Letting Reality Interfere with Theory: Towards a "How" of Fieldwork-Based Securitization Studies more

Letting Realities Interfere with Theory: Towards a "How" of Fieldwork-Based Securitization Studies Paper for presentation on the panel "The Place and Position of Fieldwork in IR" at the 2011 International Studies Association Annual Convention, 16-19 March, Montreal, Canada. Work in progress – please do not cite without author's permission Cai Wilkinson School of Government and Society University of Birmingham, UK c.wilkinson@bham.ac.uk c.wilkinson@bham.ac.uk NOT FOR CITATION WITHOUT PERMISSION 2 ISA 2011 Montreal c.wilkinson@bham.ac.uk NOT FOR CITATION WITHOUT PERMISSION Letting Realities Interfere with Theory: Towards a "How" of Fieldwork-Based Securitization Studies Abstract Despite the increasing prominence of critical approaches to security over the last two decades, as yet little attention has been paid to the place of fieldwork in understanding security. Rather than being seen as an opportunity to experience security and its multiple situated meanings, all too often fieldwork becomes an exercise in finding what theory tells the researcher to look for. While this approach is likely to lead to a better fit between data and model, it is in danger of causing the researcher to be either "realities blind" or to feel that theory lacks sufficient explanatory power to be of use. This paper explores the tensions that exist when theoretical models are taken into the field. Specifically, I reflect upon how the researcher can begin to navigate these tensions between fieldwork and theory via the reflexive utilisation of her experiences in the field. In doing so, theory becomes one of many possible interpretations of security, rather than offering a definitive account of security in a particular location. I then discuss how this reconceptualisation of the relationship between researcher, theory and the field can facilitate the development of critical sensibilities capable of mediating between theory and realities. Keywords: Securitization theory, Securitization Studies, Fieldwork, Interpretive methods, Experiential knowledge, Reflexivity, Sensibilities, Critical Security. 1. Fieldwork in Securitization Studies: Excess Baggage or 'Nothing to Declare' As graduate students we are told that ‘anthropology equals experience’; you are not an anthropologist until you have the experience of doing it. But when one returns from the field the opposite immediately applies: anthropology is not the experiences that have made you an initiate, but only the objective data you have brought back.1 As the quotation above from anthropologist Rabinow suggests, all too often fieldwork has been viewed by scholars as merely a data collection exercise, the harvesting of facts and figures that can then be analysed with the help of scientific theories and reported as factual "knowledge" or even a definitive "Truth". While this situation has been redressed to varying degrees in disciplines such as anthropology, sociology and human geography via various "turns" and accompanying debate over the politics of the production of knowledge, discussion of methods in International Relations and especially the subdiscipline of Security Studies has remained muted. Despite the fact that political science, including IR, has experienced an interpretive or "ethnographic turn" of sorts,2 traditional positivistic approaches continue to dominate the mainstream, despite calls for increased methodological pluralism from within the discipline,3 as 1 2 Rabinow, Paul (1977) Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco Berkeley: University of California Press: 4. Neufeld, Mark (1993) “Interpretation and the ‘science’ of international relations”, Review of International Studies 19: 39-61; Price, Richard (1993) “Interpretation and disciplinary orthodoxy in international relations”, Review of International Studies 20: 201-204; Vrasti, Wanda (2008) “The Strange Case of Ethnography and International Relations”, Millennium 37(2): 280. 3 Central to this trend in the US has been the Perestroika Movement, while in Europe the C.A.S.E. Collective’s 2006 “manifesto” is a good example. Monroe, Kristen R. (2005) Perestroika!: The Raucous Rebellion in Political Science, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press; C.A.S.E. Collective (2006) "Critical Approaches to Security in Europe" Security Dialogue 37(4): 443-487. 3 ISA 2011 Montreal c.wilkinson@bham.ac.uk NOT FOR CITATION WITHOUT PERMISSION evidenced by the lack of attention paid to questions of methodology.4 The blinkered nature of this stance has not been missed by all political scientists, as Bayard de Volo and Schatz noting the irony "that although political scientists, as students of power and politics, are well positioned to consider these links, the discipline tends rather to ignore them". 5 Indeed, even post-positivist scholars of IR have often been reluctant to engage fully with the “mess” of empirical research, wary of condemnations from fellow scholars; on the one hand, it is argued that the "how" of fieldwork is "excess baggage" that is little, if anything more than self-indulgent navel-gazing on the part of the researcher, or, on the other, that it is "nothing to declare" in that while the constructed nature of the object of study’s world is acknowledged, academic research should present what Pouliot calls “experience-distant” knowledge that is deemed to be objective and neutral.6 In the case of securitization studies, in common with other theory-based areas of research, this preference for "experience-distant" knowledge risks reducing empirical material to "facts" and figures that can be used to assess the success or failure of a securitization and hence what "security" is in that particular situation with little consideration of the local context. This issue has not gone unnoticed. Building on the Copenhagen School’s concept of facilitating conditions, scholars have attempted to expand consideration of context within securitization's framework in a number of ways. Hughes has called for the audience’s pre-cognitive biases, or existing world view, to be added to the facilitating conditions for a successful securitization to occur.7 Similarly, considering the impact of photographic images on security policy, Möller has argued that the “collective memory of the targeted audience” must be taken into account as a precondition for a successful securitization.8 In addition, increased attention has been paid to how better to include consideration of securitization's context. Salter has proposed dramaturgical analysis to consider the “setting” of a securitization, since the process “reflects the complex constitution of social and political communities and may be successful and unsuccessful to different degrees in different settings within the same issue area and across issues”.9 Stritzel, meanwhile, has argued that it is their “embeddness in social relations of meaning and power that constitutes both actors and speech acts”, leading him to propose an additional framework to facilitate the consideration of context in applications of securitization.10 Although these works have consolidated existing critiques of securitization and societal security in particular through the addition of empirical case studies, it is debates over the nature of security that have provided the most fundamental challenge to the Copenhagen School. Wæver has previously asserted that the securitization approach has an distinct advantage over the majority of mainstream and critical approaches to security in that it “points to the inherently political nature of any designation of security issues and thus it puts an ethical question at the feet of analysts, decision-makers and political activists alike: why do you call this a security issue? What are the implications of doing this – or of not doing it?” 11 In practice, however, the Copenhagen School stops in a position described by Eriksson as “observe how others 4 Pouliot, Vincent (2007) “‘Sobjectivism’: Toward a Constructivist Methodology”, International Studies Quarterly 51(2): 359-384; Balzacq, Thierry (2009) "Constructivism and Securitization Studies" in Mauer, Victor & Myriam Dunn Cavelty (eds.) Handbook of Security Studies London & New York: Routledge: 65. 5 Bayard de Volo, Lorraine & Edward Schatz (2004) “From the Inside Out: Ethnographic Methods in Political Research”, PS: Political Science & Politics 37(2): 268. 6 Pouliot, Vincent (2007): 359. 7 Hughes, Bryn (2004) “Political Violence and Democracy: Do Societal Identity Threats Matter? The Security and Politics of Identity” Paper presented at the Australasian Political Studies Association Conference, University of Adelaide, 29 September – 1 October: 16. 