## RESEARCH, ETHICS AND RISK IN THE AUTHORITARIAN FIELD

Marlies Glasius, Meta de Lange, Jos Bartman, Emanuela Dalmasso, Aofei Lv, Adele Del Sordi, Marcus Michaelsen and Kris Ruijgrok

Research, Ethics and Risk in the Authoritarian Field

Marlies Glasius • Meta de Lange Jos Bartman • Emanuela Dalmasso Aofei Lv • Adele Del Sordi Marcus Michaelsen • Kris Ruijgrok

# Research, Ethics and Risk in the Authoritarian Field

Marlies Glasius Meta de Lange Jos Bartman Emanuela Dalmasso Aofei Lv Adele Del Sordi Marcus Michaelsen Kris Ruijgrok University of Amsterdam Amsterdam, The Netherlands

*The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council (FP7/2007-2013) / ERC grant agreement n° 323899.*

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This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland *To everyone who has helped us in the authoritarian field, and especially to those who have remained anonymous. Without them, field research would be impossible.*

## Contents

**Dos and Don'ts in the Authoritarian Field** 119

## About the Authors

**Jos Bartman** is a PhD candidate at the Department of Politics, University of Amsterdam, and a team member of *Authoritarianism in a Global Age*. His research focuses on how subnational authoritarian regimes use repression. During his research master's, he conducted four months of fieldwork in rural West Bengal (India). For his current research, he has conducted fieldwork in Veracruz (Mexico) and Gujarat (India), where he has interviewed targets and executors of political repression.

**Emanuela Dalmasso** is a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Politics, University of Amsterdam, for the research project *Authoritarianism in a Global Age*. She holds a PhD in political science from the University of Turin (Italy). Her main areas of expertise and interest are Middle Eastern politics and gender studies, with a specific focus on Morocco. She has previously published on these topics in the *Journal of Modern African Studies*, *Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions*, *Contemporary Arab Affairs*, and *Mediterranean Politics*. Her work is based on extensive fieldwork in Morocco and Tunisia.

**Meta de Lange** is a junior researcher at the Department of Politics, University of Amsterdam, where she contributes to the project *Authoritarianism in a Global Age* with organizational and research support. She graduated from the Political Science Department at the University of Amsterdam in 2012 with a master's thesis based on interviews with Occupy activists in Amsterdam. She gained fieldwork experience in Surinam (2005), interviewing youths in detention, and in Cameroon (2006) conducting interviews on the impact of HIV/AIDS in a rural area.

**Adele Del Sordi** is a former post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Politics, University of Amsterdam, where she contributed to the project *Authoritarianism in a Global Age* by looking at the impact of globalization on authoritarian sustainability in post-Soviet Kazakhstan. Since November 2017 she has joined the Graduate School of East and South-East European Studies at the University Ludwig-Maximilian in Munich, Germany. She holds a PhD in political systems and institutional change from the Institute of Advanced Studies (IMT) in Lucca, Italy. Her research interests include the stability of authoritarian regimes, post-Soviet politics, and authoritarian learning. She has conducted extensive fieldwork in Kazakhstan between 2011 and 2017.

**Marlies Glasius** is a professor of international relations at the Department of Politics, University of Amsterdam, and principal investigator of the ERC-funded project *Authoritarianism in a Global Age*. Her research interests include authoritarianism, international criminal justice, human security, and global civil society. She holds a PhD cum laude from the Netherlands School of Human Rights Research and previously worked at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). She is the author of *The International Criminal Court: A Global Civil Society Achievement* (2006) and *Foreign Policy on Human Rights: Its Influence on Indonesia under Soeharto* (1999) and coeditor of volumes on international criminal justice (with Zarkov 2014), on human security (with Kaldor 2006), and on civil society (with Kostovicova 2011, with Lewis and Seckinelgin 2004, and the annual *Global Civil Society* Yearbook, 2001–2011). She has conducted fieldwork in the Central African Republic, Egypt, Greece, Indonesia, Liberia, and Sri Lanka.

**Aofei Lv** is a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Politics, University of Amsterdam, for the research project *Authoritarianism in a Global Age*. She finished her PhD at the Politics Department, University of Glasgow, in 2015. She got her bachelor's and master's degree at Nankai University, China. She has conducted fieldwork in China since 2010, including interviews with officials of different departments within the central government, journalists, scholars, senior managers of enterprises, and representatives of international organizations in China.

**Marcus Michaelsen** is a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Politics, University of Amsterdam, and a team member of the project *Authoritarianism in a Global Age*. He obtained his PhD in media and communication studies from the University of Erfurt (Germany) with a dissertation on the role of the Internet in Iran's political transformation. He holds a master's degree in Middle Eastern Studies from the Université de Provence (France) and was a research fellow at the Institut Français de Recherche en Iran (IFRI) in Tehran from 2004 to 2006. His research interests include media and political change, digital media activism, and the politics of Internet governance, with a particular focus on Iran and the Middle East. He has conducted fieldwork in Iran and Pakistan.

**Kris Ruijgrok** is a PhD candidate for the research project *Authoritarianism in a Global Age* at the Department of Politics, University of Amsterdam. His PhD research uses a mixed-methods approach to study the role of Internet in street protests in authoritarian regimes. He holds a cum laude master's degree in political science from the University of Amsterdam. He has recently conducted fieldwork in Malaysia.

## List of Abbreviations

## Introduction

**Abstract** In this introduction to *Research, Ethics and Risk in the Authoritarian Field*, we explain why and how we wrote this book, who we are, what the 'authoritarian field' means for us, and who may find this book useful. By recording our joint experiences in very different authoritarian contexts systematically and succinctly, comparing and contrasting them, and drawing lessons, we aim to give other researchers a framework, so they will not need to start from scratch as we did. It is not the absence of free and fair elections, or repression, that most prominently affects our fieldwork in authoritarian contexts, but the arbitrariness of authoritarian rule, and the uncertainty it results in for us and the people in our fieldwork environment.

**Keywords** Authoritarianism • Field research • Reflection • Uncertainty • Qualitative research • Fieldwork methods

#### Why This Book

We wrote this book, in the first place, because we needed it and it did not exist. In 2014 we came to the discovery, as a comparative research group preparing for fieldwork, that there was practically no written guidance on how to handle the challenges of authoritarianism research. There were reams of literature on anthropological fieldwork, and some good texts on how to do research on political violence in conflict areas (for instance, Sriram et al. 2009; Mazurana et al. 2013; Hilhorst et al. 2016). But the image they painted of their field did not mirror our experience, and the advice they gave was only partially applicable. Country-based texts were also an **i**mperfect fit: we found some interesting discussion on navigating the party-state in China (Heimer and Thøgersen 2006), or on circumventing the prohibition on mentioning ethnicity in Rwanda (Thomson et al. 2013), but the extensive reflections on Chinese language and culture, or on what it means to be a white researcher in the African Great Lakes region, did not travel. Fortunately, more explicit reflection on research in authoritarian contexts per se is just beginning to emerge. In recent years, two special issues have appeared on 'closed' and 'authoritarian' contexts, respectively (Koch 2013; Goode and Ahram 2016), as well as some shorter pieces focusing on fieldwork challenges in China (Shih 2015), the Middle East (Lynch 2016), and Central Asia (Driscoll 2015), explicitly approached as authoritarian contexts. We have learned from, and draw on, this recent literature. But it still consists largely of collections of individual experiences, placed side by side rather than in conversation with each other. By recording our joint experiences in very different authoritarian contexts systematically and succinctly, comparing and contrasting them, and drawing lessons, we aim to give other researchers a framework, so they will not need to start from scratch as we did.

