Geopolitics, 18:115–131, 2013

Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

ISSN: 1465-0045 print / 1557-3028 online
DOI: 10.1080/14650045.2012.706759

Foreign Policy and Ethnography:

A Sceptical Intervention

MERJE KUUS
Department of Geography, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada

This article makes a methodological argument about ‘studying up’

in foreign policy bureaucracies. Although recent years have wit-
nessed 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 insti-
tutions. 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 pol-
icy 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 chal-
lenges 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 field-
work 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.

INTRODUCTION: THE DISCREET CHARM OF ETHNOGRAPHY

There is considerable interest today in using ethnographic methods to anal-

yse foreign policy and related spheres of state power. This interest goes much
beyond political geography; there is now even talk of an ethnographic turn
in international relations (IR).1 Despite such enthusiasm, it remains unclear
what ethnographic fieldwork means in the study of foreign policy and what
specific insight it yields about that sphere. The concept of ethnography is

Address correspondence to Merje Kuus, Department of Geography, University of British

Columbia, 1984 West Mall, Vancouver, British Columbia V6T 1Z2, Canada. E-mail: kuus@
geog.ubc.ca

115
116 Merje Kuus

too often used mainly to imply an empirically nuanced account derived from
‘being there’ on a daily basis. For the sake of greater intellectual clarity, we
need to substantiate the theoretical emphasis on ‘ethnographic detail’ with
an explicit consideration of what details to pursue, how to obtain them in
bureaucratic settings that are inaccessible by design, and what specifically
do they add beyond ‘detail’ in a generic sense.
Ethnographic fieldwork is challenging, especially in efforts to ‘study up’
and take elite circles as the object of analysis.2 The stereotypical image of
international (geo)politics as a high-brow operation in the proverbial smoke-
filled rooms discourages fieldwork – it indeed implies that if a practice can
be observed first-hand by an academic, it is not real geopolitics. There is a
kernel of truth in this simplification. The effects of foreign policies can be
observed in numerous settings, but its conception inside the more insular
echelons of the state apparatus is much less visible. It is one thing to recog-
nise the analytical value of ethnographic fieldwork; it is quite another to do it.
This article combines interdisciplinary work on the study of foreign pol-
icy with my own Brussels-based fieldwork on EU external relations to lay
out some of the difficulties of ‘studying up’ in foreign policy bureaucracies.
I do not attempt an ethnography of any particular policy setting and my
argument is not for or against ethnography as such.3 My aim is more spe-
cific: to highlight the methodological questions that we must consider as we
weigh the merits of different methodological approaches in the study of for-
eign policy and diplomacy. Scepticism here denotes a doubtful rather than
negative attitude. Ethnography clearly has substantial value in some settings;
the question here is about its viability and necessity in foreign policy set-
tings. In the following two sections, I will discuss the existing literature on
the ethnographic study of foreign policy and related spheres to highlight
the difficulty of access and engagement: of being allowed into foreign policy
institutions and of engaging the professionals who work there in open-ended
conversations that reach beyond the reiteration of rehearsed talking points.4
In the subsequent section, I will draw on my fieldwork to further illustrate
these difficulties. The purpose of the primary evidence is not to offer a
full case study of a particular methodological approach but to support the
arguments that have been made by others already. By foregrounding some
methodological dilemmas that tend to be swept under the carpet, I contribute
to a more realistic appreciation of the value and the limitations of fieldwork
in foreign policy bureaucracies.

GLASS CEILINGS

Ethnography is the subject of numerous debates in the social sciences.

