As with any book—and certainly any book involving 44 contributors—there is a long list of people whose help and hard work we would like to acknowledge. First, we would like to offer our sincere thanks to the contributors to this volume. We are beyond delighted to have been able to share these insightful stories more broadly, and we are very grateful to our contributors for agreeing to share them with us. Academics are not, as a rule, particularly keen on explaining to the world at large how our particular brand of sausage gets made. Our publications are generally the perfectly pruned and polished final products of the research process, in which the years of sweat, uncertainty, and countless mistakes are barely visible. This book, we hope, will serve as a corrective and complement to this aspect of our discipline. We are deeply grateful that our contributors were willing to share some of the less glamorous parts of their lives as field researchers in the interest of encouraging readers who may think that their own struggles and doubts are theirs alone. As an added benefit, we’re also thrilled to preserve some frankly fantastic stories for posterity.
We are also grateful for all of the support we received in bringing this project into the world. We thank the Northeast Middle East Politics Working Group, where the idea for this book first arose and many of whose members were early supporters and contributors. We are thankful for the insights provided by two anonymous reviewers of the manuscript, who provided painstaking comments that greatly improved the book, as well as to the friends and colleagues of all of the contributors (including both of us) who read and offered feedback on the individual chapters. At Columbia University Press, our editor, Caelyn Cobb, was incredibly enthusiastic about this project from the beginning, and provided us with invaluable support through what was at times a logistically complicated process, as did her staff. (This was particularly true because we were both away on field research ourselves during the early stages of the project, and often in different time zones, making coordination even more challenging than usual.) We’d also like to thank Nthabiseng Kamala at Boston College Media Technology Services for helping to draft our cover design, all of the research assistants in the Political Violence Project at Boston College who edited drafts of the manuscript throughout the process, and the Clark University Political Science Department’s Harrington Fund. We also want to acknowledge the families, friends, partners, children, and others who provide an important tether to home for researchers in the field. Their love and support—from Skype calls after difficult interviews, to cups of coffee provided while analyzing data at home, to those much-needed reminders to take a break and go for a walk—make all the difference. And of course, we want to offer our sincerest gratitude to our interview subjects, survey respondents, experimental participants, and all the other people who have shared their experiences, perspectives and expertise with us and our colleagues over the years.
Finally, we’d like to end with a special note of thanks to those whose work makes our work possible: our fixers, translators, interpreters, drivers, security officers, research assistants, survey enumerators, and all of the other folks whose skill sets so often go unacknowledged but without which academic field research would grind to a halt. We cannot thank you enough, but we can commit to ensuring that your work receives the credit it deserves. As a first step in that process, this book is dedicated to you. Thank you.
Peter Krause, Boston, MA
Ora Szekely, Providence, RI