Critical Annotations on Historical Documents: Methodological Possibilities for International Relations Research

Abstract

This process note explicates the methodological intervention of maintaining fieldnotes on government documents and its significance for historically situated international relations (IR) research. For the most part, IR scholarship treats archival documents as the neutral preserve of the state, representing its coherent national interests. Building on discussions around critical methods within IR, I argue that there is a need to reflexively engage with the writing and curating practices of the state. This process note deploys the ethnographic hallmark of thick description within IR research through critical annotations on archival documents and other government publications on India’s eastern Himalayan borderlands between 1880 and 1965. These annotations encourage a granular reading of government documents and situate them within a larger context of their production, reception, archival memorialisation and subsequent access. I propose that critical annotations help us move beyond post-hoc analyses of foreign policy in terms of success and failure. Instead, in viewing IR theorising as ‘unfinished dictionaries of the international’, I argue that critical annotations challenge a unitary view of the state and facilitate a more nuanced analysis of foreign policymaking emphasising historical contingencies within which policies are articulated and enacted.

Introduction

Fieldnotes are inscriptions drafted by researchers undertaking qualitative research. These jottings capture sights, smells, sounds, observations and reflections of the researcher as part of a meticulous record of their encounters with people, the more-than-human environment and objects such as documents as they undertake qualitative research studies. Fieldnotes have their disciplinary origins in anthropology and are vital in informing ethnographic studies. As Geertz (1973) argues, ethnography is a thick description of observations, events and encounters written into copious fieldnotes. For Geertz (1973, p. 19), through writing, the researcher transforms ‘a passing event, which exists only its own moment of occurrence into an account, which exists in its inscriptions and can be reconsulted’. Fieldnotes then are both descriptive and interpretive and capture in microscopic detail social processes and flows that can be revisited, reinterpreted and formulated into conceptual analyses.

In highlighting the significance of fieldnotes for anthropology, Roger Sanjek (1990, p. xii) argues, ‘Unlike historians, anthropologists create their own documents. We call them fieldnotes’. In re-evaluating this assertion, this process note explores how fieldnotes that record the process of identifying, collating and analysing historical documents can push the bounds of international relations (IR) research. How can notes enable us to focus on the histories of production of documents, their flows across bureaucratic hierarchies, the politics of preservation and memorialisation of records in our libraries and archives and our subsequent access to these documents? What are the forms of government documents that circulate outside the remit of the archive? How do annotations of documents allow researchers to reflect on how our engagement with the documents shapes our analyses of the state and its repertoires of rule? I argue that in addressing these questions, notes can create an avenue to encourage reflexivity within IR research.

Treating this as an essentially processual account of my PhD research, I reflect on my experiences working with historical government documents that focus on India’s eastern Himalayan borderlands between 1880 and 1965. ¹ I inscribed these experiences into episodic notes as I collected documents and conducted preliminary analyses. These include hand-written entries, notes maintained on Google Keep, a digital note-taking application and Zotero, a reference management application. In acknowledging that this approach requires close and reiterative engagement with the documents, institutions that curate them and reflection on the techniques and practices of reading that a researcher employs, I term these notes as critical annotations made on and about government documents.

Typically understood, fieldnotes are the unfinished, unpublished foundations upon which qualitative field research studies are built. However, in demonstrating its significance for analysing state and foreign policy, I share excerpts of my critical annotations, followed by short analytical/explanatory accounts reflecting on the emerging questions. The next section seeks to bolster this process note with insights from historical anthropology and locates it within a critical turn towards method in IR.