A second trigger for writing the book was the death of Giulio Regeni. Regeni was a PhD student at the University of Cambridge, who was tortured to death while doing fieldwork on trade unionism in Egypt, in early 2016. Regeni's killing sent shockwaves through the community of Middle East scholars, reminding us of the risk involved in research in the authoritarian field. It affected us quite personally, because some of us knew people close to him, one of us had done research in Egypt only few years earlier, and others were PhD students about to embark on their own fieldwork. At the same time, Regeni's death and the responses to it also highlighted the rarity of such an extreme act of repression against a foreign scholar, and reminded us of our relative safety in comparison to our respondents and collaborators in the countries we study.

A final consideration for writing this book was the controversy that arose among political scientists, primarily in the United States, around the so-called Data Access and Research Transparency (DA-RT) statement. DA-RT asserted that 'researchers should provide access to … data or explain why they cannot', and led to the adoption of a joint transparency statement by a number of journal editors in 2014 (https://www.dartstatement.org). As we describe in detail in Chap. 6, these statements have become subject to increasing controversy, and a lively debate has since ensued on the merits and limits of transparency, especially for different types of qualitative research. As noted by Shih (2015), Driscoll (2015), and Lynch (2016), tensions between transparency obligations and protection of respondents are particularly acute when it comes to fieldwork research in authoritarian circumstances. While these and other contributions have thrown open the debate by critiquing DA-RT, the tension between transparency and protection remains unresolved, and few alternative models have emerged. More recently, European policy-makers have developed even more sweeping proposals to improve 'the accessibility of data and knowledge at all stages of the research cycle' (Directorate-General for Research and Innovation 2016, 52), making it all the more urgent to develop a considered response to such calls for transparency from the perspective of authoritarian field research.

There are no easy fixes either for the tension between transparency and responsibility towards respondents, or to the issues of risk raised by Regeni's death. Without simplifying, this book aims to contribute to improving the practice of authoritarian field research, by laying bare some of the dilemmas and trade-offs we encountered, examining our own decisions with hindsight, and discussing strategies we developed, to make it easier for others. We also want to open the space for reflecting on themes that we believe are too little discussed, let alone written about, by political scientists: our fears, insecurities and mistakes during fieldwork, the mental impact it has on us, and the possibility of coming home with little in the way of publishable findings.

The book is structured in the following way: in this chapter, we explain who we are, define our subject matter, and try to dispel some prejudices and dichotomous ways of thinking. We describe how we wrote the book, and for whom we believe it will be useful. In Chap. 2, we discuss how we enter the field: navigating institutional ethics requirements, getting permission to enter, and preparing for the particularities and risks involved in authoritarianism research. In Chap. 3, we explain the concept of 'red lines': topics that are sensitive or even taboo to discuss in authoritarian contexts, how we learn what they are, and how we navigate them. In Chap. 4, we discuss how we build and maintain relations in the field: how we relate to local collaborators, how we approach respondents and conduct interviews, and the responsibilities we have towards our contacts in the field. Chapter 5 discusses the mental impact of authoritarian field research, which is always stressful, often stimulating, and sometimes involves dealing with surveillance, fear, betrayal, or the suffering of others. We also reflect on adverse consequences of pressure to get results. In Chap. 6 we describe the constraints of the authoritarian field when 'writing up', and our practices concerning anonymization and off-the-record information. We make some concrete proposals on how to deal with the tension between protecting respondents and scientific transparency. In the final pages of the book, we give a carefully qualified list of 'do's and don'ts', distilled from our reflections in each chapter.

#### Who We Are

This book is a product of the ERC-funded research project *Authoritarianism in a Global Age*, based at the University of Amsterdam, which comprises four postdoctoral researchers, two PhD candidates, a junior researcher, and the principal investigator. For this project, we have done field research on aspects of authoritarianism in China, Iran, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, and Morocco, and on subnational authoritarianism in India and Mexico, from 2015 to 2017. Our inclusion of India and Mexico in this volume requires some explanation: after the transition to democracy of many countries of Latin America in the 1980s and 1990s, political scientists came to the realization that in many of these contexts, the transition remained geographically uneven. Regions and states within a national federation succeeded in remaining authoritarian, even while national-level politics became pluralist and more respectful of civil and political rights. This insight spawned the concepts of 'subnational authoritarianism' or 'subnational undemocratic regions' (O'Donnell 1993; Gibson 2005; Durazo Herrmann 2010; Gervasoni 2010), which have since also been applied to regions in Russia and Kyrgyzstan (McMann 2006), the Philippines (Sidel 2014), and India (Tudor and Ziegfeld 2016). When we refer, in this book, to India and Mexico as authoritarian contexts, we specifically have Gujarat, India, and Veracruz, Mexico, where our fieldwork took place, in mind. But these are not the only subnational authoritarian regions in these two countries, and indeed there are many such regions worldwide. While there are some important empirical and theoretical differences between national authoritarian states and subnational regions, we have found that as *fieldwork contexts*, they are not so different, and we believe that many of our experiences and recommendations are applicable to such regions more generally. In other words, such regions within formal democracies should be treated as 'authoritarian fields'. Indeed, as will become clear, the Veracruz context was probably the most brutally repressive one we investigated in this project. In our broader project, we also investigated the effect authoritarian rule continues to have on its citizens beyond borders (Glasius 2018; Dalmasso 2018; Del Sordi 2018; Michaelsen 2016), and we occasionally refer to this field of research in Europe too. We also draw on our collective fieldwork experience from previous projects, in the countries mentioned above as well as in the authoritarian or transition contexts of Cameroon, Egypt, Indonesia, Pakistan, Tunisia, and the short-lived 'Tamil Eelam' controlled by the Tamil Tigers. Hence, we bring together a tremendous amount of fresh, cross-regional experience in the authoritarian field, as well as rich knowledge of the relevant political science and area studies literature. We have devoted frequent group sessions both to preparing for our fieldwork, and to reflecting on our experiences afterwards. We were helped tremendously with this by the three ethical advisors we sought out to think through our dilemmas: Marcel van der Heijden, program manager at HIVOS and an expert on Central Asia and the Middle East; Dirk Kruijt, professor emeritus at the University of Utrecht and an expert on Latin America and the Caribbean; and Malcolm Smart, a human rights professional who has managed various regional and other programs for Amnesty International, Article 19, and Human Rights Watch. We take this opportunity to thank them for their advice and support. These discussions between ourselves and with our advisors, and the realization that in previous projects we had not had the benefit either of written guidance, or of an exchange of experiences and practices, gave rise to this book.

