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Foreign Policy and Ethnography: A Sceptical Intervention

2012; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 18; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14650045.2012.706759

1557-3028

Merje Kuus,

Peacebuilding and International Security

Abstract This article makes a methodological argument about ‘studying up’ in foreign policy bureaucracies. Although recent years have witnessed a growing interest in ethnography across the social sciences, including the study of foreign policy and diplomacy, theoretical reflections on the methodology as such greatly outnumber those that actually attempt ethnographic accounts of foreign policy institutions. This imbalance results in large part from the difficulty of fieldwork in these settings. Drawing on six years of research on EU external relations, including 105 interviews with foreign policy professionals, this article lays out some of the difficulties and thereby clarifies the benefits and costs of such fieldwork. More broadly, the article highlights some of the methodological challenges in interpretative research inside the institutions of foreign policy. My concern is not with ethnography or foreign policy as such; I rather examine the specific challenges of conducting fieldwork informed by ethnographic methodology inside foreign policy bureaucracies. The article advises caution about the ever-widening use of the term ‘ethnography’ in the study of policy. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This paper grows out of six years of ‘studying up’ in EU policy-making circles. Many individuals have helped me in this process. My greatest debt is to the seventy-two policy professionals who took time from their highly pressured days to have conversations with me, in many cases several times. A number of academic colleagues have likewise been generous with their time in discussing the paper and the broader issues it raises. They include Desmond Dinan, Klaus Dodds, Paul Evans, Daniel Hiebert, Pertti Joenniemi, Eugene McCann, Pauline McGuirk, Jamie Peck, Edward Rhodes, and Kevin Ward, among others. Parts of the paper were presented at the ‘Researching Policy’ workshop at the Department of Geography, University of British Columbia (UBC), in November 2010, the EUROGAPS workshop at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main in January 2011, the Transnational Praxis workshop series at the Liu Institute for Global Issues (UBC) later that month, the policy roundtable at the Geography Department (UBC) in November 2011, and a similar roundtable on elite interviews at Goethe-Universität in June 2012. I thank Veit Bachmann and Martin Müller for their engagement with this work during my visits to Frankfurt. The paper has also benefited greatly from the thoughtful feedback of the four referees and David Newman as the editor of this journal. The project is funded by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Michelle Drenker and Duncan Ranslem provided research assistance. Any mistakes or misinterpretations are my responsibility. Notes 1. W. Vrasti, ‘The Strange Case of Ethnography and International Relations’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 37/2 (2008) pp. 279–301; see also J. Agnew, ‘Know-Where: Geographies of Knowledge of World Politics’, International Political Sociology 1 (2007) pp. 138–148; E. Schatz, ‘Ethnographic Immersion and the Study of Politics’, in E. Schatz (ed.), Political Ethnography: What Immersion Contributes to the Study of Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2009) pp. 1–22. 2. H. Gusterson, ‘Studying Up Revisited’, PoLAR 20/1 (1997) pp. 114–119. 3. Geopolitics here refers to the processes and practices through which world politics is spatialised (J. Agnew, Geopolitics: Re-visioning World Politics (London: Routledge 2003)). The paper focuses on the study of foreign policy. I use the terms geopolitics and foreign policy loosely interchangeably because foreign policy and related institutions (e.g., defence or foreign trade) are also among the principal bureaucracies of geopolitics. I avoid the term ‘foreign policy analysis’ because it refers to a specific sub-field of international relations that is used little in this article or in human geography more broadly (M. Kuus, ‘Critical Geopolitics’, in R. Denemark (ed.), International Studies Encyclopedia (Blackwell 2010) pp. 683–701). 4. The project from which this article draws focuses on the European Neighbourhood Policy as a facet of EU external relations. In the EU, external relations and foreign policy are related but distinct fields: foreign policy is a strongly intergovernmental sphere shaped primarily by the member states whereas external relations is a more supranationalised realm where EU institutions play a notable role. The distinction has weakened since the creation of the European External Action Service in 2010 (M. Kuus, ‘EUrope and the Baroque’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28/3 (2010) pp. 381–387; M. Benson- Rea and C. Shore, ‘Representing Europe: The Emerging “Culture” of EU Diplomacy’, Public Administration 90/2 (2012) pp. 480–496). I use the term foreign policy professionals because the bureaucracy that conducts EU external relations can be compared to foreign affairs establishments of nation-states. Many of my interviewees have diplomatic training, all move in diplomatic circles. 