Ground work und paper work: Feldzugang bei Polizeiorganisationen in Westafrika

Drawing on our experience requesting access to police organisations in Ghana and Niger, this article explores the organisation and operation of two West African bureaucracies. It focuses on the administrative modes and the state agents' routines in their dealing with civil actors. Exceptional and risk carrying requests such as ours concerning a permission to conduct participant observation in police organisations create insecurity on the part of the bureaucrats concerned. Although rarely expressed in field reports and often discounted as a series of fortunate coincidences, we consider the researcher's access (or refusal) a crucial and illuminating moment of fieldwork. In our case, both technical bureaucratic operations and informal networks played a central role in our own approach as well as in the state agents' work routines and reflections on their daily occupation. Following an emic description, we call these two modes of procedure "ground work" and "paper work". The oscillating between the two reflects an inevitable interlacing of bureaucratic and informal operations, characteristic for bureaucratic organisations worldwide. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]