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Researching secret spaces: A reflexive account on negotiating risk and academic integrity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2020

Michelle Burgis-Kasthala
Michelle Burgis-Kasthala*
Affiliation:
Old College, The University of Edinburgh, South Bridge, Edinburgh, EH8 9YL, Scotland Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

This article uses the case study of the Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA) and its work on Syria as a way to reflect on the challenges international lawyers face in conducting research in relation to secret, highly constrained spaces. In particular, the article engages with debates within anthropology on the nature of para-ethnographic research as a way to think about research relationships between international legal scholars and practitioners as conducive of collaboration, (inter)dependency and dialogue. Yet this type of research, especially without the grounding of legal texts, raises questions about the legal researcher’s integrity and author(ity). Thus, the article’s core concern is to explore the inter-relationship between a variety of risks that can occur for both scholars and research subjects operating in secret spaces.

Keywords

anthropologyCommission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA)methodologypara-ethnographysecrecy
Type
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Information
Leiden Journal of International Law , Volume 33 , Issue 2 , June 2020 , pp. 269 - 287
Copyright
© Foundation of the Leiden Journal of International Law 2020

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Footnotes

*

Many thanks to all of my interviewees at CIJA, the engaging reviewers of this Journal, the wonderful research assistance of Anan AbuShanab, Sascha Kouvelis and Mariana Matias and the generous feedback of Sarath Burgis-Kasthala, Hilary Charlesworth, Fleur Johns, Toby Kelly, Andrew Lang, Sarah Nouwen, Anthea Roberts, Rebecca Sutton, Sally Wheeler and especially Pat O’Malley. An earlier version of this article was presented at the Sociology seminar series, Australian National University in May 2018 and I acknowledge the rich responses I received there. This research was funded by the Australian Research Council.

References

1 Quoted in Stewart, K. A.et al., ‘Risky Research: Investigating the “Perils” of Ethnography’, in Denzin, N. K. and Giardina, D. (eds.), Qualitative Inquiry and Social Justice: Toward a Politics of Hope (2009), at 213Google Scholar.

2 Nouwen, S. M. H., ‘“As You Set out for Ithaka”: Practical, Epistemological, Ethical, and Existential Questions about Socio-Legal Research in Conflict’, (2014) 27 LJIL 227Google Scholar, at 233.

3 For a general overview see B. Van Schaack, ‘Imagining Justice for Syria: Water Always Finds its Way’, (forthcoming).

4 Interview #2, (16 June 2017) at CIJA headquarters.

5 This challenge is also dealt with by Nouwen, supra note 2, at 238. For a rejection of the idea of ‘data’ in its entirety see Denzin, N. K., ‘The Death of Data?’, (2013) 13 Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 353Google Scholar; Pierre, E. A. St., ‘Writing Post Qualitative Inquiry’, (2018) 24 Qualitative Inquiry 603CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 605–6.

6 According to CIJA’s technology security co-ordinator and ‘ethical hacker’, training workshop, 2 November 2018.

7 Stewart et al., supra note 1, at 200.

8 Riles, A., ‘Exploring the “Legal” in Socio-Legal Studies’, in Cowan, D. and Wincott, D. (eds.), Exploring the ‘Legal’ in Socio-Legal Studies (2016)Google Scholar, at 260.

9 In Nouwen’s reflection on her own socio-legal journey in the field of international criminal justice, she raises a related contrast between the growth of scholarship on (or for) the field compared to scant empirical work such as hers. See Nouwen, supra note 2, at 228–9.

10 Marcus, G. E., ‘Introduction’, in Marcus, G. E. (ed.), Para-Sites: A Casebook Against Cynical Reason (2000)Google Scholar, at 3.

11 Anthropology comprises a number of branches. I refer to ‘anthropology’ as only the social/cultural branch of the discipline.

12 I develop this concept in detail in: M. Burgis-Kasthala, ‘Entrepreneurial Justice: Syria, the Commission for International Justice and Accountability and the Renewal of International Criminal Justice’, (2019) 30(4) European Journal of International Law.

