This book is designed to give confidence to, and share experience with, researchers who are contemplating fieldwork, especially fieldwork in societies affected by violent conflict. There are multiple pressures, many of them unspoken, to engage in perfect fieldwork and produce perfect fieldwork results. Indeed, many of the journal articles and books that we read say little about the practical and ethical difficulties that researchers experience when conducting fieldwork. The impression that is given is that everything went well and that the research design worked as intended when it was taken to the field. The pressure to produce perfect results is felt particularly keenly among Ph.D. students and early career researchers who may be anxious to please their doctoral or tenure committees. There are also, of course, the social science strictures that seek to ensure the robustness and reliability of evidence and results.
The experience of the editors of this book is that things often go wrong during fieldwork: interviewees don’t turn up; the battery in your recording device dies just before you are going to start an interview; you can’t find the agreed location; an election or violent incident means that it is simply too risky to be on the streets; you get sick; you are under surveillance by the authorities and you do not want to endanger interviewees, so you scale down your research; the research design that you developed in the comfort of your office simply doesn’t make sense once you are in the country. The list of things that can, and do, go wrong during fieldwork is endless, yet these tend not to be narrated in a formal way. They are often discussed on the margins of conferences, and among colleagues, but are rarely recorded in the endnotes of a journal article lest an unfeasible research design is seen as weakness. One place where research failings might be spoken of is in the bars around academic conferences and workshops. Here semi-boastful pub-talk might mix bravado, comedy, and often a good deal of ethnocentrism. This book is offered as a corrective to the under-reporting of what (might) go wrong in fieldwork and to the Indiana Jones syndrome whereby some researchers might be tempted to inflate stories of their bravery and ability to overcome the odds to ‘scoop’ those perfect research results.
The book is offered with humility. It does not cover everything and—unfortunately—shows the usual bias in much academic work in which voices from the Global North predominate. We greatly appreciate that many of those who experience difficulties during the research process are local scholars. However, this book focuses mainly on the experience of the ‘outsider’ researcher. The book also does not offer all the answers, but it hopes to make researchers aware of some of the potential pitfalls and ethical dilemmas they might encounter. It is unusual, however, in that large parts of all chapters are written in the first person. These sections tell the stories of academics who have: made mistakes, made progress through trial and error, felt guilty about ethical issues, come to the realisation that they were underprepared for the emotional side of fieldwork, and understood that a lot of social science methodology books emphasise abstraction when practicality, empathy, and ethics are called for. By encouraging contributors in this book to write in the first person, our aim has been to humanise the subject of field research and to make clear that it is a personal journey that is often accompanied by numerous practical and ethical choices, as well as constraints such as the decisions of ethics committees or the outcome of funding or visa applications. We are grateful that authors had the courage to not only share their success stories but talk openly about the mistakes they have made along the way and the ethical, moral, and practical challenges they encountered. This is part of a truly reflexive academic culture and enables others to learn from these experiences.
The book stresses the importance of writing the researcher back into the fieldwork process, methodological considerations, and results. Above all, the chapters in this book show that research is relational. The research experience and its outcomes, including access to sites, research participants, and interviewees, and what they are willing to share with us, heavily depend on the relationships academics build in the field. Not everyone will be able to carry out every type of field research successfully. What we are able to do in the field does not only depend upon who we are, and who we know, but how others see us, and what they think we might be able to offer in return. A range of identity markers such as gender, age, nationality, skin-colour, religion, and family status can have unanticipated impacts on our research (see chapters by Njeri or Murray de Lopez), because they impact on how others treat us, both positively and negatively. We might just not get along with some interviewees, in which case they might share very little with us. Others might become close friends during the research process (see chapter by Bøås). It is also in these personal relationships that many of ethical issues arise: How do we, emotionally and practically, deal with the often difficult situations of our research collaborators? What can we promise to ‘give back’? How do we use our research results, privilege, and networks to make a difference to their communities?
