Time for a change: the ethics of student-led human subjects research on political violence

ABSTRACT

Undergraduate and master’s students frequently conduct independent human subjects research on topics related to political violence and human rights – often, but not always, in the field. This work may involve the direct collection of data from vulnerable populations, in unstable contexts and about sensitive topics. However, despite the rich literature about research ethics, the ethics of advising, enabling and encouraging this type of student research on political violence has been largely overlooked. This article aims to (1) raise awareness about the proliferation of students engaging in human subject research on topics related to political violence and human rights; (2) discuss the risks inherent in this enterprise that are distinct from those that many faculty and doctoral students face; (3) provide suggestions about how to mitigate some of those risks, including a shift away from fieldwork-based research projects. We argue that it is a collective responsibility to require that students engage in ethical practices, including more thoughtful and creative selection of research questions, sites and populations.

KEYWORDS:

• research ethics
• student research
• fieldwork
• political violence
• human rights

In the past two decades, research on political violence and human rights has flourished. More researchers are leveraging a greater array of sources and methods, including historical archival data, micro-level event data sets, interviews, focus groups, oral histories, ethnography, surveys and survey experiments, and field experiments. Discussions of research ethics have developed in parallel, the subject of numerous publications and intensive workshops. As a research community, we are aware of the challenges that arise when collecting and analysing political violence data.¹ While research of all types involves ethical considerations, research on political violence raises particularly thorny issues that include access and trust, positionality and power, ensuring the physical safety of respondents, the possibility of re-traumatisation, the need to protect data, the degree to which data can be shared, and the safety and wellbeing of the researcher and the research team. Research on political violence can involve sensitive topics and vulnerable populations, and has the potential to lead to physical or emotional harm to the participants, their communities, the research team, and/or the researchers themselves.

But while ethics for faculty- and doctoral-level research is receiving more attention, a discussion of research ethics for undergraduate and master’s-level students (hereafter ‘students’) who conduct similar studies for honours theses or master’s dissertations on political violence is missing. In academic programmes across the world, students are seeking to contribute to the study of political violence by conducting their own original research – often, but not always, in the field. Despite the rich literature about research ethics, the ethics of advising, enabling and encouraging student research on political violence has been largely overlooked.²

In this article, we draw on conversations with numerous colleagues around the world, as well as our own experiences, to argue that faculty and academic programmes should exercise greater caution in encouraging and enabling students to engage in independent research in fragile environments or with vulnerable populations. We delineate common constraints of student research that make ethical considerations more complex, including limited training in methods or ethics, few (if any) formal mechanisms of ethical oversight, short time horizons, clustering in over-researched areas, and the unlikely prospect of disseminating research results. Given these myriad constraints, the traditional risk–benefit calculus of ethical research is altered. Students run a greater risk of doing harm to research subjects than do many doctoral students or faculty researchers, without the ability to provide any of the typical benefits to research subjects or communities – or to the broader project of knowledge production.

After discussing these limitations, we provide suggestions about how to mitigate the most pressing ethical risks. We conclude that it is our collective pedagogical responsibility as educators to guide students to engage in ethical practices, even if that means discouraging the use of certain research methods, sites or sources. Throughout, we underscore the role that programmes and universities ought to play in interrogating their practices, and in centring ethics within broader learning objectives. Without better training and oversight, to expect students to ‘learn on the job’ by engaging with vulnerable populations is not only ethically problematic, it is poor pedagogy. To mitigate these problems, universities should invest in training students to conduct ethical and rigorous research. At the same time, the research community should engage in a dialogue regarding evolving notions of what constitutes ethical and rigorous student-led research.

Why are students conducting political violence research?

Every year, students travel abroad to conflict-affected and fragile countries to conduct research. In part, this is a response to a perceived demand from employers for field experience (Gedde 2015), which often privileges difficult or dangerous areas (Carstarphen et al. 2010; Mitchell 2013), and universities’ financial incentives to cater to these demands (Parkinson 2019). In addition, students themselves place a premium on interacting with the ‘real world’ as a source of knowledge to complement theoretically oriented classroom learning (Mitchell 2013).

