On expertise, and its development

What expert am I? This is what Stojan Sokolović demanded of me and to which I had (and have) no good answer. Perhaps I did not understand the question. I believed at the time of his asking that I occupied a more or less secure place in a discipline that provided a sense of coherence even in its divisions (and also precisely because of its divisions). I believed that its debates and paradigms were part of the primordial trajectory of its being, and that this could be well-ordered, mapped out, and understood, if subjectively in content and context, then objectively in what we have all tacitly agreed upon as its basic ordering frameworks. The questions that I was prepared to answer were finite questions that were inherently formed and nurtured within the context of the discipline. ‘Where do you stand? What position do you take? To what side do you belong? What tradition, perspective or community do your labours faithfully represent? These are questions that we ask one another from the first moment of our entry into the field. These are the questions, we are given to know from the start, to which we must have our already prepared replies.’Footnote ⁷

What expert am I? This was not an inquiry that could be answered within the parameters of that framework, because it did not ask me to identify the disciplinary ground on which I stood or the theoretical orientation from which I spoke. It did not require me to expound on the history or genesis of my ‘expertise’ – my travels and research, my interviews and contacts in the southeast of Europe, my theoretical fears or commitments (or my fears of theoretical commitment). It charged me with faithlessness writ large, with an inescapable responsibility, to which I could simply make no adequate response. It asked me not with which experts I had spoken, or what they had said. It asked me not what scraps of truth were contained on the tiny little audiocassettes that comprised my burgeoning library of interview archives. It asked, instead, if I had noticed the slant of the setting sun on the terracotta tiles of the rooftops. It asked me if I had stuck my fingers in the honeycomb brickwork of the buildings along the Vrbas River or run the flat palm of my hand along the stuccoed gypsum plaster of the borrowed house in which I slept. It asked me if I had endured the rain at an inopportune moment, or if I had even noticed the rain at all – if I had divined anything in it. It asked me what the future held as read through the dried coffee grounds on the bottom of my cup. It asked me, to put it differently, if I had thought of something other than what I had been trained to look for. And in so doing, it asked me if there was even a possibility of narrative truth – whether anyone could actually apprehend, process, signify, and render it in speech or text or microform.Footnote ⁸ The questions that presupposed the form (if not the content) of acceptable answerability were obliterated in that single sentence – what expert are you? – asked rhetorically, perhaps, because there was no possibility of making answer along the lines for which my training had prepared me to make answer and at some level, Stojan Sokolović knew that. This was why he had asked it.

I am not a novelist. It is critically important to clarify this. There are two main reasons why this is so. The first reason is that I don't intend for my scholarship – or for what Stojan Sokolović asked of me – to be dismissed this easily. The second is that, if I am a novelist, then I must be in the business of training a generation of novelists masquerading as social scientists behind me. And this is not the case.Footnote ⁹ I want to guard against a generation of novelists just as I want to guard against the positivist tradition that entrenched an orthodoxy ofknowledge production that works (unsuccessfully, in my view) to deny all traces of the self in scholarly writing and to discipline the others it encounters into rigorous categories that don't work and never did. The researcher is not an empty vessel to be filled with knowledge that is then poured forth through publications and lectures in some charade of authenticity. But neither can the IR scholar engaged in autoethnography rely on the narrow, unassailable ground of standpoint epistemology to secure his or her claims. Standpoint epistemologies may silence those who don't (or more properly, can't) assume a particular identity. This does not extend debate in the field. Instead, it stifles debate. But this is not just a problem with standpoint epistemologies. It is a problem of the contemporary development of social science more generally. Here, the chief problem is that the disciplinary territories that Ashley identified work to silence those who take other positions. There are many ways in which this silencing is accomplished. One of the most obvious tactics takes place in approaches that use standpoint epistemologies as disciplinary weapons. There is nothing more frustrating to me than attending conferences or workshops when that inevitable silencing question is asked: ‘Have you been there?’ This question is not asked in an attempt to further fruitful discussion. It is asked to dismiss and to silence. These kinds of disciplinary questions permeate debate in IR – both orthodox and critical – because the contours of academic debate are erected in specific, adversarial ways.Footnote ¹⁰ It is not just that our writing is stultifying and limited. It is also that the very structure of the discipline is organised in an adversarial way, which in turn feeds into the limitations associated with our thinking and writing. The late feminist scholar Grace Jantzen expands on the implications of this phenomenon:

Roxanne Doty once remarked in a seminar at York University that you can only say what you really want to say once you have tenure.Footnote ¹² If you begin by saying what you want to say, no one will listen to you. Maybe no one will listen, anyway. But what Doty expressed in that seminar was her own growing awareness that there is an ethics at work in what we do, in who we are, and in our enormous power to determine who others are, and why. It is an ethics not only with respect to the discipline's own narrative accounts, but also in the strictures of writing that are required for the development and deployment of successful scholarship. Doty's later career has been marked by a radical critique of – and departure from – accepted academic scholarship in IR. She is quite literally wandering in the desert.Footnote ¹³ In those wanderings, she has produced what many must consider to be among the most profound meditations on the securitisation of American space ever published in IR.

