Ethnography and international relations: situating recent trends, debates and limitations from an interdisciplinary perspective

Challenges in conceptualising and using ethnography in IR

Iver B. Neumann (2010), a leading IR scholar who was also trained in anthropology, once indicated that each discipline has a very different research intent: “A different exercise, which call[s] for a different writing style” (Neumann 2010:1054). Whereas IR generally opts for a top-down or deductive approach, social anthropology, through ethnography, turns to a bottom-up perspective on investigating the world. In this section, I start with the abstractions that define IR as an academic field to show how ethnography has been integrated, especially in IR’s critical scholarship. I suggest that the disciplinary practices of the field are responsible for ethnography’s limited presence, which include the lack of training offered to the next generation of scholars and the various challenges related to fieldwork logistics and deploying a bottom-up methodological approach in a deduction-prone academic discipline. I also reflect on some lessons from social anthropology for IR scholars for avoiding pitfalls in designing and conducting ethnographies of the international.

For Ashley, pointing out the anarchy of the international realm is meant to reify state sovereignty as more important than any other principle or reality within IR. This perspective is consistent with Rob Walker’s (2006) emphasis on the various binary oppositions and conceptual categories on which IR inquiries are based: inside/outside, sovereignty/anarchy, friends/enemies, morality/instrumentality, and rules-based/power politics. The academic discipline of IR has maintained its distinctiveness not only through these conceptual categories, but also by building a field that has a separate object of study, separate from what is examined within a state.

This intellectual exercise and related abstractions are presented as value-free and non-normative assumptions about world politics; hence, making anarchy and state sovereignty facts from which any IR inquiry starts. However, Steve Smith (2004) argues that these representations contribute to an unstable and violent world order, especially when translated into methodological preferences for rational choice and game theory. According to these theories and related deductive methodologies, states, as self-interested sovereign entities, will necessarily clash with other states to maximise their claim to power and resources. These methodologies are therefore of limited usefulness when we problematise the assumption that states are egotistical unitary actors engrained in mainstream theoretical approaches.

Despite their limitations, such assumptions are not easily questioned because they are supported by a logic of disciplinarity and the academic fragmentation of knowledge. IR scholars study what happens between states, so foundational concepts such as state sovereignty are more than abstractions. They are intertwined in the broader aim of IR in the pursuit of knowledge and supported by privileged state-centrist and deductive methodologies that do not question these premises (Beier 2005:64–65; Schmidt 1998). IR scholarship hermetically combines questions of ontology, epistemology and methodology, and is often characterised by having mainstream approaches that are hard to engage with from a different perspective (Zalewski 2006:46–51). IR’s disciplinary logic also tends to translate into a reluctance to experiment with other methodologies than the ones privileged by mainstream scholarship, including ethnography, which is often met with the mainstream’s “defensive reaction to uncertainty” (Beier 2005:70).

As such, IR’s take on ethnography has been adapted from some contemporary anthropological scholarship focused on connections and associations among different territorial sites. IR’s engagement to some extent obscures classical ethnographies emphasising the importance of cross-territorial comparisons (see Mauss, 2002) or different geographically specific moments and temporal connections (see Geertz 1980; Mandelbaum 1973). Its engagement here overemphasises the commitment by some within anthropology to be less focused on its traditional use to understand a locally experienced, multi-location, inter-cultural and globalised world (Abélès 2011; Falzon 2009; Marcus 1986; Lie 2013).

It is important to note that, prior to the so-called ethnographic turn, ethnography was used somewhat in IR’s feminist scholarship, which is positioned within the post-positivist and reflexive tradition of the field, especially since the 1980s. As Ann Tickner (2006:20–21) indicates, “there is no unique feminist research method”, as the goal of knowledge contribution here is an “ongoing process… emerging through conversation with texts, research subjects, or data”. In a discipline that mostly relies on the “objectivity of the natural sciences”, feminist IR scholarship grounds its credibility in methodologies that are seen as less-than-scientific and that embrace subjectivity (Zalewski 2006:46).

