["The Australian Journal of Anthropology, EarlyView. ", "\nAbstract\nHow might fieldwork anxieties serve as a productive site to revisit the theoretical presumptions that guide research practices? This article explores moments of suspicion and scepticism during fieldwork to reflect on the tensions of fixing anthropological lines of inquiry and conceptual lineages. Drawing on research with Sahrawi refugees and the Sahrawi state‐in‐exile, it examines the disjuncture between project conceptualisation and fieldwork experiences to reflect on the conceptual troubles of pursuing research framed as novel. The article demonstrates how the tensions of conducting ‘novel’ research provides insight into the politics of knowledge production, providing the opportunity to critique and dismantle the homogeneity and force of concepts like sovereignty without undercutting the communities who have the most at stake in the pressures to conform to them.\n"]