KRISTA E. WIEGAND
▶ FIELDWORK LOCATION: LEBANON
In 1995, I conducted my first field research and inadvertently ended up interviewing terrorists. I was working on my master’s thesis at American University, studying the role of national and religious identity in the Lebanese Civil War. I had traveled to Lebanon to conduct interviews and surveys in the field, even though Lebanon was still tense and a travel ban was in place. Incredibly, I received approval from the institutional review board (IRB) to conduct both surveys and interviews in Lebanon. I had a very supportive thesis advisor, an Israeli peace activist and scholar who was confident that I could do the field research in Lebanon. I was trying to figure out how national, religious, and regional identity played a role in the Lebanese Civil War. There was no local polling company at that time, nor any logical way to pursue a randomized survey, so I set about trying to get a good variety of surveys from different religious groups. In postwar Lebanon, the religious and regional divisions were still quite sharp: Lebanese Christians were living in East Beirut and to the north, along the coast and into the mountains up from Jounieh and Byblos; Druze were living in the mountains east of Beirut; and Muslims were living in West Beirut and south of the capital, along the coast and in the Bekaa Valley near Syria.
A friend’s mother arranged for me to meet with a professor she knew, who helped me contact others who were willing to be interviewed. The internet was still in its infancy, especially in Lebanon, and email was not a good way to contact people. Land lines were unreliable because they required an infrastructure that had been destroyed in the war. Calling cell phones and personal connections were the only means of communication; as a result, I relied solely on my friends’ friends and their friends. The people I knew were educated Christians and Sunnis who had fled during the war and were returning to Lebanon. At first, I relied on their contacts and asked people at the beach clubs, mountain cabins, restaurants, and cafés to fill out my surveys, which were in English and translated into Arabic. In this fashion, I was able to acquire about two hundred completed surveys, eventually compiling some interesting patterns and data about the role of identity in Lebanon.
I now had an overwhelming number of surveys from Sunnis, Maronite Catholics, Greek Orthodox, and Druze, but I had very few Shia respondents. To get access to Shia respondents, my friend Pierre asked his car mechanic in south Beirut, a Shia, to distribute my surveys around his neighborhood among Hezbollah and Amal supporters, and to return them to me a week later. A few days later I learned that my surveys had been confiscated by Hezbollah, and I was not certain which office or branch of the organization had them. I asked my friend to arrange a meeting with the people who had confiscated them, so I could persuade them to return my surveys. As a graduate student with limited funds, it had cost me a lot to photocopy the fifty or so surveys I had given to the car mechanic.
I went to an office in Dahieh, a suburb in south Beirut, with my friend Pierre, and we met with a handful of people from Hezbollah for a couple of hours. I would not recommend visiting such a group without prior arrangements and safety considerations, and without weighing the pros and cons. They proceeded to interrogate me about whether I was in the CIA, why the U.S. government was pro-Israeli, and what I—an American woman who was not married to a Lebanese man—was doing in Lebanon. I did my best to explain that the CIA does not hand out surveys to collect information, but in the end I was unable to recover my surveys. As a consolation prize, they gave me a beautiful rosewood Qur’an stand made in Iran, for my use when (if) I decided to convert to Islam.
The meeting had been intimidating, but it led me to want to learn more about Hezbollah. A few years later this became the major research topic for my PhD years at Duke University. Two years later, with the travel ban lifted, I returned to Lebanon for a year to teach political science courses at Notre Dame University–Louaize, and I got to know Lebanese society and politics much better. The focus of my doctoral research at Duke was territorial disputes, political violence, nationalism, ethnic conflict, and the Middle East.
In the summer of 2000, I heard that the Israeli army (IDF) and the South Lebanese Army (SLA) had suddenly withdrawn from the southern occupied part of Lebanon where they had been since 1982. I knew I had to travel there as soon as possible to see firsthand what the until recently occupied border region and disputed territory of Shebaa Farms were like. News reports indicated that Hezbollah now controlled the entire southern region, which had been abandoned by the IDF and the SLA. I realized I needed permission from Hezbollah to travel in the south of Lebanon.
I went online to Hezbollah.org (a website that has since been taken down), as well as to several other renamed sites, and clicked on “Contact Us.” I sent an email requesting permission to travel in the south of Lebanon for research reasons, and I received a response instructing me to contact an official when I arrived in Beirut the following week. I was able to secure travel funding from Duke with a vague research proposal about observing the transition in the south of Lebanon, but I had no plans for the field research I would do when I arrived there. I traveled to Beirut only a few weeks after the Israeli withdrawal, and because I was not planning to conduct any interviews, I did not seek IRB approval for anything.
When I arrived at Hezbollah’s Central Information Office in the southern suburb of Haret Horeik with my friend Joe, who would help me with my request for travel papers, I was caught off guard. First, my passport was taken to register in their records, and second, I was brought into a room to meet with Sheikh Attalah Ibrahim, director of information for Hezbollah, for the interview I had supposedly requested. On the spot, I had to come up with questions to ask him about Hezbollah policies and strategies, not sure how far I could go when asking about the organization’s positions on Israel. I came up with questions on the fly, asking about Hezbollah’s plans in the south of Lebanon, how the “liberation” had been celebrated by all Lebanese (regardless of religious identity), and how Hezbollah was participating in Lebanese politics. The sheikh spoke with my male friend Joe in Arabic, never making eye contact with me, and the two of them had long exchanges that Joe, not a professional interpreter, summarized the best he could for me. I felt uncomfortable but knew that the cultural norm for religious Shia men was not to shake hands or look directly at women they did not know, and I needed to not take it personally. Sometimes, field research turns into something unanticipated, and it was important for me to be culturally sensitive and ready for a conversation that would turn into an interview.
