CHAPTER 2
Entering the Field
Abstract In this chapter, we deal with authoritarian field research in relation to ethics procedures (or lack thereof!), visas, and permits, and what
we do in advance to prepare for an optimal, and optimally safe, fieldwork
period. We acknowledge that fieldwork in authoritarian contexts is mostly
not very dangerous for researchers, but it can be. We discuss the particular
nature of authoritarian fieldwork risks, the concrete risks we ourselves and
others have faced, and what we can do to assess and mitigate those risks.
We conclude that while we should be aware of risk and try to minimize it,
we need to accept that risk cannot be eliminated if we want to engage in
authoritarian fieldwork.
Keywords Authoritarianism • Field research • Risk • Fieldwork ethics
• Safety • Access
In this chapter, we discuss our preparations for entering the field and our
handling of the risks associated with authoritarian fieldwork. In terms of
preparations, we deal with experiences with the ethics procedures (or lack
thereof!) of universities and funders, the vagaries of visa requirements, and
what we do in advance to prepare for an optimal, and optimally safe, fieldwork period. We discuss the particular nature of authoritarian fieldwork
risks, the concrete risks we ourselves and others have faced, and what we
© The Author(s) 2018
M. Glasius et al., Research, Ethics and Risk in the Authoritarian Field,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68966-1_2
17
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can do to assess and mitigate those risks. We will conclude that while we
should be aware of risk and try to minimize it, we need to accept that it
cannot be eliminated if we want to engage in authoritarian fieldwork.
Ethics ProcEdurEs
Authoritarian field research poses a number of ethical challenges. The
most prominent of these is undoubtedly the potential risk to our respondents, but risk to ourselves, issues of informed consent, and potential misuse of findings by authoritarian regimes are also among them. We deal
with such issues, and with what we hold to constitute ethical behavior,
throughout this book. But we also operate in institutional environments,
which sometimes come with their own ethical review procedures. We have
found great variance in the appropriateness and comprehensiveness of
such procedures. We recognize a general reflex among academics to consider ethical review as just another bureaucratic nuisance. However, it is
our shared experience that, when well-designed, ethical reviews can be
extremely useful in pushing us to reflect on ethical implications of our
research. Our Kazakhstan researcher, for instance, asked colleagues who
had done fieldwork research in Central Asia before what they had done to
keep interview material confidential, and whether they had trained research
assistants on ethical matters, in order to meet the ethics requirements of
her co-author’s US university, which funded the research. She would
never have asked colleagues these questions if the Internal Review Board’s
questions had not required her to describe the procedures she would use.
We also have some experience with less appropriate ethical review procedures, and considerable experience with a complete absence of ethical
review procedures.
We have on occasion experienced ethical review as a bureaucratic nuisance ourselves: our current funder, the European Research Council
(ERC), for instance insisted, after most of the fieldwork had already taken
place, on receiving a copy of the interview protocols of each our field
researchers. We dutifully supplied sample protocols for each researcher,
but we do not believe these to be particularly meaningful. As every qualitative researcher knows, every interview is slightly different from the last,
and we never stick precisely to the script. We also have some doubt as to
whether the ethics auditors who asked for the interview guides actually
went on to peruse them. This example, we would put in the category of
harmless bureaucratic nuisance: we do not think the request was particularly
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useful, but it did not cost us a huge amount of time, and it did not in any
way interfere with our own views of what is ethical.
Ethical review procedures can become really problematic, however,
when their existence actually causes us to behave less ethically than we
otherwise would. This can come about in response to ‘one-size-fits-all’
procedures, without an understanding of the particularities of qualitative
social science research in general, or of the specific challenges of authoritarian field research. Much depends on who conducts the review. Thus,
our funder, the ERC, uses a form that asks whether ‘the proposal meets
the national legal and ethical requirements of the country where the
research will be performed’ and whether ‘approval of the proposed study
by a relevant authority at national level’ will be sought. Fortunately, our
ethical auditors ticked both boxes as ‘yes’, while indicating in writing their
acceptance of our explanations why we could not guarantee to always be
in compliance with national law, or get formal approval from state authorities (see also below). They also accepted our argument that under the
circumstances, oral consent was more appropriate than signatures on consent forms (see also Wall and Overton 2006, 64). Had the ethics review
been conducted by someone with less understanding of the particularities
of authoritarianism research, we might have had difficulties getting clearance. We do not know of any instances where an ethical review procedure
actually prohibited a scholar from undertaking authoritarian field research
(but see Matelski 2014, who mentions a case relating to Myanmar). A
more frequently encountered problem is that, by making impossible
requests, review boards may actually ‘encourage obfuscation’ rather than
transparency (Wall and Overton 2006, 62). We know of a colleague working in African contexts for instance, who had been taught by his wellrespected PhD supervisor to produce counterfeit informed consent forms,
because their university required them, even in contexts where they would
be quite inappropriate and perhaps even unethical.