Our reflections and recommendations in this book are based on our individual experiences. Where many of us have very similar experiences, not only during the fieldwork for this project but also in previous fieldwork episodes, we have taken the liberty of abstracting from these incidents or practices and formulated more general findings. Wherever possible, we have engaged with the existing literature so as to be on firmer ground in our quest for generalization. In many other instances in this book, where our experiences are more varied, contradictory, or even unique, we just describe what our practice is or what has happened to us as an individual experience. Importantly, we want to emphasize that one should not read the experiences of, for instance, our China or Iran researcher, as 'this is what it is like to do field research in China', or 'this has been the experience of political scientists going into Iran'. It is not just the country context but also the political timing of our research; our research agenda; the kinds of respondents we seek out; characteristics such as our gender, age, and nationality; and even our personality that feed into the experiences we have. Nonetheless, even where we are reluctant to generalize from our experience, we believe the collection of incidents and routines we put forward here will be helpful to others in orienting themselves on future fieldwork, or reflecting on past fieldwork, and contributes to building up a sedimentation of experiences in the authoritarian field.

#### What Is the Authoritarian Field?

The expression 'authoritarian field', which we used for the title of this book, has two different meanings. First of all, it is a field of academic research. As such, it denotes the study of authoritarian rule as an object of research, and those academics, primarily political scientists, who are its students. There are different ways of studying authoritarianism: historically, empirically with quantitative, qualitative, or mixed methods, or (more rarely) purely theoretically. Second, the 'authoritarian field' is a place where academics and others spend time to gather research data. As such, it refers to territories under the jurisdiction of governments that are authoritarian in the senses outlined below: they fail to conduct fully free and fair elections, they curtail freedom of expression and freedom of association, and most importantly for our experience, there is some arbitrariness to their governance, resulting in various forms of insecurity for those who reside in or enter such territories. As we already mentioned, authoritarian jurisdiction is not always coterminous with the borders of a state, and in fact authoritarian power need not be strictly territorial (Glasius 2018; Cooley and Heathershaw 2017), but mostly what we discuss in this book does concern conditions within the borders of an authoritarian polity.

We as authors are 'in the authoritarian field' in both senses: we gather data in places that are under authoritarian rule, and our object of study is also authoritarian rule. For the purposes of this book, we use the expression 'authoritarian field' in the second sense: as a geographical space structured by particular sociopolitical features. When we discuss the authoritarian field as an object of study, we use 'authoritarianism' or 'authoritarian rule'. Along with the rest of the political science profession, we tend sometimes to think of our field as divided into quantitative and qualitative, and to equate the latter orientation with going into the 'authoritarian field' in the second sense. This is an unhelpful oversimplification. It overlooks the contribution of historical studies, which may be desk-based, but may also involve fieldwork to get to relevant archives (see, for instance, Thøgersen 2006; Tsourapas 2015, 2016). Equally, quantitative research can be based on surveys or statistics that can only be gathered in the field. Three of us have experience with conducting surveys in the authoritarian field, and we will reflect on those experiences here. Nonetheless, most of our fieldwork revolves around conducting interviews, which we believe also reflects the most prevalent source of data among our fieldworker colleagues. We therefore focus particularly on interviewing (in Chap. 4) and handling transcripts (in Chap. 6).

 A minimum definition that political scientists subscribe to is that authoritarianism is characterized by the absence of free and fair competition in elections. The contexts we investigate do indeed have in common the absence of fully free and fair elections. However, for understanding the specific challenges of authoritarian fieldwork, this is not a particularly helpful point of reference. A broader, less universally agreed definition of authoritarianism insists that apart from the lack of free and fair elections, authoritarian regimes are also characterized by violations of the right to freedom of expression and access to information, and freedom of association. This begins to give us some better clues as to the specificity of the authoritarian field, but it too provides limited insight into what the authoritarian field is like as a research context.

In other publications, we have provided analyses of many aspects of the various authoritarian regimes we study. Here, we want to take the opportunity to share something we cannot fully communicate in our substantive work: how we *experience* authoritarianism in our fieldwork. While a focus on elections simply is not relevant for understanding everyday life, a focus on civil rights violations might cause us to envisage authoritarian-ruled states as giant prison camps. We may get fixated on a notion of agents of the state who are constantly and single-mindedly involved in arresting dissidents, harassing journalists, closing down websites or breaking up demonstrations. Indeed, some of us have found that by using authoritarianism as an analytical lens, we unintentionally constructed a monster in our minds called authoritarian regime. The monster, we imagined, is out to do nasty things to its citizens, and perhaps to us. All of the governments we study do curtail freedom of expression and association, but they also pursue educational policies, regulate export licenses, and worry about the economy; and their officials also attend summits, give rousing speeches, and attend to personnel matters. While there are examples of authoritarian regimes in which all citizens live in fear of their governments all the time (North Korea is the paradigmatic example), the twenty-first century authoritarian governance we study is more subtle, and uses repressive measures more sparingly. As first-time visitors, some of us needed to experience that most people are not being arrested most of the time, before being able to discern the more subtle ways in which the environment *is* authoritarian. This has not been our universal experience, however. Our Kazakhstan researcher, by contrast, having lived in Kazakhstan before she became an academic, was inclined to separate the analytical lens of 'authoritarianism' from everyday experiences in the country, and only gradually became more aware of the potential risks attached to her research. Our China researcher, having grown up in the People's Republic, did not need to discover the multidimensional realities of China, having experienced them from birth.

Our initial prejudices may also have led us into truncated moral judgments, assuming that (all) agents of the state are the bad guys, corrupt and repressive, and (all) activists are the good guys. We needed to discover that agents of the state can be conscientious, well-informed, and willing to discuss the problems of their political system with us, as well as sometimes inviting us to look critically at the policies of democratic countries. Activists, we found, are often brave and impressive but can also at times be vain, petty, and invested in criticizing their peers as much as the government. Another bias some of us have had to shed relates to the aspirations of citizens of authoritarian countries. Some citizens of authoritarian states do think that life is 'better' in democratic countries, and they would like to live there if they could, but many do not. Our Kazakhstan researcher found that for Kazakhstani students who went to study in democratic countries, being in an environment where civil liberties are respected was not automatically relevant and important to most of them. Our Iran researcher found that even for Iranian citizens who *do* deeply value human rights and personal freedoms, this does not necessarily mean they would like to go and live in the west if they could. They want to stay and change their own country, and if they have to leave, it is with a heavy heart.

The feature of authoritarianism that most prominently affects our fieldwork is not its repressive aspect as such, but its arbitrariness, and the uncertainty that results in for us and the people in our fieldwork environment. In democratic contexts, without knowing in detail all the laws of the land, we have a reasonable understanding of what is legal and what is criminal behavior. In authoritarian circumstances, it is never quite so clear what you can and cannot do. There are laws, many laws, but they are not consistently applied, they contradict each other, and executive behavior without legal sanction is also a possibility. This results in a sense of uncertainty: you never know whether you are crossing a red line or not (for a longer discussion of the concept of 'red lines', see Chap. 3). In fact, the insecurity cuts both ways. People within the regime also suffer from uncertainty, about the level of popular legitimacy and robustness of their regime, even in ostensibly very stable circumstances (an insight reflected in the title of Andreas Schedler's book *The Politics of Uncertainty*, 2013). Our presence as researchers is probably a low priority within the constellation of self-perceived existential threats to the regime, but we cannot take this for granted. Most of the time, we probably will not be crossing a red line, but the lines are not fixed; they move, for us and for our respondents. In all probability, nothing will happen. But the latent threat that something can happen, to you or your respondents, is what is specific about authoritarian regimes, and hence also authoritarian fieldwork. Finally, the authoritarian field may have a cultural element: authoritarianism is not only about what the state or the party does but also about how people have internalized self-limitation, even while the concrete limits of free speech are set by the leadership, and subject to change. The arbitrary behavior of the state brings about feelings of mistrust, powerlessness, and uncertainty in people which can affect their social relations, with each other and with us.