8 Möller, Frank (2007) "Photographic Interventions in Post-9/11 Security Policy" Security Dialogue 38(2): 179-196. 9 Salter, Mark (2008) “Securitization and desecuritization: a dramaturgical analysis of the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority”, Journal of International Relations and Development 11: 321-349. 10 Stritzel, Holger (2007) “Towards a Theory of Securitization: Copenhagen and Beyond”, European Journal of International Relations 13(3): 367-370. 11 Wæver, Ole (1999) “Securitizing Sectors? Reply to Eriksson” Cooperation and Conflict 34(3): 334. 4 ISA 2011 Montreal c.wilkinson@bham.ac.uk NOT FOR CITATION WITHOUT PERMISSION advocate!”12 Security may be intersubjectively constructed between the actors in a securitization, but in applying securitization the analyst is objectively reporting the results of this process. The result is that an unwieldy “objective constructivism” ties the hands of any analyst wishing to explicitly consider the questions suggested by Wæver. While theoretically-orientated scholars such as Taureck have dismissed calls for greater consideration of securitization’s normative and political implications as “fashionable”, “misled”, and “of no relevance to securitization theory”,13 there is now a nascent trend in securitization studies that has started to address the wider normative and political implications of securitization theory. The concerns per se are not new, as evidenced by Huysmans’, Eriksson’s and Wæver’s exchanges in the late 1990s.14 However, in contrast to attempts to refine or strengthen the theoretical framework provided by adding new criteria or theoretical categories,15 or by specifying additional conditions and variables,16 securitization studies has recently become increasingly concerned with a more fundamental reconceptualisation of the Copenhagen School's theory by viewing securitization as a "pragmatic (sociological) act rather than a universal one.17 This view, Balzacq argues, "embeds securitization in a configuration of circumstances, the congruence of which facilitates its realization."18 I have previously explored the use of an interpretive approach to contextualising empirical securitization studies via exploration of the distal context or "macro-environment" of securitization.19 Although this exploration utilised fieldwork that I had undertaken in Kyrgyzstan in order to illustrate the principles of interpretive research, it did not directly address the role of fieldwork in this endeavour. This paper seeks to begin addressing this omission by considering how the tensions fieldwork creates between the "expert" knowledge of theory and the local knowledge(s) of "the field" and its inhabitants, including the researcher herself, can be used to invert the relationship between theory and realities via the utilisation of what I call critical sensibilities. In the following section I provide an account of my experience of taking securitization theory to Kyrgyzstan and the problems that I encountered that led me to adopt an interpretive ethno-methodological approach to my fieldwork and research in general. I then discuss what such an approach entails and what principles can be used to deploy it in a rigorous and systematic way, allowing the researcher to temporarily discard theory in favour of interpretations that are meaningful to people's lives in the fieldwork location. The fourth section of the paper turns its attention to the importance of accessing and engaging with local knowledge as a way to problematize and, by extension, decentre the theoretical knowledge of securitization theory. I then consider the necessity of writing securitization theory "back in" as one possible interpretation of many, an act that fundamentally reconceptualises the relationship between the 12 Eriksson, Johan (1999a) “Observers or Advocates? On the Political Roles of Security Analysts” Cooperation and Conflict 34(3): 314. 13 Taureck, Rita (2006) “Securitization theory and securitization studies”, Journal of International Relations and Development 9: 53 & 60. 14 Huysmans, Jef (1998b) “Security! What Do You Mean?”, European Journal of International Relations 4(2): 226-255; Eriksson, Johan (1999a); Wæver, Ole (2000) “The EU as a security actor – Reflections from a pessimistic constructivist on post-sovereign security orders”, in Kelstrup, Morten & Michael C. Williams (eds) International Relations Theory and the Politics of European Integration: Power, security and community London & New York: Routledge: 250-294. 15 Stritzel, Holger (2007); Vuori, Juha A. (2008) “Illocutionary Logic and Strands of Securitization: Applying the Theory of Securitization to the Study of Non-Democratic Political Orders”, European Journal of International Relations 14(1): 65-99. 16 Balzacq, Thierry (2005) “The Three Faces of Securitization: Political Agency, Audience and Context”, European Journal of International Relations 11(2): 171-201. 17 Balzacq, Thierry (ed.) (2010) Securitization Theory: How Security Problems Emerge and Dissolve London and New York: Routledge: 18 18 Ibid. 19 Wilkinson, C. (2010) "The Limits of Spoken Words: From Meta-narratives to Experiences of Security" in Balzacq, Thierry (ed.) (2010) Securitization Theory: How Security Problems Emerge and Dissolve. London and New York: Routledge: 94-115. 5 ISA 2011 Montreal c.wilkinson@bham.ac.uk NOT FOR CITATION WITHOUT PERMISSION realities of the field and theory by revealing the situated and partial nature of securitization's interpretation of "security". Finally, I conclude with a discussion of the implications of this reconceptualisation for the role of the researcher, arguing that the development of a critical sensibility is vital for the successful navigation of the tensions between multiple forms of knowledge and the politics and practices accompanying them, as well as offering a way to generate new empirical and theoretical insights into the construction of "security". 2. Taking Securitization Theory to Kyrgyzstan: A Confession One of the initial attractions of the Copenhagen School's conceptualisation of security when developing my research plan was that it apparently, as Taureck has argued, provided "a tool for practical security analysis".20 This seemed to be especially the case when securitization theory was viewed in conjunction with the concept of societal security, which offered a framework that in principle facilitated the examination of security claims made in the name of particular identity communities.21 Certainly, I was aware that these concepts were not unproblematic – a fact to which the growing body of literature critiquing the Copenhagen School's conceptualization of security from a wide range of angles was testament.22 However, most of the critiques focused on epistemological issues and did not consider questions of methodology, including my own contribution, which saw the bind of the Westphalian straitjacket on the Copenhagen School's theory and IR more generally as a key issue for empirical operationalisations in non-Western settings.23 Furthermore, the Copenhagen School's overall stance on the use of their theory was explicitly empirical-friendly and, very unusually, even Area Studies-friendly.24 Writing in Regions and Powers, Buzan and Wæver openly acknowledged the need for more empirical studies, calling for more studies that consider “how the empirical matter might be decanted into our theoretical container”.25 As such, perhaps naively, I was confident when departing for Kyrgyzstan that that securitization theory would survive the trip unscathed. Yet while the largely theoretical critiques of the Copenhagen School have not only highlighted a considerable number of potential problems but also proposed theoretical innovations to address them, the actual process of attempting an empirical investigation of “security” utilising the framework provided by the Copenhagen School proved extremely problematic. Once in Bishkek, it rapidly became apparent that the central problem facing me, to invert to Buzan and Wæver's analogy, was how to decant the theoretical matter into the empirical container. Concerns previously discussed as largely abstract epistemological issues about the privileging of the public voice over other forms of expression, the reification of identities, the inherently retrospective and outcome-orientated nature of securitization and the role of the analyst, were made more immediate, the implications and consequences more clear. Most worrying from my perspective was the sense that, despite the Copenhagen School's claims to the contrary, starting out with theory would result only in findings that conformed to the suggested framework (i.e. successful securitizations), rather than capturing the multiple, fragmented, fluid and often contradictory security dynamics evident in Kyrgyzstan. 