13 Merry, S. E., ‘Anthropology and International Law’, (2006) 35 Annual Review of Anthropology 99CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 107. Also see Mosse, D., ‘Misunderstood, misrepresented, contested? Anthropological knowledge production in question’, (2015) 72 Focaal – Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 128Google Scholar, at 131.

14 J. Borger, ‘Syria’s truth smugglers’, The Guardian, 13 May 2015.

15 Smissaert, C. and Jalonen, K., ‘Responsibility in Academic Writing: A Dialogue of the Dead’, (2017) 24 Qualitative Inquiry 704CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Madison, D. S., ‘Dangerous Ethnography’, in Denzin, N. K. and Giardina, D. (eds.), Qualitative Inquiry and Social Justice: Toward a Politics of Hope (2009)Google Scholar, at 193.

17 This is a term used by Barnett, but in his account international criminal accountability actors are not included. See Barnett, M., ‘Humanitarian Governance’, (2013) 16 Annual Review of Political Science 379CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 On the notion of ‘legal humanitarianism’ see Kendall, S., ‘Beyond the Restorative Turn: The Limits of Legal Humanitarianism’, in De Vos, C.et al. (eds.), Contested Justice: The Politics and Practice of International Criminal Court Intervention (2015)Google Scholar.

19 The most noteworthy being the ongoing inability of the International Criminal Court (ICC) to act in relation to Syria due the absence of Syrian ICC membership and the double veto of Russia and China against ICC jurisdiction through the United Nations (UN) Security Council. See UN Security Council Draft Resolution, UN Doc. S/2014/348 (22 May 2014).

20 For example, there is now collaborative work between CIJA and the United Nations’ International, Impartial, Independent Mechanism (IIIM), established in December 2016, as per the United Nations General Assembly Resolution 71/248 on International, Impartial and Independent Mechanism to Assist in the Investigation and Prosecution of Persons Responsible for the Most Serious Crimes under International Law Committed in the Syrian Arab Republic since March 2011, UN Doc. A/RES/71/248 (21 December 2016). The two organizations entered into a memorandum of understanding on 28 June 2019, whose provisions facilitate the transfer of CIJA’s files to the IIM, particularly in the latter’s pursuit of domestic, criminal trials.

21 J. Borger, ‘Smuggled Syrian documents enough to indict Bashar al-Assad, say investigators’, The Guardian, 13 May 2015; Borger, supra note 14; J. Borger ‘The Guardian view on international law: we need enforcement and example’, The Guardian, 15 October 2016; J. Borger, ‘The Guardian view on Syria, the ceasefire and the aid convoy attack: a new low’, The Guardian, 21 September 2016; J. Borger ‘The Guardian view on Syrian war crimes: searching for a road to justice’, The Guardian, 8 February 2017; and R. Engel and K. Werner, ‘Investigators quietly probe allegations of Syrian war crimes’, NBC News, 30 March 2018.

22 M. Kersten, ‘Here’s How Perpetrators of Crimes in Syria are being Prosecuted’, Washington Post, 4 March 2019.

23 ‘The Documents Men: Will smuggled files lead to justice for the Assad regime’s victims?’, The Economist, 24 November 2018.

24 Afshar, S. and Cutcher, N., Syria’s Disappeared: The Case against Assad, 2017, available at www.channel4.com/programmes/dispatches/on-demand/65453-001 (accessed 30 December 2019)Google Scholar.

25 B. Taub, ‘The Assad Files’, The New Yorker, 16 April 2016.

26 Nouwen, too, notes the complex relationship between ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ stories. See Nouwen, supra note 2, at 234.

