‘You are one of us’, but I wasn’t Managing expectations and emotions when studying powerful security actors

Studying people of power is still not very typical for anthropologists, but it has been done for many years. Laura Nader already called upon her peers to study up and with this to gain more understanding in power relations in the United States in the 1970s. The author studied the Israeli security industry and its global reach. She wanted to understand how Israeli security as a commodity is marketed, how it sold and what messages are conveyed when doing so. Most of her fieldwork was in Israel; she would interview security actors from the industry. The author would go to do observations at security fairs. She would walk around the stalls of a range of companies, selling weapons, cybertechnologies, uniforms and helmets, and their security consultancy services. The emotion of relief every time the author finished an interview or after walking out of a security exhibition in Tel Aviv’s big convention centre was intense.