20 Taureck, Rita (2006) "Securitization theory and securitization studies" Journal of International Relations and Development 9: 53. 21 Buzan, Barry, Ole Wæver & Jaap de Wilde (1998) Security: A New Framework for Analysis, Boulder, CO & London: Lynne Rienner. 22 Huysmans, Jef (1998) "Revisiting Copenhagen: Or, On the Creative Development of a Security Agenda in Europe" European Journal of International Relations 4(2): 479-505; McDonald, Matt (2008) "Securitization and the Construction of Security" European Journal of International Relations 14(4): 563587. 23 Wilkinson, C. (2007) "The Copenhagen School on Tour in Kyrgyzstan: Is Securitization Theory Useable Outside Europe?" Security Dialogue 38(1): 5-25. 24 Buzan, Barry & Ole Wæver (2003) Regions and Powers: The Structure of International Security, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 51 25 Buzan, Barry & Ole Wæver (2003) Regions and Powers: The Structure of International Security, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 49. 6 ISA 2011 Montreal c.wilkinson@bham.ac.uk NOT FOR CITATION WITHOUT PERMISSION This realisation left me feeling very uncertain about how to proceed with fieldwork. While securitization theory requires that events have already taken place and the outcome is known (i.e. was the securitization successful or not), fieldwork requires attention to be paid as much to process as to outcome. Fieldwork requires strategies to cope with this shift in focus and both generally and specifically in relation to the theoretical approach of the research, must be found or improvised. As such, research often becomes a far less pre-planned undertaking, moving into the realm of praxis rather than methods. While methods are theoretical ideal types, instructions for and descriptions of how one is supposed to conduct research, praxis is concerned with actions that are “entailed, required, or produced by a theory, or by particular circumstances”. 26 In other words, it is about how the research was actually done, rather than how it is supposed to have been done or how it is subsequently presented. How I proceeded with my fieldwork was largely determined by conditions in post-Akaev Kyrgyzstan, which were considerably less stable and familiar in comparison to those I had anticipated based on my previous experience of living in Bishkek in 2000-2001 when writing my original research proposal in 2003.27 Once I had returned to Bishkek in September 2005 and realised to extent to which I needed to reappraise my existing understandings of the sociopolitical context, there was a fundamental decision to be taken: allow the theory to take precedence despite recognising that it would “edit out” many of the processes and interlinkages in narratives of “security” in Bishkek, or worry about the theory later and concentrate on building a more comprehensive – and therefore broader – picture of “security” in Kyrgyzstan and how people related it to their lives, identities and communities. Rather than proceeding in an organised, step-wise manner, praxis took over. My decisions were based on hunches, instinctive guesses and the desire to try and understand, rather than explain, what was going on around me. I pursued leads that seemed interesting to me or that enabled me to find out more about a particular topic, largely regardless of whether I could see an immediate connection to securitization. In addition, it was also a reaction against disciplinary theoretical commitments and a growing sense of unease about ignoring the politics of research. Traditionally, the process of writing has involved transformation of praxis into a formal methodology: The researcher is expected to edit out the “messiness” of her fieldwork, tie up loose ends, systematise her account and show the step-wise progress of the research (which may not have ever actually happened that way) and adopt the "view from nowhere".28 An additional purpose of this editorial exercise is to ensure that our final accounts meet the criteria specified for particular knowledge claims – i.e. the underlying assumptions about what we’re saying. In the case of IR, and Security Studies especially, the continued preference for expert theoretical knowledge over local situated knowledge reflects the continued influence of positivistic criteria on how we write our research: it should be presented as universalist (i.e. that generalisations can be made from it), use “preestablished impersonal criteria” (i.e. use observation and previously confirmed knowledge) and be disinterested, meaning that “[s]cientific claims should be assessed independently of local social, economic, political, and personal interests”.29 In the case of my research, conforming to these criteria would involve redacting events in Kyrgyzstan to fit the Copenhagen School's conceptualisation of security presented by securitization and societal security. I found myself fighting against this process: how could I justify editing my research to fit this format when it was dissatisfaction with existing treatments of Central Asia and the redactional tendencies of theoretical approaches that had in large part provoked me to undertake a PhD in the first place? Reflecting on his own research,30 Tim Pachirat describes the quandary that this poses for the researcher vividly and humorously: 26 Oxford English Dictionary (2008) “praxis, n.”, d. Online version, www.oed.com [last accessed 12.05.2009]. 27 This was principally due to overthrow of the Akaev regime in events known variously as the "Tulip Revolution" or the "March events" on 24 March 2005. 28 Gold, Lorna (2002) "Positionality, Worldview and Geographical Research: A Personal Account of a Research Journey", Ethics, Place & Environment 5(3): 224 29 Law, John (2004) After Method: mess in social research, London & New York: Routledge: 16-17. 7 ISA 2011 Montreal c.wilkinson@bham.ac.uk NOT FOR CITATION WITHOUT PERMISSION Light footed the brave ethnographer crosses the swinging bridge only to realize half way through that the ropes are fraying under the weight of baggage hitherto unexamined. Creak, creak, SNAP! Alas, there falls our brave ethnographer into the Canyon of Postmodern Doubt and Despair.31 This "baggage" in most general terms, is identified by Zirakzadeh as the desire to write one's research in a manner that is "meaningful for everyday people"32 – specifically, that is, for the people about whom we are writing. As a result, the task facing those researchers seeking to bridge the gap between what they experience while conducting fieldwork and what theory tells them it means is "to find a way to represent the world that capture[s] participants' understandings, feelings and choices"33 while simultaneously remaining theoretically engaged. In the following section I describe my response to this task as I adopted an interpretive ethno-methodology to help me navigate the messy and multiple fields of research in which I found myself. It is in many ways a "confession" in that focuses on the process of fieldwork itself rather than the outcome, as Magolda explains: "Confessions reveal how the research came into being, expose the human qualities of the field-worker, chronicle the researcher's shifting points of view during the fieldwork and writing phases of the research".34 As such, confessions create space to acknowledge the central role that chance, serendipity, coincidence, contingency, and personal choices play in shaping research and how the researcher has dealt with them. It would be easier in many ways, to stick to the convention of providing only a formal methodology: Over two periods of fieldwork (September 2005 – January 2006 in Bishkek and March – June 2006 in Osh) I conducted 32 semi-structured interviews with representatives of civil society, journalists, and international organisations on their understandings of "security" in Kyrgyzstan; I identified securitizing actors, referent objects and threat narratives as presented in local print media and international electronic media reports; I attended public protests and rallies at which I took photographs in order to triangulate the data obtained via interviews and media coverage; and I kept a field diary. However, while this brief summary is entirely accurate, it also suggests a degree of purposefulness and straightforwardness that certainly did not feel present at the time. As such, much as I have argued that securitization strips context from the analysis of security that it presents, so the presentation of a formal research methodology is stripped of context and process. The researcher is portrayed as an impartial bystander, anonymously observing how others speak security, as Eriksson put it.35 Yet if securitization is, as the Copenhagen School claims, “intersubjective and socially constructed”,36 then what of the researcher’s role in constructing it? After all, it is the researcher who acts as the “translator” between events and theory; my understandings and interpretations of people’s words and actions, as well as my interpretation of the theory, all contribute to the final account of security that I present to you, the reader. 