Reflexivity and Temporality in Researching Violent Settings: Problems with the Replicability and Transparency Regime

Abstract

Researchers studying conflict, violence, and human rights in dangerous settings across the globe face a complex set of ethical, personal, and professional dilemmas. Especially in more positivist fields and professions, there is pressure to conduct and present research as 'objective'. Yet the reality of field research in violent and conflict-affected settings is much messier than ideals in methodology textbooks or the polished presentation of field data in much published work. I argue that rather than the imposition of blanket positivist standards of replicability and research transparency, research in violent settings needs to draw lessons from interpretivist ideas and methodologies about the researcher's role in the process of data gathering, analysis, and presentation. I focus on three key issues: reflexivity, temporality, and the geography of research between 'field' and 'home,' drawing on personal experiences conducting research on conflict, violence, and postconflict society in Liberia, Nicaragua, South Africa, and Uganda. I show how these three issues practically, theoretically, and ethically conflict with replicability and transparency demands. Through a practice of reflexive openness, however, positivist-leaning researchers can more honestly and ethically reconcile realities of research with professional expectations in the field and after returning. Beyond the omnipresent ethical imperative to protect human subjects, researchers in violent and conflict-affected settings must engage in various ethical, mental, and professional balancing acts while living in the field, interacting with research participants, recording and analyzing data, and reporting findings. Researchers in more positivist fields must determine how to reconcile their experiences in the field and emotional orientations toward research participants with the 'objectivity' that their disciplines or employers may expect in data gathering and analysis. Balancing these priorities can be a struggle even in more reflexive fields like ethnographic sociology and critical geography (e.g. Nilan 2002; Woon 2013). An

Ethics Versus the Law: The Case of the Belfast Project

“…Also, advances in technology can cause inaccessible or private information to become accessible (Bridgen and Gohdes 2020). As the case of the Belfast Project shows, there is even uncertainty about whether research institutions will keep their promises when facing external pressure (Thaler 2021). This level of uncertainty seriously compromises the principle of informed consent because it is not possible fully to inform someone about the risks they would be taking if they participate in research (Parkinson and Wood 2015).…”

“…Yet the Belfast Project researchers were recruited specifically from each side of the Troubles, to interview people from their own side. This makes sense because to gather information from people who are implicated in violent conflict, a researcher would need to demonstrate understanding of their participants' perspective on that conflict (Thaler 2021) and to be trusted, at least to some extent, by those participants. In this context, in the course of a qualitative interview which is in fact a conversation and where both parties to the dialogue know they share a perspective, some leading questions seem almost inevitable.…”

(Dis)courtesy Bias: “Methodological Cognates,” Data Validity, and Ethics in Violence-Adjacent Research

“…Scholars may approach these challenges from any number of angles, ranging from emphasizing the importance of trust-based, credible, and/or working local relationships (Al-Faham, 2021, p. 5; Fujii, 2017; Thomson, 2010) to relying on sub-national comparisons (Giraudy et al, 2019; Snyder, 2001), employing sophisticated quantitative analysis (Hoover Green & Ball, 2019; Price et al, 2014), or practicing data triangulation, especially via mixed-methods or multi-epistemological research (Davenport & Ball, 2002; Driscoll, 2021; Khoury, 2020; Thachil, 2014, 2017; Thaler, 2017, 2019). Yet, the difficulties associated with conducting research in these locales are often understood as uniform, intrinsic characteristics that influence researcher-participant relations in predictable, blanket, and consistent ways across populations of interest.…”

“…Due to similarity in techniques deployed to gather data in these spaces—from survey instruments to games, semi-structured interviews, and participant observation 2 —potential participants often see researchers not as independent actors, but rather as part of a larger body of outsiders who are often better educated, wealthier, more mobile, and culturally or politically distinct from the milieu in which they work (Lewis et al, 2019). This fact is most consistently manifest in the broad trend of potential participants confusing researchers for aid workers or journalists (Foster & Minwalla, 2018; Lewis et al, 2019), though scholars also report potential respondents assuming that researchers may be intelligence agents (Driscoll & Schuster, 2017; Thaler, 2019).…”

Ethics, Epistemology, and Openness in Research with Human Participants

“…Questions of consent have been addressed most carefully for settings where participants may risk significant harm should their participation in a research project or their specific contributions become known, e.g., conflict, post-conflict, or authoritarian settings (Wood 2006; Program on Middle East Political Science Studies 2014; Cronin-Furman and Lake 2018; QTD WG IV.1 and IV.2 2018; Thaler 2019). However, actors in other settings may also suffer harm should their participation or contributions become known—for instance, in the form of attacks on their social reputation, psychological stress, or violations of their privacy.…”