Traditionally the realm of anthropology, the method is increasingly used
outside that discipline too.5 In political geography and international relations
 Foreign Policy and Ethnography 117

(IR), a number of scholars have called for greater use of ethnography to

reduce these fields’ heavy reliance on formal textual sources like speeches.6
In theory, ethnography refers to the methodology of endeavouring to
make sense of how others make sense of the world.7 It is neither synony-
mous with participant observation nor an all-purpose antidote to positivist
model-building. It is possible to conduct participant observation informed
by positivist methodology and it is likewise possible to study how peo-
ple make sense of the world without conducting participant observation.8
Ethnographic writing can be helpful in producing more ‘peopled’ or embod-
ied accounts of social practices, but it does not resolve the difficulties of
textual representation or automatically render scholars reflexive.9 The com-
mon denominator in ethnographic accounts is not the specific research
technique but the focus on everyday lived experience, on finding in the little
what eludes us in the large.10 In practice, however, the term ethnography is
used as shorthand for close-up detail derived from participant observation.
It implies immersion in the settings being studied. Moreover, the concep-
tual fascination with ethnography and participant observation is not always
accompanied by meticulous empirical work. It has also resulted in ‘drive by’
ethnographies based on a couple quick trips packed with one-time inter-
views. Elizabeth Dunn points out that ethnography too often refers to little
more than talking with people.11
These debates around ethnography as such say little about foreign pol-
icy bureaucracies. Most ethnographic work in anthropology, geography and
related disciplines focuses on actors outside formal foreign policy structures.
In international relations, a great deal of such work comes out of feminism
and focuses explicitly on women’s everyday lives outside the sphere of the
state.12 To this day, there is a remarkable paucity of ethnographic work in
international relations.13 Most close-up accounts of foreign policy and related
bureaucracies, including accounts by anthropologists, meanwhile draw from
interviews rather than participant observation. They place less emphasis on
bounded communities in bounded places and more on tracing the con-
nective flows and networks of ideas and people.14 Although they use the
idiom of ethnographic fieldwork and writing, the actual empirical analysis is
built on a mix of interviews, documentary analysis, and some ethnographic
observation.15 That ‘some’ sometimes appears to be as modest as being
escorted through the corridors by an administrative assistant. Analyses that
focus explicitly on foreign policy continue to rely on textual sources. There
is still a veritable glass ceiling on ethnographic work with the consequence
that the upper reaches of the social system are largely in the shadow –
and this nearly forty years after anthropologist Laura Nader’s original call
to ‘study up’.16 Most studies of foreign ministries, European Commission,
the World Bank, and other such ‘high places’ are still informed by broadly
positivist methodologies, employed to attempt causal analysis and model-
building.17 Individual policy makers are important in these studies insofar
118 Merje Kuus

as they help the researcher to grasp the putative position of their institu-
tion: what the Commission or the World Bank ‘thinks’.18 This is precisely the
question welcomed by the public relations departments of those institutions.
It channels the researcher into the intellectual and ideological premises of
the organisation she studies.19
One task then is to bring ethnographic sensibility to the study of for-
eign policy structures. This requires access beyond a 30-minute interview in
which the researcher is fed public relations talking points. Bureaucracies are
designed to guard information and foreign policy institutions do so explic-
itly, with little allowance made to transparency or public engagement. They
operate through carefully calibrated codes of secrecy enforced through secu-
rity clearances. Information and individuals are sequestered in terms of their
access to information as well as physical space, and this means separate
floors with additional security guards and surveillance technology.20 The
public relations departments of foreign policy institutions are well prepared
for processing researchers and the press. Even beyond these departments,
the research subjects are diplomats trained to give charming interviews
that do not reveal information but feed it. The ethnographic trademark
of ‘deep hanging out’ – to use James Clifford’s iconic phrase – is usu-
ally out of bounds in foreign policy institutions.21 Imagine asking a foreign
ministry policy maker for permission to shadow her at work, or picture
yourself explaining to a diplomat who specialises on security policy that
your study is based on ‘deep hanging out’ with him. Mentioning ‘deep
hanging out’ in this context amply illustrates the origins of the phrase in
a particular set of power relations that are not applicable in foreign pol-
icy settings. These are not places where researchers can chummily hang
around; they are almost always accompanied by someone. As for the hotels
and restaurants that foreign policy elites patronise on professional occasions,
an academic like myself can barely afford a (modest) meal there, much less
a room. Social science research budgets are no match for those of foreign
policy.
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. High-level
officials can exert far-reaching influence on research not only through their
formal powers but also through their rhetorical and social skills. They excel
in arguing within the technical and ideological parameters of their field.
To participate in the field, the researcher has to command its language, but
the language powerfully directs the questions that can be asked in it.22 The
danger for the researcher of being trapped in the echo-chamber of policy talk
is real.23 Such entrapment occurs when ‘scholars, once having proven their
usefulness to policymakers and thereby earned their trust, become unwilling
to offer dissenting opinions for fear of risking their access and privileges’.24
 Foreign Policy and Ethnography 119

