The Researcher as a National Security Threat

Abstract

Based on ethnographic research in Iran among the country's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and its Basij militia, this article explores the process of gaining access to these militarized groups in order to conduct long-term research. Specifically, what does it mean to build rapport and gain trust within a highly securitized space such as this? What happens when the researcher is a potential “national security” threat in both Iran and the United States? How is national security enacted in everyday interactions in the field? Given that anthropologists have tended to have an affinity with the group and community they work with, this article explores the implications of research among a group of men in charge of surveillance, intelligence gathering, and citizen suppression in the country. The article argues that in the midst of national security rhetoric, interrogative surveillance is a strategic tool that makes space for engagement.

Security Regimes: Transnational and Imperial Entanglements

“…In emergent scholarship, the scholar too has changed to be less protected by American/racial/white citizenship and subject to multiple regimes of surveillance and sovereignty. For instance, Bajoghli's (2019b) ethnography of proregime cultural producers in Iran is a powerful account of how diasporic scholars face a double bind: viewed with suspicion by states and institutions at both ends (in her case, Iran and the United States), their racialized expertise simultaneously aligning and them from communities "out there" (Razavi 2022(Razavi , 2021. Furthermore, for such multiply located scholars, safety and risk are not bracketed through clearly designated entries and exits from a foreign field, for places travel with people (Aciksoz 2019), making easy distinctions between home and field untenable (Berry et al 2017), building on earlier interventions by feminist anthropologists.…”

“…Security regimes flourish with disparate temporal and spatial logics. A rich line of inquiry probes how the security logics of Global South states are constituted transnationally (Chalfin 2010, Guirguis 2016, Ali 2019, Bajoghli 2019a, Thomas 2019, Al-Bulushi 2021) through regional histories and genealogies of imperialism that intersect with but are not wholly coterminous with the War on Terror (Dua 2019, McKinson 2019, Junaid 2021, Byler 2022. Ali (2019), for example, captures how the War on Terror has emboldened the Pakistani state to expand its security infrastructure, but also illustrates how the state constitutes itself in relation to competing regional powers (i.e., India, China) in frontiers such as Gilgit-Baltistan.…”

“…Ali (2019), for example, captures how the War on Terror has emboldened the Pakistani state to expand its security infrastructure, but also illustrates how the state constitutes itself in relation to competing regional powers (i.e., India, China) in frontiers such as Gilgit-Baltistan. Bajoghli (2019a) examines how media producers of the Iranian regime attempt to manage generational anxieties around the meaning of revolution, continuously slipping between national and diasporic articulations/circulations. Taken together, this scholarship problematizes the intellectual and methodological bypassing of Global South security regimes as mere proxies or recipients of seemingly external "global" forces, even as it interrogates the notion that the "Global South" itself refers to a fixed and even geography (Al-Balushi et al 2022 Transnational security regimes are enmeshed in a neoliberal capitalist order that has exacerbated economic inequalities and that relies on racialized modes of differentiation to enshrine these inequalities.…”

Decolonizing Middle East anthropology

“…Decolonizing anthropological practices will take different forms in a variety of SWANA locations, depending on how liberatory progress is impeded by the United States, European states, or other countries inside or outside the SWANA region. It also depends on whether anthropologists and their interlocutors face threats of state violence, threats that may be related to anthropologists’ social identities (Bajoghli, 2019b; Berry et al., 2017). We need more discussions in our discipline on the kinds of practices that can work toward decolonization or liberation in authoritarian contexts—especially when this work could feed into Euro‐American stereotypes about who is ready for democracy.…”

“…Critical SWANA anthropology can face pressures and threats from universities, outside organizations, and states at each stage of its practice and production (Bajoghli, 2019b; Berry et al., 2017; Damluji et al., 2015). This is evident in the history of SWANA anthropology in the United States, where the field has been shaped by gender, class, generation, US national politics, and changes in the academy (Deeb & Winegar, 2016).…”