In this view, methods developed in feminist IR scholarship gave way to the ethnographic turn in IR by allowing for intellectual space away from the positivist tradition and by exploring concrete ways to link everyday life inquiries to IR topics, processes and structures. These are significant parameters through which IR’s engagement with, expectations and overall understanding of ethnography as methodology have been shaped and limited.

In her view, IR’s engagement with this methodology has been limited by the disciplinarity at play in the field, as ethnography became recognised only to the extent that it would accommodate IR’s main goals.

Vrasti has been criticised for being a gatekeeper who idealises ethnography and ignores successful qualitative IR attempts that are broadly in line with the spirit of ethnography (see Aradau and Huysmans 2014; Lie 2013; Rantacore 2010; Neumann 2010). Vrasti sees ethnography as a methodology that critical IR scholars often invoke for its reputation, though they do so without properly conducting and engaging with it. As such, her critique is aimed at IR’s limited engagement with the history of the methodology and the decades of debates in fields like social anthropology. Limited by her own preference for post-positivist and reflexive deployments of ethnography in social anthropology, she argues that it should not be equated solely with a pre-set combination of interviews and observations, but rather is something that requires deep reflexive practice during fieldwork. Moreover, empirical representations gained through this methodology should not automatically become a new holy grail for IR scholars. Her scepticism about the use of ethnography in IR is its framing as a methodology newly discovered by the discipline, and that its use in the field does not come with the necessary training (Lie 2013:219; Neumann 2010:1055).

Vrasti, referring to the process of translating fieldwork to written form Vrasti (2010:86), similarly highlights some of the unspoken precepts that make IR and ethnography difficult to reconcile based on the training its scholars receive: “It is in writing that the fantasy of valid truth is produced, by taking ourselves out of our projects, treating the world around us as evidence and subsuming social reality to explanatory methods and theories.”

Some of this ill preparedness can also be explained by the complexity of conducting, in logistical and practical terms, an ethnography of the international. Working on foreign policy and diplomatic relations, Merje Kuus (2013) denotes problems with “studying up” the professional classes, of maintaining sustained access and building personal relationships with elite decision-makers and diplomats, especially in a context of high turnover and disinterest in academic knowledge production: “Clifford’s casual phrase about hanging out appears jarring here because the power relations that favour the researcher in traditional ethnographic settings are often reversed in the study of foreign policy elites” (Kuus 2013:118).

This speaks not only of a logistical problem but also of the challenge that comes from combining ethnography with an investigation into state and inter-state realities. Many ethnographies of the international, whether in IR, social anthropology, sociology or other disciplines, have struggled with a focus on the state, as a “pre-empirical entity external to what may be grasped by ethnographical methods” (Lie 2013:207). However, there are lessons that can be gathered from how social anthropology has attempted to address this, including how to study states or political entities through their effects on everyday life, material practices and so forth. State-centrism can notably be avoided by limiting the focus on objects of second or third degree. For instance, David Mandelbaum (1973:180) suggests examining different dimensions of social life as main “devices for analysis”, such as the cultural or the economic domain. They can then be conceived in juxtaposition with one another and give us a more complete understanding of how people order their lives, including the influence of political forms among other social structures at play. Similarly, both Edward Evans-Pritchard (1954), in his study of the Sanusi, and Mauss (2002), looking at the social function of exchanging gifts, examine transnational social realities without assuming the precedence of territorialised political entities in shaping people’s habits, beliefs and lives. Evans-Pritchard (1954:69–70,103–104) explores how a mystical Muslim fraternity—the Sanusiya Order—with lodges across North Africa, integrated the Bedouin semi-nomadic social structure, and he does so to explain its unique developments, notably in reaction to Italian colonialism. Similarly, Mauss (2002) documents the interactions relating to the exchange of gifts between different societies for the purposes of trade, diplomacy and so forth, without assuming that this logic is inherently linked to an abstract raison d’État of the political communities involved.