While we have no personal experience of ethical reviews making impossible demands, we have considerable experience of operating in universities that have no ethical review procedures whatsoever. Three of the four
postdoctoral researchers in our project encountered neither ethics procedures nor any ethics training during their PhD trajectory. Our Morocco
researcher went on to work for two other European universities without
encountering any institutional engagement with research ethics. The
researchers in question do not believe they have made fatal ethical mistakes in their research, but the lack of institutional awareness of ethical
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concerns did sometimes make them feel unprepared for problems and
dilemmas they encountered in the field. Moreover, it meant that there was
no obvious person or body to consult on these matters; they were left to
figure them out on their own, without much experience.
In general then, we would argue for engaged ethics procedures, preferably with an element of human interaction, that force us to reflect on ethical challenges we might encounter without turning into a bureaucratic
box-ticking exercise. We would urge academics to push for such procedures, not only when they face procedures that are too rigid but also
where they encounter an absence of either training or clearance reviews.
GaininG Entry: PErmits and Visas
As part of the ethics procedures described above, some universities and
grant-making institutions insist that researchers should seek prior permission to do research from some authority in the country where their fieldwork is to take place. There may, in general, be circumstances in which
requiring such permission is quite justified, for instance, when doing
research related to a country’s natural resources or conducting medical
trials. When it comes to the social sciences, we believe that there is no
general justifiable need for such permission, but there may be circumstances in which it is reasonable for the state to limit entry. Loyle (2016,
927), for instance, describes how Rwanda instituted a permit system ‘in
part as a response to rampant and unchecked social and scientific research
that was conducted in the country post-1994 with limited regard for the
health and psychological well-being of research participants’. Today however, Loyle points out, the ‘process serves as a high-cost barrier to research
in Rwanda’, and severely constrains research on subjects of sensitivity to
the government.
Below we describe some of our own practices when gaining entry, and
the restrictions and ambiguities in state policies on permission for research
we encountered. With one exception, none of us have ever sought government permission for our research on authoritarianism, or applied for a
research visa. Such an official request, if there is even a dedicated procedure to process it, would only serve to attract the authorities’ attention to
our research, arouse suspicion, and most likely result in a denial. For
Morocco, for instance, there is a procedure, and one is formally required
to ask for permission to do research in the country. But getting permission
can take months and sometimes it is just not given. To our knowledge,
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most Maghreb researchers do not apply for it. India officially requires a
research visa, but despite being formally democratic, it is very restrictive in
giving out visas for any politically sensitive research, such as in our case
repression in the context of subnational authoritarianism, but also, for
instance, on the Maoist insurgency or other armed groups, or any research
on Kashmir.
Our first visit to the field was often different from subsequent experiences in terms of our purpose for going. Our Iran researcher came primarily to study the language, our Kazakhstan researcher was working for an
international organization, and our India researcher felt that, as a master
student, the line between just ‘hanging out’ as someone who is interested
in the country and being there as an academic researcher was still quite
fluid. Once we were set on our career course, this kind of convenient
ambiguity has tended to dissipate. Even our China researcher, a Chinese
national who grew up in the country, now clearly goes as a researcher, not
just someone visiting home.
So, how do we enter the country nowadays? Sometimes, we go on
tourist visa. Tourist-friendly countries like Malaysia, Morocco, or Mexico
make it very easy to enter the country—indeed Europeans can stay in
Morocco for three months without even applying for a visa. There is
something uneasy about doing research on a tourist visa or without a permit, especially where a research visa or permit does in fact exist. But a
tourist visa does not imply that we are treating the purpose of our presence
as a secret. We all carry letters from our home universities, signed by a
head of department or university official, explaining our research, but we
have rarely had occasion to produce them. Our Morocco researcher writes
‘study, work and tourism’ or ‘work and tourism’ on her immigration form.
Our India and Mexico researcher has conducted interviews with local
policemen and magistrates while on a tourist visa. The experience is that
state officials are not in the habit of questioning whether one has a research
visa or permit: how you came into the country is not really their concern.
Nonetheless, the lack of an official stamp of approval can make us vulnerable, or at least make us feel vulnerable. Our Morocco researcher applied
for official approval for her research on Salafists after experiencing intrusive surveillance, an experience detailed in Chap. 5. She applied not
because she expected to get permission (and indeed she never received a
response to the request) but simply in order to signal that she was not
doing clandestine research.