30 Pachirat, Timothy (2008) Repugnance and Confinement: Dividing Space, Labor, and Bodies on the Kill Floor of an Industrialized Slaughterhouse, Unpublished PhD thesis, Yale University. 31 Pachirat, Timothy (2005) personal email. Used as the epigraph for the panel proposal “The Political Baggage of Political Ethnography” for the 2007 Mid-West Political Science Association Annual Conference, Chicago, 12-15 April. 32 Zirakzadeh, Cyrus Ernesto (2009) "When Nationalists are Not Separatists: Discarding and Recovering Academic Theory While Doing Fieldwork in the Basque Region of Spain" in Schatz, Edward (ed.) Political Ethnography Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press: 104. 33 Ibid. 34 Magolda, Peter M. (2000) “Accessing, Waiting, Plunging in, Wondering, and Writing: Retrospective Sense-Making of Fieldwork”, Field Methods 12(3): 210. 35 Eriksson, Johan (1999a) “Observers or Advocates? On the Political Roles of Security Analysts” Cooperation and Conflict 34(3): 314. 36 Buzan, Barry, Ole Wæver & Jaap de Wilde (1998) Security: A New Framework for Analysis, Boulder, CO & London: Lynne Rienner: 31. 8 ISA 2011 Montreal c.wilkinson@bham.ac.uk NOT FOR CITATION WITHOUT PERMISSION A formal methodology reveals very little about the role of the researcher in creating the very knowledge that she presents. It doesn’t tell you how I negotiated access to my interviewees, nor how or why I decided to interview these people in particular. What did I document and why? Why did I choose to spend time in Bishkek and Osh and why did I not conduct my fieldwork as a continuous period of time? What was the motivation for doing the survey when, like many post-positivist social scientists, I am sceptical of statistics at the best of times? (This was exactly why I chose to do it – to see how the results could be affected by contextual factors.) What language or languages did I work in? Did I use an interpreter? Why didn’t I make an effort to learn Kyrgyz, which is, after all, the state language? In short, how did I affect my research? Answering such questions in detail, I believe, is vital for understanding and evaluating research and the accounts presented by making explicit the knowledge claims being made. The importance of this for scholars in disciplines unfamiliar and potentially hostile to interpretive approaches is explained by Yanow and Schwartz-Shea: As long as a researcher is writing for a community of readers sharing the same presuppositions and assumptions, there is little or no need to be explicitly reflective about what was done either in accessing or generating data or in analyzing them, beyond a simple description of settings and sources. But when writing for other interpretive (or meaning or discourse or epistemic) communities, or across communities (as in interdisciplinary or crosscultural work), or within communities with no agreed-upon procedural norms or when such norms are under contestation, explicit statements of methodological concerns and methods procedures become more necessary.37 In addition, Magolda argues, they serve as a reminder to readers of research that is eventually produced that "the fieldwork process is imperfect but not fatally flawed". 38 Once I had returned from Kyrgyzstan, the relevance of these points were proven. While in the field it had made complete sense to ignore the discipline and concentrate on “being there” using a broadly ethno-methodological approach founded on observing, experiencing, listening, participating and, always, questioning, regardless of how relevant or not it might seem at the time. Back at my desk in Birmingham, however, issues of "gaps" in my research, and of power and politics and especially the nature of the knowledge claims we make loomed ever larger and became impossible to ignore, resulting in the adoption of an interpretive approach to my research project. 3. An Interpretive Approach to Fieldwork: Temporarily Neglecting Theory How should we integrate the insights of theories we learn in the classroom with the views of participants in politics? Can we simply discard and view reality cold, without the images, categories, and words that our professional vocabularies provide us?39 Zirakzadeh talks of “learning to discard theories” when undertaking fieldwork.40 Discard is arguably too strong a word; I would suggest that it is more accurate to view the process as one of temporarily and consciously neglecting theory in favour of "being" in the field. Semantics aside, the point is the same: decentring theory and seeing beyond the assumptions that it imposes on our interpretation of events requires that the researcher at least temporarily loosens her ties to theory (ironically at the very time when she may wish to hang on to it more tightly than 37 Yanow, Dvora & Peregrine Schartz-Shea (2006) “Introduction” in Yanow, Dvora & Peregrine SchartzShea (eds.) Interpretation and Method, New York & London: M.E. Sharpe: xiii. 38 Magolda, Peter M. (2000) “Accessing, Waiting, Plunging in, Wondering, and Writing: Retrospective Sense-Making of Fieldwork”, Field Methods 12(3): 210. 39 Zirakzadeh, Cyrus Ernesto (2009) "When Nationalists are Not Separatists: Discarding and Recovering Academic Theory While Doing Fieldwork in the Basque Region of Spain" in Schatz, Edward (ed.) Political Ethnography Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press: 97. 40 Zirakzadeh, Cyrus Ernesto (2009): 101. 9 ISA 2011 Montreal c.wilkinson@bham.ac.uk NOT FOR CITATION WITHOUT PERMISSION ever as a way to cope with the ‘mess’ of the social world by which she is being confronted) and strive to be open to multiple and diverse perspectives, interpretations and linkages – in other words, to see the bigger picture and not just focus on what theory tells us to find. However, while "temporarily and consciously neglecting theory" and "seeing the bigger picture" sounds like an easy undertaking, there is a need to ensure that it is done in a systematic and rigorous manner so that we can justify our interpretations and accompanying knowledge claims. An interpretive ethnographic methodology offers one possible way to achieve these aims. The qualification of "interpretive" is important, given that, as Weeden points out, there is "ethnographic work that is not interpretive and interpretive work that is not ethnographic". 41 In contrast to "traditional" ethnography, which was defined largely by the researcher's prolonged immersion in a particular single geographical locale and focus on the everyday lives of the people present there, what Denzin calls postmodern or interpretive ethnography presents a more flexible methodology designed to accommodate the contemporary world and the changing nature of the field and our relationships with it.42 Amit Vered notes that this flexibility is not entirely new, noting that "[t]he ethnographic ‘field’ has always been as much characterized by absences as by presences and hence necessitated a variety of corresponding methods – interviews, archival documents, census data, artefacts, media materials and more – to explore processes not immediately or appropriately accessible through participant observation."43 What is more novel, however, is that ethnography has increasingly becoming "recognizable as a flexible and opportunistic strategy for diversifying an making more complex our understanding of various places, people, and predicaments through an attentiveness to the different forms of knowledge available from different social and political locations" as the "fetishisation" of participant observation ceases.44 Central to interpretive ethnography is the concept of researcher reflexivity, described by Crapanzano as being "the need to be critically conscious of what one is doing as one does it".45 Rose reminds us that the overarching aim of adopting an explicitly reflexive stance and thereby situate our (i.e. researchers'/scholars') knowledge claims is "to produce non-overgeneralizing knowledges that learn from other kinds of knowledge".46 In the case of interpretive ethnography, I suggest that reflexivity necessitates a particular consideration of praxis, or how the research was actually done and why, rather than how it is supposed to have been done or how it is subsequently presented. In relation to fieldwork, it is perhaps instructive to consider the following explanation of what praxis is: Praxis is the idea that you do something because you want to do it, and after you’ve done it, you find out all the reasons why you did it. But all those thing that I might say are the reasons, I've only found out that they were the reasons for doing it by doing it […] I can think of great reasons afterwards, but it’d be dishonest.47 This quotation highlights the fact that reflexivity is not just something that can be bolted on to our research as a discrete issue to consider if it is to be able to displace the normative assumptions 41 Weeden, Lisa (2009) "Ethnography as Interpretive Enterprise" in Schatz, Edward (ed.) Political Ethnography Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press: 85 42 Denzin, Norman K. (1997) Interpretive Ethnography: Ethnographic Practices for the 21st Century Thousand Oaks, London & New Delhi: Sage Publications. 