Foreign Policy and Ethnography: A Sceptical Intervention

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.     

Švejkian Geopolitics: Subversive Obedience in Central Europe

This article uses the character of Josef ?vejk from the popular Czech novel The Good Soldier ?vejk and his Fortunes in the World War to illuminate the subversive effects of irony and self-deprecating humour on dominant geopolitical narratives. Empirically, my examples focus on the coverage of NATO invitation in major Estonian newspapers in 2002. Theoretically, these examples highlight the subtlety of resistance and the central role of irony in it. By foregrounding ?vejkian absurd obedience, which is nonetheless highly subversive, the article contributes to a better understanding of popular geopolitics, resistance geopolitics, and more broadly, the role of human agency in geopolitical discourses.     

For Slow Research

This essay addresses a relatively neglected practical aspect of critical policy studies: the pressure to produce many research outputs. That pressure emanates in part from the fast‐paced policy world studied by the researcher, and in part (perhaps even more significantly) from the university environment of the researcher herself. The essay highlights how the tendency towards output‐driven or fast research operates and what analytical traps it engenders. My goal is to spell out, more explicitly than is commonly done, why the push toward fast research is problematic on analytical grounds and why it ought to be resisted on these same grounds. I call for slow research to underscore that context‐sensitive critical investigation of a social field, such as policy, is a necessarily slow process.