Annotating Government Documents: Towards ‘an Ethnography of the Archive’ for IR

This process note builds on historical anthropology’s impulse to place the archive under a critical gaze (Axel, 2002). For instance, Stoler (2009) and Dirks (2002) argue that archival documents are not merely containers of moments that are long gone. Rather, archival documents are ‘active, generative substances with histories and itineraries of their own’ (Stoler, 2009, p. 1). From this perspective, state power is documented and reproduced through archival records. Dirks and Stoler, in their respective scholarship, advocate for an ethnography of the archive. For Stoler, this ethnography entails an analysis of stylistic genres of writing and tones used, the lexicon and frames of reference deployed by administrators in inscribing matters at hand, and how documents are collated and organised in archives. Equally, it is important to map the boundaries of the archives and analyse the surfeit of written production that circulates outside its remit. Stoler argues that this method draws attention to archival form, which reflects and reproduces the political anxieties of the colonial state as it seeks to order, govern and produce enduring knowledge about the colony. Viewing the archive as a discursive formation, Dirks argues that through the archives, ‘the state literally produces, adjudicates, organises and maintains the discourses that become available as the primary history’ (Dirks, 2002, p. 59). These interventions into archival form and discursive productions open out a monolithic view of the state and move beyond the idea of the archive as a monument preserving a nation’s history and instead focusing on its politics of organisation and curation.

Anthropologists have built on these arguments to study the materiality of government documents and the centrality of writing to constitute postcolonial bureaucracies (e.g., Hull, 2012; Mathur, 2016). However, IR scholarship, for the most part, continues to treat the state as a reified actor in the international arena, with a coherent and recognisable set of national interests. While the practice turn and ethnographic turn in IR highlight the significance of field research and anthropological reflexivity in unpacking the state and focusing on its quotidian embodied practices and effects (e.g., Dittmer, 2017; Lie, 2013; Neumann, 2007; Rancatore, 2010; Vrasti, 2008), I argue that there is a need for a similar reflexive engagement with the writing and curating practices of the state through critical annotations. Annotations can be situated within a critical approach to the IR method that views methods not as neutral tools for organising empirical data, but as performative devices that enact and disrupt social and political worlds (Aradau & Huysmans, 2014, p. 598). This critical approach to method also engenders a shift in IR theorising, and as Guzzini (2013) argues, IR theory can no longer be reduced to empirical generalisations. Instead, IR theorising is an ongoing and arguably messy process that produces ‘unfinished dictionaries of the international’ that are routinely updated and transformed (Guzzini, 2013, p. 531). Within this approach, the role of the researcher cannot be bracketed away or effaced. Rather, critical annotations can be deployed to emphasise how academics do IR research. They centre reflexivity by creating opportunities for researchers to reflect on the role of their socialisation, training and institutional structures within which they operate and even engage in autoethnographies of conducting IR research (see also Alejandro, 2021; Brigg & Bleiker, 2010; Eagleton-Pierce, 2011).

Situated in this broader conceptual framing, I demonstrate how critical annotations can enrich a reading of historical material for IR. I draw on two examples—a close reading of a colonial archival document on the frontier between Tibet and Sikkim in the 1880s and notes exchanged by Governments of India and China excerpted from a White Paper housed in the Indian Council of World Affairs (ICWA) Library at Sapru House, New Delhi.

Reading Colonial Documents: Bureaucratic Flows and Racialised Identities

The extracts of critical annotations discussed in this section refer to the file titled ‘Tibetan incursions into Sikkim 1886–1887’ (File reference number: IOR/L/PS/7/49, Sec. No. 15). This file is a despatch to the Secretary of State for India summarising correspondence on an incursion by a small army of Tibetans into Langtu, ² along the trade route between Darjeeling and Tibet. This exchange focuses on calibrating the British response to Tibetan incursion into Sikkimese territory and planning the next steps upon evaluating potential gains and fallouts. On the one hand, the British administration was concerned that not responding to this incursion may further encourage Tibetans to continue to cross borders. On the other hand, the British administration did not want to incur significant expenses in ousting the Tibetan army and guarding Sikkim from further ingress. More significantly, the administration did not want to create an impression among the Chinese that the British were seeking to enter Tibet forcibly or were otherwise vitiating the terms of the recently concluded 1886 Sino-Burmese convention. In this file, a decision is made not to send troops or financial assistance to oust the Tibetan troops in Langtu in 1886. Reports and academic scholarship situate this incident as a response to a proposed commercial mission into Tibet under Macaulay’s leadership, discuss the Sikkim expedition of 1888 where the Tibetans were eventually evicted from Langtu and evaluate the subsequent negotiations to delimit the Sikkim–Tibet frontier, involving the Chinese amban (see Bayley, 1910; Cheng, 2021). Instead, through a close reading, I explore the specific micro-level bureaucratic processes and flows that remain out of view in discussions on policy decisions.