43 Amit, Vered (2000) “Introduction: constructing the field” in Amit, Vered (ed) Constructing the field: ethnographic fieldwork in the contemporary world London & New York: Routledge: 12. 44 Gupta, Akhil & James Ferguson (1997) “Discipline and Practice: ‘The Field as Site, Method, and Location in Anthropology” in Gupta, Akhil & James Ferguson (eds) Anthropological locations: boundaries and grounds of a field science Berkley, Los Angeles & London: University of California Press: 35 45 Crapanzano, Vincent (2010) "'At the Heart of the Discipline': Critical Reflections on Fieldwork" in Davies, James and Dimitrina Spencer (eds.) Emotions in the Field: The Psychology and Anthropology of Fieldwork Experience Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press: 56 46 Rose, Gillian (1997) "Situating knowledges: positionality, reflexivity and other tactics", Progress in Human Geography 21(3): 315 47 Wilson, Tony (1984) Whatever You Want: New Order Play at Home, RPM Productions. 10 ISA 2011 Montreal c.wilkinson@bham.ac.uk NOT FOR CITATION WITHOUT PERMISSION inherent in securitization theory and the discipline of IR more widely. Rather, as Sultana explains, reflexivity has to be made an integral part of the research process from start to finish, with the effect that "boundaries between process and content can get blurred."48 In this respect, reflexivity is not about being completely transparent (if indeed this is possible), but rather about explicitly acknowledging this blurring and "the uncertainties and gaps in interpretation" on the part of both the researcher and respondents that are inherent to it.49 This approach does not sit easily with many, both from a scholarly perspective and an ethical one. From the perspective of traditional scientific enquiry, reflexivity can perhaps seem like a justification for opportunism or even wilful distain or disregard for research design,50 as England acknowledges: The openness and culturally constructed nature of the social world, peppered with contradictions and complexities, needs to be embraced not dismissed. This means that ‘the field’ is constantly changing and that researchers may find that they have to maneuver around unexpected circumstances. The result is research where the only inevitability seems to be unreliability and unpredictability.51 And yet, she continues, this fluidity of the social world "in turn, ignites the need for a broader, less rigid conception of the ‘appropriate’ method that allows the researcher the flexibility to be more open to the challenges of fieldwork".But in the absence of an "appropriate" method, how can the reader – or researcher – assess the knowledge claims being made and be confident that the research presented was not opportunistic and is, from a positivist perspective, "valid"? After all, as Weeden points out "Interpretive social science does not aspire to the objectivity of the field sciences of old".52 In contrast to such positivist "field sciences", the validity of interpretive research is governed by inquiry being able to “demonstrate its truth value, provide the basis for applying it, and allow for external judgements to be made about the consistency of its procedures and the neutrality of its findings or decisions.”53 Most centrally this means that any research, regardless of whether it is positivist or interpretivist, must demonstrate that it is rigorous and systematic, or, in other words, that it is trustworthy. While positivist criteria for establishing trustworthiness are internal and external validity, reliability and objectivity, interpretive criteria are credibility, transferability, dependability and confirmability.54 Looking at each of these criteria individually, this means: • Credibility is defined as “the compatibility of the constructed realities that exist in the minds of the inquiry’s respondents with those that are attributed to them.” 55 It is ensured by prolonged engagement, persistent observation, and triangulation – every piece of data used should be confirmed by at least one other, preferably different source, with the degree of convergence between different sources providing a standard or evalution.56 In 48 Sultana, Ferhana (2007) "Reflexivity, Positionality and Participatory Ethics: Negotiating Fieldwork Dilemmas in International Research", ACME 6(3): 376 49 Mullings, Beverley (1999) "Insider or outsider, both or neither: some dilemmas of interviewing in a crosscultural setting", Geoforum 30: 348 50 Heathershaw, John (2009) Review of "Fieldwork in Difficult Environments: Methodology as Boundary Work in Development", Central Asian Survey 28(2): 257 51 England, Kim (1994) "Getting Personal: Reflexivity, Positionality, and Feminist Research", The Professional Geographer 46(1): 81 52 Weeden, Lisa (2009) "Ethnography as Interpretive Enterprise" in Schatz, Edward (ed.) Political Ethnography Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press: 90 53 Erlandson, David A., Edward L. Harris & Barbara L. Skipper (1993) Doing Naturalistic Enquiry Newbury Park, London & New Delhi: Sage Publications: 29. 54 Taken from “Table 7.1 Establishing Trustworthiness: A Comparison of Conventional and Naturalistic Enquiry”, in Erlandson, David A. et al. (1993): 133. 55 Erlandson, David A. et al. (1993): 29. 56 Erlandson, David A. et al. (1993): 138-9. 11 ISA 2011 Montreal c.wilkinson@bham.ac.uk NOT FOR CITATION WITHOUT PERMISSION • addition, member checks, peer debriefing and the creation of “holistic views of the context” through the use of photographs, documents and other materials to provide background are used to create a credible account of the research. Transferability, as with positivist paradigms, is assessed “in terms of the extent to which [an inquiry’s] findings can be applied in other contexts or with other respondents.” However, this should not be taken to mean that interpretivist research design can be evaluated against a criterion of replicability. Rather, the researcher attempts to describe in great details the interrelationships and intricacies of the context being studied. Thus the result of the study is a description that will not be replicated anywhere [emphasis added – CW]. The ‘thick description’ that has been generated, however, enables observers of other contexts to make tentative judgements about the applicability of certain observations for their contexts and to form ‘working hypotheses’ to guide empirical inquiry in those contexts.57 • • "Thick description" is central to facilitating transferability by providing a detailed and contextual account of the research. “Purposive sampling” also facilitates transferability, being “governed by emerging insights about what is relevant to the study and purposively [seeking] both the typical and divergent data that these insights suggest.”58 Dependability describes the criterion of consistency. In contrast to positivist claims, consistency does not necessarily imply replication, since changes in findings may be caused not only by error but also by altered circumstances or “reality shifts”. Therefore, Erlandson et al. suggest that the interpretivist researcher should be aiming for “trackable variance”; i.e. “variabilities that can be ascribed to particular sources (error, reality shifts, better insights, etc.)".59 Confirmability refers not to the establishment of objectivity – which is held to be an illusion – but to the idea that data can be tracked to sources and that the logic of enquiry is both explicit and implicit in the study.60 This criterion recognises that the researcher is a co-constructor of his or her findings and requires explicit reference to the role the researcher has played in his or her choice of methods, decisions and interpretations. Taken collectively, these criteria offer a set of standards that can guide the researcher both while undertaking fieldwork and during the process of writing. However, they offer no guidance about how the researcher should conduct her research in terms of actual methods and their relative advantages/disadvantages. This is due to the central principle that there are multiple ways of knowing that are all potentially equally credible and which collectively create a "thick description". Thus there is no reason why quantitative survey data, semi-structured interviews, newspaper reports and photographs cannot all be included in the research, provided they are engaged with in an explicitly critical and reflexive manner by the researcher – a process that includes acknowledgement of anomalies, dissonances, contradictions and gaps in order to widen the focus of our research from simply what we know to encompass how we know it as well. Central to this activity is accessing and engaging with local interpretations and understandings of the phenomenon being investigated, as I discuss in the following section. 