Ambiguous spaces,empirical traces: Accounting for ignorance when researching around the illicit

1 “The illicit” in human geography

The illicit is a consequential but often overlooked phenomenon in human geography that has gained increasing attention in numerous subfields. These include: the geographies of crime and policing (Evans et al., 2002; Fyfe, 1991; Gilmer, 2014, 2016; Harries, 1971; LeBeau and Leitner, 2011; Lowman, 1986; Moran and Schliehe, 2017; Peet, 1975; Yarwood, 2007); migration, conflict, and security (Peluso and Watts, 2001; Samers, 2004; Zolberg, 1989); resource frontiers and territorialization (Ballvé, 2019b; Kelly and Peluso, 2015; McSweeney et al., 2018; Watts, 2018); natural resource governance and conservation (Bocarejo and Ojeda, 2016; Kelly, 2011; Robbins et al., 2009; Woods and Naimark, 2020; Ybarra, 2012); and economic geography on illicit economies (Brown and Hermann, 2020b; Gregson and Crang, 2017; Hall, 2010; Hudson, 2020). Although other fields (sociology, criminology, anthropology) have more consistently engaged with the illicit, geographical theorizations bring out its socio-spatial and territorial implications. In particular, geographers have revealed how competing state and non-state authorities continually negotiate the bounds between licit and illicit to favor various interests, discipline populations, and reorganize space (Abraham and Van Schendel, 2005; Hall, 2013; Hudson, 2014). In this section, we discuss how the illicit has been treated in human geography and how we operationalize it in our analysis.

Although the term “illicit” is often used as a self-evident category, it is actually fraught with ambiguity. We follow Abraham and Van Schendel (2005), recognizing that the defining line between licit and illicit transcends state definitions of legality. Illicit activities are pervasive in both social life and state processes (Abraham and Van Schendel, 2005: 7) and are integral to global economies and geopolitical configurations (Hudson, 2014). Capital, goods, and actors are not innately illicit or licit, but merely accumulate these labels as they circulate (Gregson and Crang, 2017: 212–213). Categorization of the illicit is shaped by local perceptions of morality, enforceability, and the threat of violence or other risks, all of which are highly context-dependent and dynamic. Certain spaces support a wide range of unlawful but socially permissible activities and many illicit and licit activities mutually reinforce each other (Roitman, 2006). As Hall (2013) describes, “In spaces that elude the sovereign gaze of the state or across which it is uncertain or contested, the formal distinctions between licit and illicitness become problematic, even meaningless” (373). States thus extend their authority over new regions and peoples by dictating the licit/illicit boundary and securing their exclusive right to enforce it (Vandergeest and Peluso, 1995).

Illicit activities range from complex, highly adaptable, multinational operations with vast spatial footprints and vertically integrated production, to smaller and more localized organizations, to isolated, unorganized, or small-scale crime performed by individuals or families as a survival strategy (Hudson, 2014: 779). Illicit organizations are generally fluid; individual actors or groups may at times merge with larger organizational structures and later disperse (Hudson, 2014) or be amorphous in structure to varying degrees (Finckenauer, 2005). While participation in these networks may be locally normalized, persecution by national and/or international entities encourages a veil of secrecy surrounding the networks’ activities that members often enforce through real or perceived threats of violence (Andreas, 2011: 419–420). This obscures the entanglements of these networks in a wide range of licit and illicit economic activities and social and political affairs (Slack and Campbell, 2016). Hall (2013) has attributed the paucity of substantive reflections on organized crime in geography to the extensive scale of illicit networks, the “opacity” around illicit activities generally, and the ontological uncertainties between licit and illicit activities that make it difficult to analyze. This paper seeks to address this analytical challenge.

Because the impacts of transnational illicit networks affect myriad research topics in human geography (Abraham and Van Schendel, 2005; Hall, 2013; Nordstrom, 2007), we operationalize “the illicit” with a focus on illicit commodity production and trade networks. Though the insights gained are applicable to illicit activities across the spectrum, the authors’ research sites (Mexico, Peru, Colombia, and Laos) were heavily affected by patterns of conflict and governance related to the cultivation, processing, and/or transportation of illicit “drug” crops, controlled by narco-trafficking networks (or “cartels”). The resource frontiers and borderlands we study have long been intertwined with the illicit (Castells, 1996: 162; Hall, 2013: 376), making ambiguity around livelihoods and resource use in these areas particularly widespread.