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For other countries, such as China, Iran, or Kazakhstan, getting any type
of visa requires more bureaucratic effort, and moreover, there is a realistic
risk of being denied entry. To some of us, the restrictive visa policies seem
like part and parcel of the system of authoritarian control: the government
wants to strictly monitor who enters, and who does what in the country. In
post-Soviet countries in particular, it is not just the entry visa. One needs to
regularly register one’s exact whereabouts, with a hotel or with the migration police. Having said that, as western researchers we may too easily read
authoritarianism into such requirements, and forget the often draconian
procedures of our own authorities vis-à-vis non-residents. Our China
researcher, when she first came to the United Kingdom from China, also
had to register with the local authorities at the police station.
An important commonality in our experiences with gaining entry is ambiguity: the rules are unclear, they keep changing, or they are applied unevenly.
Our Iran researcher is pretty certain that the lack of response to his request for
a study visa in 2015 was not politically motivated, but just a matter of sloppiness, the application had been delayed or forgotten somewhere, and he was
quickly issued a tourist visa instead. At the same time, Iran researchers do
regularly have their visa denied on what are likely to be political grounds. Even
some researchers with long-term relationships and networks have still been
denied. Our China researcher can freely leave and enter the country, but she
has seen that the treatment of foreign scholars by the Chinese government
appears quite arbitrary: a colleague whose visa application was rejected reapplied two weeks later and was accepted. A US-based scholar working on Tibet
was rejected, which seems unsurprising in itself, but then another researcher
working on the same topic was accepted at almost the same time. In
Kazakhstan, entry has actually become easier in recent years, with visa-free
regimes offered for short stays. But the bottom line, in Kazakhstan as in other
authoritarian contexts, is that the bureaucratic requirements are never quite
stable and transparent, and this in itself creates the kind of legal uncertainty
that appears to be one of the hallmarks of authoritarian rule. Most authoritarianism scholars gain access to their fieldwork sites most of the time, but denial
of entry is always a possibility, and even expulsion is never unthinkable.
constrainEd choicEs
Our choices of fieldwork countries, and of research topics, are in part
determined by what is possible, and safe. Little is in fact known about what
drives fieldwork choices. Clark’s (2006) valuable survey of difficulties
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faced by researchers in the Middle East and North Africa only showed 16%
of respondents specifying ‘the political situation’ and safety as contributing
to their country choices, and did not distinguish between repression and
other safety risks. A more recent study on the political risks of field research
in Central Asia found that ‘(s)everal respondents reported that they no
longer work in Uzbekistan’ and a ‘few respondents singled out
Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan as sites where they have experienced significant censorship/restrictions, chosen not to go, or experienced difficulty
going’(CESS 2016, 7). Goode (2010) initially discerned a relation
between Russia becoming more autocratic and a decline in fieldwork, but
qualified his conclusions in a later study of the broader region (Goode
2016). Nonetheless, we would logically expect the most repressive regimes
within the authoritarian universe to be less likely settings for field research:
either because it would be too dangerous, or simply because it is impossible to gain access. Similarly, assessments of feasibility and risk are likely to
constrain the choice of research topics and research questions. We do not
expand on this point, since it has been dealt with extensively by the contributions to Observing Autocracies from the Ground Floor (Goode and
Ahram 2016). At the level of our own considerations and observations of
colleagues, the notion of constrained country choices, and associated
knowledge gaps, seems to have validity. Our Kazakhstan researcher for
instance made a clear choice, within Central Asia, not to do research in
Uzbekistan for safety reasons. We know no one who has done fieldwork in
Saudi Arabia, Turkmenistan, or North Korea. We know colleagues who
have started doing research in Myanmar only after it democratized from
2011. And more dramatically, we know many colleagues who have abruptly
stopped doing research in Egypt when it became much more repressive in
recent years.
not so danGErous
Field research in authoritarian settings is by no means the most dangerous
kind of social science research one can imagine. Research on organized
crime, or in the middle of civil war, is likely to be more dangerous. The
risks that a foreign academic runs in an authoritarian country are also
incomparable to the risks run by local activists, because of both components, ‘foreign’ and ‘academic’. We write academic books and journals,
the tone is balanced, the jargon complex. We do not usually express outrage in our academic work. Moreover, more often than not, we write in
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English and not in a local language that is easily accessible to the population. Both foreign journalists and local academics are typically more at risk
than we are. A different matter is the risk we may pose to our respondents,
an issue we consider in more depth in Chaps. 4 and 6.
Gentile distinguishes between two types of security risk in authoritarian
contexts: ‘crime-related risks, [in which] the state is, or at least should be,
your “friend”’ and ‘risks in which the state (the secret services, internal
security forces and the like) is your “enemy”’ (Gentile 2013, 427). We
would add two further categories: risks resulting from crisis situations and
risks that are related to the authoritarian contexts in more indirect or
ambiguous ways. We do not discuss the first type of risk, which does not
specifically relate to our position as researchers in the authoritarian field.