#### Beyond 'Westerners' and 'Locals'

In a book like this, reflecting on our fieldwork experiences, we tend to fall into thinking in terms of a stereotypical dichotomy: us, westerners, who go to visit them, the locals, in their field. It is true that the authors of this book all are, or have been, employed at western universities, and we do go on fieldwork in authoritarian contexts, sometimes for months, but we do not live there. But our identities and relations to the field are a bit more varied than the dichotomy would suggest. As already mentioned, our China researcher grew up in the 'field' she researches. She needed time to acclimatize to the culture and politics of Europe, and now approaches the field with more of a sense of distance, but she is not 'a westerner' any more than she is 'a local'. Our Iran researcher, ostensibly a 'westerner' with his German passport, in fact also grew up in an 'authoritarian field': the German Democratic Republic. Our Kazakhstan researcher feels that growing up in Southern Italy, while certainly not authoritarian, does not fit stereotypical ideas of western liberal democracy either. The crucial importance of informal networks in her region of origin resembles that in the Kazakh political field. We mention these biographical details because we see them reflected in the often complex identities and relations to the field of many of our colleagues: some are nationals of the fields they study, many have dual nationality (this seems to be especially prevalent among Iran scholars), some have spouses with origins in 'the field', some have grown up in it, and so on.

Conversely, as anthropologists have long noted, the 'locals' are not invariably rooted to the soil of the authoritarian field. We are acutely aware of this because the mobility of nationals of authoritarian countries is part of our substantive research agenda. Many of the Iranian journalists and bloggers who came to form our Iran researcher's local network a decade ago have fled the country after the 2009 crackdown on election protests, and now live all over the world. Our Kazakhstan researcher has interviewed Kazakhstani students during a period of study abroad, or after their return, and our China researcher does survey research on Chinese students' experience abroad. Our Morocco researcher has done research among Moroccans in the Netherlands, Belgium, and France. Hence, we do not find colonial images of us, intrepid travelers, who go to visit the natives and report back on how they behave, to correspond to our actual experiences. Nor do we suffer much from postcolonial guilt. In some cases, we experience that we are in a relation of economic privilege in relation to our respondents, but mostly, we do not. Most of the authoritarian countries we investigate are not particularly poor countries, and our respondents are not usually the marginalized in society, but members of the middle class, sometimes even the elite. We recognize that this may be different for researchers in other authoritarian contexts, or with different research agendas. Researching the authoritarian regimes of extremely poor countries, such as Eritrea or Tajikistan, or vulnerable groups, such as undocumented migrants, religious minorities, or indigenous people, may throw up ethical questions that we have not had to face. Nonetheless, we are privileged in a political sense: our affiliations to western universities, and for most of us our passports, often give us greater protection from the authoritarian state than its residents have. Moreover, if we ever feel that the authoritarian field gets to be too oppressive or dangerous to us, we can get on a plane, usually from one day to the next, and get beyond the reach of the state we study. None of us have had to exercise that option, but it is there. For most of the people we come into contact with, it is not.

#### How We Wrote This Book

Writing a book with eight people is not like writing alone or with a small number of co-authors, but it can be done. In fact we recommend the experience for research groups that have worked closely together, as a way of capturing the accumulated knowledge. Since we all use interviews as our primary material in our own research, we naturally turned to interviews as the most appropriate way to structure the writing process: we interviewed ourselves. We first brainstormed about what topics should be covered in the book and came to a provisional table of contents. Then, the project leader and the project assistant came up with a list of interview questions, which was amended by the six other researchers, who have done all the fieldwork in this project. The project assistant proceeded to have in-depth interviews with the six researchers, often over two sessions, yielding about eighteen hours of interview material. The six field researchers edited the project assistant's interview transcripts and cut and pasted them into the table of contents. The project assistant also placed relevant passages from existing literature into this format. The project leader then produced first drafts of each chapter, which were in turn discussed with, and edited and commented on by, the six field researchers. We also commissioned comments from a number of our colleagues at the University of Amsterdam, all experienced fieldworkers, on different draft chapters. We would like to thank Julia Bader, Farid Boussaid, Marieke de Goede, Julian Gruin, Imke Harbers, Beste Isleyen, Vivienne Matthies-Boon, Polly Pallister-Wilkins, Abbey Steele, and Nel Vandekerckhove for their comments. After a second round of edits, the full text was submitted for review. We gratefully acknowledge our anonymous reviewer for the helpful comments, both on the proposal and on the draft manuscript of the book.

#### Who This Book Is For

This book should be essential reading to those readers who, like the authors, are in the authoritarian field in both senses. For academics who study authoritarianism on the basis of desk-based research, this book will help them to better understand the ways of working of their colleagues who do fieldwork, and perhaps consider it for themselves, or in collaboration, in mixed-methods projects. Fieldwork research has in the past sometimes been treated as an art form rather than a method, something that cannot be taught. While we do think it involves a certain amount of learning by doing, we do not want it to be approached as an occult pursuit. We expect this book to be especially useful for junior scholars, such as PhD researchers or researchers exploring the topic of authoritarianism for the first time, but we aspire to speak to senior scholars as well. Even if the recent reflective turn in qualitative methods comes too late for you to be 'trained' in them, it is never too late to explicitly reflect on the merits and drawbacks of one's approach to field research, and our work can serve as a source of comparison in this respect.

The first four chapters of this book will also be valuable to academics who (aim to) spend time in the authoritarian field but whose research does not revolve around authoritarianism. Social scientists who study agricultural or trade policy, forest management, gender, or religion in authoritarian contexts are likely at some point to find themselves confronted with the sensitivities of the authoritarian state. Even beyond the social sciences, scholars of archeology, climate change, or epidemiology who are in the authoritarian field will need to have some engagement with local policymakers, and will profit from having a social awareness of the context in which they find themselves. Researchers may find themselves caught in politics, even though they never intended to investigate the political aspects of a given topic. We can think, for instance, of a linguist studying the Tamazight languages of North Africa, who suddenly finds that her extensive contact with the people who speak it is a source of suspicion to the authorities, or a biologist who is interested in the fish population in the Yangtze river and discovers that the disappearance of certain species due to pollution is a politically sensitive topic.

Chapters 5 and 6, which deal with mental impact and with anonymization of sources respectively, will be of interest to other categories of scholars. Academics who work with vulnerable groups in society, such as drug users, sex workers, or undocumented migrants, or with groups that engage in illegal or controversial behaviors, such as criminal gangs or racist movements, may be confronted with the negative mental impact of living through traumatic incidents or hearing hard stories. The same may be true for scholars who investigate the repressive or secretive aspects of democratic states, such as the practices of secret services, anti-terrorist policies, or counterinsurgency training. Scholarship on all these topics also faces the challenge of how to deal with anonymity in the face of an increasing call for transparency, just as we do, and they may consider to what extent our practices and recommendations are applicable for their fields.