4. Making Use of Mess and Multiplicities: Engaging with Local Knowledge Recourse to theoretical frameworks cannot replace the detailed and careful interrogation of the object of study within a specific locale, paying attention to local understandings. Moving the local to the foreground of study permits us to focus on specificities, ambiguities and the disjunctures 57 58 Erlandson, David A. et al. (1993): 30-32. Erlandson, David A. et al. (1993): 33. 59 Erlandson, David A. et al. (1993): 34. 60 Erlandson, David A. et al. (1993): 35. 12 ISA 2011 Montreal c.wilkinson@bham.ac.uk NOT FOR CITATION WITHOUT PERMISSION between theory, method and the field. For the study of social phenomena, such an approach is likely to be far more revealing and nuanced than a focus on commonalities both theoretically and empirically, as well as facilitating the bridging of the gap that too often exists between these two integral parts of research. Fieldwork places the researcher in the position of a mediator between cultures and their norms. This refers not only to the cultures of countries, but also institutions and organisations, leading Yanow to call people in this role “border crossers” or, in some ways, “bicultural ‘translators’”, who have both expert and local knowledge. 61 Yet local knowledge, which is situational and experiential, is often viewed as inferior to “expert” or “scholarly” knowledge, which is theory-based, abstracted and generalized,62 leading it to be overlooked in IR and Security Studies. Making this “local knowledge” explicit is perhaps the most vital component for ensuring our work is fully contextualised and focused on the subject of research, not on the researcher. In this sense it is up to the researcher to present this knowledge and use it to both contextualise and decentre IR’s disciplinary preference for expert knowledge, as I demonstrate in this section drawing on two encounters from my own fieldwork. In the first encounter, I reflect on the word "security" and how the insights provided by respondents both individually and collectively highlighted its fundamentally situated and contextual nature, necessitating consideration of language, respondent positionality and interpretations and multiple meanings. In the second I consider how local knowledge can be used by the researcher to check her assumptions and offer alternative analyses of phenomena such as identity groups. I conclude the section by briefly discussing the benefits of including local interpretations in our accounts of researching "security", both as a way to contextualise and situate our research, but also to decentre theoretical interpretations. Security vs Bezopasnost One of the things that rapidly became evident in Kyrgyzstan was that the word “security” itself needed to be explored. In some ways this was a "lost in translation" issue: virtually all fieldwork was conducted in Russian, but the research is being written up in English and uses concepts defined and explained in English. Specifically, and centrally, the word “security” presents a problem: whilst English draws a distinction between “security” and “safety”, Russian has only one word, bezopasnost, literally meaning “without danger” and defined as “a state in which danger does not threaten; in which there is defence from danger”.63 Yet the meanings of "security" and bezopasnost seemed qualitatively different as well. It often appeared to me that people talked more about safety in an immediate physical sense than security in the sense of an existential threat. It is often difficult to distinguish between the two at the sub-national level, particularly in light of the unstable socio-political situation. Similarly, the societal dimension, with its focus on group identities, allows for greater overlap between safety and security than would be the case with inanimate, institutional referent objects such as the state, since discussion with people will be framed by whichever understanding of bezopasnost is more relevant to them, regardless of theoretical criteria. Throughout this section I have preserved and highlighted this ambiguity of meaning in the quoted interview excerpt by using the Russian term bezopasnost, rather than lay claim to “knowing” or correctly interpreting what my respondent meant. In light of this difference, I was conscious of the need to ensure that my interpretations were rooted in local understandings. To help address this issue I introduced a check question during interviews: "what does “security” mean to you?" On its own this question would have been wholly inadequate, but within the wider context it proved to be very important in picking up 61 Yanow, Dvora (2004) "Translating Local Knowledge at Organizational Peripheries", British Journal of Management 15: S14-S15. 62 Yanow, Dvora (2004): S10. 63 Ozhegov, S.I. & N.I. Shvedova (eds) (1997) Tolkovyj slovar russkogo yazyka [Explanatory dictionary of Russian], Moscow: Azbukovnik: 41. 13 ISA 2011 Montreal c.wilkinson@bham.ac.uk NOT FOR CITATION WITHOUT PERMISSION nuances, contradictions and ensuring I did not leap to conclusions on the basis of limited information. In addition, from a theoretical perspective, it further highlighted the need to understand what we – and others – mean when we use certain words, since no word is valueneutral and our usage is informed by a myriad of socio-cultural factors that require explicit interrogation by the fieldworker. Most frequently, however, interviewees were keen to stress the range of possible definitions, often contextualising their answers in considerable detail. For example, the president of one local NGO working on conflict prevention and mediation explained how definitions of bezopasnost have changed over time, but that currently different actors – in this case the Kyrgyzstani government and the NGO sector respectively are using different definitions: … this is possibly from my experience of work. Now we already have several understandings in the region of what bezopasnost is, incidentally thanks to international organisations, that earlier by bezopasnost we always had in mind state bezopasnost or regional bezopasnost and today we focus on the term human bezopasnost. I think that this understanding [of the term] is getting through to a certain elite, to a certain section of the elite. Secondly, who answers for it. If earlier, as we said, there was such an understanding, a Soviet (“sovok”) understanding, as state bezopasnost, then the institutes of state were responsible for state bezopasnost. As a rule this is the Ministry of Defence, the police, the Committee for National Security, and so on. Today, since we’re now talking about human bezopasnost, there is also the notion that not only state institutions are responsible for it [i.e. bezopasnost], but that the civil sector should also carry responsibility. … Further, since we’re talking again about state bezopasnost, it is borders, one’s territory, the territory of the country, maybe its natural resources, its intelligence officers, the CIA and the like as a threat. Today we include in bezopasnost such things as a quality education, for example, equal access to resources, ecology has become a very serious matter, and, well, quality of life in general. So we’re already changing the component parts of the word bezopasnost. Well, and, if earlier when we talked of bezopasnost, then as a rule, we were looking as an external enemy as a threat, some form of inter-state war. But today, when we talk about bezopasnost, here [in Kyrgyzstan], undoubtedly, we’re talking about internal political chemistry, put it this way, about the interrelationships between the authorities, the opposition and citizens, about the presence or absence or weakness or strength of mechanisms of state institutions or other institutions that are capable of resolving disputed, conflictual problems.64 As this response shows, away from the abstract and isolated world of theory, security/bezopasnost possesses a multiplicity of meanings that are intersubjective and inherently situated historically, politically, socio-culturally and personally. In its orthodox form, securitization theory cannot easily accommodate such multiplicity due to its focus on a particular understanding of "security". Fieldwork in this respect presents the researcher with an opportunity to destabilise the Copenhagen School's conceptualisation of "security" in two ways. Firstly, alternative interpretations from respondents can be reported and critically engaged with as part of the researcher's ongoing sense-making process in answer to the question of how "security" means. Secondly, the situated nature of security can be emphasised and explored by deferring to local terms or definitions, as I have done in this section by using the Russian word bezopasnost rather than translating it and losing the ambiguity contained within it. Whilst this deliberate maintenance of ambiguity may seem unnecessary to some, it is, I would argue, a useful way of highlighting the situation-specific nature of our understanding and helps to decentre both theory and the researcher by demonstrating how security, or rather, bezopasnost, means in the fieldwork context. Local knowledge 64 Interview with representative of Fund for Tolerance International, Bishkek, 30.11.2005. 