Along with all other preparations, researchers should of course make
themselves aware of the crime profile of the places where they are to do
research and take relevant precautions. We devote most attention to the
first, ‘classic authoritarian’ type of risk, but will also address ‘crisis risk’ and
‘indirect risk’.
Depending on which county one investigates, and especially which
topic, a researcher may need to prepare for being under electronic or physical surveillance (see also Chap. 5), for being interviewed by security
agents (see Gentile 2013), and for being warned off certain activities or
topics. All these things have happened to us. It is rare for a researcher to
be arrested, detained, or expelled, and slightly less rare but still unusual to
be denied entry. These things have not happened to us. Clark’s (2006)
survey, mentioned above, despite the modest number of responses (55)
gives some insight into the frequency of such events, at least in the Middle
East and North Africa: ‘22% of the researchers noted that they at one
point had difficulties gaining entry to the countries of research or obtaining research visas due to the perceived political sensitivity of their topics by
the host governments. Others reported that they had experienced the
threat or actual seizure of their research data (5%), surveillance and monitoring by security (4%), arrest and/or detention (4%), and police harassment (2%)’. The recent Central Asia survey, without giving exact
percentages, similarly reports ‘ten first-hand accounts of arrest and
detention by state officials and a further seventeen of various forms of
harassment of the researcher or assistants’ among a few hundred respondents (CESS 2016, 8).
Ahram and Goode (2016, 839) discuss the case of 13 China scholars
who were denied visas after publishing a book on Xinjiang province, as
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well as the arrest of Alexander Sodiqov, a PhD student who was arrested
on suspicion of treason and held for over a month in Tajikistan (Goode
and Ahram 2016, 828). Another incident that has attracted much attention is that of the immediate expulsion of Davenport and Stam (2009)
from Rwanda after presenting findings on the genocide that were uncomfortable to the government. There have also been a few recent cases of
expulsion of Russia scholars, specifically those who study archives, but
according to the US embassy in Moscow, the incidents concern a ‘very
small minority of the large number of Western academics who travel and
study in Russia’ (Schreck 2015). While it is difficult to generalize about
visa denials, expulsion remains a matter of relative rarity, and arrest even
more so, in most authoritarian contexts.
and yEt it can BE danGErous
There have been some very worrying recent cases of arrest and detention of
social scientists in Iran. Homa Hoodfar, an anthropologist, was held for
almost four months and then released in 2016. She coped with prison brutality by dealing with the situation as unintended ‘fieldwork’ (Kassam 2016).
Most recently and dramatically, Xiyue Wang, a PhD student in history at
Princeton University, was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment on charges
of spying after having already spent a year in prison (Gladstone 2017).
So far, we have not distinguished between foreign visitors such as
Davenport and Stam, and dual nationals or nationals investigating their
own country, such as Sodiqov or Hoodfar. Since we are dealing with rare
occurrences, we cannot systematically compare, but it seems likely that the
latter two groups and especially nationals are likely to be more vulnerable
to the risks we have outlined, since their treatment is less likely to lead to
diplomatic intervention, even though their home university might exert
itself on their behalf. Moreover, even apart from the risk of arrest, the
impact of expulsion or visa denial on them may be much greater, entailing
not just an enforced change of country specialism but being cut off from
homeland and loved ones. As for local academics, they fall into a different
category altogether, which is not the subject of this book. For them, many
research topics are likely to be proscribed, and in most cases, research on
their country’s authoritarian system as such will not be possible.
The death of Giulio Regeni, a PhD student at the University of Cambridge
who was tortured to death whilst doing fieldwork on trade unionism in
Egypt in 2016, sent shockwaves through our community of researchers. It
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was one of the reasons that propelled us to write this book. He was killed
for doing exactly what we do. Contrary to some portrayals in the press,
Regeni was neither a clueless student, nor did he have a subversive political
agenda. He was in close touch with academics who had tremendous local
knowledge and made no obvious mistakes. Regeni became the victim of a
rapidly deteriorating situation, in which mid-level security agents may
have had, or seized, more autonomy than is usual in authoritarian settings.
Regeni’s death and the responses to it highlight the rarity of such an
extreme act of repression against a foreign scholar, and reminds us of our
relative safety in comparison to our respondents in the countries we study.
Generally, it continues to be true that it is a terrible publicity for a regime
to harm a researcher from a western university, and therefore highly
unlikely. But Regeni’s death is also a reminder that in doing authoritarian
field research, we must accept a small risk that things go horribly wrong.