27 My interview questions are listed at the end of this article.

28 Elliott, I., ‘“A Meaningful Step towards Accountability”?: A View from the Field on the United Nations International, Impartial and Independent Mechanism for Syria’, (2017) 15 Journal of International Criminal Justice 239CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rankin, M., ‘Investigating Crimes against Humanity in Syria and Iraq: The Commission for International Justice and Accountability’, (2017) 9 Global Responsibility to Protect 395CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rankin, M., ‘The Future of International Criminal Evidence in New Wars? The Evolution of the Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA)’, (2018) 20 Journal of Genocide Research 392CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 This internship was co-ordinated by Professor Alex Whiting, a faculty member, Commissioner of CIJA, and one of my (publicly-quotable) interviewees.

30 See, for example, a panel discussion which included William Wiley hosted by the International Bar Association on 13 April 2019 in The Hague, available at vimeo.com/332691433 (accessed 12 July 2019).

31 See, for example, N. Hurd, ‘Interview with Chris Engels’, September 2018, CSCE, available at www.csce.gov/international-impact/interview-chris-engels-director-investigations-and-operations-commission (accessed 12 July 2019).

32 See, for example, an interview with Stephen Rapp: B. Beach, ‘Justice Seeker’, 2018, Harvard Magazine, available at harvardmagazine.com/2018/03/justice-seeker (accessed 12 July 2019).

33 See Nouwen, supra note 2, at 240.

34 For example, see Geertz’s discussion on ‘convergent data’ in anthropology, which he defines as, ‘descriptions, measures, observations, what you will, which are at once diverse, even rather miscellaneous, both as to type and degree of precision and generality, unstandardized facts, opportunistically collected and variously portrayed, which yet turn out to shed light on one another for the simple reason that the individuals they are descriptions, measures, or observations of are directly involved in one another’s lives; people, who in a marvellous phrase of Alfred Schutz’s, “grow old together”’. As such they differ from the sort of data one gets from polls, or surveys, or censuses, which yield facts about classes of individuals not otherwise related. See C. Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (1983), at 156.

35 Bochner, A. P., ‘Unfurling Rigor: On Continuity and Change in Qualitative Inquiry’, (2018) 24 Qualitative Inquiry 359CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 363.

36 Ibid., at 364.

37 Massoud, M. F., ‘Field Research on Law in Conflict Zones and Authoritarian States’, (2016) 12 Annual Review of Law and Social Science 85CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 89.

38 Cunliffe, A. L. and Karunanayake, G., ‘Working within Hyphen-Spaces in Ethnographic Research: Implications for Research Identities and Practice’, (2013) 16 Organizational Research Methodology 364CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 365.

39 Similarly, for Nouwen, the ‘unequal access to opportunities taints the production of knowledge – only a particular set of people, in a particular set of circumstances, is able to shape the research agenda which in turn informs polices that shape the world. These limitations on knowledge production are exacerbated by the discipline’s own assessment of who counts as “authority”’. See Nouwen, supra note 2, at 258. On the responsibility of access see also Al-Hardan, A., ‘Decolonizing Research on Palestinians: Towards Critical Epistemologies and Research Practice’, (2014) 20 Qualitative Inquiry 61CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cerwonka, A., ‘Nervous Conditions’, in Cerwonka, A. and Malkii, L., Improvising Theory: Process and Temporality in Ethnographic Fieldwork (2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 34.

40 Ibid., at 10.

41 Many thanks for Katherine Carroll for this insight. Also note Denzin’s point here, who suggests that, ‘the politics and political economy of … data … is not a question of evidence or no evidence. It is rather a question of who has the power to control the definition of evidence, who defines the kinds of materials that count as evidence, who determines what methods best produce the best forms of evidence, whose criteria and standards are used to evaluate quality evidence’. See Denzin, supra note 5, at 354.

42 For an example see Smith, V., ‘Ethnographies of Work and the Work of Ethnographers’, in Atkinson, P.et al. (eds.), Handbook of Ethnography (2011)Google Scholar.

