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E-book Research, Ethics and Risk in the Authoritarian Field

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Penilaian

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We wrote this book, in the first place, because we needed it and it did not exist. In 2014 we came to the discovery, as a comparative research group preparing for fieldwork, that there was practically no written guidance on how to handle the challenges of authoritarianism research. There were reams of literature on anthropological fieldwork, and some good texts on how to do research on political violence in conflict areas (for instance, Sriram et al. 2009; Mazurana et al. 2013; Hilhorst et al. 2016). But the image they painted of their field did not mirror our experience, and the advice they gave was only partially applicable. Country-based texts were also an imperfect fit: we found some interesting discussion on navigating the party-state in China (Heimer and Thøgersen 2006), or on circum-venting the prohibition on mentioning ethnicity in Rwanda (Thomson et al. 2013), but the extensive reflections on Chinese language and cul-ture, or on what it means to be a white researcher in the African Great Lakes region, did not travel. Fortunately, more explicit reflection on research in authoritarian contexts per se is just beginning to emerge. In recent years, two special issues have appeared on ‘closed’ and ‘authoritar-ian’ contexts, respectively (Koch 2013; Goode and Ahram 2016), as well as some shorter pieces focusing on fieldwork challenges in China (Shih 2015), the Middle East (Lynch 2016), and Central Asia (Driscoll 2015), explicitly approached as authoritarian contexts. We have learned from, and draw on, this recent literature. But it still consists largely of collections of individual experiences, placed side by side rather than in conversation with each other. By recording our joint experiences in very different authoritar-ian contexts systematically and succinctly, comparing and contrasting them, and drawing lessons, we aim to give other researchers a framework, so they will not need to start from scratch as we did.A second trigger for writing the book was the death of Giulio Regeni. Regeni was a PhD student at the University of Cambridge, who was tor-tured to death while doing fieldwork on trade unionism in Egypt, in early 2016. Regeni’s killing sent shockwaves through the community of Middle East scholars, reminding us of the risk involved in research in the authori-tarian field. It affected us quite personally, because some of us knew people close to him, one of us had done research in Egypt only few years earlier, and others were PhD students about to embark on their own fieldwork. At the same time, Regeni’s death and the responses to it also highlighted the rarity of such an extreme act of repression against a foreign scholar, and reminded us of our relative safety in comparison to our respondents and collaborators in the countries we study. A final consideration for writing this book was the controversy that arose among political scientists, primarily in the United States, around the so-called Data Access and Research Transparency (DA-RT) statement. DA-RT asserted that ‘researchers should provide access to ... data or explain why they cannot’, and led to the adoption of a joint transparency statement by a number of journal editors in 2014 (https://www.dart-statement.org). As we describe in detail in Chap. 6, these statements have become subject to increasing controversy, and a lively debate has since ensued on the merits and limits of transparency, especially for different types of qualitative research. As noted by Shih (2015), Driscoll (2015), and Lynch (2016), tensions between transparency obligations and protec-tion of respondents are particularly acute when it comes to fieldwork research in authoritarian circumstances. While these and other contribu-tions have thrown open the debate by critiquing DA-RT, the tension between transparency and protection remains unresolved, and few alterna-tive models have emerged. More recently, European policy-makers have developed even more sweeping proposals to improve ‘the accessibility of data and knowledge at all stages of the research cycle’ (Directorate-General for Research and Innovation 2016, 52), making it all the more urgent to develop a considered response to such calls for transparency from the per-spective of authoritarian field research.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

321.9 GLA r

Penerbit

London : Springer Nature., 2018

Deskripsi Fisik

130 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9783319689661

Klasifikasi

321.9

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

-

Subjek

Authoritarian Government

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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