The likelihood of such incidents is very low when the regime is stable, but
increases in crisis times when the regime feels threatened and needs to
reassert its power, such as in the aftermath of the Arab revolts, the Iranian
Green Movement protests, or the Andijan massacre in Uzbekistan. Of
course if we can predict looming periods of instability in advance, we may
(despite the fascination such periods hold for us as political scientists) opt
to refrain from doing fieldwork at such times. But one of the hallmarks of
authoritarian rule is its apparent unassailability, sometimes followed by
sudden collapse, and scholars have had notorious difficulty predicting
such collapse. So, we must accept the chance of unexpected crises, and
concomitant uncharacteristic behavior from state agents, as one of the
known unknowns associated with authoritarian field research.
Possibly the most dangerous work within our group was carried out
within an ostensibly democratic context (at least at the national level): in
Veracruz, Mexico. The research focused on the subnational authoritarian
rule of this region, and in particular on the repression of critical journalists, several of whom had been found murdered in the previous years. The
risks he anticipated were only in part connected to the subnational authoritarian context and the researcher’s plans. A white young man could be
taken for an oil executive (lucrative for kidnapping purposes), or, more
connected to politically sensitive interviewing, for a US Drug Enforcement
Agency (DEA) official. An important generalizable point here is that there
is no obvious correlation (nor, we hasten to add, an inverse correlation)
between how authoritarian a state or regional context is and how vulnerable a researcher may be to criminal violence.
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assEssinG risk in adVancE
One obvious source of information in preparing for fieldwork in authoritarian contexts is human rights reports, or conversations with human
rights activists. A problem with this kind of information, however, is that
it reports on only one dimension of a multidimensional political system: its
human rights record. The purpose of human rights reports is not to give a
would-be researcher a balanced and personalized sense of risk. It is important for researchers to know about censorship and about dissidents in
prison but also to get past identifying a regime solely with its censors and
prisons, especially when their research questions focus on issues other than
repression. When a human rights organization uses an expression like ‘culture of fear’, for instance, we should take it seriously, but not assume a
priori that we will indeed find all our potential respondents terrified. Only
particular groups will come in for harsh repression, and our likely respondents may not belong to such groups. As Pepinsky has written about
Malaysia, in many contexts, ‘(m)ost not-very-vocal critics will live their
lives completely unmolested by the security forces’, and will find living
under authoritarianism ‘tolerable’ (Pepinsky 2017).
A similar caveat should be made about the security briefings of our
foreign ministries. They are typically written with tourists, perhaps businesspeople in mind, and tend to err on the side of caution in case of any
political instability. At the same time, they are not geared towards the very
particular risk assessments we need to make. While it is a good idea to
contact one’s national embassy upon arrival, it is important to be aware
that the duties of embassy staff are (a) to maintain good relations with the
host country and (b) to be responsible for their nationals when there is any
kind of difficulty. Both of these roles may cause them to be conservative in
their advice, and not overenthusiastic about political science research
undertaken by their nationals. Just like the information from human rights
NGOs, the advice from embassies should be seriously considered, but
there are good reasons not to make it your primary behavioral guide (see
also Loyle 2016, 928).
The best source of information for first-time visitors may be more experienced academics, especially those who have recently been in the field
themselves. While some may display gatekeeper behavior, most will be
encouraging and helpful. Loyle (2016, 929) also recommends ‘works of
fiction and journalistic non-fiction’, and especially fiction by local authors.
If they exist in a language accessible to you, such sources can be great for
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conveying a sense of the culture (including, sometimes, the political culture) you are about to enter. Of course, they should not usually be relied
on for topical analysis of recent political developments.
Our Malaysia researcher initially overestimated the dangers of his field
research, which involved interviews especially with social movement activists. Describing himself as ‘starting from zero’, he discussed the risks of
this fieldwork with various social scientists and a human rights activist
about before going. He asked them what with hindsight seemed to him
naïve questions: are activist leaders known by name, can you openly e-mail
them? Nonetheless, he soon discovered that in Malaysia too, there are
limits to how openly one can investigate anti-government protest.
The Iran researcher’s preparations were very much colored by the
events that had occurred towards the end of his PhD research: many of the
activists he had interviewed and befriended had been forced into exile
after the failure of Iran’s Green Movement. Moreover, he had not returned
for five years and had published critically on Iran in western media in the
meantime. The advice he received from Iranian contacts was ambiguous.
He went ahead with his visit, which turned out to be not very dangerous,
but not very productive either, as we will elaborate in later chapters.
Because of the heightened security concerns, our Mexico researcher
proceeded with his research in stages: starting in the capital and taking
time to take advice from a relevant human rights organization, before
proceeding to the more risky subnational context of Veracruz. When he
arrived, both the human rights organization in the capital and the local
representative of an international security consultancy were aware of his
whereabouts and the nature of his research. This did not guarantee that
nothing would happen. But it did mean that if there were an arrest, a
threat, an assault, the local actors with the most appropriate local expertise, and with at least some clout, could immediately be involved.