5. Sustained discussion of these debates is beyond the scope of this paper; for entry-points outside geography, see S. Greenhalgh, Just One Child: Science and Policy in Deng's China (Berkeley: California University Press 2008); A. Gupta and J. Ferguson, ‘Discipline and Practice: ‘The Field’ as Site, Method and Location’, in A. Gupta and J. Ferguson (eds.), Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science (Berkeley: University of California Press 1997) pp. 1–47; Schatz (note 1); C. Shore, ‘The Limits of Ethnography versus the Poverty of Theory: Patron-Client Relations in Europe Re-Visited’, SITES: New Series 3/2 (2006) pp. 40–59; C. Shore and S. Wright, ‘Policy: A New Field for Anthropology’, in C. Shore and S. Wright (eds.), Anthropology of Policy (London and New York: Routledge 1997); C. Shore, S. Wright, and D. Pero (eds.), Policy Worlds: Anthropology and the Analysis of Contemporary Power (New York: Berghahn 2011) pp. 27–31; Vrasti (note 1); S. Ybema, D. Yanow, H. Wels, and F. Kasteeg, ‘Studying Everyday Organizational Life’, in S. Ybema, D. Yanow, H. Wels, and F. Kamsteeg (eds.), Organizational Ethnography: Studying the Complexities of Everyday Life (Los Angeles: SAGE 2009) pp. 1–20. Much of the debate revolves around the difficulty of studying processes that cannot be neatly located. Policy settings present additional difficulties of access and engagement that have received less attention. 6. E.g., N. Megoran, ‘For Ethnography in Political Geography: Experiencing and Re-imagining Ferghana Valley Boundary Closures’, Political Geography 25 (2006) pp. 622–640; A. Mountz, Seeking Asylum: Human Smuggling and Bureaucracy at the Border (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2010); M. Müller, Making Great Power Identities in Russia: An Ethnographic Discourse Analysis of Education at a Russian Elite University (Berlin: Lit Verlag 2009); I. Neumann, At Home With the Diplomats: Inside a European Foreign Ministry (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 2011); Vrasti (note 1). 7. C. Geertz, ‘The Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture’, in C. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays by Clifford Geertz (New York: Basic Books 1973) pp. 56–58. 8. P. T. Jackson, ‘Can Ethnographic Techniques Tell Us Distinctive Things About World Politics’, International Political Sociology 2/1 (2008) pp. 91–93. 9. Vrasti (note 1) p. 284. 10. Geertz (note 8), cited in H. Gusterson, ‘Ethnographic Research’, in A. Klotz and D. Prakash (eds.), Qualitative Methods in International Relations: A Pluralist Guide (New York: Palgrave MacMillan 2008) p. 93. 11. E. C. Dunn, ‘Of Pufferfish and Ethnography: Plumbing New Depths in Economic Geography’, in A. Tickell, E. Sheppard, J. Peck, and T. Barnes (eds.), Politics and Practice in Economic Geography (Sage Publications 2007) pp. 82–92. 12. Much of the discussion of ethnography in IR is between those who use ethnography to challenge the positivist epistemological commitments still powerful in the field and those who see ethnography as a method of insufficient rigor (see Schatz (note 1), Ybema et al. (note 5) for useful discussions). According to Vrasti (note 1), IR tends to treat ethnography as an easy way to add colour to positivist and rational choice analyses. Ethnographic accounts in that discipline tend to reduce the method to an empiricist data collection, a writing style, or a theoretical sensibility too broad to add anything new. 13. Schatz (note 1) p. 18. 14. J. Peck and N. Theodore, ‘Mobilizing Policy: Models, Methods, and Mutations’, Geoforum 41/2 (2010) pp. 169–174; J. Wedel, C. Shore, G. Feldman, and S. Lathrop, ‘Toward an Anthropology of Public Policy’, The Annals of the American Academy AAPSS 600 (2005) pp. 30–51. 15. Peck and Theodore (note 15) p. 172. 16. L. Nader, ‘Up the Anthropologist: Perspectives Gained From Studying Up’, in D. E. Hymes, Reinventing Anthropology (New York: Pantheon Books 1972) pp. 284–311; see also Gusterson, ‘Studying’ (note 2). There are certainly exceptions to this general tendency. Outside IR, the few existing ethnographic studies of business and government circles offer valuable insights into these ‘upward’ circles include K. Ho, Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street (Durham, Duke University Press 2009); S. Hopgood, Keepers of the Flame: Understanding Amnesty International (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP 2006). 17. See L. Hooghe, The European Commission and the Integration of Europe: Images of Governance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2001); C. Weaver, Hypocrisy Trap: The World Bank and the Poverty of Reform (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2008). 18. M. Kuus, ‘Policy and Geopolitics: Bounding Europe in Europe’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 101/5 (2011) pp. 1140–1155. 19. In the European context, George Ross's Jacques Delors and European Integration illustrates the point. Ross has enviable access to the Delors Cabinet, a major power centre in Brussels at the time, but his account is highly celebratory the Cabinet and its power-broker Pascal Lamy; G. Ross, Jacques Delors and European Integration (Cambridge: Polity Press 1995). 20. See I. Neumann, ‘‘A Speech That the Entire Ministry May Stand For’, or: Why Diplomats Never Produce Anything New’, International Political Sociology 1 (2007) pp. 183–200. 21. J. Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press 1997) p. 56. 22. See C. Cohn, ‘Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 12/4 (1987) pp. 687–718. 23. Gusterson, ‘Ethnographic Research’ (note 11) p. 98; see also L. McDowell, ‘Valid games? A Response to Erica Schoenberger’, Professional Geographer 44/2 (1992) pp. 212–215. 