This book analyses the challenges of secrecy in security research, and develops a set of methods to navigate, encircle and work with secrecy. How can researchers navigate secrecy in their fieldwork, when they encounter confidential material, closed-off quarters or bureaucratic rebuffs? This is a particular challenge for researchers in the security field, which is by nature secretive and difficult to access. This book creatively assesses and analyses the ways in which secrecies operate in security research. The collection sets out new understandings of secrecy, and shows how secrecy itself can be made productive to research analysis. It offers students, PhD researchers and senior scholars a rich toolkit of methods and best-practice examples for ethically appropriate ways of navigating secrecy. It pays attention to the balance between confidentiality, and academic freedom and integrity. The chapters draw on the rich qualitative fieldwork experiences of the contributors, who did research at a diversity of sites, for example at a former atomic weapons research facility, inside deportation units, in conflict zones, in everyday security landscapes, in virtual spaces and at borders, bureaucracies and banks. The book will be of interest to students of research methods, critical security studies and International Relations in general.
Author(s): Marieke De Goede, Esmé Bosma, Polly Pallister-Wilkins
Edition: 1
Publisher: Routledge | Taylor & Francis Group
Year: 2020
Language: English
Commentary: TruePDF
Pages: 331
Tags: Official Secrets: Research: Methodology; Confidential Communications: Research: Methodology; Security Systems: Research: Methodology; Secrecy
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of figures
List of boxes
List of contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction: navigating secrecy in security research
Interlude: rigorous research in critical security studies
Part 1 Secrecy complexities
Section I: Secrecy, silence and obfuscation
1 The problem of access: site visits, selective disclosure, and freedom of information in qualitative security research
2 The state is the secret: for a relational approach to the study of border and mobility control in Europe
3 Postsecrecy and place: secrecy research amidst the ruins of an atomic weapons research facility
Section II: Access, confidentiality and trust
4 Navigating difficult terrain
5 Accessing lifeworlds: getting people to say the unsayable
6 Research dilemmas in dangerous places
Part 2 Mapping secrecy
Section III: Reflexive methodologies
7 Writing secrecy
8 Gender, ethics and critique in researching security and secrecy
9 (In)visible security politics: reflections on photography and everyday security landscapes
Section IV: Ethnographies of technologies
10 The black box and its dis/contents: complications in algorithmic devices research
11 Multi-sited ethnography of digital security technologies
12 Researching the emergent technologies of state control: the court-martial of Chelsea Manning
Part 3 Research secrets
Section V: Critique and advocacy
13 Searching for the smoking gun? Methodology and modes of critique in the arms trade
14 Critical engagement when studying those you oppose
15 Secrecy vignettes
Section VI: Research ethics in practice
16 Research ethics at work: account-abilities in fieldwork on security
17 Material guides in ethically challenging fields: following deportation files
Index