To highlight the role and significance of critical annotations, I have drawn quotations from the file with appropriate referencing and mapped the process of critical reading and engagement through notes. To distinguish my critical annotations from the rest of the article, I have provided a date and have set them in italics.

Making note of the From and To info … this document, although only 30 pages, shows the paper trail of information all along the bureaucratic hierarchy from Darjeeling to London and then from London to Peking—literally mapping the tentacles of the empire … but these are not stable pipelines where information is moving without uncertainty … see for instance

‘I do not know whether my replies have reached the Government of India, or if they have at all influenced the views which have now been taken of the case. My answers were as painstakingly correct as I could make them; but they referred to matters of purely historical or rather antiquarian interest, which could have, I thought, no practical bearing whatsoever on the present position’. ³

Draws attention to movement of information as staccato rather than smooth flows from one level of hierarchy to next.… What information makes it through and what gets filtered out? Also, the idea that purely historical matters have no bearing on present policy positions makes me wonder how policy comes to take on an ahistorical veneer … totally untouched by ‘antiquarian concerns’ Not to mention, Oldham’s anxiety (as seen in the quote above) about his utility to the state is so palpable here… Yikes!

‘As regards to the Tibetans, they still occupy the positions on the Edgar road in Sikkim territory … if general rumours are to be credited, they announce their intention to advance still further into Sikkim with a force augmented by a badly-armed, ill-disciplined kind of militia organised by the monks and drawn from the neighbouring Tibetan villages’. ⁴

Immediate association that comes to mind when reading this description is ‘nasty, brutish and short’—Tibetans as primitive people from the state of nature who lack the arms and organisation and coherence of the British; so much of this view of the Tibetans find echoes in other documents and writing—the Chinese amban calling the Tibetans naturally doltish in another exchange with Viceroy of India (IOR/L/PS/7/112, Reg 60), ⁵ I can’t believe that these references even exist and it’s such a classic example of categories of the Other. (M Balasubramaniam, Critical Annotations on Tibetan Incursions in Sikkim, 31 August 2023)

In moving beyond an uncritical reading of the content, these annotations open out a political and affective dimension of engagement with the document. This is not to overstate a single document’s importance in analysing a particular period’s history. Instead, I argue that critical annotations enable nuanced engagement and create possibilities for forming connections across different documents. In this process, annotations can be used to decentre the state as the key, arguably even the singular actor in IR and emphasise the role of individual bureaucrats and their quotidian anxieties as they produce knowledge about the state and shape its policies. These notes also highlight that information does not merely flow unhindered from one level to the next within the bureaucratic hierarchy. Rather, some concerns emerge in fits and starts, and while some facts capture policy imaginaries, the rest are dismissed as ‘antiquarian’ concerns. Critical annotations, thus, allow us to reflect on how multiple complex concerns are distilled to specific policy decisions that are then communicated through diplomatic channels, such as the letter from the Secretary of the State to the British Envoy in Peking conveying the decision of the government not to evict the Tibetan army in 1886.

Finally, critical annotations, especially on colonial archives, can highlight the racial production of state/state-like actors within the international sphere. This view of the Tibetans as ill-disciplined and naturally doltish reflects a ‘colonial order of things’ (Stoler, 2009, p. 40) that situates Tibetans at the bottom of a racialised hierarchy. This allows the colonial state to discursively produce Tibetans as exclusively an object of imperial concern and not as a political actor with specific state interests.