Inside foreign policy institutions, the whole social arena – the multiple inter-
locking fields of economic, political and symbolic capital – is tilted toward
the professionals who work there. As in most bureaucracies, policy makers
have little incentive other than their personal curiosity to talk to a researcher.
Their institution may want to seem more accessible, but in most cases it is
up to their personal preferences. They furthermore operate in hierarchical
settings where the pressure to repeat the party line is substantial.25
The ‘studies up’ that include substantial fieldwork inside foreign pol-
icy and related bureaucracies are rare. To the degree that they dwell on
fieldwork at all, the authors all stress the sensitive nature of such work.
Michael Goldman, in his study of the World Bank, notes the stark pres-
sures of conformity on his research subjects.26 Ananya Roy’s book on
microfinance, based in part on interviews at the United States Agency for
International Development, briefly mentions the author’s substantial diffi-
culties with access and engagement.27 Rarely did Roy’s interviewees voice
disagreement with the public agenda of their institution. When she invited
them to reflect on resistance to the dominant discourses, interviews were
simply cut short. Most of the best accounts of elite policy bureaucracies
(as distinct from street-level bureaucrats – agencies concerned with direct
service provision) draw by and large on textual material or interviews,
sometimes complemented by a small participant observation component.28
Accounts that display both excellent access and anti-positivist perspectives –
for example, Iver Neumann’s studies of the Norwegian foreign ministry or
Karen Ho’s account of the Wall Street investment banks – are the exception.
Both Neumann and Ho frankly acknowledge their personal contacts at these
sites.29

ENTANGLEMENTS OF POWER

Ethnographic fieldwork is a two-way process. It involves not only access

in the sense of getting in the door, but also engagement as a process of
building relationships that extend beyond the initial encounter. In foreign
policy settings, forging such relationships is complicated in part because
individuals rotate in and out of positions relatively quickly. Although career
paths vary, a typical diplomatic rotation lasts for three to four years and
the subsequent one may easily be on the other side of the world. In my
work, almost all of the 46 individuals I interviewed in 2007–2010 changed
positions within the initial four years of the project (discounting promotion).
The pace of rotation has continued: by 2012, many had changed jobs several
times (although in some cases this had to do with the establishment of the
EU’s own diplomatic service, the European External Action Service, in 2010).
This puts parameters on repeat interactions. More importantly, diplomacy
120 Merje Kuus

relies heavily on personal networks and interpersonal trust. Organisational

charts tell the researcher little as the daily practice of foreign policy – what
actually happens rather than what ought to happen – draws substantially on
informal connections based on long-term networks, previous postings, and
social familiarity.30 This social context can produce a veritable esprit de corps
but it also makes diplomatic settings more opaque to outsiders.
As with all studies of policy elites, the interviewees must find the
researcher’s findings at least mildly interesting if not directly useful. They
can contest these findings in ways that most ethnographic subjects cannot.
A telling example comes from Gusterson’s Nuclear Rites, one of the few
‘studies up’ to formally incorporate the full-length responses of some of his
informants into the final product.31 One of these informants is worth quoting
at length to convey his articulate use of social scientific research to criticise
the study done on him. The informant, weapons designer Seymour Sack who
works at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (a US government lab
for nuclear weapons design), argues that Gusterson had

chosen a mild sensationalism, quoting dreamy, naïve, ignorant and/or

irresponsible sources, with a penchant for self-dramatization (or appeal-
ing to the interviewer’s interests, a la the Margaret Mead syndrome).
Embedding these interviews in academic sociological jargon intermixed
with classical anthropological techniques for analyses of primitive cul-
tures (Bronowski et al.) does not compensate for omission of the banal
realities. . . . It is unfortunate that the childish anecdotes quoted are not
a reliable measure of the responsibility with which new weapons are
designed.32