As part of their research projects, students may collect data on topics relating to political violence using methods like interviews and surveys. Respondents may be elites, such as policymakers and leaders of organisations, but they may also be non-elites who belong to vulnerable or marginalised groups, including victims and witnesses of violence, refugees and migrants, and individuals belonging to ethnic and religious minorities. Based on discussions with colleagues, examples of such projects that students have proposed or conducted include interviews with former child soldiers, victims of wartime rape, former jihadi fighters, combatants in conflict zones, gang members, and newly arrived refugees; participant observation of violent protests and extremist political groups; and online survey experiments proposing to expose respondents in volatile areas to fake inflammatory news. These types of projects concern topics of great importance, but are ethically complex.

Engaging in research can instil in students the importance of evidence-based knowledge and allow them to gain experience with collecting data, grappling with ethical dilemmas and drawing inferences. Research with human participants can also help students build empathy and learn about violence in the contexts where it occurs. Students are often committed to improving the lives of others, and fieldwork can seem like an essential first step in developing the bona fides to get a job after graduation. For example, one guidebook recommends that students looking to work on the monitoring and evaluation of international development aid programmes should ‘do a research-based dissertation out in the field’ (Gedde 2015, 288). For these reasons, faculty across the globe have supported this type of student research. While well intentioned, we argue that these benefits are outweighed by significant risks of harm to vulnerable populations and others, including the students themselves.

Why are student research ethics a concern?

We highlight here four key constraints facing student researchers. While some of the issues we raise are relevant for all researchers, we focus on students for three reasons. First, as we will argue, these concerns are especially acute for students, who lack the resources of many doctoral trainees and faculty researchers. Second, while some of the issues we raise have been discussed in the research ethics literature, they have not been considered in light of student researchers nor considered through the lens of educators’ responsibility to ensure ethical pedagogy; this article highlights this blind spot. Third, the solutions for these issues in the context of student researchers are more readily addressed because university programmes have the ability to design and implement programmes that mitigate these concerns, a point to which we return in the conclusion.

(1) Lack of training

In most academic programmes that focus on issues of political violence and human rights, it is common for students to receive limited training in qualitative forms of data collection or in basic principles of research ethics. The lack of student training is not a problem of supply. Many faculty members in these programmes have experience in collecting qualitative data, and there are excellent teaching resources on research methods and ethics. Nor is the lack of training a demand problem: employers seek to recruit students with strong writing and analytical skills who are trained in qualitative methods (Carstarphen et al. 2010). Rather, the focus on quantitative skills in most programmes is an artefact of which curricula are valued in the academy – namely, the privileging of quantitative analyses and statistical skills over other forms of inquiry.

While some students may have relevant work experience that enables them to be sensitive, skilled researchers, students with professional or activist backgrounds may struggle to distinguish between their past work values and their current role as student researchers. Having worked for institutions like governments, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), advocacy groups, or news media, students may still subscribe to the professional imperatives of those institutions. This can bias their research and undermine the scientific process, and unwittingly makes student research less ethical. For example, a military student expressed frustration about being asked to consider personal safety risks in the field and, by extension, those of the research team. He felt that if he had survived combat, he could determine what constitutes reasonable risk. In another case, a former journalist wanted to quote a respondent who withdrew his consent to be included in the study; because the interview was given ‘on the record’, the student viewed the quotation as fair to use even after the respondent rescinded consent. Both examples illustrate the need for training students as academic researchers per se, with a solid foundation in ethical reasoning and academic research norms.