Crucially, this book encourages us to see fieldwork as something more than a series of methodological techniques. Rather than thinking of research as a linear process, and fieldwork as one stage in that, it is suggested that we conceive of research as part of the complex assemblage that makes up the researcher and the context in which researchers operate (see chapter by Mitton). Connectedly, we can’t see ethics and ethical dilemmas as something that only occurs during fieldwork. Thus, ethical dilemmas or concerns for the security of our interviewees do not occur only in the fieldwork phase. They should start when we plan our projects, what we consider data, and continue all the way into the writing up and publishing process (see chapters by Lederach, Krystalli, Millar, and Vogel and Mac Ginty). Research design and the fundamental assumptions upon which that is based are connected with the political economy of universities, specific fieldwork techniques, how fieldwork results are to be disseminated, and many more issues.
It is worth noting that many of the contributors to this volume struggled to write in the first person. Part of this, it is worth conjecturing, is because academic writing privileges the abstract and the impersonal. In an effort to be ‘scientific’ and ‘professional’, the individual is subjugated to an impersonal language. Yet, as the chapters in this book affirm, fieldwork is deeply personal. It is often, especially if part of a Ph.D., conducted alone. It relies on individual decision-making, budgeting, time-keeping, and security-consciousness. Even if there is a Ph.D. supervisor or a Principal Investigator who has a management role in the research, it is often up to the individual researcher on-the-ground to make judgement calls (see chapter by Gallien).
The rest of this introductory chapter will consider a number of salient issues that impact on fieldwork in conflict-affected societies. Many of the issues interlock to produce a complex landscape in which research is to be undertaken. Gender, for example, cuts across many issues, often in subtle ways (see chapters by Hume, Jennings, Kappler and Tschunkert). The obvious implications of gender might include the difficulty a female researcher might encounter in safely accessing a male environment, including when interviewees are from elite sectors of society (see chapter by Wade). But many other subtle dynamics might be at play, depending on the circumstances. For example, after a full day of interviews, a female researcher might not feel comfortable going out for dinner on her own and thus feel restricted to a hotel room. Or she might be accompanied to interviews by a male colleague or interpreter. Despite asking questions, the interviewee might address all of his answers to the male—in effect, ignoring the female researcher. Or, the female researcher may have to change her research focus if her original research site is in a country affected by the Zika virus. Female academics also have caring responsibilities more often as their male counterparts, meaning that fieldwork periods often need to be shorter, or turned into a logistic and financial challenge by having to take family members along or pay for extra care at home while away (see chapter by Murray de Lopez). Many of these issues are personal and subtle and all come on top of the many structural factors that often make academia an unwelcome space for females (see everydaysexism.com).
Security
In May 2018, Durham University Ph.D. student Matthew Hedges was seized by the authorities in the United Arab Emirates and held in the most appalling conditions (Hedges 2019). He was accused and eventually convicted of spying and sentenced to life imprisonment. During his incarceration, he was subject to torture (most of it psychological) and had little access to consular or legal advice (BBC News 2018). Pleas that he was conducting scholarly research held zero traction with the UAE authorities, who released him after six months in captivity. In January 2016, Giulio Regeni, a Cambridge University Ph.D. student, was abducted, tortured, and murdered during field research in Egypt (Michaelson and Tondo 2019). It is most likely that the perpetrators were Egyptian security officials (Michaelson and Tondo 2018). Given such incidents, it is not surprising that security issues deserve to be taken seriously by researchers (see chapters by McAuley, Brett, Mitton and Roborgh). It is also worth noting that while the cases of Hedges and Regeni received considerable media attention, their local research interlocutors were also likely to have received unwelcome attention from the authorities. Networks such as Scholars as Risk demonstrate the need to better support the security and academic freedom of local researchers (see scholarsatrisk.org).
It is a truism that anyone wishing to conduct field research in conflict-affected societies must be aware of the potential of some sort of risk. Usually, active war-zones are out of bounds for academic researchers and so most research occurs in ‘post-conflict’ societies. Yet these societies are often troubled and often extremely violent, with the risks to researchers ranging from state surveillance, crime surges, and the possibility of the reoccurrence of the conflict. In such circumstances, and given the high-profile cases like Hedges and Regeni, it is unsurprising that universities place an emphasis on...