Navigating Suspicion: Access, Trust, and the Ethics of Studying Border Bureaucracies 

Guest post by Maartje van der Woude. Maartje van der Woude is a Professor of Law & Society at Leiden Law School, the Netherlands, specializing in border criminology, migration control, and socio-legal studies. In her most recent book “The Mobility Control Apparatus: Getting to the Core of Crimmigration in the Schengen Area” (Routledge, 2025), she examines the discretionary dynamics of migration and border control within Europe’s Schengen Area, where criminal law and immigration enforcement increasingly converge. This blog is part of her current research project “Emotional Labour in the Borderlands”, funded through an NWO SSH-Medium grant (project nr: 406.22.RB.007). 

"Everything changes, nothing perishes." This quote from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (book XV, line 165) became a quiet companion throughout the years I spent studying intra-Schengen mobility control. Despite constant political shifts, policy reforms, and legal recalibrations, the structures underpinning Europe’s border regime remained strikingly persistent—and exclusionary. I came to understand this paradox most intimately not through theory, but through fieldwork with one of the Netherlands’ key border actors: the Royal Netherlands Marechaussee (RNM). The RNM  is a military police force that operates at the intersection of defense, policing, and migration governance, playing a key role in border control, mobility management, and the enforcement of migration-related policies. 

This blog post responds to the call of this series: to reflect not only on our research findings but also on the messy, often obscured process of gaining and maintaining access to state security institutions. Access, after all, is not merely logistical—it is epistemological. How we are received (or rejected) by border bureaucracies reveals a great deal about how those organizations perceive themselves, their power, and us. 

A Call to Adventure 

My research journey began almost by accident. When a student I was supervising expressed interest in interning with the RNM, I realized how little I knew about this semi-military police force. I initially mapped them in my mind as a ceremonial guard tasked with protecting the royal family. But as I dug deeper, I discovered their pivotal role in policing both the external and internal borders of the Schengen Area, operating at the intersection of national security, migration control, and criminal justice. 

Curious, I reached out to request a meeting. The response was a mixture of openness and reservation. While operational-level contacts were relatively forthcoming—thanks in part to the student’s internship—there was marked hesitation at the (higher) management level. Nevertheless, I was invited to RNM headquarters in The Hague. I still remember walking in, wearing a brightly colored dress with a large red flower pinned to it, greeted by four uniformed officers who rose stiffly from their chairs. It was a moment of symbolic collision: academic curiosity meeting military formality. 

Gaining Access, Slowly 

Access did not come in one moment—it unfolded over time. There were informal chats, bureaucratic hurdles, and repeated rounds of “testing the waters.” As Schwell aptly describes, researching security organizations means navigating terrain that is opaque, shifting, and highly codified. Fieldwork here is never neutral. You are constantly being read, assessed, and—at times—distrusted. 

Still, I was allowed in. And, to the surprise of many of my (inter)national colleagues, I stayed in. 

That fact alone merits reflection. In a field where access is often denied or revoked—particularly after critical publications—I have been repeatedly welcomed back by the RNM. Over the past decade, I have published work that openly questions aspects of their migration control practices. And yet, my access has not only endured but occasionally deepened, something that speaks to the RNM’s rare and commendable professional openness. 

But it also raises an uncomfortable question: when does sustained access risk becoming co-optation? 

The Ethics of Being “In” 

As Bosma, de Goede, and Pallister-Wilkins remind us, secrecy is not only about what is hidden—it is also about the conditions under which access is granted. Being allowed “inside” can, subtly or explicitly, come with expectations: of alignment, of caution, of self-censorship. Didier Bigo has warned that researchers working in the field of security may become “functional actors”—recruited into stabilizing the very systems they seek to critique. 

These are not abstract concerns. I have been invited to closed-door meetings, consulted informally, and occasionally cited by internal actors. While part of me sees this as a sign of research relevance, I also recognize the risk: the gradual drift from critical observer to useful accessory. 

To guard against this, I’ve tried to remain explicit about my theoretical commitments and independence in my publishing. I do not submit my work for internal approval. I continue to interrogate the racialized, securitized logics of mobility control—even when doing so makes follow-up fieldwork more complicated. As Michael Lipsky observed in his work on street-level bureaucrats, proximity to power can clarify—but it can also cloud. I’ve had to learn to let my proximity sharpen my questions, not dull them. 

Deep Hanging and Uneasy Intimacies 

Throughout the fieldwork, I practiced what Geertz (1998) calls “deep hanging out”—a method of building trust not through formal interviews but through shared time and everyday conversation. I spent hours on border patrols, in roadside cafes, during long periods of downtime. I heard about officers’ childhoods, marriages, missions abroad, and disillusionments with the system they served. 

These interactions humanized the organization in important ways. They reminded me that border bureaucracies are not monoliths but collections of people navigating contradictions. Yet those same officers could, within minutes, shift into authoritarian or sometimes even discriminatory behavior when interacting with people on the move. These moments were jarring. They produced moral dissonance: how could someone I’d just shared a pleasant conversation with, and seemed to be able to connect with on a certain level, express such exclusionary views? 

Over time, I learned to ask—not confront. “What made you react that way?” “What do you think is going on here?” These questions often led to more revealing conversations than outright criticism. But they also forced me to confront the uncomfortable truth that empathy and critique must coexist. The challenge is to resist reducing state agents to either heroes or villains—to hold space for complexity without abandoning criticality. 

Access as Data, Not Just a Means 

Reflecting on this over a decade-long research relationship, I now see access itself as part of the data. Who gets let in, under what terms, and how that access evolves over time are all clues to the institutional self-understanding of security actors. In my case, the RNM’s continued openness signals not just tolerance but a strategic confidence. It is, perhaps, a tacit claim: “We have nothing to hide.” But as scholars, we must always ask—what might still remain unsaid? 

Studying border bureaucracies from the inside requires a careful dance: to stay close enough to understand, but distant enough to critique. It means recognizing when you are being instrumentalized, and when you are beginning to instrumentalize others. It means acknowledging that the very act of being granted access is never neutral—it is part of the bordering process itself. 

 
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