Dealing with abstractions in ways that are not limited to bottom-up approaches can be further addressed by embracing more fully the hermeneutical circle and by developing a stronger interplay between theory and praxis, combining both inductive and deductive reasoning. As Geertz (1980) explains, his use of the hermeneutic circle may start from an inductive strategy of describing real-life events and encounters. However, this does not mean that ethnography is purely an inductive method, as it involves an ongoing engagement with theoretical tools both to accurately describe social facts and to offer some explanations. In Deep Play, Geertz (1973:412–453) shows how descriptions of specific events, interactions and rituals related to cockfighting in Bali are better comprehended when tools such as Jeremy Bentham’s concept of “deep play”, which is used to draw out the meanings of these activities, are deployed as part of understanding some specific features of Balinese society. However, such a concept is not applied blindly, as it remains in conversation with the empirical case. As such, Geertz adapts it and it becomes, alternatively, “deep fights”, “deep matches” or “deep cockfighting”; hence, reflecting a particularly situated form of knowledge, anchored in theoretical connections to other scholarly topics and debates.

Glick Schiller (2003:298) is concerned with “analyses that equate society with the state”, as they tend to sacrifice some of the inductive insights from fieldwork in describing and representing the world.

This point is relevant to critical IR scholarship that engages with the ethnographic method, which tends to navigate between the need for deductive ontological categories such as the state, and exposing subjugated knowledges based on how different collectives and individuals experience the international on their own terms. Critical IR scholars’ attempts to move their inquiries beyond state-centrist and territorialised methodological precepts are met by a field that is disciplinarily and structurally developed on an abstraction of state sovereignty; the distinctive representation of anarchy between states and methodological preferences for quantitative and deductive approaches.

Practice-focused research

In contrast to the vast majority of studies coming out of mainstream IR, critical scholarship in the field has identified, to various degrees, some value in utilising ethnography. In the various studies focusing on international practices, rather than theories or concepts, as a start to an academic inquiry, ethnography provides access to a mode of knowledge that was previously under-appreciated. From the scholarship associated with the practice turn to the scholarship associated with the aesthetic turn, IR’s plural engagement with ethnography speaks to disciplinary disagreements over whether it is better understood as a method, among others, to collect new data or a unique methodology, with its own rules and standards.

The practice turn in IR scholarship, influenced by the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Bruno Latour, has steadily increased in importance since the early 2000s as a starting point for focusing on everyday actions and unquestioned common senses of the international. As such, it advocates for methodological plurality and co-existence in the study of world politics in order for mainstream theoretical approaches to be complemented by studies focused on specific material realities, perceptions and habits; hence, looking at “world politics through the lens of its manifold practices” (Adler and Pouliot 2011:3). The focus is on practices like diplomacy rather than on actors like states, as practices are understood as “competent performances” that are “socially meaningful patterns of action which, in being performed more or less competently, simultaneously embody, act out, and possibly reify background knowledge and discourse in and on the material world” (Adler and Pouliot 2011:6).

In the context of Western liberal democracies, Bigo makes it clear that a better comprehension of the perspectives and practices of these security professionals will help us understand new tendencies in how international security is conceived, planned, implemented and experienced. This approach is in line with other IR scholars associated with the practice turn and for whom greater use of ethnographic accounts, among other research methods, helps redefine IR’s objects of study, realign theory and practice, and open up new avenues for a more inclusive and holistic research agenda (see Cornut 2014; Kuus 2013).

