Secrecy and Methods in Security Research

A Guide to Qualitative Fieldwork

Marieke De Goede, Esmé Bosma, Polly Pallister-Wilkins, Marieke De Goede, Esmé Bosma, Polly Pallister-Wilkins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429675348
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Seguridad nacional

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.

The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

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

Oliver Belcher and Lauren Martin

• Research objective: This chapter will aid researchers working with participants who are reluctant to speak “on the record.” This chapter will help researchers working with freedom of information act requests, as well as contexts where private contractors hold important information related to their projects.
• Research puzzle: This chapter explores how qualitative research can evoke the secrecy, security, and politics it seeks security research seeks to explore. We rethink what access and denial can mean for researchers. We argue that deferrals, indecision, and off-the-record comments provide insight into participants’ understanding of security discourse itself.

Introduction

Access, confidentiality, and classified information can be tremendous challenges for research on security. Confidentiality and classified information have long had an aura attached to them, as they are often represented in newspapers, popular media, and film as the means par excellence by which state and military actors deny the public access to information. Access by researchers into state, military, and non-governmental institutions usually requires sensitivity, a performance suggesting that some activities or scenes must remain behind closed doors to all but the most qualified individuals, even in nominally democratic societies. However, as we explore in this chapter, holding up appearances of secrecy and confidentiality does not always indicate sensitivity, but can instead indicate moments of inaction by state actors, a lack of clear policies, busyness on the part of officials, or even a desire by officials not to reveal internal institutional tensions or disagreements.

In critical scholarship, it has become almost cliché to describe state power and institutions as messy, incoherent, and grounded in everyday practices (Mitchell 1991; Mountz 2004; Painter 2006; Jeffrey 2013). However, issues of access and confidentiality are rarely considered as instruments that have a specific function in relation to a messy state. Our own work has also shown us that access and the selective disclosure of information are more than annoyances. Rather, they offer insights to understanding the production of security, state power, and knowledge. Requesting information, interviews, and documents reproduce the mechanisms of disclosure. In this sense, we regard security research to be a critical “inscription” device (Aradau and Huysmans 2014), particularly for the selective constructions of “the record.” Therefore, one has to pay close attention to pending applications, deferred access to research sites, “off the record” conversations, and classified secret documents. Across our different projects, our experience shows much more of an “ad-hoc-racy” than a bureaucratic logic, and that the “state effect” (Mitchell 1991) arises as much from indecisions as it does from coherent policy.

Drawing on our respective research on U.S. military facilities and U.S. immigration enforcement practices (Belcher and Martin 2013), we argue that confidentiality, classified documents, and “off the record” conversations are crucial for understanding the everyday and embodied workings of security and state power. The chapter includes anecdotes and lessons drawn from our experiences with selective disclosure and access, as well as Freedom of Information and open records requests. Like other chapters in this volume, we offer some practical tips for doing research on securitization and militarization. We emphasize to researchers, especially young scholars, the importance of repeated attempts and persistence.

Insights into the messy state: site visits, access, and confused authority

In our research, we rely primarily on three sources: site visits, interviews, and archival research. The next three sections will consider questions of access in relation to these three sources. Our research on U.S. immigration detention and military trainings and operations has brought us into contact with American state, border and military officials for access, and increasingly with for-profit contractors as numerous functions of the U.S. state have been privatized. As we discuss below, our dealings with private contractors have been tricky, as the authority to grant or deny access to information, institutions, and field sites is often unclear – and undecided – between state and non-state actors. Moreover, contractors’ operations and procedures can be considered proprietary information and therefore beyond the reach of freedom of information laws, which can pose serious obstacles for the researcher.

Our methodological approaches with immigration enforcement and military officials have primarily involved semi-structured interviews (Belcher and Martin 2013), non-participant observation (cf. Belcher 2014), and archival research. Along with careful planning and the tried-and-true method of cold-calling/emailing, we have found these methods to be the best in terms of rich informational content for our research. Aradau and Huysmans (2014: 604) have shown how methods in qualitative security research work as “inscription devices”: “As devices, methods enact social and political worlds in multiple ways.” This is important not only for qualifying and situating the knowledge we produce, but to understand research as a process through which securitization, depoliticization, and marketization are expressed. Paradoxically, this can mean that the process of not getting access, the paperwork of denial, deferral, pending applications, and so on, can also constitute moments in which “security” can be produced and understood. Thus, our research practices ask how people, institutions, and objects (such as bureaucratic paper files) draw together in particular ways; or, to put it differently, the way we seek access often organizes those modes of access.

For example, in her research at the T. Don Hutto Family Detention Facility in Taylor, Texas, Lauren interviewed detention visitation coordinators and worked to establish rapport with personnel (Martin 2014). Lauren’s fieldwork provided interesting insights into the everyday functioning of a major immigration detention facility. The ambiguous authority of private prison and detention contractors like CoreCivic and GEO Group created regular difficulties for researchers and visitors. Telephones worked intermittently, making it difficult for visitors to plan visits, and for detainees to communicate with family and legal representatives. The privatized staff were often ill-trained in the rights and limitations of detainees’ visitors and legal representatives. Attorneys negotiated continually changing visitation requirements. Sometimes the facility management required identification and clearance ahead of time, sometimes not. Dress codes were open to interpretation, so that women, for example, could be denied access for wearing a sleeveless blouse (commonly worn during hot Texas summers). In the absence of federal detention visitation policies, contractors and sub-federal agencies were unclear whether they were authorized to make visitation policies.

