Investigative policy analysis: Leveraging ethnography's postures to research secretive state policies in access-restricted authoritarian contexts

This article argues that the investigative postures and sensibilities inherent in ethnography can be synthesized with document-based policy analysis to assess secretive government policies in severely access-restricted contexts. It outlines ‘Investigative Policy Analysis,’ the approach that decisively contributed to uncovering Beijing's system of oppressive policies in China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Investigative policy analysis adapts an ethnographic logic of discovery to a non-ethnographic object of inquiry. The method qualitatively differs from digital ethnography: rather than exploring online social interactions or meaning-making, it treats digital spaces as forensic repositories of bureaucratic evidence. Unlike process tracing, which maps causal links between known variables, this approach must first reconstruct the concealed policy system itself. As in microhistory, it synthesizes micro-level data points to reveal governance structures and their impact. By integrating a posture of ‘fluidity’ with analytical ‘rigor,’ this form of ‘long-distance digital forensics’ enables scholarly inquiry in access-restricted authoritarian settings.