Finally, beyond the academy, we expect some chapters of this book to make useful reading for policy-makers, civil society practitioners, business people, or journalists who find themselves in the authoritarian field, or dealing with authoritarian state authorities. Some may have a more difficult experience: as we describe in more detail in Chaps. 2 and 4, there are important differences between our work and that of journalists and human rights investigators in particular, which may cause them to have a harder time. On the other hand, valued technical experts or cultural journalists may experience much less in the way of political impediments or sensitivities than we have done. Nonetheless, for anyone who expects to have significant interactions with locals in the authoritarian field, there is relevant guidance in this book regarding the need to spend time getting used to the sociopolitical as much as the physical climate (Chap. 2), to develop a sensitivity to the 'red lines' (Chap. 3), and to build trust with interlocutors (Chap. 4). Chapter 5 may be of interest to human rights and humanitarian workers, to compare our experiences and recommendations to the practices that have been developed in their own fields. Chapter 6 may be of interest to journalists, who face similar trade-offs between protecting sources and being transparent.

#### References

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## 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 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 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 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, 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.

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 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 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 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 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.

#### 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 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.

#### 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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.

#### References

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## Learning the Red Lines

**Abstract** In this chapter we, as scholars of authoritarianism, discuss the 'red lines', a term used in authoritarian contexts to denote topics that are highly politically sensitive. We first describe commonalities in what the red lines are in different contexts, distinguishing between hard red lines and more fluid ones. We describe how we navigate red lines in fieldwork by offering a depoliticized, but not untrue, version of our research; how we adapt our wording and behavior to remain within the red lines, but still give us meaningful research results; and how we respond when the red lines shift, and words and behaviors previously acceptable become taboo, or vice versa.

**Keywords** Authoritarianism • Field research • Red lines • Sensitive topics

Observers of Chinese politics use the term 'red lines' to denote topics that are highly politically sensitive, the idea being that these are lines that must not be crossed. A red line does not necessarily mean that a topic cannot be discussed at all, but great care must be taken how it is discussed, and with whom. The term 'red lines' is also used in Morocco, and in Farsi there is also such an expression. In other contexts, we have not come across the phrase as such, but we adopt it here as a useful shorthand for topics or issues that are sensitive in the sense that investigating them is considered threatening or forbidden by the regime (see also Ahram and Goode 2016, 840). Thus, our notion of 'red lines' is distinctly political. We do not discuss primarily cultural dimensions of what constitutes appropriate or inappropriate topics and behaviors. Of course a field researcher also needs to be aware of cultural taboos but that is not a matter restricted to authoritarian contexts.

In this chapter, we first describe what we know of what the red lines are in different contexts. We distinguish between hard red lines and more fluid ones. With respect to the hard red lines, we find considerable commonalities across countries. For us as scholars of authoritarianism, understanding the red lines is our bread and butter, but we believe it is important for any professional visitor to an authoritarian-ruled state to at least gain an understanding of the hard red lines. The fluid lines are much more contextspecific, more dependent on who we are interacting with, and more subject to change over time. The main commonality here is this ambiguity itself, which keeps us in uncertainty about precisely what is permissible.

We devote the bulk of the chapter to discussing how we navigate the red lines. Our primary strategy, and that of others, has been to be open and honest about the fact that we are social science researchers, and to explain the nature of our research in terms that are approximately accurate, but stripped of their politically sensitive import, so as to stay within the red lines. We give many examples, from our own experience and that of others, to elucidate what we mean by a 'depoliticized version' of our research, giving special attention to the wordings we use, and how local contacts can help us adapt our wording. We also give some examples of behaviors that, while far from being outrageous, came close to or crossed the red lines. Finally, we devote some attention to how the shifting of red lines over time can affect research.

#### Hard Red Lines

While the hard red lines are taboo subjects, it is not particularly difficult to discover, even before entering the field, what they are. What they have in common is that they are directly connected to regime stability, or the regime's core legitimizing narrative. In Iran, it is always the Supreme Leader: you cannot criticize him or question his position. In Morocco, likewise, his Majesty the King is a red line topic, and in Kazakhstan, it is the President who has been head of state for the last 28 years. In China, members of the Politburo Standing Committee can never be criticized.

Corruption is an important political topic in many of the contexts we investigate, and it is not necessarily controversial to discuss corruption as a societal problem. But investigating corruption in relation to the current top-level leadership is almost always taboo. This is true for the top leadership of the Chinese Communist Party and for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. There is ample evidence of how sensitive investigating top-level corruption in authoritarian contexts is and of how regimes respond to it. An investigation by *The New York Times* journalists on the wealth of then Chinese prime minister Wen Jiabao's family resulted in the blocking of the newspaper's website in China (Barboza 2012; Branigan 2012). In Malaysia, a deputy public prosecutor was killed after investigating a corruption scandal in which the prime minister was embroiled, and allegedly leaking information about the case to the press (*Sarawak Report* 2015). In a decentralized country like Mexico, certain states are notorious for attacks on journalists who investigate the involvement of state-level officials in corruption scandals. None of us has done field research on the authoritarianism-corruption nexus, and we know relatively few academics who do so. A recent book that does focus on the nefarious financial networks of Central Asian leaders relies primarily on desk research (Cooley and Heathershaw 2017, 20–22), especially from court cases, leaked documents, and NGO sources.

Two other common red lines are ethnic or religious cleavages in society, and occupied or secessionist territories. These issues are red lines because openly discussing them can put into question the societal and/or territorial cohesion of the authoritarian state. In Malaysia, the 'special rights' of Malays in relation to primarily Chinese and Indian minorities are a red line and cannot be questioned. On the one hand the government exploits the fears and tensions between the different groups to some extent, positing itself as the guarantor of peaceful relations; on the other hand, it may genuinely fear large-scale ethnic unrest, as well as Islamic radicalism. In Kazakhstan discussing ethnic relations is problematic, unless framed in terms of the official discourse of harmony and tolerance. In China, focusing on conflicts between the Uyghur minority and other ethnic groups is unacceptable. In Rwanda, as reported by Loyle (2016, 925), asking questions about a person's ethnic identity is actually proscribed by law. Questioning Morocco's sovereignty over the Western Sahara, or suggesting that the rights of the local population are being violated, is a red line for Morocco, as is questioning whether Tibet or Taiwan belongs to China in the Chinese context (see also Reny 2016, 916).

#### Fluid Lines

Beyond the hard red lines, it is clear who is in power, but it is never certain what exactly is possible. As Loyle (2016, 924) writes about Rwanda, authoritarian regimes create 'a gray area around certain research topics. Restrictions are vague and punishments appear random. As a result, scholars may be unclear about what is or is not permitted and confused about the potential consequences of asking different types of research questions'. There is always a margin of error.  If they cross them, even in a private, anonymous interview with a foreign scholar, they will not be doing so unwittingly. Local journalists in particular consider the red lines every day. For them, the lines are different, more restrictive, than for us, because what they write or say is read or heard by a broad local audience immediately, rather than by a narrow English-speaking academic audience, many months later. They can be a good source for us precisely because they may sometimes want to express to us privately what they know but cannot communicate openly in their own work.