Students hoping to conduct fieldwork are often well-meaning, but a naïve desire to ‘do good’ can cause unintended harm. Researchers have described occasions when students have made promises to vulnerable respondents that they could not keep (Paczynska and Hirsch 2019). Even students who have done background research on the location and topic of their studies may not possess the deep contextual knowledge that allows for grounded risk analysis and an ability to interpret culturally embedded behaviours. Students may also lack the tools to reflect on their positionality in the research process. Absent training, students may not recognise why it is inappropriate for a researcher who has no prior experience to undertake an independent project that requires that they interview traumatised, marginalised or vulnerable people. As a result, students may operate unaware of potential risks to respondents’ – and their own – physical and emotional well-being. Finally, without training, students may not take adequate steps to ensure the confidentiality of respondent identities and the security of their data. The lack of adequate training constitutes a failure of pedagogical responsibility, with the potential for profound consequences.

(2) Condensed time frames

Because the time frame for students’ research is often brief, shortcuts and risky decisions are more likely. Unlike faculty researchers and doctoral students who can pause projects when concerns arise, students are required to complete their studies on a strict schedule.³ As a consequence, they are less able to follow best practices regarding long-term relationships and reciprocity (Wood 2013), increasing the risk that respondents will experience these encounters as dehumanising (Sukarieh and Tannock 2013). Many students are socialised into a consumer model of knowledge acquisition that positions research subjects as ‘content providers’ (Dwyer and Castel 2019, 47); these dynamics are accentuated by time pressures to collect data quickly. Students are disincentivised from spending time getting to know participants and communities in favour of instrumentally obtaining data. This style of ‘drop-in’ field research is also more likely to result in poor data quality and incorrect conclusions (Wood 2013).

(3) Over-research and research fatigue

Some fragile and conflict-affected locations suffer from research fatigue. Students tend to travel to the same research sites that other students – and faculty and doctoral students – have already thoroughly researched. During the summer months, there can be a rush of students to popular locations. Over-research of particular populations and sites is a problem for the entire discipline, and one that has multiple root causes – but it is compounded by seasonal streams of student researchers.

One consequence of over-research is that researched communities become less trusting of researchers in general (Sukarieh and Tannock 2013). Communities overwhelmed by students may be frustrated by repeated requests for access and unfulfilled promises made by inexperienced researchers. Over-researched communities may also develop strategies to restrict or commodify access. For example, an NGO in Lebanon charges researchers for ‘fixing’ services and reimburses certain families in Internally Displaced Persons camps to be the ‘interviewees’ to protect others from being pestered by researchers and journalists. While this is a creative solution to a problem, it demonstrates just how overburdened some sites are by demands for research participants.

(4) Altered risk–benefit calculus

The three aforementioned issues each influence a broader risk-benefit calculation, foundational to all considerations of research ethics. Ethical research requires scholars to weigh possible risks to participants with the potential benefits generated through knowledge production, and the impact that research may eventually have on improving people’s lives.

Social scientists often motivate their work as beneficial because it will contribute to knowledge production, which may ultimately facilitate social and political improvements. Aside from this being a temporally distant outcome, it is also particularly implausible for student research, which is rarely published or otherwise disseminated. Some programmes make undergraduate theses and master’s dissertations available in digital format, but unlike research published in academic journals, student theses and dissertations are not peer reviewed; this issue may not be obvious to a lay reader and raises additional ethical concerns about disseminating the results. As a consequence, the benefits of student work accrue mainly to the student, in terms of completing a graduation requirement.⁴ Any risks to research participants – and any costs that they bear, including their time and emotional labour – are therefore less justified. Research that extracts knowledge without contributing to either the researched community or to global knowledge production results in a ‘benefit gap’ (Mitchell 2013), whereby the time and labour of research participants are exploited for the purpose of student training (Mitchell 2013; Martin 2016).

Uncertain oversight

It is often not clear who – or what institutional entity – should be overseeing student research, or who should step in to change or halt ill-advised research plans. Some countries do not have a formal ethics review process for social science research. Other countries, like Sweden, do not allow for student work to be evaluated by the same ethics review boards that doctoral students and faculty can access. In the United States, some student research may be ineligible for review by a university’s institutional review board (IRB). For example, student projects that are framed as ‘consulting’ or those that have a real-world client may not be eligible for review because these types of studies may not meet the federal definition of research. Without an ethics board or IRB, institutions or individual faculty mentors are left to provide ad hoc oversight.