24. A. Acharya, ‘Engagement or Entrapment? Scholarship and Policymaking on Asian Regionalism’, International Studies Review 13/1 (2011) 12–17. 25. See Neumann, ‘‘A Speech’’ (note 21). 26. M. Goldman, Imperial Nature: The World Bank and Struggles for Social Justice in the Age of Globalization (New Haven CT: Yale University Press 2005). 27. A. Roy, Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development (New York: Routledge 2010) p. 191. 28. E.g., M. Barnett, Eyewitness to a Genocide: The United Nations and Rwanda (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press 2003); D. Campbell, National Deconstruction: Violence, Ethnicity and Justice in Bosnia (Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota Press 1998); Greenhalgh (note 5); S. Hopgood, Keepers of the Flame: Understanding Amnesty International (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP 2006); L. McDowell, Capital Culture: Gender at Work in the City (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers 1997); V. Pouliot, International Security in Practice: The Politics of NATO-Russia Diplomacy (New York: Cambridge University Press 2010); C. Shore, Building Europe: The Cultural Politics of European Integration (London and New York: Routledge 2000). 29. Neumann, At Home (note 6), Ho, Liquidated (note 17). 30. ‘Debating the European Union: An Interview with Cris Shore and Marc Abeles’, Anthropology Today 20/2 (2004) pp. 10–14; Kuus, ‘Critical Geopolitics’ (note 3); Neumann, At Home (note 6). 31. Such feedback is practised in anthropology, but rarely in studies of elites. In my work, I send copies of publications to my interviewees (those whom I can locate), recognising that they usually do not read the work. 32. H. Gusterson, Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory and the End of the Cold War (Berkeley: University of California Press 1996) pp. 247–248. 33. Gusterson, ‘Studying’ (note 2) p. 117. 34. D. Mosse, ‘Politics and Ethics: Ethnographies of Expert Knowledge and Professional Identities’, in C. Shore, S. Wright, and D. Pero (eds.), Policy Worlds: Anthropology and the Analysis of Contemporary Power (New York: Berghahn 2011) p. 52. 35. Ibid., p. 54. 36. Ibid., p. 63. 37. A claim of ethnography also fosters a false impression of social distance between the academy and other bureaucracies. An academic interviewing a foreign policy professional today usually amounts to one middle-class civil servant interviewing another. 38. S. Wright, introduction, in C. Shore, S. Wright, and D. Pero (eds.), Policy Worlds: Anthropology and the Analysis of Contemporary Power (New York: Berghahn 2011) pp. 27–31. 39. ‘Debating the European Union’ (note 31). 40. Ibid., p. 11 41. C. Ban, ‘Sorry, I Don't Speak French: The Impact of Enlargement on Language Use in the European Commission,’ in M. Gueldry (ed.), Walk the Talk. Integrating Languages and Cultures in the Professions (Lewiston: Edward Mellon 2009). 42. The ‘filling in’ step in particular enabled me to record not only the content of what was said but also the ways in which it was said: the gestures and expressions that form an essential part of any spoken communication. See also note 4. 43. Among the mid- to high-level officials, thirteen were Director Generals, Deputy Director Generals, Directors or Principal Advisers (at EU institutions), Heads of Cabinet, or Permanent Representatives of member states; another eighteen were either unit heads (ten individuals) or deputy heads (eight individuals) in EU institutions. This categorisation is close to but not the same as European Commission's definition of middle and senior managers. The union's eastern enlargements in 2004 and 2007 that brought in junior and senior officials from these ‘new’ states also slowed the career progress of existing officials and contributed to a certain blockage of career paths at middle and high levels: professionals advanced to the level of unit head or deputy head but unable to secure further promotion because of the de facto national quotas used in such appointments (at the level of unit head and above). Sharp insights do not necessarily correlate with rank in any event, neither in Brussels nor elsewhere. I may underestimate the number of PhDs among my interlocutors because scientific degrees normally do not appear on business cards in EU institutions. The number in the text (sixteen out of seventy-two) is a low estimate, based on interview material and publicly available background information. 44. Hooghe (note 18); Kuus, ‘Policy and Geopolitics’ (note 19); Shore (note 29). 45. ‘Life on the EU Gravy-train Is Not to Be Envied’, Charlemagne's Notebook, The Economist, 14 Dec. 2009, available at , accessed 1 Sep. 2011 . 46. My study focuses on multilateral, transnational, explicitly civilian settings. I know of no ethnography of a defence ministry but I suspect that such settings are no less difficult to access and engage. 47. See Mountz (note 6). 48. E.g., Barnett (note 29); Campbell (note 29); Pouliot (note 29); Shore (note 29). 49. See also Vrasti (note 1). 50. Wedel et al. (note 15). 51. See E. Schoenberger, ‘The Corporate Interview as a Research Method in Economic Geography’, Professional Geographer 43/2 (1991) pp. 180–189. 52. T. Pachirat, Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight (New Haven: Yale University Press 2011); M. Brigg and R. Bleiker. ‘Autoethnographic International Relations: Exploring the Self as a Source of Knowledge’, Review of International Studies 36 (2010) pp. 779–798. Insisting on ethnography in the study of foreign policy could also shortchange the accounts (in other settings) that do involve substantial participant observation.