For researchers exploring contemporary Sino-Indian relations, paying attention to the enduring legacies of these colonial hierarchical categories is important. I argue that contemporary policy discourse strips Tibet and Tibetans in exile of their agency and reduces Tibet to merely a strategic resource, as the Tibet card, to be deployed in service of the needs of the Sino-Indian bilateral relationship. Recuperating the active historical role of Tibetans, especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, requires close reading of archival documents (see for instance, Gupta, 2021), reflecting on colonial categories through which states render legible different communities and paying attention to how, as researchers, we engage with these colonial lenses in our scholarship. I posit that critical annotations may serve as a methodological tool to enable this interrogation.

Building on this, the next section explores the institutional silences in archives and the proliferation of writing outside its boundaries in institutions such as libraries.

Bridging Archival Silences: Primary Material in Libraries

Catalogues of different archives capture what Dirks (2002, p. 52) calls the ‘weight of archival excess’, with pages upon pages of detailed minutiae of the state and its activities. Even as the archival excess looms large and threatens to overwhelm, silences and gaps in the archives stand out conspicuously. As Basu (2022) argues, as a result of the politics of declassification in the country, records of the 1962 Sino-Indian border conflict, among others, are notably absent from the National Archives of India. Even as these records remain inaccessible, there is a proliferation of specialised publications on Sino-Indian relations in the 1950s and 1960s. This includes a series of White Papers published by the Government of India and tabled in the Indian Parliament from 1959 onwards that lay out the Indian territorial claims along the Himalayas and contain detailed accounts of negotiations between Indian and Chinese officials. In addition, there are several reports and brochures published by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting and the Ministry of External Affairs in the immediate aftermath of the 1962 conflict that reinforce the Indian position and foreground and criticise Chinese aggression. These documents are publicly available in the libraries such as the Indian Council of World Affairs (ICWA) Library. The following extract of annotations engages with White Paper V, which captures communications exchanged between the Governments of India and China between November 1960 and November 1961, in the immediate aftermath of Zhou Enlai’s visit to India. The White Paper covers incidents of violation of borders, boundary disputes, airspace violations and allegations of mistreatment of Chinese nationals in India and Indian nationals in China. One of the notes sent from the Indian Ministry of External Affairs to the Chinese embassy in India discusses an alleged intrusion of a Chinese armed patrol in Jelep la Pass in Sikkim in September 1960.

‘The Ministry of External Affairs presents its compliments to the Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in India.… The Government of India would therefore, repeat their request to the Chinese government to take steps to prevent such violation of Sikkim territory in the future. The Ministry of External Affairs takes this opportunity to renew to the Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in India the assurances of their highest consideration’. ⁶

This use of language is so fascinating—EXTREMELY polite salutations and then the actual meat of the note is so much more direct. Chinese response follows same template of polite greetings but the body of the text does not mince words in refuting violations. Rest of the white paper has literally gathered every last note sent by the Indians and the Chinese, highlighting every single violation of territory or airspace and refutation from the other government.… What purpose does this level of detail serve? (M Balasubramaniam, Critical Annotations on White Paper V, 24 July 2023)

Another set of publications, helmed by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting in the immediate aftermath of the Sino-Indian conflict of 1962, zoom out from the details to provide a definitive statement of the Government of India’s territorial claims and position on the border. As one of the publications states,

‘This brochure is designed to correct the inaccuracies of Chinese propaganda and also to indicate to readers the dimensions of the Chinese threat’ ⁷

The tone, purpose and intended audience are clearly not the same. This preface is perhaps the clearest statement of why there is a burst of similar publications post-war. The rest of this brochure foregrounds Indian territorial claims and highlights that the ‘Chinese threat’ has global implications for peace and mutual co-existence. (M Balasubramaniam, Critical Annotations on the Chinese Threat, 25 July 2023)

In encouraging a granular reading of texts and situating them in their unique contexts of production and circulation, critical annotations can emphasise the multiple genres in which the state articulates its positions. In my reading of these texts, it appears that the state speaks in different tongues, depending on the department, the purpose of the communication and its intended audience. In teasing out the multiple repertoires of representation deployed by the state, these annotations can enable us to look beyond the state as a unitary actor and focus on its various processes and state effects. From this perspective, foreign policy is not a reified and unchanging rational capture of national interest and instead emerges from a complex amalgam of perceptions, analyses of situations, interests and concerns about reception.