Even in cases where student work can be reviewed by an ethics board, the constraints highlighted above may not be considered in determining whether a project should proceed. IRBs are primarily concerned with harm to research subjects, not to the researcher or the research team. Some colleagues report that even when student research is eligible for ethics review, it may not be submitted due to time constraints or because review of student projects is not an institutionally consolidated practice. Finally, while research funders may act as de facto gatekeepers for faculty and doctoral research, student projects are funded from a variety of sources, at least some of which lack ethics review or oversight requirements.

What are the potential consequences of students conducting political violence research?

Harm to the student researcher

All researchers who conduct sensitive research in violence-affected areas run risks of personal harm. If armed conflict has ended, powerful stakeholders have vested interests in the promotion of certain narratives; researchers who probe into the wrong topics can find themselves detained, deported or assaulted. Student researchers, especially those with limited knowledge of the context, are poorly equipped to deal with problems that may arise when the political landscape shifts. Unprepared students may also cause harm to themselves, including forms of research-related trauma.

Leaving trouble in your wake

The most serious risk of students engaging in research absent proper training and oversight is that they inadvertently cause harm – physical, emotional or social – as a consequence. For example, students asking questions about emotionally charged issues risk re-traumatising respondents; poorly run focus groups can create interpersonal or social tensions; and in extreme cases, people may be fired from a job or face violent retribution as a consequence of participating in research. Further, vulnerability is not always obvious and modes of ‘vulnerability’ are not constant over time, making it challenging for novice researchers to plan mitigation efforts. Finally, data collection places a ‘layered burden’ on the research team – organisations, research assistants and other brokers – whose relationships may suffer if student conduct with participants does not meet certain standards.⁵

It is rare for social scientists to conduct post-mortem studies to understand what happens in the aftermath of research, and it is difficult even for experienced researchers to estimate the full scale of the risks for respondent harm, especially in the long term. But studies in public health bring to light the potential for unanticipated harms that participants may face. One meta-analysis that reviewed dozens of studies of participants’ experiences being asked about violence and abuse found that 4–50% reported that they experienced harms as a result of the research, including emotional distress, and needing to seek professional counselling (McClinton Appollis et al. 2015). Similarly, one month after an initial study on gender-based violence in Ethiopia, public health researchers asked survey respondents whether they had experienced any costs from participating in the prior study. 20% of respondents reported that they had been beaten by their husbands for taking part; the two most common reasons were that the participants’ husbands thought their wives were trying to get them arrested and that the participants had refused to share with their husbands the topic of the survey (Cohen 2010). Harms are not limited to research participants; Eriksson Baaz and Utas (2019) discuss a case of a research broker in Uganda who was violently punished by government soldiers for assisting in a research project conducted by US-based scholars.

These examples involve faculty researchers; students with limited training, research skills and field experience are likely to struggle even to anticipate these types of potential outcomes. The lack of ethical oversight also means that there is no mechanism for participants to report ‘adverse events’ that result from research.⁶ As a result, the faculty advisors and academic intuitions overseeing student research are unlikely to ever find out about negative outcomes for participants.

Reputational costs

While the well-being of researchers and research participants is the primary reason for exercising caution, it is also in faculty researchers’ self-interest to ensure better oversight of student research. People living in researched communities may be unable to distinguish novice student researchers from experienced researchers. When any researcher conducts a study that is perceived by respondents and their communities as extractive, disrespectful or harmful, it can have the effect of reducing trust in researchers as a collective. Consequently, all parties conducting research in these areas risk incurring reputational costs and fomenting misgivings about the scholarly enterprise if they do not adhere to ethical standards.

While student researchers tend to think of their projects in isolation, they take place in a context in which their position is embedded in histories of interactions and power relations.⁷ Academic institutions should have an interest in how their students conduct themselves in the field. Unethical research – which the university has provided the opportunity and, in many cases, the funding to perform – runs the risk of being publicised and harming the reputation of the institution and its researchers.

