FOTINI CHRISTIA
▶ FIELDWORK LOCATION: AFGHANISTAN
I began doing research in Afghanistan in 2004 while still a graduate student in the middle of writing my dissertation. A couple of years after the fall of the Taliban, Afghanistan was pristine territory for social science, and it was not yet overrun by foreign academics. The Afghan war was then known as “the good war” when compared to a violently disintegrating Iraq, and pundits as well as locals were optimistic about peace because change felt palpable. Even in those early days, there was no valor or glamour associated with being in Afghanistan. Although a difficult setting in which to do research as a foreigner and as a woman, it proved to be a great learning ground for meaningful fieldwork in tough places.1 The lessons from the Afghan countryside inspired some of my most exciting early work and have stayed with me for life, enabling do-no-harm policy relevant research in other war-torn, hard-to-access areas such as Iraq and Yemen.2
BUILDING CONNECTIONS WITH JOURNALISTS AND EXPATS
My first realization, a mere few hours after setting foot on the ground in Afghanistan, was the importance of building connections with journalists and expats. Insightful and well informed, even when not social-scientifically minded, they can be a great resource for research. Journalists combine a good understanding of the local context with a broad network of influential acquaintances, and they do not see academics as competition given our vastly different publishing horizons. Rather, they appreciate the rigorous nature of our work, and they saved me a great deal of time and effort by making introductions, offering helpful suggestions on an array of logistical arrangements, and explaining how red tape worked in Kabul. I am still grateful to the United Nations staffers who, on my first trip to Afghanistan, rented me a room in their house on Kabul’s Butcher Street that was meant to serve as their safety bunker. It was the best bargain in town, and it came with a lot of advice on how to navigate a then unfamiliar terrain. Their frequent offers for a car ride or a meal, generous in and of themselves, came with information that helped tremendously in figuring out how to optimize my data collection strategy.
I also got phenomenal insight, better than any book on Afghanistan I had ever read, from expat area experts who had lived in the region for decades. Their nuance was unparalleled and offered some really creative views on whom to interview and how, what survey questions to ask, and how to come across as an overall savvy researcher in this context. My meetings with true connoisseurs of Afghanistan and its people, such as Michael Semple and the late Nancy Dupree, were memorable in that regard. Some influential policy-related pieces resulted from these interactions that not only deepened my interest in the area and attracted positive attention to my work but also proved integral to later thinking on my research.
Friends or acquaintances with local connections to share also turned out to be invaluable. I remember chaperoning an Afghan friend in meetings with aspiring suitors, who were so keen to impress her that they would offer to help out her researcher friend (me!), providing hard-to-get contact details for potential interview subjects. This Jane Austen-esque interaction didn’t just show me the importance of local acquaintances; it also showed me the value of understanding local gender politics and how being a woman in such a field setting, as insightfully noted by other academics doing research in the Muslim world, could be a strength at times and a weakness at others.3
BEING THE “THIRD GENDER” AS A WESTERN WOMAN IN AFGHANISTAN
Some of the best advice I got was to keep my head low and covered and to be cognizant of the gender dimension in everything I set out to do in Afghanistan. Afghan women are treated as second-class citizens, but Western women working in Afghanistan are seen as a third sex, with access both to the Afghan male and female worlds that are more often than not segregated. Being able to interact with both Afghan men and women for my research allowed me to see not only the large gaps between the spaces the two genders occupy but also the several points of contact and what they meant for research on topics that transcend gender, such as local governance and development.
For instance, for a project on community driven development across the Afghan countryside, the gender dimension was critical as an outcome variable and from a measurement perspective. Specifically, we needed to do large-scale data collection involving surveys in villages with both male and female members of households. That required having female enumerators for female subjects and male enumerators for male subjects. Our enumerators also had to be able and willing to travel with us for extended periods of time in the Afghan countryside because our sample covered five hundred villages in a diverse set of ten Afghan districts dispersed across the country. The enumerator recruitment process was very cognizant of gender; we had to make sure that the women we hired as enumerators had escorts who were male relatives. That meant we needed to come up with mother-son, wife-husband, daughter-father, or sister-brother teams of enumerators. We looked for pairs that allowed us to optimize on enumerator quality. We often had to recruit women first because they were harder to find; then we tested whoever was available among their father, brother, son, or husband to see who best fit the requirements to serve as the counterpart male enumerator. Although these gender demands made for a challenging recruitment process, the familial relations they entailed helped the team sustain high morale and performance in the field, even in the toughest of places in rural Afghanistan.
