeepers. Many members of the Russian and Chinese state security services, and probably a lot of members of Al Shabaab, the FARC in Colombia, and other insurgent groups around the globe, don’t see much of a distinction anymore between the American academy and the national security state. In order to be as transparent as possible, and to avoid charges of Orientalism, most of us have an instinct that it is appropriate to involve locals in our research. But in certain war zones or authoritarian regimes, the locals are functionally pre-positioned hostages. It might be more important, on balance, to take steps to shield locals from predatory prosecution and allow them to maintain plausible deniability. Rather than assuming that good ethnography only means successfully evading and avoiding those figures or assuming that we are invisible to them when the opposite is likely true, we recommend undertaking a series of thought experiments that would view the research project from their standpoint, and incorporate that situational awareness into research design.

Early career researchers ought not shoulder the risks and rewards of situational awareness alone -- as a disciplinary rite of passage. We appeal to mentors to develop strategies to build situational awareness into all stages of the research. For some (most?) this is a natural extension of the work mentors are already doing; for others, it may require introspection about whether life experiences from their established research programs are really analogous to the experience likely to be faced by today’s graduate students. Most of our students are confronting much more high-capacity state security bureaucracies no matter what part of the world the student opts to go to. We view our proposal as overall complimentary to the more commonplace notion of risk-assessment and skillful management of situations within spatially and temporally delimited interactional contexts of fieldwork relationships. In an academic environment that is going to continue to reward risky and dangerous fieldwork, we are increasingly concerned that this approach to research training is neither easy nor straightforward.

Our motivation for this “ethnography’s kitchen” on situational awareness in ethnographic research is certainly not a blanket call for the abandonment of research in these settings. To the contrary, as we have emphasized throughout, these issues both emerge out of the intimacy of fieldwork and simultaneously challenge ethnographic sensibilities. Ethnography is uniquely positioned to detail comprehensively and to elaborate theoretically these dangerous social worlds. This is precisely why the research chafes against the commitments of security agents in host communities and their allies in the great powers. And what is most troubling to us – the reason that we decided to write this – is that there are a lot of people who might think that exposing the linkages between state security services via symbolic confrontation (E,E) is a good thing. What may actually be emerging is a kind of arms-race where students are incentivized to imitate the practices of guerrilla journalists. To put the matter in the starkest possible terms: We are absolutely certain that right now certain PhD students are weighing the costs and benefits of committing to confrontation and running on a collision course with U.S. state agents more or less in order to see what happens.xviii

It is going to become incumbent for every researcher—qualitative or quantitative—who collects data related to contemporary terrorism, criminality, the drug war, or civil war violence in general, to self-define their role with a great deal more self-awareness. Conducting scholarly work in authoritarian or unstable environments on politically sensitive topics while staying safe requires keeping one’s eyes open and responding flexibly to highly local and contextualised variables. How does one mentor and advise early career researchers on this type of situational awareness? While the ethics and power relations of ethnographic fieldwork in “anthropological locations” (Gupta and Ferguson 1997a; Gupta and Ferguson 1997b) have been a core concern to ethnographers across the social sciences, our main suggestion that advisors and mentors consider related set of questions about what sort of research projects we should encourage our students to undertake. This may come prior to asking how to undertake them ethically, or how to measure core concepts according to the best technological practices. This is a big ask at a moment when research “impact” is the primary criteria for hiring, promotion, and department resourcing. By formalising what is lurking over the horizon, we hope to open space for a conversation to move in that direction.

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i Many political scientists are functionally co-opted. Many anthropologists’ research may be complicit with statist agendas, at least from a certain point of view. The ongoing critical blowback related to the Human Terrain Systems program (that embedded social scientists with military units) continues to foreground the murkiness of the uses to which ethnographic data might be put (Kelly et al. 2010). Gusterson’s (2007; see also Reichman 2012) long engagement with the intersection of anthropology and militarism is highly valuable. ii It has been a heated topic of concerted debate in anthropology for generations – at least since Bronislaw Malinowski foregrounded the vexed relationship of disciplinary scholarship and colonial administration in his (1929) essay on “Practical Anthropology.” iii The limitations of Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) for capturing the full range of complex and power-laden interactional contexts has been well-treated (Bell 2014; Tittensor 2016), and have recently been rediscovered in political science in the context of ongoing DA- RT/JETS debates. Consolidating a clear mandate for anthropologists to directly benefit host communities has been a robust topic in applied anthropology (see, Besteman 2013; Besteman