The ethics of autoethnography

There are a number of ethical issues surrounding voice that IR scholars have attempted to confront in recent years. I will explore three interrelated ethical concerns here. The first has to do with the limited realities that the academic voice is capable of conveying. There is currently no widely accepted academic voice through which I can convey these encounters with Stojan Sokolović. This is not a problem of the rarity with which we are confronted with such ‘informants’. Field researchers reading this article know very well that these encounters are common occurrences. But they are relegated from their first moments into a space reserved for a different kind of knowing, and what we end up doing is privately remembering, rather than publicly writing them into our publications.Footnote ¹⁴ This divides our experiences in the field into public and private and, quite predictably, results in a silencing of the private. So the knowledge that emerges explicitly in autoethnographical accounts is already there – it is present because all of us who have arrived in someone else's country with solid research agendas and eager questions have encountered aspects of these communities (or individuals within them) that do not fit with the overall account.Footnote ¹⁵ These people ask something else of us; something that our profession is not prepared to give. This does more than just limit our scholarship. It does more in its silence than our normative understanding of silence suggests of it. To be silent is still to speak. To be silent does not divest us of our roles as political subjects. What we must come to ask is ‘whose voices are not being heard and why?’ At the same time, we need to recognise that finding an academic answer to this question is of no value unless we can implement meaningful change in the ways that knowledge is generated. The point here is to inquire into who gets to decide what counts as proper academic discourse and what needs to be relegated to private memory in order for that academic discourse to move unassailably forward. Given Grace Jantzen's incisive point above, how do we know that the encounters we relegate thus are not actually the things we should be writing about?

Following on from this, the second concern here is that the academic voice perpetrates a considered violence against those whose realities it claims to write. J. Marshall Beier has explored this in significant depth with respect to the appropriations and types of ‘knowledges’ made possible by European encounters with the Lakota peoples.Footnote ¹⁶ The academic gaze is an all-encompassing gaze. It seeks to make sense of everything it encounters and, more significantly, to master what it encounters. With respect to field research, this is accomplished by a touristic move into a targeted environment that has normally already been made ‘known’ through the scholarship one reads prior to departure. Unlike tourism, however, fieldwork is justified, legitimated, and funded by institutions whose primary claim is to produce and secure what counts as knowledge. Aside from the vehicle of the interview, which is always crafted by the researcher prior to departure for the target locale, the informant has no mechanism through which to speak back. While autoethnography certainly does not solve that problem, it affords the possibility of conveying something that we would not otherwise have been able to hear. It does not seek to appropriate the voice of the informant – were this the case then we could safely say that two decades or more of critical scholarship have not been heard by proponents of autoethnography at all. Rather, what autoethnography here accomplishes is to focus attention on the relationship of the self to the world that is investigated. In this sense, it is not an appropriation of others (at least not any greater in terms of its violence than the academic voice, which pounds others into manageable interview material), but rather a reflexive awareness of the self as a perpetrator of a certain kind of violence in the course of all writing and all representation – a violence, incidentally, that cannot be avoided.Footnote ¹⁷

There are other good reasons to reconsider this question of academic voice. An academic voice that allows for certain elements of autoethnography has the potential to re-center our attention on the individual lives and deaths of people whose names we would otherwise not know – and for good reason, considering the succinct fates and attributes that are ascribed to them through our research: for example, war criminal, rape victim, refugee, displaced person, and so on.Footnote ¹⁸ If we were reading the work of Carol Cohn, we in IR have known since at least 1987 that language, and the use of language, is extremely significant in terms of how we come to know both the violence and the ‘who’ that will bear (or has borne) the brunt of the violence.Footnote ¹⁹ Rethinking how we write others may raise a range of epistemological problems in terms of the privileged (or even romanticising) self, but it also forces us to consider the names and lives of those who are mobilised into our publications for the purposes of tenure and promotion, research grant applications, and other forms of career-development.