A fluid line, for instance, is the degree to which government institutions and politicians below the leadership can be discussed and criticized. In Kazakhstan, there is some, and in China, Malaysia, and Morocco, even considerable leeway to critically discuss and investigate specific ministries, local authorities, or government policies. Intra-elite rivalries sometimes increase the space for sensitive research, but there can also be a danger of getting caught up in them: in Iran, for instance, contact with westerners can in itself be the subject of intra-elite mistrust and slander.

Likewise, there is great variation in the degree to which antigovernmental activism is sensitive. In Iran, the topic of political prisoners is a red line, as is the Green Movement to some extent. In Malaysia, the main protest movement campaigning for clean and fair elections, Bersih, operates quite openly. Today, while not everyone feels comfortable participating in the protests, discussing them is not experienced as problematic. But the religious and ethnically based anti-governmental Hindu movement ('HINDRAF') is much less openly tolerated and a more sensitive topic of discussion. In China too, the degree to which one can discuss protests publicly really depends on topic and context. Our China researcher found her online posting of information on protests in Hong Kong censored; but when she posted or forwarded international news coverage of a mass protest against a proposed factory in Northeast China, nothing was blocked. We can approach these differences analytically, thinking of reasons why a minority movement is more sensitive than a cross-ethnic movement, or why Hong Kong is more of a red line than a local protest in the far north, but we also believe that when it comes to the fluid lines, distinctions can be more arbitrary and do not always lend themselves to logical explanation.

#### Depoliticizing the Research

One of the clearest, most commonly agreed recommendations in the emerging literature on fieldwork in authoritarian circumstances is to 'frame the research topic in a way that has the best chance of reducing any sensitivity around it' (Art 2016, 980). This appears to be a common practice among scholars of the post-Soviet region, as reported in the Central Eurasian Studies Society's recent task force report on fieldwork safety. According to their survey, '(m)any respondents admitted to adjusting the presentation of their research topic to decrease risk. Some respondents indicated that they either do not disclose their real research topics to anyone or change how they describe their work depending on the context, whether a government institution, university, etc.' (CESS 2016, 6). The report also mentions that a 'small minority reports outright misrepresenting their purpose for being in-country, a practice that we [the taskforce] find ill-advised' (CESS 2016, 7) because of the risk it poses to local helpers after publication of the real research. Making research sound 'bland and gray', avoiding 'phrases that hint at political curiosity or other sensitive topics' (Turner 2013, 398) is apparently also a usual approach to field research in socialist East Asian states including China, Laos, and Vietnam (Cornet 2013; Petit 2013; Sowerwine 2013, all cited in Turner 2013; Reny 2016). Country specialists on Iran (Malekzadeh 2016), Kazakhstan (Gentile 2013), and Rwanda (Loyle 2016) all refer to similar strategies. While most accounts recommend depoliticizing research for pragmatic reasons such as gaining access and reducing risk, Malekzadeh (2016, 866) adds the important insight that an interest in the mundane may actually improve research validity. While initially 'looking for dramatic or expressed bursts of opposition or bouts of justice seeking under authoritarian rule', he learned instead to seek out 'how people negotiate with what can be a suffocatingly tedious and impenetrable bureaucratic setting in order to improve their own lives'. This chimes with Pepinsky's (2017) plea for attention, in the Malaysian context, to 'everyday authoritarianism' rather than looking for spectacular repression.

Just like these other scholars in the authoritarian field, we do not tell lies about what our research is about, and we do present our plans in ways that are neutral, non-specific, and depoliticized. But depoliticizing political science research is easier said than done. Below, we elaborate on our own practices and the examples given by others in order to give practical substance to what it means to 'make it boring' (Malekzadeh 2016, 865).

First, there is the term 'authoritarianism' itself. The common research project that we mainly draw on for this book is called 'authoritarianism in a global age'. It is no secret that we investigate authoritarianism. If you google any of us, you will come across the term, and it is likely that all our publications, some more prominently than others, will feature the term 'authoritarian'. In China, interestingly, authoritarianism itself is not a red line, or at least until recently it was not. Government officials do not themselves refer to the regime as authoritarian, but foreign and even domestic scholars openly do so in conversation, if not in Chinese publications. It is not considered a term of opprobrium, just an analytical distinction from democracy. In Morocco by contrast, where the regime likes to see itself described as 'democratizing', authoritarian as an adjective applied to the Kingdom is a red line.

But regardless, in explaining what we do during fieldwork, most of us never use it. It is not even that it would necessarily be dangerous to do so, it is just unhelpful. Speaking of authoritarianism (or democracy for that matter) invites abstract discussions about ideologies, cultural differences, or western hypocrisy. Some respondents might react badly to the suggestion that their government is authoritarian; others, especially activists, might actually embrace it. Either way such discussions often lead us away from the concrete things we want to find out. We might refer to the general project as being about comparing different state responses to globalization, and then go on to describe our specific research interest.

Our Chinese researcher when introducing herself, especially to officials, gives them her business card—which has her name and affiliation in Chinese and English, but not the name of our project (see also Loyle 2016, 929 and Malekzadeh 2016, 867 on business cards as symbols of the legitimacy of our status as researchers). She gives them many details, lots of answers to any questions they may have, so they are not left with the feeling that she is hiding anything. In her recent research on the interactions between Chinese companies and government agencies over big data, she would not mention concerns about privacy, surveillance, or censorship. Instead, she would refer to US companies and government-corporate relations to initiate conversations. Taking the United States both as a competitor and point of reference allowed government officials as well as company managers to talk easily about the Chinese situation.

Our Iran researcher, when interested in online censorship, surveillance, and harassment by the Iranian authorities, framed this as an interest in Iran's Internet policies, or recent developments regarding the Internet in Iran. Even in interviews with activists, he would not introduce the term 'censorship' into a conversation himself but follow the lead of a respondent in terms of the wording and the depth of discussion.

Loyle, in the context of Rwanda, also gives some very concrete examples of how to depoliticize research topics: 'it may be unwise (or prohibited) to ask questions about government corruption in distributing natural resource contracts but alternate wording of the research question, such as "contract allocation" or "indicators of governance effectiveness," can provide similar answers without drawing unwanted attention to your research. Concepts such as "state violence" or "repression" can easily be replaced with words such as "conflict" to suggest general patterns of violence instead of research directed toward abuses by the state' (Loyle 2016, 930).

Sometimes, with a particular type of respondents, we find that there are advantages to dropping the depoliticized version that we crafted. Our Malaysia researcher, after initially being cautious, discovered that much more could be discussed openly than he expected, and it worked to be very forthright. He began to introduce himself to activists as doing research on Internet and protests in authoritarian regimes—usually adding that it was debatable how authoritarian Malaysia was. This was also the experience of our researcher on the subnational contexts of India and Mexico. He found that using the word 'authoritarian', which is not exactly commonplace in these formally democratic states, was actually helpful when speaking to local opposition figures and journalists. These illustrations just go to show how context-dependent the appropriate ways and degrees of depoliticizing one's research are. In most other authoritarian contexts, such an opening would be most alarming to respondents and kill any chance of a good interview. But in these specific contexts, with this particular group of respondents, it was actually an icebreaker.

