Some light at the end of the tunnel

One of my main struggles in my project is the difficulty to find articles about government secrecy which present a theoretical framework and empirical evidence to explain the theories. I finally found a very good article which addresses these issues. David N. Gibbs’s article titled “Secrecy and International Relations” (Journal of Peace Research 32, no. 2 1995: p. 213-228) explains three theories to analyze government secrecy, focusing on foreign policy. These theories are: External Threat approach, Bureaucratic Politics approach, and Internal Threat approach. External Threat means that government use secrecy when concern with national security, specially to conceal information they don’t want other countries to know. Bureaucratic Politics suggests that information is classified because of arcane feuds or operating procedures. Finally, Internal Threat indicates that secrecy is used to mislead the public of their policies. The latter is the theory more vastly explained by the author and it uses the crisis at Congo in the 1960s as an example to support this theory. Relating this article to my project, I’m looking into more literature about these theories, with emphasis on more recent publications. In addition, some questions have come into mi mind related to the data I’ll be analyzing. Which is the approach that better explains the press discourse on government secrecy? What about the discourse from archival professional organizations, political scientists, and historians?

Regarding the data, I already started saving newspaper articles from different sources dating from the early 1990s. I will be analyzing only editorial pieces, which would present a better opportunity to analyze the arguments of the press, instead of looking at news events.

Some notes about this week's readings:

Hammersley indicates that “the goal of ethnographic research is to discover and represent faithfully the true nature of social phenomena.” (H&M, p. 66). To reach this goal, researchers use ethnography to submerge into in-depth participant observations, fieldwork, and in-depth interviews. What is different from other methodologies is that in ethnography the researcher experience the setting firsthand. In other words, the researcher role in the setting is much more than an outsider writing observations. Hammersley states that one of the most valuable features of ethnography is “its commitment to seeking to understand the perspectives of others, rather than simply judging them as true or false.” This approach is not exempt, however, from the debate on whether this methodology can be used to develop a strong theory, or if it is just an approach to present a descriptive story of a particular setting.

How ethnography is placed into practice? The descriptions given in John Van Maanen’s essay (H&M, Ch. 5) and Silverman’s chapter 3 basically calls for paying careful attention to details, which can be accomplish with discipline and practice. Specifically on fieldnotes, both Van Maanen and Silverman indicates that at the same time the researcher is making observation, he/she is also analyzing the data collected.