There would be many more such examples if more ethnographers of sci-

entific and policy processes solicited formal feedback from their subjects.
To highlight this is not to valorise the response but to underscore the uphill
tight-ropes involved in ‘studying up’.
The quote above also indicates that a part of the problem lies in the
historical baggage of anthropology: the assumption of bounded, ‘native’
research subjects. Although a great deal of contemporary anthropology has
critiqued that assumption, it is still the popular image of ethnography. When
Gusterson formally presented his research to his informants at the Livermore
National Laboratory, one of the Laboratory’s leading scientists had come to
the talk wearing nothing but a loincloth and carrying a cane to which he had
nailed an animal skull.33 The informant shook the cane at Gusterson and
grunted whenever the presentation displeased him – which seemed to be
quite often. He was obviously playing with the stereotype of the civilised
anthropologist studying the uncivilised natives. The incident showed his
sense of humour as well as his position of power – only from a confident
intellectual and social position can one play that joke well.
 Foreign Policy and Ethnography 121

Put differently, ethnography implies a power relationship between

the ethnographer and her subjects that policy elites have the power to
resist. In the words of David Mosse, the problem lies in the ‘very nature of
professional identity formation on the one hand and of ethnographic enquiry
on the other’.34 The self-image of powerful bureaucracies, although certainly
not each and every professional in them, is bound up with the idea of
objective knowledge. It is a kind of cosmopolitan claim: to stand above the
specifics of one’s institution and social context. For a researcher, the object of
analysis is

a professional habitus that automatically transfers the actuality of events

into the pre-given categories of acceptable and legitimate fictions (e.g.
‘decisions taken by committee’, relationships denuded of interest, power-
free information) and idealized process (with no mention of pressure
on staff to meet targets or threats of transfers). The habitus screens out
extraneous factors and analyses problems in relation to solutions, pro-
ducing a proper project history of design, implementation, learning, and
improvement’.35

Ethnography erodes that premise: the ethnographer in effect makes herself

cosmopolitan by rendering other experts ‘local’ and thereby denying their
cosmopolitan claims.36 From the perspective of these ‘other’ experts, the
ethnographer’s assertion of cosmopolitan knowledge of them is arrogant.
What they object to is the ethnographers’ claim of social distance from them
and knowledge of them (and hence power over them). This claim may be
softened, but it is in one form or another embedded in ethnography.
These examples raise the question of whether ethnographic work that
relies on participant observation is viable or even desirable in foreign policy
settings. What specifically is achieved by ‘ethnography’ over and above the
insights obtained from ‘regular’ interviews? If the goal is to offer jargon-free
analysis sensitive to specific contexts and the people who operate in these
contexts, could such accounts not be produced by other means – interviews
again? Could the idiom of ethnography do more harm than good by foster-
ing a false impression of access and engagement.37 It is in this context that
Susan Wright proposes the term ‘intensive interviewing’ for an approach
that involves ethnographic sensibility but does not involve the historical
baggage and problematic connotations of ethnography.38 The term ‘inter-
view’ does not imply a particular long-term relationship with the informants
beyond conversations. Ethnography is of someone, interviews are with
someone.
The next section will briefly illustrate these methodological issues on
the basis of my own fieldwork: 105 interviews with 72 foreign policy pro-
fessionals conducted in nine research trips between 2007 and 2012. I use
the experience to back up my doubting attitude toward ethnography in
122 Merje Kuus

diplomatic settings and to argue that the seemingly less detailed method
of interviewing is more honest than the widening evocation of ethnography
in these specific settings.

