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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 July 2017
As one of the Middle East's more open countries, Lebanon is fairly congenial to foreign researchers. Classified as “partly free” by Freedom House, it ranks ahead of all the region's countries, except Israel, Tunisia, and Turkey. However, when it comes to researching Hizbullah, this openness and congeniality subsides. While Hizbullah contains political and social branches, it is first and foremost a military and guerilla organization—the self-proclaimed Islamic Resistance in Lebanon (al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya fi Lubnan). Like any military and guerrilla organization—especially one that is subjected to Western terrorist designations and economic sanctions—Hizbullah is innately and justifiably secretive, vigilant, and suspicious of foreigners and outsiders, including academics, scholars, and researchers. Based on my personal experiences researching Hizbullah in Lebanon, these characteristics have ebbed and flowed with its organizational evolution and situational context. At the international, regional, and local levels, the complexities and dynamics of the politics surrounding Hizbullah have shaped my experiences as a researcher in Lebanon and have demonstrated the importance of being aware of these politics and adapting to them. These convoluted and shifting politics have also revealed the inherent merits and challenges of ethnography—a rigorous, informal, and improvisational endeavor and process that necessitates, above all else, flexibility.
1 Bray, Zoe, “Ethnographic Approaches,” in Approaches and Methodologies in the Social Sciences: A Pluralist Perspective, ed. Porta, Donatella Della and Keating, Michael (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 296–315 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 Freedom House, “Freedom in the World 2016: Table of Country Scores,” accessed 20 February 2017, https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world-2016/table-scores.
3 For more on the virtue and necessity of rigor, informality, improvisation, and flexibility in fieldwork and ethnography, see Bray, “Ethnographic Approaches,” 296–315; and Gusterson, Hugh, “Ethnographic Research,” in Qualitative Methods in International Relations: A Pluralist Guide, ed. Klotz, Audie and Prakash, Deepa (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 93–113 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 See, for example, Christine Sylva Hamieh and Roger Mac Ginty, “A Very Political Reconstruction: Governance and Reconstruction in Lebanon after the 2006 War,” Disasters (2010), accessed 23 June 2013, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19486352; and Scarlett Haddad, “Promesse tenue: 270 immeubles à Haret Hreik entièrement reconstruits à l'initiative de Waad,” Liban, 11 May 2012, accessed 23 June 2013, https://mplbelgique.wordpress.com/2012/05/11/promesse-tenue-270-immeubles-a-haret-hreik-entierement-reconstruits-a-linitiative-de-waad/.
5 Noe, Nicholas, ed., Voice of Hezbollah: The Statements of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah (New York: Verso, 2007), 11 Google Scholar.
6 See Lob, Eric, “Is Hezbollah Confronting a Crisis of Popular Legitimacy?,” Crown Center Middle East Brief 78 (2014): 1–8 Google Scholar.
7 Office of Foreign Assets Control, US Department of the Treasury, “Terrorism: What You Need to Know about U.S. Sanctions,” accessed 2 July 2013, http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/Programs/Documents/terror.txt; The Council of the European Union, “List of Persons, Groups and Entities Subject to Freezing of Financial Assets and Enhanced Measures in Police and Judicial Cooperation (July 2016),” Official Journal of the European Union, 13 July 2016, accessed 4 November 2016, http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:32016D1136&qid=1474969819578&from=EN.
8 Randa Slim, “Hezbollah's Plunge into the Syrian Abyss,” Foreign Policy, 28 May 2013.
9 For more on these attacks, see International Crisis Group, “Crisis Watch Database: Lebanon,” accessed 21 February 2017, https://www.crisisgroup.org/crisiswatch/database.
10 Lob, “Is Hezbollah,” 4.
11 For an insightful and thought-provoking analysis of how a foreign anthropologist adapted her research methodology and design to similarly rapid, dramatic, and tragic political and conflict-based transformations in Yemen, see Marieke Brandt's contribution to this roundtable.