This leads to the third ethical dimension of academic voice, and that is the autodisciplinarity enacted by the writer of IR. We operate in a field that has a very specific narrative past, and a set of conventions around which we must orient our scholarship if we want it to be published and taken seriously by our colleagues. Had I not already known this, it would certainly have become apparent to me at the International Studies Association Annual Convention in New York this year, when I was lucky enough to be riding in an elevator with an academic who was loudly explaining to her rapt (or captive) protégé how the panel they had just attended did not ‘fit’ either the conference theme or, indeed, the discipline of IR. The protégé was properly disgusted. Witnessing this encounter illustrated to me that there is already autoethnography operating all throughout IR, in both the terms I'm arguing for, and also as the ‘orthodox’ work to proclaim the superiority of their orthodoxies over others. We already belong to a discipline that tells stories about its past, and these stories comprise a narrative that develops along a relatively clear plotline – the development of realism in response to the failures that culminated in the First World War; the rise of behaviouralism in response to connections developed between natural sciences and psychology; the terroristic explosion of critical interventions following the end of the Cold War. All along this trajectory, we can trace the closures that intellectual purism and orthodoxy require for the maintenance and reproduction of certain positions and approaches. Critical theorists are equally culpable in this respect.

It is perhaps objectionable to some that I am here conflating ‘story’ with ‘narrative’. In so doing, I follow Tony Adams, who argues that both stories and narratives proceed along ‘storying conventions such as the use of common storylines, linear or chaotic temporal sequences, and writing within/against genres.’Footnote ²⁰ If we understand stories and narratives as ‘tools for managing life,’ it becomes possible to recognise the similarities in content, if not in form, between different forms of text.Footnote ²¹ What is at stake here is not the objective veracity of any particular claim, but rather the question of how that veracity is generated, and by whom. In other words, some of us enjoy a narrative privilege that others do not.Footnote ²² The plain fact that professional academics possess (a certain kind of limited) narrative privilege when it comes to storying the world they encounter means that those stories – and their generation – need to be carefully queried. If all were empowered to speak and write equally, there would be less need for an ethic of scholarly writing, because scholarly writing would be just one more form of textual expression. But this is not the case. Scholarly writing is understood as ‘truth writing,’ and the stories associated with this writing often – though not always – operate under the pretence that there is no self behind the choice to write something in a particular way. This is the sleight that allows us to call them intellectual ‘histories’ or ‘narratives’, and not ‘stories’. As Roxanne Doty reminds us with respect to IR, ‘[e]ach of these narratives is a creative story presenting itself as truth, but ultimately grounded only in the imaginations of individual and collective writers and readers.’Footnote ²³ Additionally, she observes that there is a self lurking in this sleight. In our sanitised, self-evacuated, academic landscape, we become the ‘hideous beings swallowed up by our scholarly clothes, the dancing fools under the fluorescent lights of our paradigms and theories that voraciously consume our thoughts, hammer the soul from our words, and drain our voices of any traces of humanity.’Footnote ²⁴ I believe that Doty is right, and it is this that in no small measure motivates my own attempt to write IR in ways that I believe contain the potential for a greater measure of ethical accountability on the part of the researcher.

The ethics of responsible scholarship are significant here in terms of how we question, how we adjudicate between answers, and how we situate ourselves as writers, witnesses and participants. In this sense, Virginia Dominguez is perfectly correct: if we don't show our motives, they cannot be evaluated by our readers. I write out of love. I also sometimes write out of guilt.Footnote ²⁵ In all cases, I write because I become aware that something is not the way I thought it was. Something has hurt me. Something has made me angry or sleepless or aggrieved in some way. I don't think the fact that I have personal motivations that orient me toward the political world I study is particularly unique. However, my account of my relationship with Stojan Sokolović cannot be considered to uniquely authorise me as a speaking, knowing agent because of the depth of my emotional experience. My encounters with Stojan Sokolović should not be understood to place me in a privileged position of knowledge acquisition. That is most certainly not the intent of this article. Instead, I am trying to impart the awareness visited upon me that I don't know what I think I know, or that what I think I know is not so. In other words, my encounters with Stojan Sokolović had implications for my scholarship that I had not considered. There are limitations to my scholarship that I have not sufficiently acknowledged. This awareness, it seems to me, evokes some of the very first critical attacks against orthodox IR in the 1980s and, in those ways at least, is in line with the ‘stories’ of IR itself.Footnote ²⁶ R. B. J. Walker, for example, famously queried the discipline's stance that its approaches did not take an ethical position. Ethics was, instead, something to be ‘added’ only after the theory had been developed and only if the theorist wished to consider it. Today, virtually all critical scholars understand that each approach to IR has an ethics associated with it, for better or worse. Richard Ashley, as already noted, explored the ways in which the discipline disciplined its practitioners. V. Spike Peterson queried the distinctions between public and private that produced and relegated gendered forms of labour – and of gendered being itself – into discrete complementarities that either were or were not proper arenas of scholarly investigation. Steve Smith explored theory as emancipatory practice. And, of course, Robert Cox framed the terms for generations of subsequent scholars with his single well-placed observation that ‘theory is always for someone and for some purpose’. These were some of the first public critical resistance moves against IR as a scientific discipline. There are countless others, whose omission here is not intended as a dismissal. What is at stake for the place of autoethnography in the discipline is the question of how open critical scholars remain now that they have acquired their own privileged status. How orthodox have critical approaches become? Are they still willing and able to welcome further, justified movement? I believe that they are. I have faith in them.