As an individual researcher, being a woman helped me to relate and connect with interview subjects who were willing to interact and share stories because they perceived me as less threatening than male colleagues. I have no doubt that several warlords whom I interviewed for my dissertation were keen to meet with me, not just because of their interest in my research topic but also partly because I was a Western woman academic, not a usual sighting in Afghanistan at the time. From the set of influential warlords who were initially too busy to meet me, I learned how to best present my research project. It was through such initial conversations that I became more aware of the importance of appropriately presenting myself and my work. The ultimate intent of writing a dissertation is to turn the work into a published manuscript, so I told my subjects I was working on a future book. They could readily recognize that, and they often explicitly ask to be referenced. It was also important to highlight the academic nature of the project, as well as my institutional affiliation.
For the harder-to-access elites, an approach that always worked involved, as other researchers have noted, dropping some names of prominent individuals who had already granted me access.4 It was easier to first secure interviews with more marginal elites who may have fallen out of power but who, at some point, had played a major role in terms of rivalry and competition to contemporary power players in the field. These people readily grant interviews, and they had more time to talk about the past and the glorious times in which they may have been involved. Once I secured their version of the story, the more influential public officials who may have originally been too busy to meet due to other obligations became available.
DISCIPLINE IN DATA COLLECTION AND WORKING WITH LOCAL RESEARCHERS
One aspect of fieldwork involves going with the flow and reaching out to build connections with locals and expats to figure out exactly how to position yourself and your work; another aspect requires being very organized and systematic. Specifically, in Afghanistan, and in all other war zones where I have carried out research since then, I never failed to notice the importance of discipline during the data collection process. There are codified and straightforward ways to do surveys or experiments, but people often get sloppy with their field notes. It is important to keep everything organized and systematic: take detailed field notes, along with photos, and transcribe them as consistently and as often as possible. It is field notes that offer rich context and allow a researcher to figure out how to gather, organize, and present the rest of the data collected from the field. They bring great color but can be easily confused or left out if not kept and documented in a rigorous way.
Discipline is even more important when leading a team of local researchers in the field. Enumerators require a lot more training than is usually programmed or budgeted, need to be followed in the field to test both their capacity to collect data and their knowledge of the survey and research instruments, and need to be monitored closely. Irrespective of how professional they are, the quality of work they will produce for you—that is, the quality of data they collect—is directly correlated with your level of involvement, dedication, and oversight in the data gathering process.
Beyond making sure that the financial incentives for enumerators are structured appropriately, I found that being closely involved in enumerator training and appealing to their national pride worked wonders. Specifically, indicating how the data they were collecting would contribute to research and important knowledge for their country and, in turn, potentially help improve living conditions, highlighted the importance of gathering data accurately and with attention to detail. They were all also very keen to be personally acknowledged as part of the data collection team in any academic work published from this data collection effort, something that was on offer as an extra incentive to create accountability for the data collected. Ultimately, training local enumerators is a way of giving back beyond the specific research project and findings, by building capacity and skill. And this giving back to the field site, either through policy pieces that effectively communicate the findings and impact of the academic work or through building local research capacity, is both the right thing to do ethically and an undoubted enabler of future research.
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Fotini Christia is professor of political science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
PUBLICATIONS TO WHICH THIS FIELDWORK CONTRIBUTED:
• Christia, Fotini, and Michael Semple. “Flipping the Taliban: How to Win in Afghanistan,” Foreign Affairs 88, no. 4 (July-August 2009): 34–45.
• Christia, Fotini. Alliance Formation in Civil Wars. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
• Christia, Fotini, Andrew Beath, and Ruben Enikolopov. “Empowering Women Through Development Aid: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Afghanistan,” American Political Science Review 107, no. 3 (August 2013): 540–57.
NOTES
1. On the relevance of fieldwork, see Soledad Loaeza, Randy Stevenson, and Devra Moehler, “Symposium: Should Everyone Do Fieldwork?,” APSA-CP Newsletter 16, no. 2 (2005): 8–18.
2. For an excellent discussion on qualitative research in war zones, see Elisabeth Jean Wood, “The Ethical Challenges of Field Research in Conflict Zones,” Qualitative Sociology 29, no. 3 (September 2006): 373–86, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-006-9027-8.
4. Schwedler, “The Third Gender,” 425.