Instead of getting travel permission, I was instructed to visit Hezbollah’s district office in Nabatiya, near the former southern border. Along with my friend Joe and his mother, who had come along because she was curious about seeing the south of Lebanon, I was shown into a reception room for coffee and another meeting. There was none of the hype that most journalists write about, none of the tension that people assume is present among members of a group like Hezbollah, whether labeled “guerillas,” “terrorists,” or “resistance fighters.” Rather, they were politely curious about my interest in them and my reasons for wanting to visit the “liberated areas.” They immediately accepted my brief explanation for my interest in the south of Lebanon. Whether they believed it or not was irrelevant, as I soon realized. In concluding our meeting, the Hezbollah district head instructed a man named Ahmed to serve as our guide, take us anywhere we wanted to go in the formerly occupied zone, and answer all my questions.
We spent ten hours with Ahmed, with Joe driving more than three hundred miles, all within the formerly occupied zone. I visited IDF posts that had been imploded as the IDF soldiers were withdrawing, drove past vast areas of burned trees and bushes and as yet undiscovered land mines, and visited with United Nations peacekeeping forces who were still located in the region despite Hezbollah’s takeover. Again, without any original intention of interviewing a Hezbollah fighter, I had an incredible opportunity to ask all sorts of questions about why Ahmed had supported Hezbollah during the war and again in 2000, as well as all about Hezbollah politics. Ahmed had been a bodyguard to the head of the military wing of Hezbollah, and he had been captured by the IDF in 1994. He had spent eleven years in a prison in Israel and had only been released a few months earlier, as part of a German-mediated agreement to swap Israelis and Lebanese, alive and dead. This “field research” taught me more in one day than I could ever learn from books, or even from conducting interviews with Hezbollah officials in Beirut.
Two years later, in the summer of 2002, while studying Arabic at American University of Beirut, I had planned to follow up with Hezbollah officials about what was going on in Lebanese politics and the changes made in the south of Lebanon. I had to cancel my interviews, however, because the U.S. embassy had contacted my Arabic professor, asking her to “keep an eye on Krista since she is on a CIA watch list.” In the post-September 11, 2001 atmosphere that included passage of the PATRIOT Act, I immediately realized that I should not pursue any further contacts with Hezbollah. The organization had been listed as a terrorist group by the U.S. government. I was extremely frustrated, but at the same time I was unwilling to risk being interrogated by U.S. officials who, under the PATRIOT Act, did not have to provide me with a lawyer. I was stunned when I was told of my status, but I was not surprised because I had been “randomly” selected for security checks with my luggage when flying, as well as interrogated by Irish authorities on a family trip to Ireland about why I had so many Lebanese, Syrian, and Jordanian stamps and visas in my passport. Eventually an airline representative told me flat out that I was on a flight watch list and that it was not random that I had been selected for extra security checks.
My visit in 2002 was my last visit to Lebanon or anywhere in the Middle East until 2011. Conducting interviews with Hezbollah had become difficult, so I turned my work toward disputes in East Asia, where I would not get into trouble for my research. It was another eight years before I felt comfortable writing and publishing an article and then my book about Hezbollah and Hamas, which included my field research in Lebanon. I didn’t know how I was going to use my earlier interviews, but they found their way into my book Bombs and Ballots: Governance by Islamic Terrorist and Guerrilla Groups. Although I did not have IRB approval, I decided the risk was worth it because the people I spoke with were from Hezbollah’s media groups. I recommend seeking IRB approval for any field research trip, even when interviews are not anticipated. It is much better to obtain IRB approval before any field research so that the research can be used in dissertations, articles, or books. I also recommend that scholars understand the risks and the political situation of the country in which they are planning to conduct research. I felt comfortable in Lebanon because I knew many locals who helped guide me away from certain areas and counseled me to avoid talking to certain types of people.
From my research in Lebanon, I learned that spontaneous opportunities would appear for which I was not prepared. I had to make an ethical choice regarding conducting interviews without IRB approval or foregoing them altogether. In the end, I decided to use these interviews in my publications because, in both cases, Hezbollah officials had granted me the interviews by choice, not by my request, and gave me their names with no requests for confidentiality. After the 2006 July War between Hezbollah and Israel, I was not even sure that the people I had spoken with in the main office and district office of Hezbollah were still alive.
I did not conduct field research again until 2017, this time as a Senior Fulbright Scholar in the Philippines. I interviewed government officials, bureaucrats, scholars, and journalists about the South China Sea dispute. Even though my interviews in the Philippines were much more organized, sometimes they were spontaneous, and I had to decide whether to ask the person to sign my IRB consent form giving me permission to use the information in my research. In the Philippines, I learned that I needed to have my IRB consent forms, interview questions, and my notebook with me at all times. I learned that I should be fully aware of cultural norms and not be afraid to ask questions that might generate controversy. Although very different in context, my field research experiences in both Lebanon and the Philippines were similar in that I faced unforeseen circumstances, which presented both ethical challenges and great opportunities.
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Krista E. Wiegand is associate professor in the Department of Political Science and director of the Global Security Program at the Howard H. Baker Jr. Center for Public Policy, at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
PUBLICATION TO WHICH THIS FIELDWORK CONTRIBUTED:
• Wiegand, Krista E. Bombs and Ballots: Governance by Islamic Terrorist and Guerrilla Groups. New York: Routledge, 2010.