2 Ambiguous spaces: Illicit regimes in resource frontiers

A key set of research questions in human geography and political ecology intersect in resource frontiers. Though our research primarily focused on aspects of these frontiers other than illicit activities, namely resource management and society-environment interactions, illicit activities were entangled with our research topics in the places we work: rural hinterlands of developing countries; areas less connected to state services, infrastructure, and control; and spaces where natural resources and livelihoods are closely intertwined. This is no coincidence. Resource exploitation and illicit networks are both served by these regions’ illegibility to formal state governance. The ambiguity that permeates these places only enhances the messy relations between field-based geographic research, state power, and illicit activities.

Although illicit networks span the globe and affect a variety of spaces, a common set of conditions conducive to activities like drug crop cultivation, processing, and transport tend to intersect with conditions that produce dynamic rural resource frontiers. Such frontiers are frequently peripheral regions, especially borderlands where licit market activity is less supported and state-sanctioned development, resource extraction, and land governance are less established (Bloomer, 2009; Brown and Hermann, 2020a; Greenough, 2004). They are also often home to marginalized minority groups and multiple competing authorities where formal property relations are still being institutionalized, livelihoods are changing rapidly, natural resource extraction is increasing, and state control is being expanded, reformulated, and renegotiated (Barney, 2009; Kelly and Peluso, 2015).

Our research sites exemplify how illicit activities thrive in resource frontiers. In the northern borderlands of Chihuahua, Mexico, decades of state neglect and economic hardship have spurred widespread emigration, consolidated agricultural production, and expanded opportunities for a thriving drug trafficking economy. In the lowlands of the Peruvian Amazon, dense forest and sheer remoteness have challenged the expansion of state control and infrastructure while enabling coca cultivation, land trafficking, and illegal logging to proceed alongside traditional production systems. Similarly, the rainforests and mangroves of the Pacific Coast of Colombia shelter revolutionary guerilla armies, paramilitaries, and other violent actors who use cocaine production and trafficking to fund their causes. In the highlands of northern Laos, opium cultivation and trade persist in areas distant from state centers and markets, and close to increasingly permeable borderlands.

The characteristic distance of resource frontiers from centers of state control provides a measure of protection for illicit activities and actors (McSweeney et al., 2018). Places with contested, incomplete, or contradictory state oversight are able to serve as hubs for transnational trafficking of illicit goods (Brown and Hermann, 2020a). In such spaces, illicit activities may be irreducibly entangled in social relations of production, the performance and assertion of resource claims, and flows of information, capital, and goods. As a consequence, “confusions between legal and illegal, public and private, disciplined and wild” can produce conditions in which rapacious resource extraction and illicit activity both thrive (Tsing, 2003: 5103). Ballvé (2019b) even labels frontiers with thriving illicit regimes as “narco-frontiers” where “uneven development, internal colonialism, political violence, and narco-fuelled dispossession” intersect (211). Brown and Hermann (2020b) refer to landscapes of extreme illegibility and little state control as “black spots." In many of these spaces, illicit networks or criminal organizations maintain their own form of order and control, even taking on certain state functions (Ballvé, 2019b; Hudson, 2014). Although these organizations act and work locally, they are made possible and structured by webs of transnational connections and distant global processes (Aas, 2007).

Spaces illegible to the state often become targets of securitization or development interventions (Abraham and Van Schendel, 2005). Emphasizing the overlap between frontier spaces and illicit geographies in turn helps states justify and harness international support for controversial, even violent, interventions (Ybarra, 2012). Thus, illicit activities can be highly lucrative but place those who engage in them at risk of punitive measures from state or transnational authorities, leading illicit activities to increasingly peripheral places and increasing secrecy. Because of these dynamics, resource frontiers, narco-frontiers, and other such havens for illicit networks tend to be characterized by pervasive uncertainty, where it is difficult to ascertain precisely who is doing precisely what. In such contexts, what limited information is available is often highly ambiguous.

3 Spheres of ambiguity

The ambiguity surrounding illicit activities has specific characteristics that we term spheres of ambiguity—strategically produced shrouds of opacity and epistemic uncertainty spanning multiple dimensions, in which knowledge about certain activities, actors, and places remains deliberately occluded and imprecise, affecting both insiders’ and outsiders’ ability to interpret and classify information to varying degrees. Ambiguity is a powerful analytic, which Best (2008) defines as a proclivity for multiple interpretations that “captures some of the forms of indeterminacy that exceed and overflow the categories of risk and uncertainty” (355). Spheres of ambiguity surrounding illicit activities obscure the timing and geographic extent of illicit activities, the actors participating, income generated, and the nature of the activities themselves. Strategic ambiguity is used by these illicit networks as both a tool of governing and a resistance to state governance (Best, 2008; Stel, 2016).