NOTES FROM BRUSSELS

A geographic study of EU external relations faces two fundamental chal-

lenges. First, the EU civil service is a vastly complicated transnational appa-
ratus very different from nation-states. EU policy making is an amorphous
assemblage of supranational standards, national foreign policy agendas, and
bureaucratic complexities built into the EU’s institutional setup. In-depth
knowledge is essential and it cannot be gleaned from a couple of trips. This
institutional setting has created a ‘bizarre’ culture of compromise that often
frustrates outsiders.39 To them, EU officials seem like ‘a species of discon-
nected, rootless mutant’ who exert power not by making claims of power but
by relentlessly pushing measures of harmonisation and rationalisation.40 In
short, the models used to comprehend diplomacy and foreign policy do not
fit the field of power in Brussels. Second, the scholarship with the best access
is generally produced by political scientists within European Union Studies.
This well-defined subfield of political science is the officially sanctioned ter-
rain of studying the Union and it is funded as such by national governments
and EU institutions alike. Intellectually, EU studies are still heavily influenced
by broadly positivist approaches and they consequently conceive policy pro-
cesses in terms of correct or effective measures or failures to make them.
Although there are exceptions to this tendency41 , EU studies as a whole has
a well-established repertoire of questions that can be asked and tools that
can be used to tackle these questions.
In this complicated transnational field and in counterpoint to positivist
hypothesis-testing, my research investigates the production of geographi-
cal expertise about Europe’s external relations inside the EU’s civil service in
Brussels. I ask: how are expert knowledge and expert authority produced on
a daily basis in Brussels? What does it take to be a foreign affairs expert there:
what resources are required in terms of substantive knowledge and in terms
of the informal ‘feel for the game’ in this transnational field of power? I try to
better understand how particular knowledge claims acquire the functions of
expertise in the city’s European Quarter: not what is done or why, but how
it is done. This analytical accent on the qualitative and the contextual rather
than the quantitative and the uniform directs me to trace how different con-
ceptions of geopolitical expertise are deployed by EU policy professionals.
In order to appreciate the complications of the Brussels scene and to unpack
these professionals’ capacity to maneuver in that scene, the study draws
from a series of thirty- to sixty-minute non-attributable interviews with the
 Foreign Policy and Ethnography 123

professionals who actually wield EU foreign affairs expertise. Repeat conver-

sations with the same individuals are designed to gain insights into changes
in policy narratives and the perspectives of individual professionals – and
to obtain more detailed insight that is possible in a one-time sixty-minute
interview. To anchor the analysis empirically, I concentrate on one issue:
the EU’s relations with its eastern neighbourhood and the role of the post-
2004 member states in the production of the EU’s external relations expertise.
This example undergirds a broader argument about knowledge and authority
inside Europe’s uniquely transnational bureaucracy.
The 105 interviews occurred in the principal EU institutions as well as
some think-tanks and national foreign policy institutions.42 The conversations
were not recorded: I took hand-written notes during the interview, filled in
the notes from memory within an hour or two after the event, and transcribed
the interview as soon as possible thereafter. All interview material is used in
a manner the preserves the anonymity of the speaker (non-attributable inter-
views in the everyday parlance of the European Quarter). Most interviewees
were contacted on the recommendation of a colleague of theirs (snowballing
method), but a number of individuals, including high-ranking ones, agreed
to an interview without any such personal recommendation.
The subjects of this research are highly accomplished and often charis-
matic individuals, many of whom have extensive diplomatic experience.
Among the seventy-two interviewees, about one half were mid- to high-level
officials in the European Commission, Council Secretariat, or the External
Action Service at the time of the interview. The other half include various
desk and policy officers, advisers, members of cabinet, as well as analysts
working in think tanks. I mention formal rank for two reasons: first to
dispel the myth of a particularly inaccessible EU bureaucracy and second
because rank has implications for access. Substantively, however, formal
rank can be even more misleading in Brussels than in other power cen-
tres. High-level EU appointments are subject to complicated national and
institutional horse-trading and even highly experienced professionals regu-
larly occupy managerial and advisory roles not considered ‘senior’ in formal
organisational charts. Among my interviewees, well more than half have
senior-level administrative or diplomatic experience at the level of College
of Commissioners, Cabinets, Directors and Directors General, Committee of
Permanent Representatives (ambassadors of the member states to the EU),
Ambassadors, Heads of European Commission Delegations, and high-level
ministerial officials. At least sixteen of them (22 percent of the total) have
PhD degrees; many more have substantial research experience and deal
with academics and their research regularly.43 Although my study looks only
at the eastern direction of one EU external relations policy, the intervie-
wees come from seventeen member states. They are an impressive group of
professionals by any definition and I learned enormously from them.
124 Merje Kuus

