ORA SZEKELY
▶ FIELDWORK LOCATION: LEBANON
On a rainy night in February 2009, I got into a taxi in Beirut with a journalist friend and headed for the southern suburbs known collectively as the Dahieh. Through my friend’s extensive local connections, she had gotten permission for us to attend a public event being held by Hezbollah.1 It was my fourth year of graduate school, and I was in Beirut to conduct dissertation research on Hezbollah, among other nonstate organizations. Their public outreach was a major focus of my project, and I was delighted to have the opportunity to attend one of their events.2
The event in question did not disappoint. When we arrived, after first mistakenly trying to get in through the regular women’s entrance, we were politely redirected to the press entrance where we lined up under a tent erected to protect us from Beirut’s wintry drizzle while our names were checked against a list. We were then admitted to a massive space that looked like a cross between an arena and an airplane hangar, full of people waving flags, posing for photos, and in some cases, posing their children for photos in front of the pack of journalists in the press enclosure in the center of the room to which we were directed.3
The press pen had an excellent view of the rest of the space, which was divided by gender, with men on one side and women on the other. The event was a commemoration of the death the previous year of Imad Mughniyeh—one of Hezbollah’s founders and a central architect of its military strategy—and was therefore attended, as far as I could tell, mostly by party members and active supporters. The front rows were filled with party dignitaries and a few political allies. Despite the somewhat grim official focus of the event, there was a festive atmosphere, and many of the attendees seemed to have brought their own flags. We were given commemorative sashes, (one of which I still have) in the distinctive shade I still think of as “Hezbollah yellow,” that were printed with the faces of three of the group’s leaders who had been killed by the Israeli military or intelligence services.
The event began with a series of speeches by various party leaders, interspersed with videos on a massive screen at the front of the room celebrating Hezbollah’s military exploits as well as performances by Hezbollah’s (all male) choir and their backup band in front of an elaborate stage set. The main event was an address—conducted live via video from a presumably safe location—by Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah. Overall, the event felt like a cross between a political rally and a Broadway show, and it gave me exactly the insight I’d been looking for into Hezbollah’s propaganda apparatus. I found the entire event fascinating.
For many of the journalists sitting around us, though, the evening was apparently a bit too long to sit through. Although a few stayed for the entire event, as the evening wore on, the seats around us began to empty. We were relatively close to the front of the room, and these vacancies soon proved irresistible to some of those in the men’s section behind us, who hadn’t had seats nearly as good as ours. Eventually, the “press section” became just another seating area.
This change in seating arrangements had somewhat unanticipated results (or at least, results that were unanticipated by me). Hezbollah’s public events are almost always covered by its satellite TV channel, Al Manar. This was no exception, and there was an enormous camera boom hovering over the room. It had largely avoided filming the press section when it was full of journalists, photographers, and cameras from rival news organizations, but by the end of the evening most of those people had trickled away. The camera began swinging in over our heads, filming the section in which we were sitting, now surrounded by regular rally attendees.
The next day, when my friend walked into work, her coworkers delightedly informed her that they’d seen both of us on Al Manar the night before—the cameraman had even zoomed in on us a couple of times. My friend and I, who both have red hair, had been instantly recognizable to her coworkers, and they had a great time teasing her about it at the office. But when she shared this with me, I felt deeply uncomfortable, although I also had to admit that it was pretty funny. Appearing on television in the audience at a Hezbollah rally (even if only briefly) seemed like it probably violated some basic rule of field research, even if I wasn’t sure which one. Wasn’t I supposed to be the observer rather than the observed? In the end, there were no real consequences (at least none that I know of), but it did leave me with a sense that I wanted to avoid similar experiences in the future if at all possible.
As it happened, this became relevant only a few months later. I returned to Beirut that spring for the 2009 election campaign and was invited by a member of one of Lebanon’s Christian political parties to attend a televised debate against a rival Christian party that was being aired on Al Manar (again). When we arrived at the venue, which turned out to be essentially an empty parking lot in downtown Beirut, I was invited to sit with some other members of the party—right behind the podiums where the debate was being held, and right in front of the cameras. I think the offer was made without any particular agenda, but the prospect of appearing on camera immediately set off some internal alarm bells, so I politely excused myself and sidled off to the back of the lot where I struck up a conversation with the crew from Al Manar who had come to film the event. Once they figured out I wasn’t a journalist from a rival outlet, they gave me some good insights into how the campaign was going. That felt like a much better point from which to observe events.
My reactions in these instances will probably feel familiar to many other researchers. At the most basic level, I don’t particularly enjoy appearing on television or video. When I’ve done so in the past, I rarely watch myself afterward. (I delegate that to my husband, who then reassures me that, no, I didn’t have anything in my teeth.) But these episodes also highlight what is, at least for me, a tension in the research process: the need to balance the academic researcher’s role as an ostensibly objective outside observer, on one hand, and the human relationships we develop with those we study, on the other. In the case of research that I’ve done involving (sometimes violent) political organizations, this has been overlaid with a tension between the need to develop trust with my research subjects and a responsibility not to misrepresent myself as a partisan supporter of their particular organization, even if I may be sympathetic to the human suffering of their civilian supporters. All of which is to say that I’m relatively certain no one who knows me would see me on Al Manar and assume I’d joined Hezbollah, but I wasn’t comfortable with the idea that I might be passing myself off as a movement supporter to people who might then be more likely to tell me things they otherwise wouldn’t.