Ambiguity generates ignorance or incoherence on a topic through a resistance to a singular interpretation or classification (Best, 2012). This is what McGoey (2007) terms “liminal ignorance” or half-knowledge. Such a flexibility in interpretation can be emancipatory in the face of systems that impose false binaries (Sedgewick, 2008), but can also create strategic advantages, whether applied to bureaucracy within organizations (Best, 2012), scientific findings (McGoey, 2007; Smithson, 1989), or in the case of illicit activities, evading the law. According to Best (2008: 362), ambiguity is reinforced and maintained by three facets of modern knowledge: the imperfection of language with respect to representation; self-reflexivity, which makes knowledge always subjective and partial; and the historical contingency of knowledge. Best’s focus on ambiguity centers on how information is invariably communicated imperfectly from one person to another. Ambiguity can also be cultivated through non-verbal signs, other context-based cues, and a general atmosphere of epistemic murk (Taussig, 1984). Within spheres of ambiguity, even mundane occurrences such as real estate transactions or fishing locations can become ambiguous because it is practically impossible (for a variety of possible reasons) to verify whether such occurrences are connected to illicit activity. This ambiguity makes it difficult for a researcher to interpret events with a high degree of certainty.

The considerable risks associated with collecting data about illicit activities for field-based researchers raise both ethical and methodological questions (Fitzgerald and Hamilton, 1996). Illicit networks often have codes of silence enforced throughout the ranks (e.g., Baker and Faulkner, 1993; Barton and Davis, 2018; Erickson, 1981; Lindelauf et al., 2009). Within and surrounding these networks, money and violence are often used to control the flow of information, and ambiguity can be an important form of protection (Ballvé, 2019a). Ignorance and ambiguity can serve as political tools in that they can protect against legal incrimination; in a court of law, ambiguous evidence would be inadmissible or at best circumstantial by legal standards. Informants may thus be safer not knowing too much and not revealing information to others. Due to ever-present threats or stories of violence, an atmosphere of terror may be characteristic of ambiguous spaces (Luna, 2018), with the accompanying epistemic murk described by Taussig (1984).

Spheres of ambiguity surrounding illicit networks make the regions and actors that interact with these networks more difficult to study, particularly for outside researchers (Ballvé, 2019a), even (and perhaps especially) when illicit activities are not the focus of the research. Ambiguous signs can include language, material phenomena, norms and social practices, and social roles (Best, 2012): 89). Information is often not fully concealed or revealed to researchers, or even to their informants, but rather is couched in vague terms that obfuscate who is involved and what activities, exactly, are occurring. While ambiguities may be understood among locals, they tend to be more opaque for outsiders less accustomed to coded speech and hidden meanings, and access to illicit spaces can be elusive (Ballvé, 2019a). Knowing smiles and other non-verbal language indicating open secrets among insiders are common in spaces where both formal and informal rules and conventions must be negotiated (Ledeneva, 2011). Actions, too, are ambiguous, when observed and reported activities may or may not be connected to illicit materials or transactions. Spheres of ambiguity can enfold activities that are used to conceal illicit activities or launder illicit gains, making it difficult for researchers to parse the relative balance of income, effort, and influence from licit versus illicit activities. Thus, spheres of ambiguity create analytic challenges that are often ignored, footnoted, or simply flagged as “gaps” due to the difficulty and danger of investigating these topics more closely.

Despite their resistance to study, documentation, and quantification, illicit networks can have profound local influences, adding uncertainty to otherwise non-controversial research topics like local resource use or household economics (Devine et al., 2020; McSweeney et al., 2014). According to Hudson:

...the difficulties of definition and measurement and in obtaining precise empirical data as to the extent of illegality should not stand in the way of seeking to understand its function and the relations between the legal and illegal. The illegal has clearly become an integral part of the contemporary phase of capitalist development. Put simply, it is too important—practically and theoretically—to ignore (Hudson, 2014: 780–781).

