Reaching the Margins Through the Centre: Navigating State Gateways in Authoritarian Fieldwork

Conducting fieldwork on politically sensitive topics in authoritarian contexts presents researchers with acute trade‐offs between access and autonomy. This note reflects on the methodological strategies and ethical dilemmas we encountered while studying land acquisition in Vietnam—a single‐party state where land conflict represents one of the most politically contentious issues facing the regime. Specifically, we discuss how working through government‐affiliated institutions and local officials carries both significant advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, official state support proved essential for reaching otherwise inaccessible populations and building respondent trust. On the other hand, it introduced sampling biases toward compliant respondents, misperceptions of researcher power among interviewees, and ethical tensions inherent in conducting research that state actors viewed as potentially useful. We describe the adaptive strategies we employed to mitigate these constraints and reflect on the broader implications for positionality, research integrity, and the responsibilities of researchers who study communities whose lives are shaped by the very systems under investigation.