This led in many cases to private contractors running detention facilities to defer to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) who handled detainee rights, who in turn would defer to a different private contracting entity tasked with handling operational matters at and between facilities. The rapid expansion of detention as a cornerstone of immigration enforcement in the mid-2000s meant that there was, for a considerable period of time, no clear policy on who makes visitation policy. At another family detention facility in Berks County, Pennsylvania, Lauren was similarly bounced around between county and federal officials, while both parties argued that they did not have the authority to grant research access. Speaking with families, researchers and attorneys, it became clear that this confusion was endemic to the broader “chaotic geographies” non-citizens and citizens alike struggled to navigate (Hiemstra 2013).

This speaks to the often-confused authority at work in contemporary visits to nominally state institutions. In the case of immigration detention centers, what interests us is not so much the frustration experienced towards private and government officials that made access unpredictable (although that frustration was certainly real!). Rather, the unpredictability and confused authority provide the researcher a partial window into the mechanics of the late-modern state. Instead of a seamless bureaucracy that is effectively oppressive because it is fine-tuned administrative machine, we are instead exposed to partially privatized state apparatus that functions in fits and starts, with deferred accountability and phantom authority in legal grey zones. Sometimes the problem is simply funding and staff capacity (see also Carte 2017). Based on our field experiences, the summer 2018 catastrophe of the Trump Administration’s taking migrant children from their families and “losing” them in the immigration system was hardly surprising. In fact, the tragedy, ongoing as we write this, tells us a lot about how unsystematic the U.S. immigration system really is.

In stark contrast, Oliver has had a largely smooth experience gaining access in his fieldwork conducted at U.S. military facilities. This is not to say that all military facilities are easily accessible. Rather, the protocol for entry tends to be more streamlined and uniform. While a range of components of the U.S. military have been systematically privatized – from security services and repairing vehicles to dining facilities and logistical supply chains – it remains the norm that the U.S. military command runs the facilities where they operate, with private contractors following the chain of command. For example, during his non-participant observations¹ of trainings for counterinsurgency warfare at Muscatatuck Urban Training Center (MUTC) and Camp Atterbury in central Indiana, U.S. military officers determined access to the bases, while the McKellar Corporation managed the training scenarios in which U.S. military personnel participated (see Belcher 2014).

The timing of Oliver’s fieldwork (2010–2011) was interesting, because it took place at a moment when the U.S. military was actively engaging with the academic community to bolster its “cultural awareness” initiative in Iraq and Afghanistan (Gregory 2008). Like Lauren’s experiences in immigration detention facilities, the grey-zone of authority was also apparent within these two military bases. For example, while Oliver was technically a guest of the U.S. military, McKellar Corporation personnel were unclear about the extent to which he could take part in the trainings, which were kind-of-but-not-quite proprietary information. After Oliver received approval to observe all the trainings, the extent to which he could interact with personnel remained unclear. On the one hand, Oliver had full access to the U.S. military personnel participating in the trainings, even while the trainings were in action. On the other hand, interactions with Afghan and Iraqi refugees also participating in the trainings were technically employees of the McKellar Corporation, and were therefore reticent to speak. Yet, on the days, all the participants were fully engaged with one another, thus making technical boundaries of access and restriction fluid. What our different experiences show is two different federal departments (Homeland Security and Defense, respectively) devolve research access very differently. The difference here shows not only a messy state in a broad sense, but ways in which localized relationships between federal, local and non-state actors become more discernible through the access process itself.

Interviews: selective disclosure and off-the-record conversations

In his 2015 Political Geography Plenary Lecture at the American Association of Geographers Conference in Chicago, Dr Mat Coleman argued that despite the seemingly spectacular violence of police violence in the U.S., it has been difficult for him (and others) to research police violence in practice, not to mention document and record in ethnographic field notes, interviews, and secondary data. In the published version, Coleman (2016) identified a range of issues that resonate with our interview experiences. In his experience of researching immigration policing in North Carolina and Georgia, Coleman describes studying the police as uneventful, cruddy, diffuse. Coleman tells the story from his research on local immigration policing, and the controversial policy of local police collaborating with federal immigration officials. The immigrant advocacy literature is rife with stories of parents going to work and never coming home. Coleman began to focus on traffic stops as a site (or so he thought) of strategically locating undocumented migrants (Coleman and Stuesse 2016). As migrant communities are often described as “under siege,” Coleman assumed that this atmosphere of fear and siege would be evident in the urban landscape. However, he never found anything observable in the traditional sense. Driving around a relatively small area for weeks, the traffic stops never became visible; that is, they did not have a durable presence. Yet, the traffic stops were very much active and alive in the fear and distrust experienced by undocumented migrants in the area which they interviewed. Borrowing from Elizabeth Povinelli (2011), Coleman (2016: 77) calls this “invisible police work” – affective, yet effective – “uneventful police rule.”

To understand police practice, as an object of inquiry, Coleman det...