Though there are promising methods for researching illicit activities in ambiguous or violent spaces, such as Ballvé’s (2019a) investigative ethnography, some researchers may have topical, logistical, or institutional constraints that prevent the direct study of illicit activity. In either case, the collected data are likely to have gaps and limitations that can reproduce ambiguity. We find valuable grounds for addressing these limitations by applying conceptual tools from agnotology (studies of ignorance) to understand the contours, boundaries, and origins of the spheres of ambiguity encountered in research around the illicit.

1 Sensing absences

Recognizing meaningful absences in knowledge requires reflexivity and a willingness to question one’s data. This step is aimed at detecting ignorances during field work and within the data collected, as well as identifying the topics in which those ignorances occur.

How can ignorance be recognized empirically? The challenge in detecting empirical absences is that they defy outright observation. However, absences may become evident when researchers notice ambiguities or encounter “empirical traces”: glimpses or hints of things that are otherwise obscured, though the meaning may remain uncertain (Frickel, 2014). A story, warning, or unexpected physical encounter may provide just enough to reveal one’s ignorance. Depending on the situation, this could either encourage further investigation or warn away from that line of inquiry. Ambiguous body language such as knowing glances and smiles may also alert a researcher that a verbal communication may have an alternate interpretation. In some cases this may be inaccessible insider knowledge, and in others such non-verbal cues may be understood by the researcher but difficult to document or confirm since it was not said aloud, cannot be asked about, and may directly contradict what was actually said (Ledeneva, 2011). Some absences can be recognized more easily when there are explicit barriers (e.g., when places are “off limits” or questions “off record”). Empirical ignorances will likely be more visible to researchers with deep local experience and are therefore more likely to be detected during long-term ethnographic research than through research methods that require less time in the field engaged in direct personal interaction.

How can ignorance be detected during data analysis? The ability to detect ignorance in data can be cultivated through attention to the differences between what is learned and what could or should be knowable. Absences may become apparent through mismatches in triangulation, repeated gaps in reported information, or by identifying what Star and Bowker (2007) call “residues," or types of ambiguous information that defies categorization and therefore is often left out or minimized in analyses. Identifying analytic residues serves as a presencing practice that can give way to new forms of knowledge (e.g., Puig De la Bellacasa, 2014).

What areas of knowledge are affected by ignorances? Ignorances impact the ability to answer certain research questions. Identifying topical themes that likely contain absences and ambiguity aid in assessing the overall effects of the ignorance on the study and the research site. These can be assessed by questioning what types of information may have been obscured by ambiguity around the illicit as well as how decision-making in the research process may have resulted in the avoidance of certain places, people, or types of questions.

2 Describing ignorance

Describing ignorance ethnographically allows for a deeper analysis of its effects than just identifying its existence. This step more finely delimits the boundary between what is known and unknown.

What is the form of ignorance? Ignorance can constitute either a complete lack of information or ambiguous, erroneous, or misinterpreted information. Whereas a researcher often encounters an absence of information surrounding illicit activities themselves, ignorance in the form of incorrect or ambiguous knowledge can also be produced by informants in the process of obscuring the existence of or participation in illicit activities. This can expand the sphere of ambiguity well beyond topics directly related to the illicit.

What is the degree of ignorance? Knowledge and ignorance form a continuum, not a binary (Frickel, 2014). The degree of ignorance describes the extent to which something is unknown, on a gradient from partial to complete ignorance (Rappert, 2015). A partial ignorance stems from something that is known of (e.g., via empirical traces) but cannot be fully seen, understood, interpreted, or quantified, often due to some type of ambiguity. Most ignorance that can be identified is partial ignorance, in contrast to a complete absence of information (sometimes called nescience) in which an “unknown” is entirely hidden (Gross, 2007).

What are the characteristics of the ignorance? We adapt Croissant’s (2014, 2018) typology to describe ignorance by adding relationality, spatiality, and materiality. ¹ These additional characteristics are relevant for understanding ignorance geographically in a field-based context (rather than a textual or laboratory context). Thus, ignorance can be assessed with respect to the following characteristics:

Chronicity: The time scale of ignorance; non-knowledge can occur in the present, can be prospective (in the future), or retrospective (occurring in the past).

3 Assessing the causes of ignorance

Interacting with spheres of ambiguity surrounding the illicit, ignorance can be reinforced at multiple points in the research process. The “ignorance supply chain” is made up of the nested and interdependent institutions and processes from the inception of a study to the dissemination of results. Ignorance can be actively or passively created at each stage, with further impacts downstream.

