Extending Slovene Independence: Outlining the Global Through Local Fieldwork

The chapter provides a reflection of the implications of the researcher’s breaking into the field in the changing political and social context of post-independence Slovenia. The reflection is presented in an evolutionary manner, beginning with the presentation of the initial research agenda, where the independence of Slovenia was to be studied under the light of the EU enlargement discourse. The methodological plan involved the conduct of in-depth interviews with political elites that were to be analysed in a neo-positivist approach that took Slovenia as an instrumental case study. Recognition of the limits of that approach, fostered by the researcher’s experiences in the field, drove the reformulation of the research, which ended up portraying Slovenian independence as a means for social reproduction, equivalent to the Gramscian notion of passive revolution. The arrival at this point is depicted as the result of the extension of the case study in terms of Lai and Roccu’s formulation of the extended case methodology in international relations, a bottom-up approach which departs from awareness of disturbances created by the researcher’s arrival in the field and postpones theoretical considerations to the final stage of the process.