‘What expert are you?’ Stojan Sokolović's question is not a question to end questions. It is a question to expand them. It does not ask me to stay silent. It does not ask me to find a way to write that will close all the gaping holes in anything I might say. It does not insulate me against critique, but in fact opens me to it. It makes me vulnerable not just to the colleagues who peer-review my work, but to those whose lives I write, without whom I could not have a career, or a nice office with a big picture window that looks out onto the commons of my university. Stojan Sokolović, like so many of our ‘informants’, asks me to think and to question differently. By his own admission, he doesn't know what this would mean, however. After several years of thinking about it, I still don't know, either. But this ‘not knowing’ does not require silence. It requires the articulation of that unknowing, and the reasons for that unknowing, so that discussion and debate in IR can continue to move in fruitful directions. Autoethnography allows me to hear the question that was asked of me. And, in hearing it, it asks me to make answer in some way. It shatters the illusion of expertise – the divide – between the ‘researcher’ and the ‘researched’. It makes me answerable to him. It makes me understand that my attempts to know him and, in turn, to make him known to others is already a failure under the terms of my discipline's expectations. It is also a violence, because it requires him to be intelligible and, if he can't be intelligible, to be eradicated from my article, book, essay, lecture, or conference talk.

Alphonso Lingis argues that it is the speaking with another that allows us to increasingly categorise, but it is also simultaneously the case that the more we speak the less I understand, the less I can organise the space, the place, and the charge of Stojan Sokolović with my own systematised categories because he must necessarily defy the bounds in which I seek to contain him. He has destroyed my myth of order. Lingis explains: ‘I present to the other the representation of him that I form. But in facing me, contesting or confirming that identity I have assigned to him, the other rises apart, beyond the representation […]’.Footnote ²⁷ This instability, however, is here an imperative. It is an advantage. It gives us room to move away from the strictures of identity and being that academic writing so pointedly demands. It gives us room to write what we could not get away with writing – not for writing's sake, but for the sake of illuminating those things that we normally ignore. And this is the ground on which the adjudication of autoethnography can begin (which would be another systematisation of scholarly conventions, but I don't consider all of these systematisations to be equal crimes). Autoethnography opens up the possibility of questioning representation, of questioning systematisation and contributing to an insistent mobility. It opens up the possibility of making an ethical response to a charge that would normally never be heard. But it also runs the danger of being an unassailable form of writing – how can we adjudicate? This is, to be sure, a critical question, and a ground for future debate. Whatever these debates-to-come might decide about autoethnography, I want to argue that, rather than some self-indulgent attempt to insulate oneself from critique, autoethnography must instead open the self to that critique. If it is to remain ethical in any sense, our representations cannot be understood as unassailable. In this way, autoethnography can contribute to ongoing identification of lesser violences, rather than insulating itself against critique by falling back on that frustrating and useless mantra ‘but have you been there?’