Reflecting on these experiences leads me to raise the following questions (some of which are also addressed elsewhere in this book): To what degree are we responsible for how we are seen by the communities, organizations, and individuals who are the subjects of our research? How do we balance the need to develop trust with those we study with the need to be transparent about our position as researchers and, perhaps, our personal beliefs? How do we (and should we) draw that line when working with those to whom we are politically or personally sympathetic? Conversely, how do we negotiate these issues when studying organizations or individuals whose actions we do not support or condone? And when there is a power imbalance between researchers and those we study—based on colonial legacies, structural hierarchies of race and gender, current political relationships, or some combination thereof—how does that complicate these issues?4
One obvious response is methodological; in formal interviews, at least, some of these questions become moot because these interviews are often much clearer interactions in which both the interviewer and the person or people being interviewed understand their roles. But even in an interview, questions can arise about how the interviewer feels, personally, about the subject at hand, which can sometimes be difficult to answer. Interview participants may also simply assume that the interviewer is in some way “on their side,” leading them to share more than they otherwise might. Although this might sometimes be the case—after all, many of us are drawn to particular research subjects as a result of our own personal and political attachments—it isn’t always, which for me, at least, can sometimes feel a bit deceptive.
The best way I’ve found to deal with these challenges, beyond trying to keep myself as invisible as possible in the research process, is a combination of transparency and compassion: transparency about my role and my research, and compassion for my research participants as human beings, if not necessarily sympathy for their political objectives or their methods of pursuing them.
Transparency—that is, being open with our research participants about who we are and what we are doing—not only means that our interview subjects have the chance to say “no” but also means they know what they’re saying “yes” to. It means being open about our positions as researchers, how their data will be used, who will see it, and in some cases, the limits of our ability to protect that data. (My personal rule of thumb is to tell my interview subjects that if there’s something they don’t want printed in a book—including their names—I don’t need to know it, and I certainly won’t write it down or record it.)
This does not have to mean engaging in lengthy disclaimers about our personal political views—indeed, it probably shouldn’t. But it does mean being honest about who we are and what we’re doing there. Above all, it means not trying to get away with anything. Not only is this safer for all concerned, it also feels most intuitively comfortable to me. If I’m going to be seen, I want to be seen accurately. I’m more or less fine with being filmed in the press enclosure at a political event or being seen talking to the camera guys—I’d just rather not be mistaken for a movement adherent, either by outside observers or by party members themselves.
Perhaps the trickier problem, though, is how to gain our research participants’ trust without conveying the idea that we have taken a side. I try, as much as possible, to separate my own political preferences and sympathies from the research process, while still engaging with those I’m interviewing with compassion and empathy. But this has been easier in the context of some research projects than others. Maintaining some objective distance has generally been much easier in the case of the armed groups I’ve studied than with noncombatant refugees or women’s rights activists, for instance. Hearing stories of personal loss and trauma over and over again can make it difficult to remain entirely dispassionate, and it probably should. This is made doubly difficult when those conversations are followed by conversations with those responsible for, or even just supportive of, those same atrocities. I have at times found myself interviewing people on different sides of the same conflict who have both suffered significantly, and I have been moved by both conversations. Perhaps most confusingly, I have at various points found myself at public events where I was somewhat unsure myself whether I was there as a researcher or as a participant. At vigils for political prisoners, memorials for those killed in violent conflict, or commemorations of past atrocities, it isn’t always possible to separate myself emotionally, and frankly, I hope it never will be. I suspect the same is true for many of my colleagues as well. If we are filmed at such events, and assumed therefore to be less than fully objective, that may be a fair assessment, and perhaps a reasonable trade-off.
For many of us, the process of doing field research is about balancing a number of competing imperatives: to understand others’ points of view while remaining objective, to listen without judging, and to be a witness without being a partisan. None of this is easy, but it is easier for me when I am standing behind the camera—rather than in front of it.
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Ora Szekely is associate professor of political science at Clark University.
PUBLICATIONS TO WHICH THIS FIELDWORK CONTRIBUTED:
• Szekely, Ora. The Politics of Militant Group Survival in the Middle East. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
• ——. “Hezbollah’s Survival: Resources and Relationships,” Middle East Policy 19, no. 4 (Winter 2012): 110–26.
NOTES
1. The event was held at Sahet al Shehada (Martyrs Square) in the heavily Shi῾ite southern Beirut neighborhood of Dahieh. There are actually two (or possibly more) Sahet al Shehadas in Beirut. Getting cab drivers from Christian East Beirut to drive to the Sahet al Shehada in Dahieh, rather than the one downtown, often required explicitly stating that, yes, I meant the one in Dahieh, and, no, I would not prefer to go to the Sahet al Shehada in central Beirut, regardless of how nice the cafés might be, and, yes, I was sure I knew where I was going.
2. A great deal of excellent work has been done on Lebanon in general and Hezbollah in particular, including by several contributors to this volume. A much abbreviated selection includes Nicholas Blanford, Warriors of God: Inside Hezbollah’s Thirty-Year Struggle Against Israel (New York: Random House, 2011); Augustus Richard Norton, Hezbollah: A Short History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007); Kamal Salibi, A House of Many Mansions: The History of Lebanon Reconsidered (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003).
3. I later realized that Christopher Hitchens, no fan of Hezbollah, was sitting a few seats away from us. That still may be the single oddest thing I’ve ever encountered during field research.
4. For further reflections on research ethics in the context of participant observation, ethnography, and interview-based research, see Lee Ann Fujii, “Five Stories of Accidental Ethnography: Turning Unplanned Moments in the Field Into Data,” Qualitative Research 15, no. 4 (2015): 525–39; Lee Ann Fujii, Interviewing in Social Science Research: A Relational Approach (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2017).