1. Introduction

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 imperfect 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.

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.

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).

Definitional matters get surprisingly little attention in authoritarianism research, but that is a topic for another publication (Glasius Forthcoming). 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 policy-makers, 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.