These observations lead to another question of ethics that arises here, and that is the question of veracity. IR assumes a certain element of veracity in its stories – whether it is the story of the discipline's documented history (in which case we need to ask what documents and oral forms have been left out of that narrative), or whether it is the material we gather in fieldwork or other research settings. Several years ago, my institution received an application from a prospective graduate student whose submitted writing sample was an entirely fictitious account of a period in Latin American history. The applicant manufactured the names of leaders seemingly out of thin air, and documented rebellions and conflicts that never took place. The Latin American specialist who reviewed the essay was mystified by the complete fabrication of people, places, and events. It is fair to say that no serious scholar intentionally fabricates information.Footnote ²⁸ But it is also prudent to remember that we rely on the veracity of the articles and books we read, and on the accounts of those we encounter in fieldwork interviews. This requires us to rely on elements of human interaction that IR (among other social sciences) has no mechanism to judge. The most basic of these elements is trust. We trust, as researchers, that our informants are telling us the truth when we interview them. But informants may lie. Stojan Sokolović says that he lied all the time to the Western academics. Why did he do this? He shrugged his shoulders. To punish them a bit for their arrogance, he said. They descend upon our cities and villages, and everyone in these places wants to be a victim – no one wants to be a perpetrator, because the shame of a perpetrator is very great. Or maybe it's that no one wants to be a victim – because the shame of victimhood is also a heavy load to bear. Maybe no one wants to talk about the war, so they make things up, maybe to protect themselves from their own memories, maybe to remake themselves anew. Maybe they want to put their best face forward, so to speak; to say ‘we did not do that killing’. ‘Go to Omarska!’ a Bosnian Serb woman once urged me. ‘You will see there was no concentration camp there.’ I didn't go. I had already heard directly from the mouth of an American forensics expert how the walls at Omarska had lit up like morning when they were doused with Luminol in the summer of 1996. All the layers of gypsum plaster in the world could not hide the blood on the walls. ‘You will see there was no concentration camp there.’ How would I know what a concentration camp should look like, anyway? What features would it have? How would I recognise them as the features of a concentration camp – or not?Footnote ²⁹

These are questions of veracity, and questions of veracity necessarily lead to questions of trust. The Serbian woman and the American forensics expert both believed themselves to be telling the truth. We know that the Serbian woman was ‘wrong’. Being ‘wrong’ is different, though, than ‘lying’. Maybe the Serbian woman did not want to believe that Omarska was what the international community and its accompanying forensics teams had said it was. Maybe she did not want to belong to a people who were increasingly seen as capable only of murder and outrage. The American woman is a forensics expert. That is probably enough to silence the Serbian woman, even in the absence of the testimony of Omarska's Muslim prisoners and the infamous photograph of the emaciated Fikret Alić behind the wire that caused such controversy in Britain and around the world.Footnote ³⁰ The veracity of the Serbian woman was easily dismissed. There was incontrovertible evidence. But that should not silence her. It should alert us not to the malice of Serbian informants, but possibly to their desire not to be responsible for such outrages. It could alert us to the fact that Serbs, too, seek those elements of a good life that animate our own approaches to the political, but that the path that was followed was not just any ordinary failure; instead it was a spectacular outrage. Trust is an elusive element of what we do, because we need to rely on our informants as trustworthy witnesses. We need to be able to determine not only that they are right or wrong, but that they are not actively lying – perhaps to punish us for our arrogance, as Stojan Sokolović indicated, but for a multitude of other possible reasons, too: fear, mistrust, a desire to please the researcher, a desire to portray oneself or one's community in a positive light. I am confident that I encountered plenty of untruths in Bosnia. I was ill-equipped – as most of us are – to adjudicate between them.Footnote ³¹ ‘Trust, but verify’ is not always a viable option. Sometimes that verification is impossible. In the case of Fikret Alić and the Omarska camp, it was possible to verify. But other claims are admittedly murkier. ‘Here is the house that I slept in; this is how my brother died; his murderer will not be prosecuted.’ The point here is not to say that all claims (whether verifiable or not) are now of equal weight. Whether the house that Stojan Sokolović slept in is more or less important than the captivity and torture of Fikret Alić is not the question I am interested in exploring. Of course we adjudicate the importance of the stakes in and between certain claims. We do this all the time, and sometimes without even really thinking carefully about it. What I wish to point out here is the possibility that we may find ourselves more invested in what we can verify, rather than in what we can't, not because the issues are always more important politically or ethically, but simply because we can verify. I cannot verify what the Pale police said to Stojan Sokolović on the day he came to seek his brother's murderer. I can't, in fact, verify that his brother was murdered as Stojan Sokolović claimed. This lack of verification, however, should not – though it does – make Luka Sokolović's murder less important in the context of our research.

