Ethical issues have always complicated the study of Middle East politics, as they do for any researcher working in undemocratic contexts. How are scholars to negotiate complex issues concerning research access, notably the responsibility to protect oneself and one's subjects while remaining as open and transparent about one's research as possible? Given the US government's deep involvement in the region, research on politics also means negotiating whether to engage, in one's scholarship or elsewhere, with existing political policies and practices.
After the outbreak of the uprisings in late 2010, the Project on Middle East Political Science organized a panel on this topic and subsequently published several of the essays together. (Available here: http://pomeps.org/2014/06/11/the-ethics-of-research-in-the-middle-east-memos/) Since then, a number scholars have asked that we seek to continue and expand the conversation, with a view toward engaging the following questions in particular: What are the ethical responsibilities of our scholarship, and to whom are we primarily responsible? Should we seek to shape public debates, and if so, how? Should we engage with government agencies and policy debates, and if so, are there limits? Are petitions, boycotts, and otherwise "speaking truth to power" appropriate roles for us, or should we strive to remain "objective" and "outside" of political debates? Is neutrality possible? When is it acceptable to remain silent, and when might we be obligated to lend our voices to certain critiques?
This roundtable would include prominent scholars who work in different methodological traditions, selected because they hold reasoned and thoughtful positions on these issues but who also have strong disagreements with each other. The objective is to open this debate to a wider audience, at the very least to illustrate and share different views in order to help individuals consider where they personally might stand. Speakers would make opening comments of 5-7 minutes each, after which the floor would be open to all comments. The original speakers will not speak again unless questioned directly, as the goal is to have a forum to debate on these issues without privileging any particular positions.
The speakers and I all feel that ethics are a very crucial issue to discuss openly, and we hope to hold the discussion in a room that is organized like a roundtable (that is, not in panel or state format) in order to level all voices and encourage discussion.
As political scientists seek usable data from the Middle East they encounter historically daunting challenges in research environments. Some previously stable regimes have fallen into civil war (Syria, Yemen). Other governments have become unusually aggressive and unpredictable in their relationship with scholars (Egypt, Turkey). As scholars and doctoral students navigate across this terrain, it is important to consider how new techniques of evidence gathering may contravene traditional ethical commitments of doing no harm to local communities. My remarks draw out some of the possible problems in two leading approaches to Middle East politics: survey experiments and interviews of refugees. In different ways these practices may contribute to conflicts and trauma they are meant to ameliorate.
My intention in my intervention will be to focus on questions related to our responsibilities toward those with whom we work abroad, our collaborators, our interviewees, etc. I will draw in part on work that I have been engaged in in chairing MESA's Committee on Academic Freedom for the last decade. Thus, while drawing on my own personal research experiences, I will also refer to cases that the committee has taken up as well.
Dr. Marc Lynch
I plan to primarily focus on the ethics of policy engagement. What responsibilities follow from the attempt to influence either the public sphere or the policy realm? Does such engagement curtail or inhibit other ethical commitments associated with academic inquiry? I will draw upon my experience over the last decade of being closely involved in the policy community and also editing widely read public sphere publications such as Foreign Policy's Middle East Channel and the Washington Post's Monkey Cage blog.
My contribution will focus on developing and deploying an "ethics of sight" in research situated in the Middle East and North Africa. Specifically, I hope to explore the practices that render specific categories, processes, or performances of violence ‘visible’ to those who do not experience or witness them firsthand and to argue that these practices interact with scholarly research ethics. To do so, I will draw on my fieldwork with militant organizations and refugee populations in Lebanon as well as broader debates surrounding questions of access, protection, representation, and sensationalism in MENA-based research.
Dr. Lisa Wedeen
My presentation makes a case for what Bertolt Brecht termed a Verfremdungseffekt—a distancing effect made possible by an active cultivation of one’s critical and innovative faculties. To understand methodologically how to pursue critically engaged estrangement, I look briefly at issues of judgment concerning the Syrian uprising, including scholarly solidarity with activists, calls for military intervention or an insistence on pacificism, contention around labeling the war, and assessments about the merits of partition or celebrations of Syrian nationalism. The uprising spoke to a desire for repairing a system that was no longer contributing to many citizens’ flourishing, but its critics presumed a defeat in advance of the effort. And in the present moment the resignation of naysayers seems more correct than those who imagined transformation to be easy, continuously joyous—even worth it. And yet without those attempts at collective action nothing would ever get (un)done. Politically engaged scholarly work operates in registers of both reparative desire and despondency simultaneously, producing at its best a prohibited knowledge people already know and can gradually, with others, confront.