14 ISA 2011 Montreal c.wilkinson@bham.ac.uk NOT FOR CITATION WITHOUT PERMISSION During my time in Bishkek and Osh, the importance of local knowledge was demonstrated to me more than once and I actively tried to get my interviewees to explain things that were, judging by the looks on their faces, incredibly obvious. In many cases this involved me deliberately asking questions that must have seemed at best naïve and at worst idiotic. Despite this, it became apparent that it was often an effective way of building up my understanding of the situation, frequently making me rethink my interpretations and understandings, and had the advantage of helping my respondents explicitly articulate the interconnections they saw between different topics. The answer I received from Oazis’ representative to my question about the relative importance of sexual orientation to people's identity demonstrates the range of references involved: CW: Every person has their own identity. There are many aspects of it. But in my opinion, in my personal experience, my sexual orientation is more important than, say, the fact that I am English. It plays a more important role. How do you think sexual orientation influences the formation of personality here? Is it the same as everywhere, or there are some differences? Respondent: I think it’s like everywhere. These people face the same problems as in other countries. And of course, first of all they want to organise their private life according to their sexual orientation. Nationality comes second… They try to associate with the people who are like them, not nationality- but personality-wise. But when the circle of contacts is wide, divisions begin: this is a Kyrgyz circle, and this is an Uzbek one. Europeans, Russians join in all circles, they’re more or less neutral, but they try to keep themselves to themselves. Everyone has their own traditions, certain groups consider themselves more elite so to speak. Just like Baltic people – they don’t associate with Russians, that circle is beneath them. The same happens here. But mostly the division is social. Wealthy people form one circle. Common people and slackers not earning good money will form another circle, irrespective of ethnicity.65 As can be seen, the focus moved rapidly from sexual orientation and an international commonality of experience to what identities people use in different situations and factors influencing these choices. Furthermore, my respondent's answer contained a good deal of analysis: he notes the importance of ethnic divisions and cultural background in broadly postSoviet terms before focusing on Kyrgyz and picking out what he feels is a primary marker and organiser of society in Kyrgyzstan – or at least, in Bishkek. Reflexive engagement on the part of the researcher with responses such as those above means that rather than simply reporting what was said as "fact", they can be contextualised within the research process as the product of a particular interaction between particular people that produces particular interpretations and understandings. The result is that the "how" of "security" begins to be made visible – i.e. the process of knowledge construction and interpretive moments. In addition, I suggest that our respondents' explanations often present insightful and powerful applied critiques of the concepts and theoretical frameworks we use. In the case of the first example, the Copenhagen School's conceptualisation of "security" was effectively problematized and recontextualised, while the second encounter presents challenge to the notion of identity that underpins societal security by articulating the complexity, multilayeredness and contextual nature of identity . 5. One More Interpretation: Writing Securitization Theory Back In If the experiential process of fieldwork requires an awareness of the double hermeneutic, 66 then writing requires what Yanow has called a triple hermeneutic, with the third interpretive moment occurring “during deskwork while reading and rereading fieldnotes and analyzing them, and 65 66 Interview with representative of NGO Oazis, Bishkek, 26.11.2005. The double hermeneutic is a theory developed by Anthony Giddens that the relationship between everyday concepts and social science concepts is two-way, i.e. they both influence and affect each other. Giddens, Anthony (1977) Studies in Social and Political Theory, New York: Basic Books. 15 ISA 2011 Montreal c.wilkinson@bham.ac.uk NOT FOR CITATION WITHOUT PERMISSION during textwork, while crafting a narrative that presents both fieldwork and analysis.” All of the sense-making processes that one experiences in the field continue during the “deskwork” and “textwork” of processing data and creating one’s analysis: reviewing events, perceptions, reactions, rereading interviews and printed sources, re-examining photographs, allowing the researcher to test and refine her interpretations in relation to previous and other interpretations.67 It is at this point, I suggest, that securitization theory needs "writing back in" to the research process. One of the main consequences of reversing the conventional relationship between theory and the field by focusing on local knowledges is that securitization's and IR's Westphalian straitjacket is highlighted, since alternative understandings of "security" are revealed. The result is that the researcher no longer necessarily has to defer to securitization theory as the arbiter of "security". Rather, as I have argued previously, for an interpretive approach securitization theory "offers one of many possible interpretations".68 As part of the "sense-making" process of writing, therefore, securitization theory offers not only a starting point of comparison against which current interpretations can be tested, but also a practical organisational framework for the writing process. Specifically, an account of "security" in the location being researched can be constructed using the orthodox theoretical framework – i.e. fitting the data to the component parts of securitization theory – with the aim of then problematizing it by examining and the exploring the differences in this interpretation and those of the researcher based on her own and others' local knowledges. The result is that what theory omits is now as important as what it includes and, crucially, can be included in the account presented by the researcher. An additional advantage to this reconceptualization is that it permits the researcher to directly interrogate the knowledge claims presented by securitization theory, as well as creating space to not only consider but explicitly acknowledge the politics of knowledge production both empirically and within disciplines. In the case of the Copenhagen School's concepts, the effect is to reveal the normative assumptions that are integral to the theory and encourage the researcher to not only recognise them but critically engage with them in order to decentre them in favour of other types of knowledge that are meaningful to the people about whom we write. Ethnographic methods are in principle well-suited for this undertaking, as Weeden explains: Ethnographic observations can generate counterintuitive findings or confirm previous research. They can raise questions about the concepts and paradigms currently informing social science projects and invite novel ways of imagining the political. They can negotiate the tensions between the particular lived experiences of social actors and analytic categories we use to generalize about them.69 But this potential is not sufficient in and of itself when deployed in securitization studies and in IR in general. At the heart of the problem is, as Vrasti puts it, “a selective, instrumental and somewhat timid understanding of what ethnography is and does” within the discipline that has largely stripped the politics from ethnography and other interpretive methods.70 This is due, in Vrasti's opinion, to the fact that in international studies the ‘ethnographic turn’ was used to facilitate a return to empiricism, albeit a new and improved kind of ‘emancipatory empiricism’, which promised to refurbish 67 Yanow, Dvora (2006b) “Reading as Method: Interpreting Interpretations”, Paper presented at the workshop on Political Ethnography: What Insider Perspectives Contribute to the Study of Power, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada, 26-28 October: 4. 