Our repeat visitors, now country experts, all prepare in similar ways:
they read local news and keep up their network, speaking to local friends
and colleagues on a regular basis. In this regard, there is not a clear distinction between continually updating their substantive knowledge of the
political developments and assessing the risks associated with the next
fieldwork trip. Even our China researcher, born and bred in China, constantly updates her sense of the trends and patterns in how much space
there is for social scientists to do their work. She talks to trusted friends
and colleagues on Chinese social media, practicing her interview questions
and honing her sense of what can be said to whom.
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GoinG thE anthroPoloGist Way
And yet, until you go you cannot really prepare. Our experience is that, for
a first visit especially, it is best not to want too much, too soon. Take time
to adjust to your environment. Read local papers; have some conversations
with the proverbial taxi drivers. Take a language class. Exploratory talks
are necessary, background conversations to orient oneself on what is safe
for oneself and others. Visit your embassy, perhaps an international organization. Talk to some foreign journalists, some local academics.
More than in relatively democratic settings, authoritarian fieldwork
requires caution, patience, and the willingness to accept that it is not
always possible to interview those one wants to speak to, or ask them the
questions one had planned to ask (see also Loyle 2016, 930–932;
Malekzadeh 2016, 863–864; Markowitz 2016, 900–901 on creativity and
flexibility in research design). The first few weeks, perhaps the entire first
visit, may not yield immediate results. You have to go and see what is possible and slowly develop a plan to relate what you want to find out to what
seems possible on the ground. In some contexts one can contact relative
strangers via e-mail, but more often one depends on introductions from
friends (see also Chap. 4). It is also important at this stage to shed assumptions that turn out to be oversimplifications, for instance, that demonstrations are either for or against the government, or that the general
population is either apolitical or deeply political.
Generally, we try to keep multiple people aware of our whereabouts.
Many of us have one or more trusted local contacts, who know what we
are doing almost on a daily basis. We stay in frequent touch with parents
or partners, and we make sure that people at home and in the fieldwork
country have each other’s contact details, so they can consult in case of an
emergency. About once a week, we discuss our progress, strategy, and
potential security risks, with a colleague at our home university.
EncountErinG thE sEcurity aPParatus
The need to take it slow, especially on a first visit, is illustrated by an early
experience of our Malaysia researcher. In his first few days, he discovered
that students or taxi drivers spoke much more openly about both the government and the main protest movement, Bersih, than he had expected.
After five days in the country, an apparently golden opportunity fell into
his lap: a protest was planned against a free trade agreement. Two local
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contacts thought it would probably be fine for him to attend the demonstration and talk to participants—although his own embassy advised
against it. He prepared a short survey, online as well as on paper, and
proceeded to the demonstration bright and early. After a brief chat with
two youngsters who planned to demonstrate, he sat down on a bench with
one of them and pulled his survey out. Within minutes, two bulky plainclothes security agents sat down next to him and demanded to see his
papers. They asked whether he had a permit, told him repeatedly that they
could not guarantee his security, demanded his passport and proceeded to
photograph it. They then told him to go back to his hotel, where he stayed
the rest of the day, abandoning his plans for the survey. Two reflections
follow from this early encounter: if this protest had not come quite so
soon after arrival, the researcher would probably have known to keep a
lower profile during the demonstration. At the same time, he might have
been less intimidated by the incident, and might have had the phone number of a lawyer on hand. On a repeat visit, he successfully attended a Bersih
demonstration.
As a PhD student, our China researcher never considered what she
might do if security agents would want to interview her. But as a postdoc
in our project, after hearing that various Chinese scholars and some foreign scholars’ Chinese students had been approached by the security services, for a ‘cup of tea’, she began to prepare, and make, a mental list of
what to do in such a situation. Before the second fieldwork trip for our
project, a Chinese colleague in China told her that he had been invited to
meet two local security agents. After talking about his own research on
China and the EU, they asked him questions about our funder, the
ERC. According to the colleague, it was a civil meeting and he did not feel
any sense of threat; they did not warn him or force him to do anything.
The agents were curious about social science research in the west in general, but appeared to be to have two specific concerns. First, they wanted
to understand whether the ERC was comparable to funding institutions
(e.g. the Ford Foundation) that fund human rights activists and frequently
touch the ‘red lines’ (see next chapter) of the Chinese government.
Second, they wanted to understand the purpose and intentions of our
project: why did we want to understand things about Chinese politics?