In his discussion of the place of trust in the human encounter, Alphonso Lingis writes that:

There is a space for radical possibility here in terms of how we understand ourselves and others in the course of our interactions with, and participation in, politics, history, and scholarship. Not only is the separation of subject and object problematic (if not impossible), and not only is the self reliant on others for its sense of sameness, but also the ability to trust in our representations of others – or in the representations they reveal to us – is at stake. And this is often irresolvable. We rely on others all throughout the development of our careers; we rely on our supervisors, our doctoral committees, our hiring committees, the referees of our journals, our informants and students, our philosophies and data sets. In turn, we rely on one another as producers of knowledge and bearers of truths extracted like harvests from the texts and pockets of the world we either read about or visit. We do not often ask ourselves whether we can be trusted – not because we actively lie, but because we trust in certain elements of our craft that are inherently untrustworthy. The point here is that the data gathered and reported by the field researcher within the rubrics of accepted academic methodologies is just as suspect as any autoethnography, and perhaps more so, because the autoethnography does not purport to be more than it is – the refiguring of the self that compiles the information and does the knowing – the re-centering of a self that has long since been absent in mainstream IR in a decades-long conspiracy of silence. Autoethnography opens space for the reader to see the intentions – and not just the theories and methodologies – of the researcher. It opens us to a deeper form of judgment. That is the core of its ethics.

The place of the self in our writing is starting, in some institutions, to take root in rocky soil. When I came back from Bosnia after my first foray into the ‘field’, I was furious. The ‘Bosnia’ I knew before I left my office was not the Bosnia that Stojan Sokolović revealed to me. I did not come back feeling lost or unsure. I came back feeling angry at what I perceived to be a profound betrayal in the texts and accepted logics of my discipline. I was not prepared to be silenced in the way that Stojan Sokolović had silenced me. This was not a problem of inexperience. It was a problem of my discipline. I wrote a long, careful letter to my dissertation supervisor. He was very young at the time – perhaps 35 or so – and untenured. In my letter, I tried to explain my frustration with what I perceived to be IR's fundamental inability to respond to the charges laid against me by Stojan Sokolović. I could not find an academic language to say the things I wanted to say. I wrote that I did not want to do this anymore – that I could not do it. I was not terribly surprised when my supervisor called me into his office several days later. But I was shocked when he casually dropped the bulk of my carefully-crafted letter on the desk before him and said, ‘This is the first chapter of your dissertation.’ I had not considered that possibility. Today, I understand that his was an act of faith.Footnote ³³ Faith is a dangerous but necessary phenomenon, because it asks us to open ourselves, yet at the same time carries the risk of betrayal and failure.Footnote ³⁴ It carries the risk of being ‘wrong’. I benefited in ways I cannot calculate from my supervisor's act of faith. A different academic – a different man – might have shaken my hand as I walked out the door of that research unit forever. In this profession, most of us do not have faith. We do not trust. We verify. It is this fact that makes all theory violent. But it also makes all theory a form of faith, because verification – and particularly verification of value – is often impossible.Footnote ³⁵

Autoethnography and representation

In July of 1999, Stojan Sokolović and I were driving from the recently revised south of Serbia back into Bosnia, where the NATO armoured vehicles are too large for the narrow mountain roads. The weather turned bad and there was nowhere to sleep because the guesthouses were all filled up with Serbian refugees from Kosovo and the landlords were bitter because those refugees had to be kept and fed free of charge. (‘What shall I do?’ demanded the owner of a hostel who had no room to let. ‘Shall I turn them away?’ He shrugged and waved us onward through a sheet of rain. ‘Find another place!’)

All along the road, there were terrible scars in the earth. At the border at Karakaj, between two republics which not long ago were undefended and inseparable, the soldiers stared interestedly at my strange blue passport. They seemed very young in the rain as they begged me for patience while they took my passport into the shelter of their guard post. One of them had sneakers on his feet. He asked from where I had come. I told him in my grammarless way that I had paused last in Belgrade, where I had a discussion with an old colleague and friend over two brown bottles of beer in Republic Square. One of the soldiers asked if the buildings along Kneza Miloša had really been so badly destroyed by the bombs. I told him they had, and that it was the same in Niš, Čačak, Kragujevac, and Pančevo. I told him that, although Belgrade was a showcase of targeted warfare at its technological pinnacle (or at least somewhere in that general vicinity), the same could not be said for other cities and villages, in which cluster bombs had been dropped on marketplaces (Niš) and cruise missiles on homes huddled together against nights marked by war (Aleksinac)Footnote ³⁶. I probably didn't say this as well as I wanted to. My Serbian is not as good as Stojan Sokolović's English, which says something very significant about my comings and goings in his country when he can't even consider the reverse. He couldn't get a visa to interview me in my ‘authentic’ surroundings if his life depended on it. There is something very painful about that to me when I think about it for too long. At the Karakaj crossing, it began to rain harder. The soldier with the sneakers on his feet told me quietly that he had heard the bombers coming every night as they passed over Karakaj for Serbia. I fished out two unbearably harsh local cigarettes from a crumpled package and offered one to him through the window of the car. He cradled it carefully in his hand while he rummaged through his numerous pockets in search of a match.