Nonetheless, Adler and Pouliot (2011) limit their understanding of international practices to a criterion of competency, which is meant to help define the field of IR as Alexander Wendt (1992) did in the 1990s when he proposed a social constructivist framework for IR that does not question the existence of states. However, international practices are not limited to practitioners of the international, as many other actors get involved in matters and events with an international dimension, from theatre productions to social movements and global protests. IR scholars associated with the aesthetic turn have also deployed ethnography as a way to document marginalised perspectives and actions towards the international realm. By focusing on key everyday life practices and moments, the aim is to unpack sites of struggle, compliance and production of IR, no matter who the practitioner is. For instance, an edited volume directed by Edkins and Kear (2013) examines the intersection of international politics and performance to go beyond the “performance dynamics of politics” in order “to think them together as modes and practices of aesthetic politics”. Whether it is through how theatrical performances bring visibility to silences in the practice of IR, how the perspective of rioters in 2011 in the United Kingdom inform debates over privacy laws, or how the staging of political speeches and protests work to reproduce international spaces, such a collection raises the question of who is competent enough to add their voice to a more complete understanding of IR practices. It also puts everyday moments, anecdotal events and banal groupings to the radar of those documenting and explaining the various rhythms of international politics.

When speaking of utilising his own perspective to relate to the ethnographical accounts at hand, Dwyer joins others associated with the aesthetic turn in deploying ethnography for academic purposes, far away from how it is considered by proponents of the practice turn.

As in other disciplines (see, for instance, in sociology: Ellis 2004; Smith 2005; Tavory and Timmermans 2014), one of the main debates arising from its distinct deployment is whether ethnography is just one among other methods for collecting new data, or a unique methodology with its own rules and standards. In IR, a conversation between two doctoral students, Rantacore (2010) and Vrasti (2010), sums up how the debate generally unfolds in the field. Opposing Vrasti’s claim that there is a right way to conduct ethnography, Rantacore, 2010 argues that ethnography is only one “particular mode of access” among others that reinforces IR’s goal “to assemble data, [and] to compose it in a way that is useful to our community of practice”.

In her view, ethnography is not just a method, and, when properly applied as a methodology, it defies the abstractions on which IR as a field is built. It also includes “language competency, cultural sensibility and social etiquette” (Vrasti 2010:83), all elements of fieldwork that are usually under-valued in IR training (see also Agathangelou and Ling 2004).

Besides being idealised in many ways in critical IR scholarship, ethnography is often chosen as a method for expressing a commitment to post-positivist research in the field, which does not give proper consideration of the methodology in the research process (Aradau and Huysmans 2014:597, 608–609).

In other academic disciplines, ethnography is conceived “as method and methodology” (Brewer 2000:28; Lewis and Russell 2011:398), as it involves both the rules and procedures to collect information and the framework through which this type of information is valued (Brewer 2000:7). In contrast to the Vrasti-Rancatore debate, we find accounts of doctoral students trained in this perspective who engage more directly with the importance of fieldwork itself (Lewis and Russell 2011:399). For instance, Teuku Zulfikar (2014) discusses not only experiences of conducting interviews and observations, but also how to gain and sustain access to the group, how to write one’s personal narrative alongside thick descriptions and how struggles with ethical and reflexive questions unfolded. This is reflective of how well-established ethnographers have negotiated their methodological preferences. Clifford Geertz’s (1973) description of anecdotal events and observations of cockfighting and betting in Bali is intertwined with his analysis of key Balinese societal features. In addition, he provides key methodological insights on how to effectively conduct this type of investigation of various cultures. As he states: “The culture of people is an ensemble of texts, themselves ensembles, which the anthropologist strains to read over the shoulders of those to whom they properly belong” (Geertz 1973: 452).

In addition to being the subject of IR debates over its method (ological) status, ethnography is perceived in many disciplines, such as social anthropology, as a way to access a particular type of knowledge. Whether conducted through first-hand experiences or through historiographical work (Geertz 1980; Mandelbaum 1973), ethnography refers to an array of methodological approaches with an attitude similar to “‘being there’ sufficient to experience the mundane and sacred, the brash and nuanced aspects of socio-cultural life” (Lewis and Russell 2011:400). In this way, ethnography makes its own contribution to the advancement of knowledge, and social anthropologists themselves are the first ones to distinguish these contributions from other types of contributions; ethnographers “crawl on all fours with a magnifying glass, rather than circling the world in a helicopter looking at societies with a pair of binoculars” (Eriksen 2005:29). Such a perspective on the vast array of ethnographical approaches, along with the role of ethnography in relation to other methodologies and the valuing of fieldwork experience, seem to provide a justification for IR to move beyond theoretical questions on how to deploy it.

