Protecting sources and confidentiality are of practical importance to certain kinds of data collection. This necessitates a number of different kinds of concerns which are properly, and usefully, addressed by institutional review board (IRB) reviews and thoughtfully considered in other chapters in this volume. It is obvious to most people that the safe collection of original data in post-conflict settings requires improvisation. Less obvious is that this improvisation sometimes has the feel of flaunting the inability of state security services to enforce the laws of their home state. This chapter departs from the vital conversation about subject confidentiality and rather takes up a somewhat more complex and difficult topic: the adversarial relationship that can, sometimes, evolve between a researcher and the indigenous security institutions of the state where research is conducted.

An adversarial strategic relationship between state security forces and academic researchers is not necessary and is not generally desirable. On the contrary: I can report from experience that there can be both personal and professional benefits to outright collusion with state security forces under certain circumstances. For those who are appalled by this suggestion— because they already know the police are the bad guys— but plan to conduct fieldwork anyway, the epigraph by Borneman and Masco (2015) expresses the nub of the problem. There can be a real conflict of interest between activist researchers and conservative police officers working in authoritarian states. Since there may be no practical alternative to a passive permanent confrontation, in this chapter I model the strategic relationship between a researcher and a low-level agent embedded in a state security bureaucracy (police, domestic intelligence, and so on). Under some circumstances, each player prefers not to yield to the other, but both must also structure strategies to avoid the worst possible outcome that can occur when neither yields.

The model in this chapter is informed by the research for my first book, a multi-year study of state formation in Central Asia and the Caucasus (Driscoll, 2015b).