43 On the importance of rapport in gaining access see Morse, Y., ‘Elite interviews in the developing world: finding anchors in weak institutional environments’, (2019) 19 Qualitative Research 277CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 280–2. See also Watson, T. J., ‘Ethnography, Reality, and Truth: The Vital Need for Studies of “How Things Work” in Organizations and Management’, (2011) 48 Journal of Management Studies 202CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 212; Bruch, E. M., ‘Researching Human Rights Professionals: Tracing the Networks of Human Rights Practice’, (2019) 11 Journal of Human Rights Practice 116Google Scholar, at 120. Notwithstanding Marcus’ seminal questioning of, ‘the desirability and achievability of rapport’ for anthropologists. See Marcus, G. E., ‘The Uses of Complicity in the Changing Mise-en-Scène of Anthropological Fieldwork’, (1997) 59 Representations 85CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 86.

44 Jones, G. M., ‘Secrecy’, (2014) Annual Review of Anthropology 43Google Scholar, at 54, 62.

45 Ibid., at 62. For Gusterson, this can lead to ‘polymorphous engagement’, which entails, ‘interacting with informants across a number of dispersed sites, not just in local communities, and sometimes in virtual form; and it means collecting data eclectically from a disparate array of sources and in many different ways’. Gusterson, H., ‘Studying Up Revisited’, (1997) 20(1) PoLAR 114CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 116.

46 Leander, A., ‘Ethnographic Contributions to Method Development: “Strong Objectivity” in Security Studies’, (2016) 17(4) International Studies Perspectives 462Google Scholar, at 466.

47 Ibid., at 467; see also Carroll, K. E. and Mesman, J., ‘Ethnographic context meets ethnographic biography: A challenge for the mores of doing fieldwork’, (2011) 5 International Journal of Multiple Research Approaches 155CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 165; Cerwonka, supra note 39, at 23–5.

48 Rappert, B., ‘Revealing and concealing secrets in research: the potential for the absent’, (2010) 10(5) Qualitative Research, at 572CrossRefGoogle Scholar. A similar point is made by Salwa Ismail in relation to research conversations she had in Syria, which were structured ‘within implicit understandings of the boundaries of authorised speech’. This was particularly the case when talking about the Hama Uprising of 1982, ‘a subject of silence more than of speech’. I had very similar experiences myself while living in Syria in 2008–2009. See S. Ismail, The Rule of Violence: Subjectivity, Memory and Government in Syria (2018), at 26.

49 Ibid., at 582.

50 See Jones, supra note 44, at 54. For a fascinating illustration of research on secret matters see González, R. J., ‘Anthropology and the covert’, (2012) 28(2) Anthropology Today 21CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Robben, A., ‘The Politics of Truth and Emotion Among Victims and Perpetrators of Violence’, in Nordstrom, C. and Robben, A. (eds.), Fieldwork under Fire: Contemporary Studies of Violence and Survival (1995)Google Scholar.

51 For some other reflections on how technology generates both access and intimacy see Bruch, supra note 43, at 127. Also see Sedgwick, M. W., ‘Complicit Positioning: Anthropological Knowledge and Problems of “Studying Up” for Ethnographer-Employees of Corporations’, (2017) 6 Journal of Business Anthropology 58CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 65.

52 While Feldman, in his account of non-local ethnography, downplays the centrality of a field site, he argues that participant observation is still required to distinguish ethnography from other endeavours. Feldman, G., ‘Illuminating the Apparatus: Steps toward a Nonlocal Ethnography of Global Governance’, in Shore, C.et al. (eds.), Policy Worlds: Anthropology and Analysis of Contemporary Power (2011)Google Scholar, at 45.