The peculiarly technocratic field of EU studies, the unique institutional

set-up of ‘Planet Brussels’, and the political culture it engenders all under-
score the importance of close-up interpretative enquiry. They also create a
particular set of problems and prospects for the researcher. One the one
hand, many professionals in the European Quarter habitually view EU pol-
icy processes through the lens of efficacy. In that lens, the procedures
that strengthen European integration and increase EU power around the
world are desirable; the ones that do not have these effects are undesir-
able. The operating language of EU professionals is the technical language
of eurospeak; if they take the researcher seriously, they assume that she
speaks it too. Most of them are familiar with the models that academics – the
ones they see – traditionally test. These academics do not usually offer new
insights to their research subjects but, quite the opposite, take cues from
them. Against this background, my question of how these policy profession-
als gradually come to conceive their work in terms like efficacy sounds odd.
Within the daily routine of the European Quarter, the correctness or efficacy
of the position is what matters; the pathways of getting there are of little
interest. Regardless of the views and preferences of individuals, the techno-
cratic analytical terrain of the European Quarter powerfully unimagines my
questions before I can ask them. One cannot discuss the technologies of
expert authority in eurospeak.
Being seated across the table yields little in these settings. I must also
engage the interviewee in a conversation. As most researchers who sit across
these tables are Brussels-watchers, the analytical terrain I navigate is centred
on questions about institutional interests and models of norms diffusion,
international socialisation, and multi-level governance. The risk of being
consigned to irrelevance by departing from this terrain is high. For these
professionals of geopolitics, geography associates vaguely with things like
regional planning – useful perhaps, exciting certainly not – and geopolitics
alludes to some of the more embarrassing facets of European political his-
tory. Some of them appear intrigued by the term geopolitics, but others find
it distasteful although they are too polite to say so.
In some cases, my interlocutor appears willing to entertain different
questions, in other cases not. It is essential that I tell the difference. If I try
to wander from the familiar path with an interviewee uninterested in such
a venture, I will not be able to interview her again. If I mold my questions
in the image of EU studies, I simply enter someone else’s turf. My questions
will not get asked, much less answered, and I will appear an ill-informed
dilettante in the process. I may furthermore bore my interlocutors, just like a
number of those Brussels-watchers have bored them in the past. ‘I was quite
interested when you said that your project is different from political science,’
said a Commission official mid-way through the interview with a tinge of res-
ignation, ‘but your questions are actually very similar to political scientists’.
Damned if you don’t (speak eurospeak), damned if you do. The question
 Foreign Policy and Ethnography 125