Poor data quality

The factors that pose particular ethical challenges for student researchers can also have detrimental effects on their research. With limited time to collect data and limited knowledge of the context, students can end up parroting official narratives, resulting in inaccurate analyses and conclusions. In addition, students may fail to appreciate nuance, describing evidence in a way that is sensational – rather than appreciative of the complexity of fragile spaces – and inadvertently fetishise human tragedy (Henry 2013). In areas where populations suffer from research fatigue, many students are merely making the rounds of the same interviewees and getting the same responses that have been delivered to others (Sukarieh and Tannock 2013). There is little scholarly value to interview data that is formulaic or scripted.

These various potential outcomes indicate that some research projects may not be advisable. How can institutions and faculty ensure that students have taken the necessary steps to mitigate harms to others and to themselves?

What is needed: more creativity and care selecting research questions, sites and populations

Some institutions are committed to investing in student research with human subjects, providing extensive methods and ethics training, ensuring ethical oversight of student projects prior to data collection, and making available additional resources (such as secure data management, emergency travel services and assistance with contacts in the field) to support student work. In these settings, some of the problems we have highlighted are moot.

But few institutions have chosen to prioritise the time or resources necessary to ensure that students are properly equipped to undertake sensitive research on political violence and human rights with human participants; in such cases this work should not take place. Individual faculty members and academic institutions should guide students away from projects involving the direct collection of data from vulnerable populations, in unstable contexts or about sensitive topics. Given the limited net benefit to research participants and society at large of student research, it is difficult to argue that any risk of harm is warranted.

This is a controversial position. Faculty may feel that gaining experience with conducting human research is an important skill that students should acquire, particularly because many students aspire to work in the fields of international development, humanitarian aid or advocacy. Students may wish to gain experience applying theory to practice and feel they are less competitive for jobs if they lack field experience. Administrators may believe that programmes will be less internationally competitive and will attract less ambitious students if this kind of student research is disallowed.

These are all valid concerns. But on balance, protecting the well-being of the people who students are ostensibly being trained to help in their future careers must come before the students’ learning experiences and institutional recruitment objectives. To state it bluntly: vulnerable people should not be used as student training resources.

When it comes to student research, shifting away from the collection of original data in the field can inspire students, their faculty mentors and their academic programmes to think more creatively about alternative approaches to conducting meaningful student research on political violence. Fieldwork is not the only way to answer a research question, and it may not be the best way. Students returning from the field can feel frustrated by difficulties arising from uncontrollable logistics and disappointed with the amount and quality of the material they collected. Even absent ethical concerns, finding alternatives to fieldwork may make for a superior research design that yields better data. In addition, many of the skills students require can be learned and practiced without working with vulnerable populations.

The role of faculty mentors and academic programmes

Individual faculty members

For student research on political violence, independent fieldwork with vulnerable people should be a last resort. But individual educators are often powerless to affect whether programmes allow students to conduct research with human participants in sensitive contexts or not. Individual thesis advisors are also often unable to provide the kind of training that students need. What can advisors do in these situations? Table 1 shows examples of alternative approaches to designing research projects to minimise the risk of harm. These strategies resolve some ethical issues – but not others, such as lack of training, over-research and time costs to interviewees. Some strategies are context-dependent; for example, interviews with NGO workers may not mitigate ethical concerns if such workers face similar vulnerabilities to the populations they serve. Another important issue is that relying on others to speak for research subjects may be problematic in terms of both data reliability and ethics.

Table 1. Mitigating ethical concerns in student research designs.

Instead of…	…consider this
Interviews with vulnerable people	Interviews with academics who have previously conducted research with vulnerable populations Archival sources or existing documentation, such as human rights reports that feature narratives from vulnerable people Interviews with NGOs that serve vulnerable populations
Interviews with aid recipients	Interviews with those who develop and implement aid policy (bureaucrats, funders, local elites)
Non-elite interviews about sensitive topics	Already collected data and reports (eg Truth and Reconciliation Commission reports and underlying narratives; trial transcripts)
Fieldwork that put the student and the research team at risk	Skype or Zoom interviews with local experts; diaspora resources
Elite interviews about sensitive topics	Interviews with former policymakers, who can speak more freely and face fewer risks

In presenting these alternatives to students, faculty can also highlight thoughtful reflections by leaders in the fields of political violence and human rights who have made similar choices in their own work; Wood (2013, 304), for example, elected not to interview survivors of rape due to concerns about risks to participants being unjustified for her ‘essentially academic project’.