Autoethnography

In IR, autoethnography stresses in its own way how the personal is co-constitutive of the representation of the international realm for and by IR scholars, and also stresses the ethical implications of considering how one represents the world (Löwenheim 2010:1028–1032). As Neumann (2010:1053) explains: “Autoethnography is a methodological choice for researchers who place their philosophical ontological wager on themselves being an inseparable part of the world.” Emphasising and celebrating their subjectivity, autoethnographers—which in IR are often conflated with autobiographers, narrators and storytellers—commit to an understanding of the social world, and its structures of oppression, through their own travels and experiences (Inayatullah and Dauphinee, 2016; Neumann 2010:1055). Discussions about autoethnography in IR have contributed to debates about the validity of findings gathered by IR researchers using ethnography and the role of scholars in representing world politics.

Autoethnographers contend that “the self can become a more legitimate source of knowledge about International Relations” (Brigg and Bleiker 2010:780) than what is seen as valid knowledge in mainstream IR scholarship. More than a reaction to disciplinary preferences, autoethnography also deconstructs the role of academic expertise based on fieldwork, and highlights the implicit violence of academic representations of the world. Through increased awareness of their actions, autoethnographers shed light on connections between one’s research and subjectivity in order to identify various possibilities for representing the inner workings of international power relations in new, more ethical ways (Dauphinee 2010:802–806; Doty 2010:1048–1049).

IR scholars use autoethnography to celebrate storytelling and accessible language, as distinct from a conventional “academic posture”, to show how their background and experiences of the international have affected and are actively part of their scholarship (Inayatullah and Dauphinee 2016:2). It is important to note that many IR scholars have utilised autoethnography only once or twice in their writing, often as a way of connecting the dots between their professional objectives and personal lives. Oded Löwenheim (2010:1025) makes this objective clear: “to connect with as many readers as possible and make them, through their emotional response to my personal story, reflect upon their own experience as human beings and the constitution of their own subjectivity”. For instance, Persaud (2016) explains his immigrant journey from the Caribbean in the 1970s and his integration into Canadian society: “The village man must learn to manage his eyes, to smile always, walk thusly, and learn to function like a self-contained moving part in a gigantic machine of production and consumption in an economy of fabricated, transient desires”. Sharing lessons he has learned in how to act in this new country, Persaud demonstrates how this journey has given him a different perspective on researching racial, immigration and cultural issues in the field.

Using autoethnography allows increased awareness of and reflexivity on the abstraction that defines the field—the international—to better grasp how it is shaped by the academics’ own decisions and experiences, their evolving sense of what makes an international issue worth of studying and what shapes this understanding.

This deployment of ethnography is opposite to the uses of ethnography by many proponents of the practice turn and related understandings of what makes for valid studies. In IR, the role of the research in representing findings had been discussed before ethnography was thought of as a methodology associated with the field’s critical scholarship. Coined as the “third debate” and opposing rationalist methodological preferences for post-positivist and reflexive perspectives, the epistemological difference between seeing the IR scholar either as an objective researcher collecting data in a disinterested manner or as a subjective presence involved in representing findings has led to distinctive types of privileged methodologies (see Keohane 1988; Navon 2001; Wendt 1998). Questions about the validity of the representations that IR academics create when they use ethnography have built on this literature but can also be seen in a different light when situated in relation to similar questions and debates in social anthropology.