of how not to bore these professionals cannot be ignored. That question is

important not only logistically (if I bore them, they will not talk to me again)
but also intellectually (staying within the limits of policy-talk may underesti-
mate the interests and abilities of these professionals). As several studies have
pointed out already, EU professionals, especially in the Commission, often
see themselves not as administrators but as policy makers and intellectuals.44
Many of my interlocutors are interested persons: highly educated, well-read,
and intellectually curious. They are the EU’s intellectuals of statecraft and
the broader questions about power and knowledge are of personal interest
to a number of them. Their talents may well go underutilised in their daily
work. The Economist correspondent comments: “In my experience, if the
life of many Eurocrats looks gold-plated, the luster is that of a gilded cage.
I cannot put a statistical percentage on it, but after years of Brussels dinner
parties, I would say that roughly ‘lots and lots’ of EU officials are bored and
rather miserable with their jobs”.45 This may make these policy professionals
more willing to take a break from the routine and engage with something
different. Even in these settings inaccessible by design, I found most inter-
viewees reasonably open and in many cases admirably so. It is essential in
Brussels as in any bureaucracy to distinguish between the attributes of the
institutional context and the characteristics of the persons who work there.
A Commission official may assume a specific technocratic interview at first
and indeed launch into one before I can even explain my approach, but
this tells us more about the social field (of the European Quarter) than the
interviewee. When I learned to sharply distinguish my project from much
of the existing work on EU external relations at the outset of the conversa-
tion, these kinds of technocratic responses decreased markedly. The quality
of the interview depends fundamentally on the quality of the questions: the
nuance offered by the interviewee hinges in part on the nuance solicited by
the interviewer. In all nine research trips, I could never predict an intervie-
wee’s approach to my questions from calculable social markers like rank,
nationality, age, gender, educational background, or institutional affiliation.
Individual personalities – that is, the interviewee’s personal curiosity, intellec-
tual scepticism, and willingness to entertain uncustomary questions – were
always pivotal.
This is not to downplay the very substantial problems of access.
Insisting on an ethnographic account will not significantly decrease these
problems. The access that an Associate Professor of Geography at the
University of British Columbia (as distinct from a Professor of International
Relations/Political Science at an elite European or US university) has to EU
policy-making circles, especially at high levels, is unlikely to increase much
even over months-long fieldwork. The opposite may be the case: the remote-
ness of the researcher in disciplinary and geographical terms could be an
asset. Brussels is a town of many circles: national, institutional, generational
(i.e., based on the length of stay in Brussels), political, and so on. Some of
126 Merje Kuus

these circles are overlapping and porous, others are more insular. Neutrality
is a precious resource to pursue and guard in that highly competitive context.
It reduces access to some circles but it makes it possible to reach others.
By being largely separate from the Brussels networks and power struggles, a
researcher may be seen as more neutral; by becoming an insider, she would
also become incorporated into specific circles and therefore have less access
to other circles. In my study, the infrequency of the encounters – once a
year at most – is an integral part of its design. It has produced slow research
progress, but it has also enabled me to maintain a certain distance from the
national and institutional power struggles in the European Quarter. That very
distance has helped me to study the social field of EU knowledge production
in ways that an analysis of any one circle (national or institutional) cannot
do. The question is not how to overcome this distance but what claims can
be made from this specific position of distance.
The purpose of these brief vignettes was to highlight the importance of
interpretative methods and the possibility of using interviews as one such
method. Interviews too reveal in the little what may elude us in the large.
In Brussels, I sometimes learned most not from what was said but from
how it was said: the gestures, the use of euphemisms, and especially the
ironic smiles that accompanied the ‘party line’ answers.46 Interviews with
these professionals allowed me to glimpse at the non-standard, contingent,
and messy quality of social life in Brussels. They enabled me to tackle ques-
tions that cannot be answered from other data and, even more importantly,
ponder questions that would not have arisen at all without them. It is with
these insights in mind that I will next return to the broader methodological
questions about close-up accounts of foreign policy institutions.

CONCLUSION

This article makes a sceptical argument about the viability and utility of
ethnography in the study of foreign policy. My object of analysis is not
ethnography per se but, more precisely, the academic fascination with
ethnography in the study of policy. As a sceptical rejoinder to this fasci-
nation, I urge careful reflection on the logistical and intellectual difficulties
of ethnographic fieldwork: getting in the door, obtaining information, and
building the long-term conversations necessarily for grasping foreign policy
settings. Some of these challenges, such as access or the risk of entrapment
in the technocratic echo-chamber, are countered by all efforts to ‘study up’ in
policy circles. Many state bureaucracies have tightened access and invested
in their public relations departments in recent years. Many operate through
strict hierarchies where policy professionals are discouraged from veering
‘off message’.47 Yet even against that background foreign policy institutions
stand out by the tight security, the plush public relations infrastructure, as
 Foreign Policy and Ethnography 127

