Symposium on Informers Up Close: On Stories and Lives Lived – The Method and Ethics of Granularity

[Nesam McMillan is an Associate Professor in Criminology at the University of Melbourne, Australia, and author of Imagining the International: Crime, Justice and the Promise of Community (2020)]

In their new book, Drumbl and Holá offer a meditative scholarly inquiry into the practice, motivations and social significance of informing. They invite the reader to better appreciate the everydayness of informing (p. 6), beautifully illustrating how informing is both commonplace throughout time and place and an activity that occurs in the context of people’s everyday lives for a range of deeply personal as well as contextual reasons. Indeed, Informers Up Close does enable a proximity, an interpersonal closeness, between the reader and the informers with whose lives it engages. Yet, it also maintains an awareness of its limits, and the limits of knowing more generally, and of the ethics and politics of its chosen focus. It is these strands – of proximity to lives lived in contexts of repression and state violence and of the method and ethics of such a project – that I focus on in this reflection.

On Lives Lived

This book is about stories

p. 8

Stories and representations of suffering and victimhood are now recognised as crucial to the global practices of human rights, humanitarianism and transitional and international justice. Certain people’s lives and experiences are picked up, becoming global icons of a particular historical, social and political event of violence. And stories of suffering are crucial to fostering a sense of proximity between geographically distant spectators and the experiences of others elsewhere. But there is also a representational violence to such practices, which enable wider engagement with other people’s experiences but also appropriate suffering, downplay people’s individuality and specificity and operate according to racial and colonial logics. Stories simultaneously enable ethical and relational proximity as well as distance.

It is in this context that Drumbl and Holá decide to listen, carefully, to the stories that have not been heard or not been heard well. Even further, they decide to listen, carefully, to the stories that have been flattened and seen with disdain:  stories of those who informed against others, including sometimes their friends and family, in the context of state violence and repression. The authors openly acknowledge that such acts of informing caused real and material harm for many who were informed upon, both during the time of communist rule and when these acts were later revealed to the public in times of transition. The aim of their book, they clarify, is not to justify or impugn the act of informing but, more fundamentally, to understand it (p. 197).

Drumbl and Holá seek to understand why people started informing, why they continued and how they acted in this relationship. Drumbl and Holá draw out the varied reasons why diverse individuals end up as informers, highlighting the centrality of emotions (particularly the emotions of fear, devotion and allegiance, desire and resentment) in people’s trajectories towards becoming and remaining an informer. Moreover, they demonstrate the relational and dialogic nature of the informer-agent dyad, which possessed its own interpersonal dynamics – including even sometimes dynamics of care and concern. In this way, Informers Up Close provides a poignant and affective account of the ‘intimacy’ that characterised the practice of informing (p. 156). It does so by reading the files kept by the StB (the secret police in Communist Czechoslovakia) and connecting them with other academic and non-academic sources. 

Through this method, Informers Up Close provides a detailed – what the authors describe as a ‘granular’ (p. 7) – account of people’s lives and dispositions as they are seen through these files. As you close the book’s covers, the reader is left with in-depth portraits of lives lived: of potential hopes and aspirations, decisions and missteps and the social, economic and political constraints and enablers that shaped these. Věra, Vašek, Lily, Goldfus, Volný and Soukup. Věra’s vulnerability; Lily’s tenacity; and Goldfus’ ambition. These are stories that, individually and collectively, stay with you and whose complexity and detail is belatedly acknowledged to matter. 

It is the close documentation and analysis offered through Informers Up Close that achieves this recovery of their stories as lives lived. As lives that have meaning and significance even if they involve actions that might be broadly condemned and have caused harm. And as lives that provide a window into the complex constellation of personal, social, political, historic and economic factors that enabled a repressive regime to maintain a network of informers who even informed on each other and created a widespread sense of a panoptican state. In taking this step, this book makes an important contribution to a more robust scholarly engagement with the practice of informing as well as drawing out the implications of this contribution to the practice and ethics of transitional justice.