2010; Rylko-Bauer, Singer, and Willigen 2006) and action anthropology (Tax 1975; Bennett 1996). A series of working papers published by the Social Sciences Research Council observes in the series précis that despite the proliferation of social science research on crime and communities impacted by violence “the literature on safe practices for those working in high-risk environments remains thin” (http://www.ssrc.org/programs/view/dsd/dsd-working- papers-on-research-security-2/). iv At the time of this writing, comparative is arguably the only subdiscipline of political science that makes attempts to reward learning languages or going to the field at all. As “observer effects” become impossible to ignore in political science, a set of ethical debates are underway on the concerns associated with experimental manipulation of local politics. The charge is clearly led by self-defined comparativists (Desposato (2016)). v Author B has written pointedly on the limitations of choice-based models of economic action (see Blinded). However, here we find that there is an elective affinity between anthropology’s ‘sociological imagination’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 2003) and game theory. vi We have in mind strategies to “arms race” with state security personnel by using tactics such as encrypting or encoding field notes. vii Most readers will recognize that there is great psychological satisfaction to be drawn from the act of “speaking truth to power" on behalf of powerless citizens of badly-governed states. viii Though certain edge-cases, such as Sadikov and Hoodfar, provide evidence that this is not always so. See http://www.cbc.ca/beta/news/world/concordia-university-prof-jailed-in-iran- s-evin-prison-family-says-1.3622606. ix The activist may believe, earnestly, that information wants to be free, that the voiceless need a voice, and that their position is functionally unique. The security bureaucrat may believe, just as earnestly, that the naïve young academic is complicit (perhaps without being aware of it) in an information operation designed to undermine the legitimacy of the government. x See Keck and Sikkink (1998). xi Indeed, they both probably recognize each other: The security bureaucrat is often the hardened older local version of the idealistic younger transnational idealist. xii Foreign aid programs and embassies can shape this space indirectly. Consider that security bureaucrat may be more likely to “ignore” activists with powerful friends who also happen to be employed in the embassy of the government whose aid programs inject tens of millions of liquidity into the economy of the capital city. xiii Most of the time (96.04% of the time) they will get zero. The 1.96% chance of acquiring an “uncontested E" payoff is offset exactly by the 1.96% chance of a symmetrical 1.96% chance of a sucker penalty for giving the “uncontested E” payoff to the opponent. That leaves the remaining .04% of the time, or four times in 10,000, when the -100 payoff is realized. The expected utility of playing the game is -0.04. xiv American TV show NCIS dramatized and sensationalized the contraband economy of Ciudad del Este. At the time fieldwork for Smugglers was being conducted, director Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty) was scouting the location of a screenplay set in the Tri-Border Area. The transnational crime drama Miami Vice employed some of Author B’s fieldwork contacts as extras for the film. Multiple mass-market paperback thriller novels were set in the region. This is only to say that there are clear templates for sensationalized mass-market cross-over appeal of the research. xv After Alex Sadikov was charged with espionage by the Tajik government, which his qualitative research was indistinguishable from espionage, Author A stopped working in Tajikistan completely. He continues to conduct research in Somalia, Ukraine, and Georgia. xvi Indeed, navigating the pitfalls of fieldwork has long been positioned as a disciplinary “rite of passage,” from Malinowski’s (1984) initial systematization of ethnographic methodologies onward. For a genealogy of fieldwork rites of passage in anthropology see (Seizer 1995; Bornstein 2007). xvii Put differently: If we hadn’t done what we did, we would never have met, and you wouldn’t be reading this right now. xviii How long before we get the first “participant observation ethnography” of a researcher who embedded with ISIL? What unit of time are we supposed to employ to answer this question? Months? Years? We are both very concerned by the possibility of a generation of scholars who have self-consciously tied their careers tied to their ability to successfully publish on the “anthropology of millennial terrorism” or “the political economy of millennial terrorism.”