#### Wording

Knowing the red lines is not just a matter of knowing what can be discussed but also how to discuss it and with whom. In referring to the various heads of state above, we instinctively remained within the red lines: to refer to the Supreme Leader or his Majesty the King as plain Khamenei or Mohammad VI would be disrespectful. Not dangerous, but inappropriate and therefore unhelpful, especially in conversations with officials, but sometimes also with ordinary people. We have learned this by listening carefully, in formal and informal conversations, to how locals spoke of their leaders.

Just as there are appropriate and inappropriate forms for referring to the head of state, there may be commonly understood neutral terms for sensitive topics, as well as terms that raise alarm bells. Matelski found that in Myanmar before democratization, 'people often referred to "the situation" to describe the general conditions they had to live in under military rule without having to go into detail' (Matelski 2014, 64, 67). Many Iranians will refer to the Green Movement's large-scale post-election protests, and the subsequent regime repression of the movement, obliquely as 'the events of 2009'. Our Kazakhstan researcher found when she worked for the United Nations that, while many citizens engaged in what we would call volunteering, it was very difficult to find an acceptable vocabulary to talk about these activities. There are two words in Russian for 'volunteering'. The one with a Latin root (*volonterstvo*) was connected with the English-speaking world, foreign NGOs, and aid programs. People then reacted negatively to the notion of Kazakhstan as a third world country in need of foreign aid, and government accusations that foreign NGOs were 'importing' protest caused further suspicion. But her conversations fared no better with the other word for volunteering, which has a Slavic origin and was used in Soviet times for obligatory 'volunteering' for communist party-affiliated organs. How to talk about volunteering was not just a cultural or linguistic conundrum; it had political implications. From the government's perspective, the line between what is acceptable volunteering and what is not is very thin, revolving around the distinction between political and apolitical activities.

When speaking to officials, we sometimes adopt their discourse to some extent. Members of a constitutional reform commission in Morocco, for instance, were keen to describe the reform as a participatory process. Instead of questioning this, our researcher took up the notion of participation and asked to know more about who participated and how. Tailoring the wording of research to fit the preferences of respondents is not in itself unique: Art, for instance, described his research on radical right parties in Europe to party officials as an interest in parties 'very concerned with preserving the distinctive political and cultural values of their societies' (Art 2016, 981). What is distinctive about the authoritarian context in comparison is the element of risk involved (see Chap. 2), which can go well beyond being unfavorably received by potential respondents.

#### Getting Locals to Vet Your Wording

In case of doubt as to what wording of research questions may be more acceptable, while still conveying enough to elicit meaningful responses, the advice of trusted locals can be extremely helpful. When our Kazakhstan researcher first prepared for fieldwork, a diplomat turned researcher from the region helped her with the wording of letters to officials she wanted to interview, making the research sound harmless and interesting to them, and even flattering. Instead of asking after the authoritarian functions of the government party, he suggested she should ask officials how the party contributes to government effectiveness. Our Mexico researcher showed a human rights worker in the capital his list of proposed questions before traveling to the region, and was advised not to use the stark word 'repression', but speak of 'control' instead, or 'safeguarding information'. Reny describes the even more finely tailored advice she got from local collaborators in her research on underground churches in China. With pro-regime respondents, '(s)entences referring to house churches as "suppressed" (*bei yazhi*) or "controlled" (*bei kongzhi*) would automatically be replaced by "supervised" (*bei guanli*). These discursive subtleties would help reduce possibilities that interviewees interpreted my words as a critique' (Reny 2016, 919).

Having trusted local people consider one's wording is even more important when doing surveys. Contrary to what one might think, survey research is possible in authoritarian contexts—on some topics, in some countries. Three of us have conducted surveys. In survey research, one typically has no direct contact with one's respondents, no way of gauging their reactions and no chance to course correct. Surveys, moreover, leave an electronic or paper trail. Therefore, it is even more important than in face-to-face interviews to stay within the red lines, in terms of wording and topics. Our Malaysia researcher discovered that—while the political implications of ethnicity are in themselves a red line—it was considered crucial, in a telephone survey, that respondents were approached by interviewers of the same ethnicity, in their own language. Otherwise, he was told, respondents would not feel comfortable discussing political views or concerns at all. Our Kazakhstan researcher, despite extensive experience in the country, relied on local survey professionals to get her question about political activities phrased correctly. Our Chinese researcher ran her survey questions by some Chinese survey experts, and found that what she thought of as acceptable, neutral questions, relating to Chinese students' attitudes to democratic countries, or their views on the values of freedom or justice, could not be asked directly at all. The experts laughed and told her she had been abroad for too long.

#### Behaviors

While most of our advice about navigating red lines revolves around choice of words, other forms of behavior too may be shaped and constrained by the 'red lines'. In the authoritarian field, a course of action that would appear completely natural in a less constrained context may entail a risk of exposing self or respondents. In the Chinese context, Reny (2016, 919) describes taking public transport with two missionaries for whom it might have been better not to be seen with her: '(b)y the time we got there, I realized we should have taken a taxi instead. Not only were we in a suburb where locals were not accustomed to seeing foreigners, but also we had to walk 10 minutes on the main street to reach their apartment … (l)ocals on the street had enough time to notice me'. Our India researcher similarly found that he needed to course correct to avoid exposing respondents. Having gotten quite comfortable with the political setting after three months of fieldwork, he was conducting interviews in a coffee house wellknown to be frequented by left-wing activists, and hence—but he was not aware of this at the time—also by government agents. After firing off some sensitive questions about the Maoist insurgency, he was warned by one of his interlocutors: 'if I were you I would ask your questions a little bit more discreetly'. No difficulties ensued for respondents either in the Chinese public transport incident reported by Reny or in the Indian coffee house, but as always in these contexts, we constantly need to reflect on our behavior, because there *might* be consequences.

Constant reflection on his own conduct, in relation to the 'red lines', was also the mode that our Malaysia researcher found himself in when attending an anti-government demonstration in 2016. Foreigners are not allowed to demonstrate, and his own embassy had advised against attending. Despite a bad experience during previous fieldwork (see Chap. 2), he decided, based on his own assessment and local advice, to go. During the demonstration he was continuously assessing whether to best be alone, or visibly part of a group; what he would do if anyone wanted to take a photo with him; what if anyone gave him the movement's yellow t-shirt to wear; what if the police would ask him what he was doing there. The demonstration, and his participation in it, passed without incident, but by the end of the day, he was exhausted by the constant self-assessment.

A very different fate befell Clotilde Reiss, a master's student who was in Isfahan, Iran, during the Green Movement protests in 2009, participated in the protests and took pictures, and apparently sent a brief report to the French research institute in Tehran (Ayad 2009). She was arrested and spent nearly a year in an Iranian prison. While our Iran researcher would think twice about giving information to western embassies and diplomats, especially by e-mail, reporting back to a research institute under these extraordinary circumstances is not a behavior beyond our comprehension. But in Iran, especially at that time, the accusation of 'spy' attached very easily to westerners, and she paid a heavy price. In terms of our behavior then, we sometimes walk a fine line between becoming overconfident and touching a red line, and being overcautious and sometimes a little paranoid. In Chap. 5 we will discuss the mental impact of such preoccupations in more detail.