All around us, the fields stretched out into an unseen distance, marked in my memory with pyramid stacks of hay and distant, clustered collections of houses across the flatlands of Serbia. The things that had been destroyed were destroyed, and nothing could be done then to take it back. The road was more poorly lit than usual because the switching stations and refineries had all been bombed, and there remained a state of energy emergency as a result of that war, which my friend in Belgrade reported had from the beginning smelled thickly of death and defeat. It was more terrible to drive in the darkness, I thought, if only because the image produced by my imagination is sometimes more difficult to grasp than the reality of things – and this was the case even when I had already seen what was done. When the sun was yet low in the sky and the earth was scorched in places by deep black craters that had collected blackish water in their centres, the sight was somehow bearable. It was bearable because I could talk about it (I could write about it). I could murmur at it, and then hear the story of the night that it (whatever it had been) was struck by missiles that were satellite-guided and fired from the safety of a thousand miles away. You could hear them coming, my ‘informants’ said. They made terrible whistling noises in the seconds before the earth trembled and the concussions rippled through the surrounding houses, imploding all the glass windows for half a mile and wrenching the nearest buildings from their very foundations. My security studies mind rattled on stupidly about air-to-surface, wing-mounted, laser guided missiles, defended against poorly by outdated anti-aircraft artillery, which was essentially useless, because those bombers hid up beyond the clouds at a full 15,000 feet. It was because of this that NATO made so many mistakes in their target identification and the reason why the Serbian gunners could not find them up there.

It was better for me to see it in the day because I could order and catalogue the damage. The rational parts of me could engage in assessment – in verification. I could grasp the blast radius and the corresponding damage done to structures 20 metres, 40 metres, 100 metres from the point of impact. It was a neat trick, how the intellect was able to master the heart in daylight. But at night, along that road, passing unseen gnarled transformer towers, charred roof tiles, smashed windows, structures bent at crazy angles, bridges broken in half, my intellect could not function as it had been trained to function. At night, there was no rational order for me, because without seeing, I cannot order, but I can imagine. And imagining is sometimes worse than seeing, because seeing allows me to find the parameters of something – allows me to delineate things – whereas imagining has no parameters, and because it goes on and on long after the seeing is finished.Footnote ³⁷ It keeps me awake at night. I suspect that I am not the only one who is kept awake by these things – these unacademic answers to the question of why I write what I write. So, I waited in the rain at the Karakaj crossing, and I thought these things – things which I was sure that my discipline would never provide a place for me to say, and to which I still cannot do justice, because darkness is something other in a world apprehended and mediated by vision. We huddle against it, whether in the shelters of our little circles of lamplight, or in the shelters of the orthodoxies and accepted knowledges of our disciplines.

The soldier with the sneakers on his feet smoked my cigarette under the cover of his waterproof overcoat. He gathered himself beneath that coat, squinting his eyes against the rain as he waited for his superiors to return with my passport. I thought that it was unfair for me to think about him – to wonder why he didn't have proper boots or to contemplate what else he might have in the many pockets of his coat or to wonder how he felt when he had heard the NATO warplanes crossing on their way to Serbia. I thought it was unfair for me to wish that I had the time and the opportunity to talk with him further when that desire was only so that I could represent him better in some narrative or other, as I am representing him now. I thought it was unfair to want to write about him, to want to capture him like some strange animal in his authentic surroundings, a hastily-constructed border post in a seemingly random spot. I felt that I was on a safari of some sort, scouting Serbs like lions. I felt that then, and I feel it still – the narrow line between fieldwork and tourism, between scholarship and voyeurism.Footnote ³⁸ Ours is a strange pornography. Speaking of war, but readily applicable to the fruits of our everyday research, Levinas writes that ‘violence does not consist so much in injuring and annihilating persons as in interrupting their continuity, making them play roles in which they no longer recognise themselves, making them betray not only their own commitments but their own substance […]’.Footnote ³⁹ When it was finished, the soldier that I wanted to interview and never did tossed the cigarette out into the side of the road and said that he would go inside to see why ‘in Christ's name’ it was taking so long. He came back promptly with my passport and regretfully announced that his superiors had forgotten about me. He wished me a safe and pleasant journey and I gave him another cigarette before I thanked him and drove on. The stamp in my passport was thick-lined and still wet. The ink had bled into the fibers on the opposite page as well. The rain had let up a bit, and I was pleased about that, because those roads going up through the mountains were dangerous enough without that they should also be wet.