68 Wilkinson, C. (2010): page ref req. 69 Weeden, Lisa (2009) "Ethnography as Interpretive Enterprise" in Schatz, Edward (ed.) Political Ethnography Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press: 85 70 Vrasti, Wanda (2008) "The Strange Case of Ethnography and International Relations", Millennium 37(2): 280. 16 ISA 2011 Montreal c.wilkinson@bham.ac.uk NOT FOR CITATION WITHOUT PERMISSION the parochial vestiges of the discipline and restore its much-desired critical voice while keeping its regulatory mechanisms intact.71 There is, therefore, one more element to be written "back in" to our research in order to meaningfully bridge the gap between theoretical and experiential forms of knowledge: the researcher. 6. The Researcher as a Data Source: Developing Critical Sensibilities …it is easier to assert that one is being sensitive to contingency and complexity that to be so in practice. Whenever a researcher is writing an account, it is impractical and perhaps impossible to be sensitive to all voices. To compose a story, one must choose whose tale to tell.72 While the researcher has a choice of which participants' or communities' tales she chooses to tell, there is one tale that she cannot avoid telling if her research is to be fully contextualised: that if her own experience of the research process. Yet explaining how to go about this without running the risk (or, more likely, receiving the accusation) that the reflexivity so essential for this endeavour "decays into narcissism"73 is, as I suspect this paper confirms, a frustratingly imprecise exercise with much reflection and few conclusions, let alone instructions. At the same time, the sense of frustration caused by the lack of an explicit "how" answer is salutary, reflecting the interpretivist assertion that "meaning is what the researcher understands it to be."74 On a basic level, therefore, there is a need for the researcher to articulate her positionality in relation to both the field and her research, an issue about which I have written about previously.75 However, in order for the researcher to write herself fully into the research process and situate the account of security presented in her writings, I suggest that the development of a critical sensibility or sensibilities is likely to be beneficial, facilitating not only interrogation of the researcher's role but also the politics of knowledge production generated by the interactions between the interpretations of the researcher, respondents and securitization theory. Building on the basic principle of positionality, a sensibility refers to the creation of an explicit awareness regarding how any aspect of one’s personality affects one’s perception of the surrounding world.76 I would argue, however, that is likely to be a personal and emotive aspect rather than a purely objective characteristic in that it has affected one’s experiences and is likely to be at odds with the prevailing societal norms in some way, either at home, work or the fieldwork locale(s), i.e. a “marked category”, for example, a feminist sensibility or an immigrant sensibility in relation to one's old and new countries. As such, these are aspects of positionality that are more likely to influence the shape of the research being undertaken due to the sense of displacement experienced. Such displacements can be used strategically,77 creating particular 71 72 Vrasti, Wanda (2008): 281. Zirakzadeh, Cyrus Ernesto (2009) "When Nationalists are Not Separatists: Discarding and Recovering Academic Theory While Doing Fieldwork in the Basque Region of Spain" in Schatz, Edward (ed.) Political Ethnography Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press: 115. 73 Keith, Michael (1992) "Angry Writing: (re)presenting the unethical world of the ethnographer", Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 10(5): 551-568. 74 Maggs-Rapport, Frances (2000) “Combining methodological approaches in research: ethnography and interpretive phenomenology” Journal of Advanced Nursing 31(1): 220. 75 Wilkinson, Claire (2008) "Positioning 'Security' and Securing One's Position: The researcher's role in investigating 'security' in Kyrgyzstan" in Wall, Caleb R.L. & Peter P. Mollinga (eds.) Fieldwork in Difficult Environments Berlin & Vienna: Lit Verlag: 43-67. 76 Wafer, James (1996) “Out of the Closet and into Print: Sexual Identity in the Textual Field”, in Lewin, Ellen & William L. Leap (eds.) Out in the Field Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press: 261. 77 Katz, Cindy (1994) "Playing the Field: Questions of Fieldwork in Geography", The Professional Geographer 46(1): 67-72. 17 ISA 2011 Montreal c.wilkinson@bham.ac.uk NOT FOR CITATION WITHOUT PERMISSION opportunities for the generation of new insights into and critiques of the nature of knowledge production. As an example, I felt that my identity as a genderqueer person arguably made me more aware of gaps and silences in who gets to “speak” security in the public domain and in whose name due to my own experiences as a member of a minority identity group. I was particularly interested in why some identities that people tend to feel are very fundamental to their sense of self – gender in the case of the social survey I conducted, sexuality in my case – proved incapable of generating sufficient cohesion to meet the Copenhagen School’s criteria of a “wefeeling”. In this respect I was able to use my awareness of how being queer affects my perceptions and interpretations of interactions and events, or what could be described as a “queer sensibility”, to inform my research, or, more accurately, to add a different angle. This is not to say that other people would not have been aware of such “silences”, nor that there are not many more “silent/silenced voices” that I did not seek to include and that a different sensibility would have revealed. At the same time, including consideration of such sensibilities can deepen the degree of reflexivity achieved by accessing the researcher own embodied knowledge, resulting in the researcher moving from being a reflexive interpreter of her research to being an integral part of the research process and product. Both theoretically and practically, speaking “security” is a value-laden venture. Ole Wæver argues that the Copenhagen School’s conceptualisation of security, in contrast to the majority of mainstream approaches, has the distinct advantage that it “points to the inherently political nature of any designation of security issues and thus it puts an ethical question at the feet of analysts, decision-makers and political activists alike: why do you call this a security issue? What are the implications of doing this – or not doing this?”78 However, all too often these questions have not been answered satisfactorily beyond epistemologically-based arguments that have little empirical application. In this paper, I have suggested that one way to address these questions for securitization studies scholars intending to conduct fieldwork as part of their research is via the adoption of an interpretive ethno-methodological approach. Reflexive consideration of factors such as the praxis of research, how local concepts and their expressions relation to the concept being investigated and the positionality of both the researcher (especially in the form of critical sensibilities) and respondents, all contribute to the creation of a thick description of the research. Local knowledge both contributes to the researcher’s account of their subject and also, crucially underpins it. The researcher cannot simply go to "the field" and locate “security”, or indeed any other phenomenon. Rather, she must build up sufficient description around it so that it is made “visible” in its environment, in much the same way as an artist may draw an object using negative space. The negative space in this case is “security”, which is interpreted by the researcher in relation to that which surrounds it, namely the research itself. 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