Spies Like Us
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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.