Research as a military mascot: Political ethnography and counterinsurgency in southern Thailand

Abstract

The term ‘political ethnography’ has been used to describe a recent trend whereby political scientists, including scholars of security studies and international relations, increasingly deploy fieldwork to explore a variety of political arenas. This article challenges a one-dimensional understanding of political ethnography that sidelines the politics activated in an ethnographic research process and instead calls for political ethnographers to self-reflectively analyse their own positionality in terms of imperial complicity. It discusses experiences of researching counterinsurgency practices in southern Thailand and outlines different dimensions through which counterinsurgents positioned the author as a ‘military mascot’. These include assumptions about the Western and Christian identity of the researcher as well as ideas about the author’s ability to produce objective ‘facts’ in reporting a presumably peaceful military mission. The article concludes by reflecting on the problematic alliance between political science and imperial military projects of counterinsurgency, arguing that the lack of discussion about this affinity constitutes one of the conditions that facilitate the ‘mascotting’ of political ethnographers with military interlocutors.