well as the media training and the rotation-based career paths of their pro-
fessionals. Although these institutions may have lost some of their aura of
primus inter pares in recent decades, the difficulties of ‘studying up’ are still
taken to a higher pitch there. These difficulties are not problems that can
be resolved but dilemmas that must be negotiated on a daily basis. Evoking
ethnography can create the illusion of access and engagement that hinders
rather than helps that effort.
Methodologies that strive to make sense of how others make sense of
the world can offer a great deal to our understanding of policy processes
and there are several successful examples of such efforts in the scholarship
on policy elites.48 But ethnography as participant observation – which is how
the term ethnography is usually used – is not the only or even the principal
method for producing such accounts. The growing use of ethnography as
a kind of catch-all for quotidian detail too often fails to deliver the kind
of nuance that it tacitly promises.49 Even anthropologists increasingly use
methods other than ‘talking to and living with’ their research subjects.50 The
insightful studies cited above draw more on interviews and textual analysis
than traditional ethnography.
A detailed discussion of interviewing as a research method is beyond
the scope of this article, but I hope to have contributed to a more informed
consideration of its merits compared to ethnography in foreign policy set-
tings. In particular, I suggest that interviews can be used to chart a middle
way between the ‘entrapped’ academic speaking fluent policy talk and the
‘cosmopolitan’ academic claiming to offer an ethnographic account of for-
eign policy on the basis of few tightly regulated encounters. Interviews do
not carry the connotation of personal familiarity that ethnography does and
they do not license the researcher to make florid claims about ‘molecular’
details derived from ‘being there’. Such (tacit) claims are in many cases mis-
leading, borne of the academic prestige of ethnography rather than the actual
research procedures ‘on the ground’. Although interviews involve no ‘hang-
ing out’ in Clifford’s sense, they are rich social interactions in which, as in any
social interaction, what is conveyed exceeds what is said.51 An interview, as
any interpersonal interaction, necessarily involves observation, and the qual-
ity of the interview depends in part on the quality of the observation. In my
work, the repeat interviews could be called ‘intensive’ in the sense that they
build longer term contacts with the respondents. However, all interviews
that are context-sensitive could be called intensive because they all require
in-depth knowledge of and attention to the contexts and relations studied.
If the researcher does not make a concerted effort to engage the interviewee,
it is not a ‘un-intensive’ interview but a bad interview. In a similar way, all
social science knowledge production is relational: an interview as much as
participant observation. In the study of foreign policy and related spheres,
interviews may be not the second best method but often the only viable
method and we need to be unapologetic about this. They offer a limited
128 Merje Kuus

and partial view, but so does ethnography: indeed all research offers a par-
tial view into the social fields studied.52 Less may be more in this instance:
claiming less access and engagement would allow for more nuanced and
more relational accounts of the policy machinery.
One way of dealing with ‘upward’ fieldwork sites has been to widen
the tent of ethnography and frame interviews like mine as ethnographic:
to describe the settings and the subjects as if offering an ethnographic
account. However, this could seriously misrepresent the research and the
social field studied. To express scepticism about such widening of the tent
is not to discount ethnography, but to urge greater reflexivity about what
data are obtained and what data are not obtained, and how, and why in
foreign policy bureaucracies. It is to underscore that an account involv-
ing ethnographic fieldwork is not necessarily more nuanced than one that
uses interviews. If we strive to illuminate and explain the everyday tech-
nologies of thought inside foreign policy bureaucracies, we certainly need
close-up knowledge of and sensitivity to the social context of foreign policy
processes. Such sensitivity can be practised through interviews as well as
ethnography.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This paper grows out of six years of ‘studying up’ in EU policy-making cir-
cles. 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 bene-
fited 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.
 Foreign Policy and Ethnography 129

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 spa-
tialised (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 princi-
pal 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 distinc-
tion 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 con-
ducts 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.
130 Merje Kuus

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.
 Foreign Policy and Ethnography 131

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 <http://www.economist.com/blogs/charlemagne>, 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.
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