This automatic association between ethnography and reflexive perspectives is less pronounced in other disciplines, especially in social anthropology, where autoethnographical accounts have integrated the discipline’s knowledge production and representation in different ways. For instance, Mandelbaum’s (1973:178) study of life history as an ethnographical methodology highlights the importance of “researchers’ own life experiences” in selecting the approach, as it aims at uncovering a type of knowledge that could be considered true and real but that does not have specific scientific pretensions. The intent here is to discover social facts and realities by shedding light on the commonality of the human condition and the emotional structures at play. In blurring IR’s disciplinary lines between objectivist and subjectivist research commitments, even Geertz (1973:453) utilises autoethnographical accounts as a way to connect to his object of study, to effectively frame the writing of his formal descriptions, and to commit more deeply to resolving the methodological struggle of “‘saying something of something’ and saying it to somebody”.

For Mary Louise Pratt (1986), the difference from IR is that there is a disciplinary need in social anthropology to strike a balance between offering impersonal descriptions of an object of study and revealing the role of the researcher’s personal experiences in representations. Speaking of the 1982 controversy around Florinda Donner’s account of the Yanomamo, she says: “What was at issue was not ethnographic accuracy, but a set of problematic links between ethnographic authority, personal experience, scientism, and originality of expression” (Pratt 1986:29). Donner’s more reflexive stance in presenting her fieldwork was questioned not because of empirical inaccuracies but because of her choice to explicitly acknowledge her personal involvement in the representations made. For Pratt, this type of debate is part “disciplining” and part “un-disciplining”, as it allows an academic community to navigate between “personal and scientific authority, a contradiction that has become especially acute since the advent of fieldwork as a methodological norm” (Pratt 1986:32). With the increasing interest in ethnography in IR, disciplinary debates may lead also to new perspectives on methodological norms, especially norms for fieldwork, and to a recognition of how different ethnographic findings from distinct epistemological standpoints may be productive, particularly when these standpoints are in conversation with one another.

Multi-sited studies

As previously mentioned, feminist IR scholars like Carol Cohn (2006) have turned to Marcus’ (1986) multi-sited ethnography as an alternative methodology for their inquiries, in belief “that the continuities across sites are telling, and significant” (Cohn 2006: 107). In the 1980s, ethnography was identified as a reputable and reliable methodology for critical IR scholarship interested in making linkages between everyday life and global processes. Even if Marcus’ approach is contested within social anthropology and is far from a classical approach (see Falzon 2009; Hage 2005), it has been privileged in IR in the form of multi-sited studies with ethnographic sensibilities. The reason is that the emphasis on connections between different territorial sites and distinct perspectives of selected groups in their everyday lives allows scholars to justify their inquiries as part of IR’s main contribution to knowledge, while opening up the field to new subjugated knowledges. Nonetheless, methodological questions arise in other fields on the ways in which a priori case selection can occur.

In IR, bottom-up approaches to the world are limited by a disciplinary need for a pre-empirical understanding of world politics and its main processes and structures. Even in critical scholarship, Kai Koddenbrock (2015:245) argues that in “the academic field tasked with studying world politics… systemic logics cannot be grasped by focusing exclusively on the minute details and their unstable assemblages”. Although helpful to understand “the ‘mess’ that is social life”, methodologies such as ethnography tend to limit IR scholarship in their necessity to “think big, to assert stability, totality and structure” (Koddenbrock 2015: 246). Privileging himself a Marxist understanding of world politics through a clear pre-empirical assertion of global capitalism, Koddenbrock joins other critical IR scholars for whom some limitations to ethnography can be found in the necessity to posit the structure(s) at play prior to investigating social life (see Muppidi 2013; Shani 2008; Withworth 1994).

It is in this disciplinary context that the logic behind multi-sited studies has been taken on, in different ways, by critical IR scholarship. As Marcus mentions Marcus (1995), multi-sited ethnography takes shape “around chains, paths, threads, conjunctions, or juxtapositions of locations in which the ethnographer establishes some form of literal, physical presence, with an explicit, posited logic of association or connection among sites”. In contrast to traditional ethnographic methods, what the author proposes is an object of study that is most appropriate for IR scholars interested in new emancipatory ways to conduct research away from state-centrist methodological assumptions, at a time when the importance of globalisation emphasises the need for new ontological avenues (Marcus 1995:101–102). As with the disciplinary instincts of IR, this methodology requires one “to start with some prior view of a system and to provide an ethnographic account of it, by showing the forms of local life that the system encompasses”, or “to construct the text around a strategic selected locale, treating the system as background” (Marcus 1986:171–72).