53 See the work of Kamari Clarke, Sally Merry and Annelise Riles in K. Clarke, Fictions of Justice: The International Criminal Court and the Challenge of Legal Pluralism in Sub-Saharan Africa (2009); S. E. Merry, Human Rights and Gender Justice (2006); S. E. Merry, supra note 13; Merry, S. E., ‘The potential of ethnographic methods for human rights research’, in Andreassen, B. A.et al. (eds.), Research Methods in Human Rights: A Handbook (2017), 141–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Riles, A., ‘Anthropology, Human Rights, and Legal Knowledge: Culture in the Iron Cage’, (2006) 108 American Anthropologist 52CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Riles, A., ‘Afterword: A Method More Than a Subject’, in Cowan, D. and Wincott, D. (eds.), Exploring the ‘Legal’ in Socio-Legal Studies (2016)Google Scholar, at 257–64.

54 Twining, W., ‘Law and Anthropology: A Case Study of Inter-Disciplinary Collaboration’, (1973) 7(4) Law & Society Review 561CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 562.

55 See Geertz, supra note 34, at 169.

56 Ibid., at 170. In addition, Riles suggests that ‘it is necessary to treat the intersections and gaps between disciplines as its own ethnographic zone, to observe how particular actors make claims for themselves and their disciplines through and against disciplinary accounts and the borrowing of one another’s methods’. See Riles, supra note 53, at 53.

57 For Sedgwick, ‘the state of ethnography is such that in its proliferation across the academy, and in claims to its use everywhere, there is by now no general consensus as to what ethnography is … it rests, precariously, on negative definitions, i.e., of what ethnography is not. In practice, ethnography has become an increasingly large receptacle for all sorts of qualitative methods’. See Sedgwick, supra note 51, at 74.

58 Darian-Smith, E., ‘Ethnographies of Law’, in Sarat, A. (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Law and Society (2008)Google Scholar, at 549.

59 F. Johns, Non-legality in International Law (2013), at 21–2; S. E. Merry, supra note 13, at 106.

60 Generally, see Gupta and Ferguson challenging this ideal in Gupta, A. and Ferguson, J., ‘Discipline and Practice: “The Field” as Site, Method, and Location in Anthropology’, in Gupta, A. and Ferguson, J. (eds.), Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science (2007)Google Scholar. For a background story to gatekeeping in the anthropology discipline, see M. Lamont, How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment (2009), at 87–95.

61 Feldman, supra note 52, at 46. For an application of Foucault’s ‘ethic of discomfort’ in her own activist ethnography see Coleman, L. M., ‘Ethnography, Commitment, and Critique: Departing from Activist Scholarship’, (2015) 9(3) International Political Sociology 263CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 246, 278.

62 Ingold, T., ‘That’s enough about ethnography!’, (2014) 4 HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 383CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 386.

63 As typified by Clifford, J.et al. (eds.), Writing Culture; The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, 25th Anniversary Edition (2010)Google Scholar.

64 Marcus, G. E., ‘On Ideologies of Reflexivity in Contemporary Efforts to Remake the Human Sciences’, (1994) 15 Poetics Today 383CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 384–5.

65 Robben, supra note 50, at 96. See also Marcus, supra note 43.

66 Marcus (1994), supra note 64, at 385. See also Marcus, G. E. and Cushman, D., ‘Ethnographies as Texts’, (1982) 11 Annual Review of Anthropology 25CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 39.

67 This is wonderfully captured by Mosse’s account of the problems he faced in trying to exit his field site and breaking fieldwork relationships. See Mosse, D., ‘Anti-social anthropology? Objectivity, objection, and the ethnography of public policy and professional communities’, (2006) 12 Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 935CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This is related to Gupta and Ferguson’s discussion about the ‘hierarchy of purity’, see Gupta and Ferguson, supra note 60, at 13.

68 Westbrook, D. A., ‘Creative Engagements Indeed! Open “Disciplines”, The Allure of Others, and Intellectual Fertility’, (2014) 3 Journal of Business Anthropology 170CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 176. See also Marcus and Cushman, supra note 66, at 45.

