Studying-Up and Studying-Across: At-Home Research of Governmental Violence Organizations

Abstract

Studying the military and other security organizations is challenging for both methodological and ethical reasons. Studying these domains "at home," literally in the researcher's own country, complicates things even further. This article discusses these intricacies by proposing a dynamic conceptualization of the subject-object relationship in the study of the military and security in Israel. This conceptualization illuminates the effects of the dynamic positioning of the researcher in four social fields: the academic, the militarysecurity, gender, and the ethno-national. The actual influence of these fields and their interrelations changes throughout the phases of research. We argue that when researchers and their respondents have similar ethno-national affiliation and military experiences, the dichotomous relations between them break down and give way to a dense web of expectations. This brings the researcher to maneuver between two, ostensibly contradictory, research strategies: studying-up and studying-across. The paper unpacks the complexities encapsulated in these strategies by discussing methodological and ethical dilemmas in two field studies on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict conducted by the authors.

Protecting Protection Programmes or Engaging with People? Conditional Inclusion and Evolving Relational Dynamics in Anti-Trafficking Programmes

“…The research design included an institutional ethnography and semi-structured interviews. The ethnography had the main goal to observe institutions "up" and "across", through the eyes of the N.A.Ve programme practitioners and beneficiaries (Gazit and Maoz-Shai 2010), while highlighting power dynamics. It extended over the period April 2019-April 2020, involving about 300 sessions (3-6 h each) of participant observation 7 in practitioners' coordination meetings, monitoring meetings and assessment interviews with programme beneficiaries, and meetings with N.A.Ve programme partners and relevant stakeholders.…”

Legal Emotions: An Ethnography of Distrust and Fear in the Arab Districts of an Israeli City

“…My lack of Israeli citizenship and family ties in Israel also contributed to the gradual convergence toward the label of “foreign student” or “journalist,” which was how Lod Palestinians normalized my presence among them. In the polarized Israeli‐Palestinian terrain, membership in the Jewish Israeli ethnonational community, and especially experience in the military, is an important factor in obtaining access to Israeli security officials and state documents (Gazit & Maoz‐Shai ). By contrast, my status as an outsider helped me obtain access to Lod Palestinians' everyday encounters with the state security and penal agencies.…”

The Convergence of Military Conduct and Policing in Israeli-Controlled Territories

“…The articles were among the papers presented at the conference "Military and Policing" that was held at the Open University of Israel in 2018, and organized by the Israeli Sociology Society and the Institute for Policy Analysis of the Open University of Israel. During the past two decades, the Israeli case has served as a major site in the development of macro and micro approaches to the study of the military and military affairs (Ben-Ari et al 2001;Gazit and Maoz-Shai 2010;Rosenhek et al 2003). While Israel has not figured in the formulation of a general social theory regarding civil-military relations (but see Levy 2007Levy , 2019, its experience in continuous armed struggle and the centrality of its armed forces have been used by social scientists to make substantial contributions to disciplines that center on military issues (Ben-Ari et al 2001).…”