Between Knowing and Writing: Ethics of Declining Use in Conflict Environments

How should researchers in “closed contexts”, navigate “post‐access” scenario when their own positionality conflicts with ideologically driven keepers of “information” in conflict/authoritarian settings? If they decide to consciously write/not write such information, do researchers perpetuate “relations of domination” prevalent on field or compromise agency of the marginalized populations? Also, how should researchers navigate indirect threats, suspicion and fear that come along while navigating through such information? Based on my fieldwork experience of doing policy ethnography (October 2022–June 2023) in spatially polarised Ahmedabad (and a short fieldwork in Dimapur (Nagaland) studying mob lynching incident and peacekeeping in 2015 in which a mosque was attacked), this short paper engages with the ethical implications of “possessing information” through what I call “declining to use access”. Declining access implies selective withdrawal of access to sensitive information that could be valuable to research as it is shared on perceived perceptions of mutual trust (intimacy) by partisan and non‐partisan actors in authoritarian settings.