69 Sedgwick, supra note 51, at 65.

70 See Gupta and Ferguson, supra note 60; Coleman, supra note 61, at 272.

71 A rich body of scholarship from the fields of institutional and organizational ethnography have grappled with some of these concerns, but are beyond the scope of this article. In particular see Bruch, supra note 43; Langhof, A., ‘Off the record: understanding the (latent) functions of documents in organizations’, (2018) 7 Journal of Organizational Ethnography 59CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Watson, supra note 43; Watson, T. J., ‘Making organisational ethnography’, (2012) 1 Journal of Organizational Ethnography 15CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Zilber, T. B., ‘Beyond a single organization: challenges and opportunities in doing field level ethnography’, (2014) 3 Journal of Organizational Ethnography 96CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

72 Westbrook points out that ‘shifting the object of inquiry from traditional cultures to present situations changes many things for ethnography, but it does not transform either the fundamental stance of the ethnographer or even the activity of learning through conversation – there is no need to understand ethnography as declining along with the possibility of geographic discovery’. See D. A. Westbrook, Navigators of the Contemporary: Why Ethnography Matters (2008), at 42–3.

73 Merry, supra note 53, at 141.

74 For Greenhouse, ‘[c]hanges in the social fields of law in turn affect what constitutes fieldwork. The strong emergence of discourse, narrative, performance, and practice as “found objects” … blurs any easy distinction between what is “in” some “field” or outside of it’. Greenhouse, C. J., ‘Fieldwork on Law’, (2006) 2 Annual Review of Law and Social Science 187CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 187. Also see Feldman, supra note 52.

75 See Gupta and Ferguson, supra note 60, at 39.

76 Hastrup, K., ‘Getting it right: Knowledge and evidence in anthropology’, (2004) 4 Anthropological Theory 455CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

77 Feldman, G., ‘If ethnography is more than participant-observation, then relations are more than connections: The case for nonlocal ethnography in a world of apparatuses’, (2011) 11 Anthropological Theory 375CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 378. See also Marcus, G. E., ‘Ethnography Two Decades after Writing Culture: From the Experimental to the Baroque’ (2007) 80 Anthropological Quarterly 1127CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 1132.

78 For one of the most developed contributions on multi-sited ethnography see G. E. Marcus, Ethnography though Thick and Thin (1998). Merry prefers to call this type of approach ‘de-territorialized ethnography’, which in contrast to multi-sited ethnography, ‘comes closer to the notion that this is a disembodied space of social life, one that exists in various spaces but is not grounded in any one of them’. See Merry, supra note 53, at 29. It is important to note here that Marcus’ ground-breaking work on multi-sited ethnography would not only support continuing empirical approaches, but also far more post-structural approaches including within Marcus’ own work.

79 Feldman, supra note 77, at 377. See also Carroll and Mesman in their consideration about, ‘how long should one spend in the field?’. They stress, ‘how compressed time required us as researchers to be reflexive about our norms, work with them to find solutions, and then transition to be able to work within the multiple research approaches required of us in a contemporary and participatory society’. See Carroll and Mesman, supra note 47, at 165.

80 Thus, for Sedgwick, anthropology ‘could not have arisen outside of a colonizing framework’. See Sedgwick, supra note 51, at 66.

81 Nader, L., ‘UP the Anthropologist – Perspectives Gained from Studying Up’, in Hymes, D. (ed.), Reinventing Anthropology (1972)Google Scholar. Merry endorses ‘studying up’ as an important strand within the anthropology of international law. See Merry (2006), supra note 53, 108.

82 Sedgwick, supra note 51, at 60.

83 Deeb, H. N. and Marcus, G. E., ‘In the Green Room: An Experiment in Ethnographic Method at the WTO’, (2011) 34 PoLAR 51CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 53.

84 Holmes, D. R. and Marcus, G. E., ‘Cultures of Expertise and the Management of Globalization: Toward the Refunctioning of Ethnography’, in Ong, A. and Collier, S. (eds.), Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems (2005)Google Scholar, at 248. See also Marcus, G. E., ‘Experimental forms for the expressions of norms in the ethnography of the contemporary’, (2013) 3 HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 197CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 208.