Did we want to use our knowledge of China to instigate revolt against the
Chinese Communist Party? Did we want to use the experience and lessons
from the Arab spring and use social media for rebellion in China? It was
clear that they were not worried about western social science research on
ENTERING THE FIELD
31
China in general, but concerned about certain topics that might be funded
by ‘suspicious’ sponsors or touching ‘red lines’. Such a ‘friendly visit’ to a
third party, indicating that a research project has somehow gotten onto
the radar of the security services, appears to fit with the experience of some
researchers in the post-Soviet sphere (Gentile 2013, 430) as well as
Malekzadeh’s experience in Iran (2016, 872).
We contacted our advisors and various China scholars, western and
local. Their and our assessment was that the inquiry into our project did
not constitute an unacceptable risk to our China researcher. We did, however, think through likely questions that security agents might ask. The
answers, we agreed, should be truthful, but have an apolitical slant (see
Chap. 3). Just as Gentile (2013, 430) advises, politeness and diplomacy
should be observed as much as possible, and in the best case, an interview
might actually present ‘an opportunity to clarify possible misunderstandings’. Only the identity of our researcher’s respondents, and details of
what they said, should be sacrosanct. As it turned out, her fieldwork was
entirely uneventful. She received no invitation and did not notice any
surveillance or intrusion at all.
Some of the risky situations we have experienced are not directly but
indirectly related to the authoritarian context. Our Iran researcher underwent an incident of attempted extortion (which we will detail in Chap. 5),
the motive of which may just have been personal gain, but the act was committed by a person connected to a security agency. Such a person may have,
or at least feel they have, a higher degree of impunity in engaging in such
behavior. Likewise, the risk of sexual harassment is something familiar to
any solo-traveling female, but may take on a more menacing aspect when
the agent is a state official in an authoritarian context. Our Morocco
researcher had such an experience. She was invited by an official to a formal
dinner where she could meet many relevant contacts, but he refused to give
her the name of the restaurant and insisted instead that she should meet him
for a drink at his place. Our researcher resolved the dilemma by pretending
to accept, but a few minutes before they were supposed to meet, calling him
to say that a previous appointment had lasted longer than expected and that
she was too far away to make it to his home. Thus the official had no choice
than to pick her up where she was and go directly to the restaurant. During
the dinner, the official kept on filling her glass. Understanding what was
happening, she realized that the last thing she wanted was to find herself
alone with him in his car. A good tip to the waiter made it possible to have
a taxi ready for her in front of the restaurant. Thus when he offered her a
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lift, it took her only few seconds to politely refuse and jump into her waiting
taxi. The incident illustrates the particular interface between gender-based
and authoritarian risk that female researchers may face. When in doubt, it
may be wisest to sacrifice a spontaneous research opportunity if there is a
clear risk of harassment. The episode also suggests, however, that for a
researcher familiar with the context, some skillful navigation can make it
possible to grasp the opportunity whilst staying safe.
data sEcurity tradE-offs
We do not know to what extent any of us are under electronic surveillance
from security institutions from authoritarian or indeed democratic states.
In Chap. 5 we discuss our actual experiences with electronic surveillance;
here we describe our preparations for it. We take it as given that, as Gentile
puts it ‘(w)hen doing fieldwork in countries ruled by authoritarian regimes
it is possible that phone calls, emails and letters are monitored’, and further assume that any online activity, or documents on online servers or in
virtual clouds, may be subject to scrutiny. Our most elaborate fieldwork
preparations as a group related to data security, in particular contact details
of respondents and interview transcripts. Before our fieldwork, our project
had organized a few digital security training sessions from an expert in this
area. With hindsight though, we have come to second-guess some of our
initial learnings from these sessions, which were very much inspired by a
post-Snowden focus on digital surveillance and online intrusions at the
expense of thinking through more traditional security threats and basic
travel precautions. One common device we had agreed on was to take two
laptops into the field: one for web browsing, e-mails, and so on and one
secondhand laptop that never went online, but acted almost as a typewriter, for transcribing interviews. We would keep these separate from the
actual contact details of these respondents.
We have found, however, that applying high levels of digital security
also has disadvantages. Now, we tend to think data security more in
terms of trade-offs. The first is that it is simply time-consuming and
cumbersome. In Kazakhstan, our researcher initially used two computers and two phones, with three SIM cards. Both the China and the
Malaysia researchers took no less than three laptops into the field, a
heavy load. Transcribing interviews on an offline laptop protects respondents from electronic surveillance and would make their identity hard to
detect, but of course it does not offer absolute security. It also increases
the chances of losing transcripts. Indeed, our researcher in Gujarat,
ENTERING THE FIELD
33
India had a terrible experience of this kind. Having done quite a few
sensitive interviews with opponents of Narendra Modi, he had meticulously stuck to the strategy of keeping anonymized transcriptions only
on the offline computer, and separately on USB sticks. On his trip back,
transferring through Abu Dhabi airport, he kept both in his hand luggage. This bag was stolen—or possibly confiscated, we’ll never know—
during baggage screening at the airport. It was never recovered.