I write this now in an attempt to answer to the charge levelled against me: ‘What expert are you?’ I cannot enter a plea of ‘not guilty’, because Stojan Sokolović will never sit on the jury that is empowered to decide my fate. Stojan Sokolović is not my peer in the empire of knowledge, and no court comprised of my colleagues would convict me for having wronged him. I was only following the rubrics of acceptable scholarship. Who can be convicted for having followed the letter of the law? And yet, I have to answer to the charge, because the charge was made against the discipline itself, and I am claiming in this forum to speak both from and to that discipline. This cannot be accomplished in a novel. It has to be accomplished (if it can be accomplished at all) from within the discipline. We cannot elide this kind of responsibility by saying that it does not ‘fit’ into the proper structures of writing IR, because these structures are not appropriate to answer the legitimate questions that are asked of us. If this were so, I would upload a novel on my university webpage and leave it at that. But it is not the novelists who are answerable to the Stojan Sokolovićes. It is the IR theorists and scholars who descended, unchallenged, into his world and returned with their truths on how we should best understand it. All he is asking for is the chance to respond and to have that response be heard – to have it be meaningful. He doesn't want the relationship to end once he has answered our questions. He wants us to answer his.

There is an ethics here, and it is an ethics that does not, at the moment, have a well-formed place in our discipline. It is not a standpoint ethics, and it may not be a poststructuralist ethics (although it may find voice through forms of poststructuralism). It is not a cosmopolitan ethics, because Stojan Sokolović and I do not live in worlds that can be understood in any sense of the word as commensurable, and because we may not be working toward the same future. This is a very important point. Only some of us are vested with the ‘expertise’ to forge our way through other people's countries gathering ‘data’ in an effort to produce the ‘truths’ of the world. This is not only because our institutions vest us with this power (which is absurd, since it would mean we derive our power from ourselves), but because those institutions exist in a matrix of political relations that also vest some with the capacity to move freely, while others cannot. Perhaps we should understand the political as a craft; a form of techne as the ancients understood it: a form of building and creating relationships, rather than an epistemic commitment to dispassionate understanding or knowledge or philosophy. This politics requires both craft and philosophy, with necessary overlaps and interplays. Perhaps for us it involves, or should involve, a certain alchemy and a commitment to understanding our worlds as spaces of opportunity for creation and fruitful debate that seek not to destroy the ideas and risks we might be willing to take, but instead foster them. In a certain sense, autoethnographies in IR can begin to build a community of interested participants rather than dispassionate observers. This does not mean that autoethnography can make our disciplinary literatures whole, or create a knowledge form that is free of pitfalls and dilemmas. It does not mean that autoethnography does not require some method by which to judge its contributions. As I stated earlier, we cannot raise a generation of novelists and call them social scientists, even if the only reason we do not understand novelists to be social scientists is because their evidence is anecdotal and they lack formal training. We cannot assess doctoral qualifying or comprehensive examinations on the basis of who writes the prettiest sentence about a war zone. We cannot reduce our adjudication to a matter of aesthetics. But this does not mean that autoethnography does not have a place in IR, or that this is not a debate that needs to be undertaken.

The erasure of the self is a violence in that it purports to provide the ground for objective knowledge that is always and necessarily about others. As Clifford Geertz so aptly notes, ‘explicit representations of authorial presence tend to be relegated, like other embarrassments, to prefaces, notes, or appendices.’Footnote ⁴⁰ What I have been trying to suggest here all along is that we should also be embarrassed by our depictions of the political ‘realities’ of others.Footnote ⁴¹ Why are we not ashamed to return to our institutions from ‘the field’ and impart only the things that happened to fit into our pre-designed research agendas? Why are we not ashamed of ourselves for speaking and writing as though the only people who have the right to question us are other academics? As Raul Hilberg reminds us, it is when we succeed at our scholarly task that we are in the most danger of having usurped that which we wrote about. It is precisely our success that indicts us.Footnote ⁴²