85 Islam, G., ‘Practitioners as Theorists: Para-ethnography and the Collaborative Study of Contemporary Organizations’, (2015) 18 Organizational Research Methods 231CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 232.

86 Ibid.

87 Islam lists these as auto-ethnography; multi-sited ethnography, and para-ethnography. Ibid.

88 Holmes and Marcus, supra note 84, at 250–1.

89 Holmes, D. and Marcus, G., ‘Collaboration Today and the Re-Imagination of the Classic Scene of Fieldwork Encounter’, (2008) 1 Collaborative Anthropologies 81CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 82.

90 See Riles, supra note 8, at 260.

91 Typically, we assume that ‘[a]cademic voice has authority. It naturalizes our questions, our concepts, our frames of reference and positions us as part of a natural, authoritative “we”’. See Coleman, supra note 61, at 274. See also Gusterson, supra note 45, at 117.

92 Darian-Smith, supra note 58, at 551.

93 For example, see Empson, L., ‘Elite interviewing in professional organizations’, (2018) 5 Journal of Professions and Organization 58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

94 For example, see Pierce’s reflection on her experience as a female researcher of male litigators, in Pierce, J. L. ‘Lawyers, Lethal Weapons, and Ethnographic Authority: Reflections on Fieldwork for Gender Trials’, in Moch, S. D. and Gates, M. (eds.), The Researcher Experience in Qualitative Research (2013)Google Scholar.

95 For Marcus, this, ‘affinity arises … [the] mutual curiosity and anxiety [of the fieldworker and informant] about their relationship to a “third” – not so much the abstract contextualizing world system but the specific sites elsewhere that affect their interactions and make them complicit (in relation to the influence of that “third”) in creating the bond that makes their fieldwork relationship effective’. See Marcus, supra note 43, at 100.

96 Gusterson, H., ‘Ethnographic Research’, in Klotz, A. and Prakash, D. (eds.), Qualitative Methods in International Relations (2008)Google Scholar, 93, at 105. See also Perera, K., ‘The interview as an opportunity for participant reflexivity’, (2019) Qualitative Research, doi:10.1177/1468794119830539Google Scholar.

97 See Holmes and Marcus, supra note 89, at 84. Also see Deeb and Marcus, supra note 83, at 55.

98 Bate, S. P., ‘Whatever Happened to Organizational Anthropology? A Review of the Field of Organizational Ethnography and Anthropological Studies’, (1997) 50 Human Relations 1147CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 166–8; Clifford, J., ‘On Ethnographic Authority’, (1983) 1 Representations 118CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Van Maanen, J., ‘Ethnography as Work: Some Rules of Engagement’, (2011) 48(1) Journal of Management Studies 218CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 225.

99 See Westbrook, supra note 72, at 52. See also Holmes, D. R.et al., ‘Intellectual Vocations in the City of Gold’, (2006) 29 PoLAR 154CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

100 For Orford, ‘the protocols of scholarly writing in disciplines like law have … required that the “author” be absent from the text. Areas of knowledge such as law, which claim to be objective and technical, require that the embodied nature of the human being creating the texts in question be forgotten. An analysis of the ways in which lawyers are produced is, therefore, seen as irrelevant to the central debates of the discipline’. A. Orford (1998) ‘Embodying Internationalism: The Making of International Lawyers’, Australian Year Book of International Law, at 4.

101 MacDonald, K., ‘Towards a Transnational Feminist Methodology of Encounter’, (2019) Qualitative Research, doi:10.1177/1468794119847578CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

102 See Coleman, supra note 61, at 274.

103 See A. Al-Hardan, supra note 39, at 66.

104 See Coleman, supra note 61, at 271. Or ‘“suffering” voyeurism’ in Al-Hardan, supra note 39, at 66.

105 Nouwen notes the problem of the researcher profiting from her subjects, and also how she rarely encounters these subjects again. See Nouwen, supra note 2, at 244. See also Al-Hardan, supra note 39, at 26.