Another trade-off is that extreme security measures can actually draw
suspicion. If you behave like a spy or agent provocateur, you are more
likely to be suspected of being one. Our general policy has been to rely on
the notion, accepted in most but perhaps not all authoritarian contexts,
that social science research is a legitimate enterprise (see also Chap. 3), and
we engage in it openly, but we have a professional duty to protect our
data, and usually also the identity of our respondents. Indeed, our Iran
researcher was advised against bringing a second laptop because it might
raise suspicion, and decided not to bring one. Likewise, our Kazakhstan
researcher gave up using the second laptop after a while. She came to the
conclusion that, given that her research topic was not particularly sensitive, the risk of raising red flags during passport control by having a second
laptop actually outweighed the benefits of better protection from electronic surveillance. A final trade-off relates to how taking digital security
measures makes us feel, an issue we will return to in Chap. 5. Precautionary
routines may increase our sense of comfort during stressful fieldwork, but
it can also end up making us feel unnecessarily paranoid.
The lengths we went to protect respondent identities and transcripts
depended in part on the sensitivity of the questions we were asking, and in
part on what was considered appropriate in the context. Our Kazakhstan
researcher used pseudonyms for her interviews with students who had
been on a state-sponsored study-abroad scheme, but did not encrypt them.
In Kazakhstan, the use of encryption is subject to legal restrictions, and
would immediately signal that one has something to hide. Moreover, some
experts believe that the introduction of a mandatory ‘national security certificate’ for Internet users in 2015 has actually made encryption more vulnerable to surveillance by the security services. Since her respondents came
from a relatively select group of people, she thinks that if somebody would
have gotten hold of her computer, they would surely have found a way to
connect transcripts to respondents. However, she did not ask particularly
sensitive questions, so if a state agent had somehow come to read or listen
to the interviews, respondents would still not have been endangered. In
the case of Malaysia, many of the activists interviewed were well-known
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M. GLASIUS ET AL.
public figures, who were comfortable going on record with everything
they said, so there was no reason to keep the transcripts concealed offline,
or separate them from names and contact details.
Our Iran expert by contrast, who has also interviewed activists, has taught
himself to routinely use encryption. When he first started doing research in
2008, he had concerns about his transcripts getting physically impounded.
However, he did not know much about Internet surveillance at the time,
and he would simply e-mail his transcripts to his partner back home before
erasing them. In 2015, he erased all data from his laptop before traveling to
Iran. Less sensitive interviews he kept on his laptop, a bit hidden away with
nondescript file names, more sensitive ones he would encrypt.
Some of us never record interviews but rely exclusively on extensive
notes. Notes, they say, can have the advantage of making respondents
more comfortable but also of making the interviewer more attentive to
what she is hearing. Others do use recordings, but not for the most sensitive issues. All of us make copious notes, often in a mix of languages and
even scripts, which are not readily intelligible to others. In case of extremely
sensitive confidential information, we sometimes write nothing down at all
but try to commit it to memory. There is an obvious tension here, which
we will revisit in Chap. 6, between accuracy and transparency on the one
hand, and protecting ourselves and our respondents on the other hand.
We went through a learning curve, from having little awareness of data
security issues to assuming that rigorous measures like the use of offline
laptops and encryption provide the most safety to thinking in terms of
trade-offs between greater digital security on the one hand and the risks of
arousing suspicion, physical theft, or becoming caught up in paranoia on
the other hand. Our general experience has been that it is worthwhile to
learn and practice a range of digital security routines before going into the
field, so that we know how to use them if we find that the context requires
it. If we then find that the routines we had envisaged are unnecessary or
even inappropriate, we can relax or abandon them. The other way around,
ratcheting up one’s digital security routines once in the field, could be
technically and practically much more difficult.
chaPtEr conclusion: PlanninG ahEad
and accEPtinG risk
Preparing as well as we can may improve our judgment when faced with a
sensitive situation, and—not unimportantly—give us some peace of mind.
Ethics procedures, when well designed, can actually help us prepare by
ENTERING THE FIELD
35
pushing us to think about challenges we might face. We prepare in advance
by reading up from various sources, and by talking to politically minded
people who live in our fieldwork country, or have visited recently. Visa
procedures sometimes give us our first taste of the vagaries of authoritarian
bureaucracies. We should take some time to acclimatize on arrival, especially if it is a first visit, the situation has changed, or our topic is particularly sensitive. We scenario-plan how we might handle an encounter with
security agents. We can develop and practice digital routines. But even for
experienced country experts, or people who are nationals of the state they
investigate, unexpected situations may come up, and there is no fail-safe
way to prepare and to figure out exactly what is and is not dangerous for
oneself and others. Having assessed and minimized our risk, we accept
that it exists.
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