#### Shifting Red Lines—Closures

The political fields we study do not stand still. Our China and our Kazakhstan researcher have both experienced that since they did their PhDs, there has come to be less scope for critical political discussion, whereas our Iran researcher has first witnessed a more liberal environment becoming very restricted and then again somewhat more relaxed in recent years. In China in recent years, the domestic academic climate has contracted. There used to be considerable leeway for—relatively abstract discussions about political values, such as the meaning of citizenship or the value of democracy, in university classrooms. Currently, it appears to be the case—although it is difficult to verify conclusively—that students are encouraged to report about what teachers tell them in the classroom, a practice that has not occurred since the Cultural Revolution. This directly impacts on what can be done during fieldwork. Previously, the accessibility of information directly from policy-makers might fluctuate, but academics were always an easy source of comments and analysis. Nowadays, it is getting increasingly difficult to talk with officials even with appropriate introductions (see next chapter), and even the utterances of academics depend on longstanding relations of trust. In Kazakhstan, the red lines have not so much shifted as hardened. In the years 2007–2011, the authorities were trying really hard to open up the system to respond to the requests of international organizations (the OSCE in particular, of which they were trying to get the chairmanship for 2010), which did have a liberalizing effect. Nowadays, both online and offline media appear to be more controlled, and there is less tolerance of dissent. In the more factionalized political environment of Iran, the supreme leader was always a red line, but since 2009, the institutions that harbor political hardliners, the Revolutionary Guard and the judiciary, have also become more sensitive as topics.

Beyond our own experiences, it is important to recognize that, while there may usually be a correlation between increasing authoritarian practices in a particular country and conditions for field research becoming more challenging, the two trends are analytically distinct and do not always move together. The Central Asia task force cited in the previous chapter, for instance, writes that 'many respondents commented on the increasing authoritarianism in Azerbaijan, but the threat is much more acute for citizens of the country than for foreigners', and appears not to have had a direct impact on the research environment so far (CESS 2016, 7).

#### Shifting Red Lines—Openings

In transition contexts by contrast, researchers have had the experience of finding their customary caution suddenly unnecessary, and actually a hindrance. One of us, a regular visitor to Egypt in the 2000s, interviewed a range of activists in Cairo when Morsi was president. While the situation was volatile, she found respondents utterly unrestrained in what they said and where they said it. One took her to a famous graffiti wall in a busy street near Tahrir Square and began, in broad daylight, to interpret the political imagery, pointing and speaking. The wall has since been destroyed, and such behavior would again be unthinkable today. Analogously, Matelski (2014, 72–73) relates how, working on civil society in Burma during the junta period, she had taught herself to speak in the idiom of oblique references that her respondents used. On a return visit after transition had been announced, she found that researchers new to the context 'did not seem as bothered by warnings and sensitivities and seemed able to discuss issues that I had been hesitant to bring up'. She attributed this discrepancy, not to 'oversensitivity on my part, or lack of context sensitivity on their part. It was simply the context that changed more quickly than any of us could have imagined'.

#### Chapter Conclusion: Navigating the Red Lines

We have tended to stay away from the hard red lines in our work on authoritarianism. We have been open about being political science researchers doing fieldwork. Perhaps there are circumstances in which it is both ethical and productive to act otherwise, but we find such circumstances difficult to imagine, and would be very reluctant to undertake 'undercover' research. Like others in the field, we do believe it is ethically justified, and mostly fruitful, to present our interests in a neutral and depoliticized light, as long as what we say is not beside the truth. We are professionals who have no sinister intent to destabilize the government. We present our research as analytically driven, perhaps a little technical and boring, and we strive to keep our behavior away from the red lines too. We typically err on the side of caution, especially in the early stages of our fieldwork, but sometimes find that we rapidly need to change gear to respond to unexpected openness.

#### References

com/2012/11/25/business/chinese-insurers-regulatory-win-benefits-a-leaders-family.html.

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## Building and Maintaining Relations in the Field

**Abstract** In this chapter, we discuss the centrality of personal connections and trust in the authoritarian field. We consider our relations with local collaborators, the responsibility we have towards them, and the consideration of risk in such relations. We also discuss relations with interview respondents, the ways in which we approach them to try and maximize our chances of building trust, and how we 'work with what we have' in terms of our ascriptive characteristics, presenting a version of ourselves that helps us get information. We reflect on having been subject to manipulation by local contacts and respondents. Finally, we consider the debt we owe collaborators and respondents in the field, and the limited ways in which we can do something in return.

**Keywords** Authoritarianism • Field research • Trust • Research assistants • Respondents • Interviews

Societies everywhere run on social networks. Even in the Netherlands or in the United States, connections make social science research much easier. But in North West Europe and in Anglo-Saxon societies, networks may be a little less central than in most other societies, and it is sometimes possible, for instance, to get an elite interview based purely on a professionally worded e-mail and some follow-up phone calls. In non-western societies, networks of trust are typically much more important to everyday interactions, and getting meaningful information from strangers is much less likely. In authoritarian contexts, where the cost of having an even slightly politically loaded conversation can be high, trust and willingness to help come from who recommends you, and from how much effort you invest in assuring your respondent of your trustworthiness and respect for them.

In this chapter, we discuss how we have built our networks in the field and reflect on the centrality of personal connections and the currency of trust. We consider the relations we have with local collaborators, the responsibility we have towards them, and the (sometimes mutual) considerations of risk in such relations. Then, we hone in on one of the most important relations in authoritarian fieldwork: relations with potential interviewees, or as we will consistently call them in this chapter, respondents. We will discuss why interviews are often not refused outright, but evaded, in authoritarian contexts. We describe the ways in which we approach potential respondents to try and maximize our chances of building trust and discuss our experiences with encountering—and sometimes overcoming—three frequent obstacles to trust in authoritarian contexts: suspicion, ideological hostility, and fear. Our ascriptive characteristics (i.e. nationality, ethnic background, age, and gender) partly determine how we are perceived by respondents, but we describe how we 'work with what we have', presenting a version of ourselves that helps us build trust and get information. We explain how we navigate interviews with officials and activists, respectively, and reflect on a few cases where we have been subject to manipulation by local contacts and respondents. Finally, we consider the debt we owe collaborators and respondents in the field, and the limited ways in which we can do something in return.

#### Building Connections

We all come by our respondents via the 'snowball method', but a snowball is really the wrong metaphor, since it is the warmth of the connections that matters. People meet you, not necessarily because they are very interested in your research, but more because they trust you or the friends who introduced you to them. How warm these connections need to be depends on the kind of respondents, the topic, and the authoritarian context. In the least repressive context we work in, our Malaysia researcher found it relatively easy to meet activists who were public figures. The main concern was getting them to make time in their busy schedules. Talking to ordinary people who had occasionally attended demonstrations about their experiences was even easier. But even here, speaking to people who sympathized with the protests, but were for various reasons fearful of attending them, did really require personal introductions from their friends.