How is ignorance generated in situ? Informants, collaborators, state actors, and institutions can all generate ignorance. Assessing the production of ignorance requires identifying the actors, practices, and structures that produce, maintain, and disseminate various forms of ignorance. Are ignorances generated actively (e.g., concealment or deceit) or passively (e.g., avoidance or neglect)? Is ignorance the result of individual actions or are there institutional structures or constraints that promote ignorance? How is secrecy enforced and maintained? In the case of research around the illicit, these could range from threats of violence (to the researcher or to their informants), to principled aversion (e.g., where illicit activity is considered morally distasteful and thus not discussed), to cultural norms and habits that generate ambiguity. The high stakes and overlapping factors driving secrecy around illicit activities and networks make these distinctions particularly difficult to ascertain.

How do research practices reinforce ignorance? Researchers are embedded in an institutional context wherein funders, advisers, collaborators, review boards, stakeholders, and publishers can all contribute to the ignorance supply chain by steering the researcher away from certain topics, populations, and places. This chain has corollaries in the sites and social systems we study where a variety of actors across scales and levels of authority contribute to the production of ignorance. Thus, ignorance is created, fostered, tolerated, and reproduced both through research practices and by processes external to them, and often these are entangled. Interrogating how our own research practices engage or ignore the presence of the illicit brings attention to the ways we “presence” and “absence” certain details (Rappert, 2015), which are sometimes political or ethical in nature. Gervais et al. (2001: 424) describe four interrelated categories of absences produced during research, and we have added positional absences to this list:

Theoretical: a result of inadequate theorization or inability to conceptualize.

Assessing how ignorances are generated at each stage of the research process helps the researcher hone their practices, as well as account for their limitations.

1 Sensing absence: Recognizing the shadows through empirical traces

The presence of illicit activities in our field sites was revealed through empirical traces that provided only ambiguous details about the activity or who participated. Certain places were unexpectedly off limits, certain questions repeatedly unanswered; we stumbled upon evidence of illicit activities (hearing about packages of drugs washed up on the beach or being led through a field of coca during an interview); interlocutors made certain comments only off record. Sometimes the illicit showed up in storytelling that blurred fact and fiction, or emerged as coded or ambiguous language (e.g., fishing for “white fish”—smuggling cocaine by boat). Other times, references to illicit activities were included in broader narratives but rarely seen firsthand (e.g., rumors that certain villages or ethnic groups cultivated opium or coca). Despite the ambiguity and secrecy surrounding these encounters, taking note of them enhanced understanding of our regions of study. The accumulation of empirical traces elucidated gaps in our knowledge and guided more careful, systematic consideration of how these ignorances affected our research questions.

Through the Ignorance Assessment Framework, we identified three themes most likely impacted by absent, ambiguous, and erroneous information related to the illicit in our cases: (a) livelihoods, labor allocation, and income; (b) natural resource use, land use, and land transfers; and (c) governance, social relations, and power dynamics (Table 1). The following section is organized around these themes.

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Table 1.

Assessing the effects of illicit-related ignorance.

(a) Livelihoods, labor allocation, and income
Research themes affected	Knowledge obscured	Possible misinterpretations
Viability and importance of livelihood activities Time allocation of labor Relative contributions to household income Decision-making about diversification, intensification, extensification, or migration	Participation, income, and importance of illicit activities Decisions about traditional livelihoods and labor activities Reasons individuals emigrate or not (e.g., danger or supplemental earnings) Trade and trafficking quantities and importance	Overreported licit livelihood activities Extra income or apparent wealth ascribed to licit livelihoods Total income underreported Decision-making about livelihoods misattributed
(b) Natural resource use, land use, and land transfers
Research themes affected	Knowledge obscured	Possible misinterpretations
Natural resource use and importance Drivers of land use change Decision-making around land use transfers Land ownership and access	Harvest pressure of forest products or production quantity of crops Details of land sales and transfers (e.g., source of income, motivation, ownership) Land use activities Impacts of trafficking on access	Overestimation or underestimation of illicit crop production or harvest of forest products Land-use change misattributed Resource use and ecological impacts underestimated Overestimation of access and mobility if dangers are unaccounted for
(c) Governance, social relations, and power dynamics
Research themes affected	Knowledge obscured	Possible misinterpretations
Governance decision-making Loci of power Social norms, alliances, and enforcement	Drivers of local governance decisions How power is exercised, gained, and maintained How relations and alliances are forged Roles of important actors	Drivers of decisions misattributed due to rumors and propaganda Power of official offices/policies overestimated Role of illicit regimes underrepresented Economic drivers overemphasized (over political factors)

2 Describing and characterizing ignorance

3 Tracing the origins and drivers of ignorance

Tracing the origins of ignorance helped us recognize the ways our research practices produce and replicate ignorance. Spheres of ambiguity around illicit activities interact with researchers’ practices and decision-making as well as academic or institutional conventions to contribute to the ignorance supply chain (Table 2).

