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Because it is a slice of one's life as well as a method for gathering data and insights, and because it entails socio-cultural immersion and interpersonal trust, field research confronts political scientists with a special set of normative issues not encountered in libraries, laboratories, or home countries. This essay weighs four plausible yet fallible positions on the ethics of fieldwork overseas, with particular reference to American political science research in the Arabic-speaking world in the 21st century. I am raising questions I cannot really answer: specifically, amidst American military engagement and a good deal of spying by governments all around, can we, or ought we, practice scholarly detachment, reciprocity, activism, or, perhaps, espionage?
Field research combines extended direct observation of special events and everyday happenings with extensive semi-structured interviews, occasionally supplemented with more formal surveys and usually complemented by the collection of documents and by lots of casual conversations. Practicing a mixture of ethnography, journalism, translation studies, geography, and political sociology, and often gathering sensitive and/or controversial information through direct social interaction, field researchers encounter moral dilemmas that are all the more challenging in an era of highly charged American confrontation with the Arab Middle East. The normative standards nowadays enforced by institutional review boards at many American universities, drawn from the psychological sciences to protect individual subjects from pain, humiliation, or legal hassles, offer little guidance to field research that is not about individuals but communities, societies, and nations.
Long before the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the War in Iraq, and the heightened American profile in the Arab world, Arabist social scientists usually situated their fieldwork in one of several alternative normative rubrics, each with a strong ethical rationale but each more complicated in practice than the moral arguments alone would suggest. Sometimes we shifted paradigms as research progressed. Young scholars and those with very narrowly defined research topics often embrace the fly-on-the-wall model of the neutral, dispassionate recorder of apolitical information whose intent is to leave no impression on the subject of study. A second position, which might be called a reciprocity model, acknowledges that Northern researchers gain professional credentials from their research and obligates them to return something of value to the community. Social activists argue that while living abroad participant observers...