106 See Rappert, supra note 48, at 571.

107 See Orford, supra note 100, at 11. Wood notes that, ‘[i]n carrying out research in conflict zones, the researcher inevitably comes to wonder why the research is worth pursuing over purely humanitarian relief work’. See Wood, E. J., ‘The Ethical Challenges of Field Research in Conflict Zones’, (2006) 29 Qualitative Sociology 373CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 383.

108 Particularly as sustained by TWAIL scholarship, such as A. Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (2005); Martineau, A. C., ‘Overcoming Eurocentrism? Global History and the Oxford Handbook of the History of International Law’, (2014) 25 EJIL 329CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

109 On the tension between reform and radical change on the question of international law and Eurocentrism see Eslava, L. and Pahuja, S., ‘Between Resistance and Reform: TWAIL and the Universality of International Law’, (2011) 3 Trade, Law and Development 103Google Scholar. For a critique of TWAIL’s radical potential see Haskell, J. D., ‘TRAIL-ing TWAIL: Arguments and Blind Spots in Third World Approaches to International Law’, (2014) 27 Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence 383CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

110 Sedgwick, supra note 51, at 67–8. See also Nouwen, supra note 2, at 260.

111 It might require heightened awareness about the potential risk to the research subjects, such as those based in authoritarian states. See Clark, J. A. and Cavatorta, F., ‘Introduction: The Methodological Challenges of Conducting Research in the Middle East and North Africa’, in Clark, J. A. and Cavatorta, F. (eds.), Political Science Research in the Middle East and North Africa: Methodological and Ethical Challenges (2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 18.

112 See Westbrook, supra note 68, at 12; Coleman, supra note 61; Mesman, J., ‘Disturbing Observations as a Basis for Collaborative Research’, (2007) 16 Science as Culture 281CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

113 Thanks to Anan AbuShanab for her translation.

114 For Al-Hardan as a privileged Palestinian ‘outsider’ speaking to Palestinian ‘insiders’ in her fieldwork in Syria, she notes how the, ‘perceived need to convey the message [about the 1948 Palestinian Nakba, or catastrophe] is itself telling of the power relations from where I had come – the imperialist centres of power and upholders of the colonial and neo-colonial status quo in the (Arab) world and to where I had come …’. Al-Hardan, supra note 39, at 66.

115 See, for example, Clarke, supra note 53.

116 This is particularly the case for Westerners representing non-Westerners. See Robben, A. and Nordstrom, C., ‘The Anthropology and Ethnography of Violence and Sociopolitical Conflict’, in Robben, A. and Nordstrom, C. (eds.), Fieldwork under Fire: Contemporary Studies of Violence and Survival (1995)Google Scholar, at 7–8.

117 Lashaw, A., ‘How progressive culture resists critique: The impasse of NGO Studies’, (2012) 14 Ethnography 501CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

118 Fassin, D., ‘Noli Me Tangere: The Moral Untouchability of Humanitarianism’, in Redfield, P. and Bornstein, E. (eds.), Forces of Compassion: Humanitarianism between Ethics and Politics (2010)Google Scholar, at 42. See also Mosse, supra note 67; Marcus’ discussion on some of these points in relation to Geertz’s ground-breaking work, in Marcus, supra note 43.

119 Clifford, supra note 98, at 139.

120 Ibid.

121 Bate, supra note 98.

122 Clifford, supra note 98, at 141. See also Marcus, supra note 64, at 391. One noteworthy anecdote here is the forceful response I encountered from a colleague after a seminar I gave that had included this very quotation. She herself has carried out extensive fieldwork within marginalized communities, but was vehement in her opinion that I could not include any material from this interview because of the compromised relationship that she saw as occurring between me and my interlocutor.

123 On scholarly humility see Nouwen, supra note 2, at 234; Sedgwick, supra note 51, at 63.