Simultaneously, critical annotations help us locate documents within the broader contexts within which they are curated and stored. What kinds of accounts remain classified and inaccessible and what is available to the public to view and for researchers to study? I argue that institutional contexts and the curation policies of different institutions shape academic scholarship on foreign policy. For instance, a study of primary resources from the ICWA library produces a specific analysis of the 1962 Sino-Indian conflict informed by publications that were meant to mould domestic and international public opinion. Simultaneously, foregrounding archival silences reminds us that any studies are invariably partial, and the histories of the 1962 conflict, for example, are evolving. Analysing the content available to us, shorn of its institutional contexts, tends to reduce historical contingencies of policymaking and promote unyielding narratives of Chinese aggression and even perfidy in this period. Critical annotations here may serve as a methodological intervention, cautioning us against overgeneralisation and guiding more grounded scholarship and policy analysis.

Conclusion

This process note explored the possibilities of adapting field notes, typically used for qualitative field research, for historical IR research. Sharing some snippets from my multimodal annotations, I have sought to flesh out a few pathways for analysis by deploying this critical method. This concluding section brings together some of the observations discussed above.

In essence, critical annotations place a vital significance on processes. They treat phenomena as unfolding and evolving and simultaneously view research as ongoing. I argue that through an emphasis on the processual, annotations allow us to look beyond foreign policy decisions and outcomes and trace multiple discussions, considerations and alternative options. Here, foreign policy decisions no longer appear as path-dependent outcomes produced from a limited space for manoeuvre. Instead, critical annotations, through a focus on detail, communication structures and institutional contexts of curation and access, allow a researcher to view a field of political possibilities available to the state. Here, the focus is on how bureaucrats at different levels of the state evaluate a situation, provide their suggestions and recommendations and how final policy decisions are distilled from multiple, interests. Critical annotations, I argue, may aid us in exploring how divergent views are mediated to shape the state’s understanding of its strategic space of manoeuvre, its diplomatic and military options and how final policy decisions are articulated. This approach thus enables a shift from post-hoc analysis of successes or failures of policy to a more grounded and critical engagement with foreign policymaking at a given period.

In addition, critical annotation may help complicate the foundational assumption within IR that the state is a unitary actor within international politics. It helps us shift the scales of analysis to disaggregate the state and focus on quotidian state-making processes at different levels of the bureaucratic machinery. It draws attention to the organisational categories deployed by the state to make sense of territory and populations it governs and other international actors with whom the state interacts. It also helps us map the unique vocabularies of rule deployed by the state as it makes sense of itself as an international actor. In doing so, this approach allows us to move beyond a view of national interests as immutable. Instead, it enables us to focus on the historical contexts within which these interests are articulated.

Finally, in encouraging reflexivity, critical annotations draw our attention to the politics of knowledge production. Reading and analysing government documents is never a neutral exercise. Rather, the institutions and resources a researcher can access, the files the researcher chooses, how a researcher reads, the ideas and content that capture our attention and what we gloss over shape the scholarship we produce. It is vital to reflect on this process of engaging with historical material, as we would with field research, in the scholarship we produce on foreign policy. It is an important reminder that there is no authoritative account of foreign policy or bilateral relations. Rather IR scholarship is always partial and always ongoing account, open to revisions, reinterpretations and contestations. As Geertz (1973, 29) notes, reflexivity in ethnographic research requires academics to contend with the fact that scholarship is always incomplete—‘it is turtles all the way down’. It is in this sense of evolution that I see the emancipatory potential of critical annotations.