Beier’s collection offers a way of bringing the messiness and complexity of everyday experiences back to the forefront of studies of international processes, while justifying itself structurally and disciplinarily to IR’s goals.

Individual IR scholars working on emerging topics that deconstruct and complement state-centrist approaches to world politics also have committed to multi-sited studies. For instance, Heather Johnson (2014b:363-364) appropriated Marcus’ approach to the study of migration regimes in Australia, Spain/Morocco and Tanzania, as this method focuses on “associations and connections between sites”. By looking at sites where migration regimes reveal themselves, such as refugee camps, border zones and detention centres, she collects and presents peoples’ narratives to highlight a common experience she characterises as a condition of irregular migration. Johnson’s (2014a:16) choice of these “sites of intervention” allows for exploring “the interconnectedness of local sites at the global level,” gives room for participants to express subtleties of daily life and for her to connect them through the conceptual lens of migration processes.

With a clear political commitment to documenting the practices of online community members in their daily lives, Franklin collects the stories of participants in these communities and makes linkages to transnational processes and global structures she sees at play, including questions of gender ordering, diasporic identity-formation, ethnic change and democratisation. In this view, the author not only pluralises IR’s understanding of the international ramifications of new technologies in inter-state relations but also contributes to different interdisciplinary discussions about contemporary and deterritorialised Pacific Islander societies.

Some methodological questions remain in IR towards multi-sited studies, similar to how the deployment of ethnography to examine boundless, deterritorialised communities and related transnational processes have been discussed in social anthropology (see Candea 2009; Hage 2005). To what extent is Johnson (2014a, b) examination of irregular migration really found in the selected sites of intervention, if this ontological category and innovative concept is created prior to fieldwork? How are these sites of intervention chosen, if not due to an a priori understanding of world politics? It is important to note that Marcus (1986, 1995) struggled with such questions during the elaboration of his multi-sited strategy. One of his initial problems was that, methodologically, “the narrative complexity is considerable” and it becomes difficult, in his view, to select the right sites of interventions and voices, without falling into anecdotal knowledge (Marcus 1986:172).

Marcus’ approach is developed in conversation with a rich body of literature dealing with such methodological questions—a disciplinary history and cannon with which IR scholars are less familiar and engaged. As previously mentioned, studies by Geertz (1980) and Mandelbaum (1973) have shown how to deploy historiography and life history as ethnographical methodologies that bring the importance of temporality and moments back into any multi-sited analysis, often bridging various physical locations and political communities in order to highlight key features of a society or place in time. More to the point, ethnographical work, such as Mauss (2002) on gifting, shows how this system of interactions commonly exists in various North American and Asian societies as an ordering factor of domestic and inter-societal relations. Mauss’s work also presents their cultural, historical, institutional and geographical differences. Through an analysis of these systems of reciprocal obligations, Mauss offers both clear comparative insights and an overall explanation of the social function of this interaction in and between various societies.

In contrast to Marcus’ multi-sited strategy, social anthropologists, such as Pederson and Holbraad (2013), as well as Abélès (2011), have recently offered another strategy, closer to such classical influence. For instance, Pederson and Holbraad (2013:2) conceive of comparative ethnography as a more productive approach, allowing for a simple but effective overall finding: “(in) security can be simultaneously enacted within and across multiple temporal logics, whose complex imbrications may be studied ethnographically and compared with other times of security”. In the authors’ view, such an approach is more revealing than the methods normally privileged in IR, if for no reason other than that the researcher is not conceptually characterising experiences as insecurities, at least not in a way that goes beyond what participants express (Pederson and Holbraad 2013:8–11).