The Method and Ethics of Granularity

Indeed, multiple emotions are in play at the same time and at different times among informers and within the same informer. We think this granularity, ferment, change, and messiness matter enormously.

p. 22

The methodology of this book is a constant refrain throughout the discussion. This may be in part due to the controversial nature of its topic, but more likely also a result of the established commitment of both authors to the responsibilities of producing academic knowledge. Throughout both their prior work, questions of epistemology and method are key frames, and they are also another factor that makes Informers Up Close stand out. That is, Informers Up Close takes on a difficult and possibly unpopular topic because it seeks to contribute to what we know and how we understand. It seeks to probe deeper into that which we might not know enough about, because that constitutes a core rationale for academic work. And it doesn’t seek to provide clear or simple explanations, as much as to stay true to the phenomena with which it engages, even when this produces messy, contradictory and multi-faceted findings. Resisting the pull to unity and smoothness, in the name of retaining the richness of what has emerged, are qualities of rigorous research that it is important to recognise.

Hence my description of the book at the start of my reflection as meditative. Throughout this text, Drumbl and Holá strive to place acts and their comments on them in context; to consider how dominant approaches to the justness of informing may be shaped by our own socio-historical position; and to consider the differing perspectives to questions of responsibility found in different fields of law and culture. They start by asking ‘[w]hat is the epistemic value of the StB files? What are their truths and accuracies? What can these files tell us about the lives of individuals, along with their joys, worries, emotions, and motivations?’ (p. 9). They note both the limits of and gaps in these state generated files and the insights they can nevertheless provide into the ‘cadence, rhythm, provenance, and dialogic drivers’ of the informing relationship (p. 16). They explain their conscious choice to present six people’s stories in their book in detail: ‘we could have made the file-stories shorter or even tightened them down to their bare bones. But we decided not to. We wanted to keep them rich, and vivid, yet not fulsome … This is because the wealth of “high-resolution” granularity greatly matters to us’ (p. 103). 

I deeply appreciate how Drumbl and Holá set out their methodological choices and reasonings. This involves often taking the reader through their process of formulating their arguments, acknowledging what they don’t know or can’t be certain about, and how they recognise that there could be other interpretations. This leaves it open to the reader to draw different conclusions or actively reflect on their own assumptions and styles of reasoning they brought to the text. Drumbl and Holá talk about movement in relation to their approach to (e)motions (p. 20), and I also found their text to be one of movement, taking the reader to different contexts, to see things from different perspectives and through their own intellectual journeys in formulating their findings. There is a deep ethics to such methodological robustness, an ethics of being accountable for the knowledge you produce and the process of its production. And it is in this sense that Drumbl and Holá’s attentiveness to methodology speaks also to the ethical responsibility they willingly take on in engaging with people’s lives and stories and providing an academic frame for their others’ engagement with them.

There is also a deep ethics to granularity itself; to insisting that details, circumstances, motivations and contexts matter. This does not excuse the act of informing, but does justice to it, as a focus of research. For while human rights and international law frameworks sometimes invite us to see clear divisions between perpetrators and victims and those who are innocent and to blame, there is an increasing recognition of the existence of what the authors refer to as ‘liminal figures’, such as ‘victims who victimize’ (pp. 221, 191). And beyond just liminality, as Drumbl and Holá make visible, there is a connection between binaristic approaches and punitive responses. So, while it remains central to hold on to justice, responsibility and recognition in the face of harm, Informers Up Close invites the reader to consider how transitional justice too may take a more nuanced, tailored and contextual approach to the injuries it addresses (pp. 221-222). The call is for transitional justice approaches to also take seriously the ethics and method with which they engage with people’s stories and lives. In the hope that this might shift attention from a neater, more politically convenient mode of dealing with the past to a more sophisticated and reconciliatory approach that moves beyond simply retribution to embrace the complexity and intricacy of coming to terms with difficult pasts and building collective futures.