Political ethnography and Russian studies in a time of conflict

ABSTRACT

As reliable and unfiltered access to Russia and Russians becomes a fraught issue for social scientists who wish to conduct surveys, focus groups, do ethnographies, or interview elite actors, the war presents scholars with an opportunity to reflect on questions of what data collection means, and on better communication between quantitative and qualitative scholars. Similarly, it forces us confront the extractive and colonial nature of knowledge production; the war reveals how social science has always relied on, but not really acknowledged, the labor of native scholars, but can no longer ignore indigenously produced work, particularly qualitative research. In this review piece, the author highlights both blind spots in the potential communication between political scientists and other social scientists, and already-existing points of connection that can be further expanded, precisely because of, not despite the war.

KEYWORDS:

• Interpretive turn
• ethnography
• qualitative methods
• decolonizing

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. There is also a realist tradition in political science which makes use of ethnographic methods, but this is beyond the scope of the current article (see Kubik 2009; Prinz 2020).

2. “Native” scholars may also not necessarily be based in their country of origin, but of course the vast majority are. The war also draws attention to the way “native scholars” in elite Western institutions bear an increasing burden of “authenticity,” just like during the period of the Cold War emigres were disproportionately relied on. The warning from history here should be obvious.

3. As an ethnographer used to being asked by reviewers to justify my sources in some detail, I am struck by how often the details of survey implementation and the reliance on politically-exposed Russia-based gatekeepers is given a free pass without much mention in publications. The quote is from Krawatzek (2021).

4. Levinson’s post: https://ridl.io/why-continue-polling-in-russia/. Zavadskaya’s post: https://ridl.io/on-the-harmfulness-of-russian-polls/

5. For more information on the lack of transparency of polling practices, both academic and commercial, see this detailed discussion where pollsters anonymously admit to shady practices such as very poor field practices and faking results: https://postsocialism.org/2022/03/21/dont-trust-opinion-polling-about-support-in-russia-for-the-war-on-ukraine/

6. https://therussianreader.com/tag/mikhail-dmitriev/

7. This is based on a manual count by the author who skimmed every article in these two journals published since the first issue of 2021. The count could have extended to Europe-Asia Studies, but I don’t think the result would have been different. La Lova (2023) in this special issue has undertaken a more sophisticated analysis of publishing on Russia beyond area studies journals.

8. 2022 publications are incomplete as of this writing. In a typical year, these journals publish between 30 and 45 articles each. The total for these two years is likely to exceed 150, but due to the typical delay to publication I have focused on the first 100 publications in 2021–22.

9. For a review of European pragmatism, see Barthe et al. (2013).

10. I am aware that this article mainly cites anglophone research. Laboratorium, together with Sociology of Power and some other Russian journals, are increasingly important fora for cutting-edge social science in Russia and in Russian. Once again, the war’s influence of the politics of knowledge production in Russia, and on academic incentives, is likely to intensify the trend of Russian scholars choosing to publish in these outlets rather than in anglophone journals. For a selection of the latest work in Laboratorium, see: https://www.soclabo.org/index.php/laboratorium#:~:text=Laboratorium%3A%20Russian%20Review%20of%20Social%20Research%20is%20an%20open%2Daccess,research%20in%20Russian%20and%20English

11. Twitter post, 6 July 2022. https://twitter.com/ADoolotkeldieva/status/1544674380688629762