Ethical research landscapes in fragile and conflict-affected contexts: understanding the challenges

Abstract

As the prevalence of conflict and fragility continue to rise around the world, research is increasingly heralded as a solution. However, current ethical guidelines for working in areas suffering from institutional and social fragility, insecurity or violent conflict have been heavily critiqued as highly abstract; focussed only on data collection; detached from the realities of academia in the Global South; and potentially extractive. This article seeks to respond to that assessment by spotlighting some of the most prevalent challenges researchers face in the pursuit of ethical working practices. It explores the material and epistemic injustices that often shape and underpin research structures and relationships in these contexts. The paper draws on the authors’ experiences of research in conflict-affected and fragile contexts over the last fifteen years and on workshop discussions with researchers based in fragile and conflict-affected contexts conducted in Amman, Bogotá and Dhaka in 2019-2020. The paper works from the premise that achieving ethical research in fragile spaces is not dependent solely on activity at the site of research, but also on decisions made across the entire ecosystem of a research project. It therefore interrogates the full research landscape, from funding models, to research design (including research topics, partnerships, methods, participant selection, and researcher positionality), to dissemination plans and ethical gatekeeping. The paper critically reflects on inequities in the processes of knowledge production about conflict and fragility and the key ethical challenges that researchers encounter. It highlights the need for further guidance, support and accountability to ensure ethical research practices.

How do higher degree research students and supervisors navigate ethics‐in‐practice for educational research in sensitive or ‘fragile’ contexts?

“…As with other research from fragile contexts (e.g., Fox et al, 2020;Shanks & Paulson, 2022), the participants in our study noted that some ethical complexities cannot be anticipated.…”

Doing harm: the impact of UK’s GCRF cuts on research ethics, partnerships and governance

“…In many respects GCRF marked a positive shift away from some of the welldocumented historical challenges in South-North research partnerships (Court, 2004;Ishengoma, 2016;Bradley, 2017;Rethinking Research Collaborative, 2018;Grieve and Mitchell, 2020;Asare et al, 2022). Typically, these partnerships are funded by Northern agencies that establish the eligibility criteria in terms of disciplinary or research focus and stipulate the modalities of partnership (Shuayb and Brun, 2021;Shanks and Paulson, 2022). Such research tends to be applied and is often interdisciplinary in nature and focuses on problems physically located in the Global South (Crossley and Holmes, 2001;Bradley, 2017;Tabulawa, 2017).…”

“…Funded partnerships often include an explicit 'capacity building' element which regularly reflects a deficit view of Southern capacities and an inflated sense of Northern knowledge and expertise (Koch, 2020;Walker and Martinez-Vargas, 2020;Axelby et al, 2022). Within international research teams there is a tendency for Northern researchers to take the lead in establishing research agendas and assuming intellectual leadership of projects in ways that position Southern researchers as data collectors or junior partners within studies wholly designed in the North (Grieve and Mitchell, 2020;Mkwananzi and Cin, 2021;Shanks and Paulson, 2022). For example, in the field of education a recent study that focused on the equity of collaborative research projects involving African-based researchers found that half of the projects initiated by Northern researchers positioned African partners as implementers of Northern projects rather than genuine collaborators, even in the case of senior academics (Asare et al, 2022).…”

“…Yet a change in organisational culture takes time and success in this endeavour was limited. UK researchers and professional service staff involved in GCRF-funded projects have also worked internally within their universities to redress internal practices that undermine partnerships, including exclusionary due diligence practices (Axelby et al, 2022), contracting and payment processes that regularly undermine respectful partnerships through delays, rudeness, negative assumptions around the capacity of partner organisations and the risks involved in working with them, and internal systems that are not fit for purpose (Mkwananzi and Cin, 2021;Axelby et al, 2022;Shanks and Paulson, 2022;Brown et al, forthcoming).…”

“…It is the case that many aspects of research governance and regulation -ethics boards, safeguarding requirements, risk assessments, advisory boards and steering committeeshave developed in response to historical cases of malpractice in fields such as medicine and psychology (Busher and Fox, 2019). Over the last two decades, the processes and protocols developed to protect people in these more invasive areas of research have increasingly been applied indiscriminately to social research in ways that overstate the potential for harm to result from such work (Busher and Fox, 2019), and that can obscure ethical issues that merit further attention and reflection (Oyinloye, 2021;Shanks and Paulson, 2022). Alongside increasing standardisation of research ethics in UK universities, the same period has seen international research projects subjected to burgeoning financial regulations, with the rise of 'due diligence' assessments as part of the counterterrorism architecture (Muhomed et al, 2021).…”