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Table 2.

Ignorance Supply Chain—locating causes of ignorance within the research process.

Research stage	Potential drivers of ignorance	Examples from the authors
Study design	Limited planning due to lack of information in the literature. Avoiding locations or topics due to logistical or safety concerns. Methods and scope restricted due to safety and ethical concerns or political commitments (by IRB, host country, funders, or research partners).	Impact of trafficking on small-scale fishing absent in the literature, thus not considered relevant. Warnings of danger and a recent murder deterred the investigation of illegal logging; study sites were chosen to avoid violence. Funders rejected research proposals due to concern about danger in the region; IRB approval was contingent on assurance not to ask questions about illicit activities.
Data collection	Censorship of activities, contacts, and questions due to safety concerns and local norms. Information omitted, concealed, obstructed, or denied; spheres of ambiguity built into the culture. Political barriers to accessing reliable secondary data (from public sources, partnerships, or collaborators).	Vehicles perceived to be owned by illicit actors were avoided. Machinery in an illicit goldmine explicitly concealed by informants who feared retaliation from superiors should the machines be destroyed later. Illicit incomes seldom reported in public data; remote sensing images do not include classification for illicit crops; government data on illicit crop eradication not public.
Analysis & dissemination	Details excluded to protect confidentiality and safety of participants and communities. Data excluded from analysis due to poor data quality, confidence, or resolution. Disciplinary norms or analytical standards discount the value of partial knowledge.	Farmers reverting to illicit crops from failed substitution crops went unreported to protect the community from eradication campaigns. UNODC data on illicit activities too highly aggregated to clarify uncertainties from livelihood surveys. Avoided publishing about illicit activities to ensure ongoing access to field sites.

Conceptualizations of research questions and study designs reflect and are constrained by gaps in the literature. For some of us, the paucity of literature discussing the importance of the illicit for our research topics limited our ability to plan for encounters or anticipate their effects. In other cases, we were broadly aware of illicit activities in potential research sites and deliberately chose to avoid certain areas and topics out of safety concerns for ourselves, research assistants, and informants. In some cases the individuals or institutions overseeing our work, including funders and Institutional Review Boards, restricted where we could go, what we could ask, or what methods we could use. Methodological absences arose when we were instructed not to conduct certain types of interviews or use certain methods for collecting data. Though often unintentional, well-justified, or out of our control, these decisions and restrictions became “absenting” practices within the research process. Normalization of such avoidance can further perpetuate theoretical absences or under-theorization of topics important to these places.

During data collection, maintaining research access depended on respecting local social norms, and was influenced by danger and risk. At times, this meant avoiding certain spaces and people, averting one’s eyes, or pretending not to witness certain activities. Navigating this terrain limited the information that we could collect, contributing to the existence and persistence of empirical ignorances. The ignorances and avoidance practices of research collaborators, NGOs, or government agencies also contributed to empirical ignorance. NGOs, for example, often rely on remaining “apolitical," avoiding involvement in political conflicts or crossing local authorities by withholding information or remaining ignorant themselves.

During analysis and writing, decisions on how to treat empirical ignorances around the illicit can transfer those ignorances to wider audiences. Analytical ignorances are perpetuated when a researcher does not include ambiguous data in their analysis. Without methodically assessing ignorance, it is easy to minimize or ignore data that is anecdotal or based on incomplete knowledge, potentially leading to further misinterpretations (see Table 1). At the dissemination stage, concerns about data resolution, confidence, and ethics shape how individuals and research teams navigate these decisions. Researchers may generate positional ignorance through their need to maintain confidentiality and secrecy on behalf of their informants’ and themselves. Researchers may choose not to write about illicit activity for fear of exposing certain regions or populations to scrutiny or to protect their own safety, relationships, and access to research sites. The social and political sensitivity of reporting on the illicit, even tangentially, can lead researchers to avoid the topic rather than risk unwanted attention or misuse of their results, though maintaining these ignorances in some cases may support ongoing inequities and injustices.