The role of programmes and universities

What is needed is a wholesale shift in student training – away from a model where student research is viewed as proto-PhD research, and towards a model where students learn practical skills that prepare them to be ethical professionals. The former model is particularly unwarranted since only a minority of students end up becoming career academics.

Academic programmes should emphasise a range of important research and writing skills, including qualitative skills like conducting interviews and focus groups, and professional skills like programme evaluation and impact assessment. Ethics training is a critical aspect of educating students. Training students to develop an ethical compass and to self-correct away from potentially harmful research practices is an important lesson because many students will not have access to formalised ethics review processes in their future jobs. One example of a student’s self-correction is Fox (2018), who writes that she opted not to interview survivors of sexual violence due to her lack of experience: ‘As I am not a trained professional in this technique of interviewing and I am yet to gain more experience in conducting interviews, I felt that I would not be able to carry out a method of interviewing that would result in a positive experience for the survivors’. Instead, in her master’s dissertation, Fox relied on a published memory book of detailed testimonials from survivors, collected by trained psychologists.

Rather than using funds to support individual students’ field research, programmes could support other ways for students to gain field experience, such as study abroad, internship stipends, field-based courses and working with a local organisation. Being embedded in an organisation is fundamentally different from conducting independent research. Organisations provide support in the form of local knowledge, contextual understanding and practical concerns like security and transportation. They can also serve as veto players. Reputable local organisations are concerned about their long-term relationships with the local population, which increases the likelihood that students’ activities within these organisations will be based on the principles of reducing harm.⁸ Partnering with a local organisation is not a panacea; visiting students may struggle with a lack of understanding of the local culture and a general lack of humility, creating additional labour for the local partner, as described by Martin (2016). But such costs can be partially offset through providing funding to organisations in exchange for their labour and mentorship.

Finally, field experiences would ideally spread students around the globe, including to less saturated, under-studied field sites. Schools and programmes should teach professional ethics, and make explicit their commitment to the protection of ethical standards in field research. By explaining the reasoning and alerting employers to no longer expect field experience in the form of self-directed independent student research projects, academic institutions can lead a cultural shift in employers’ expectations.

Conclusion

Scholars working on topics like human rights, violence and trauma have an obligation to ensure that our research – and that of our students – is done ethically, with accountability and compassion. Our goal in this article is not to discourage independent research by students but rather to encourage faculty advisors and programmes to take seriously their pedagogical responsibilities for student research. In doing so, we raise questions about what types of research students ought to be doing on ethically complex topics, what research questions they have the skills to answer, and whether they are adequately equipped and supported to do so.

There are significant problems with the current system, in which students with little training or oversight – through no fault of their own – are conducting research with vulnerable people. While the ethical dilemmas we have raised are not unique to student research, the nature of student research compounds the risk of encountering these problems due to lack of training, limited time horizons and (commonly) a lack of even minimal ethical oversight. Despite the clear trade-offs at stake and the growing interest in improving ethical practices, these issues have received little attention.

The best way forward – at least until universities and programmes are ready to invest in adequately preparing and training students – is that such research should be strongly discouraged. Programmes should shift away from student projects involving the direct collection of data from vulnerable populations, in unstable contexts and about sensitive topics. To do so will require faculty mentors to encourage students to think more broadly about research questions and data sources. It will require programmes to provide resources for alternative field experiences while also investing in a normative change towards valuing ethical research engagement. Ethical student engagement in research on political violence is possible – but it will take a collective commitment to change the status quo.

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Zoe Marks, Erica Chenoweth and all of the participants of the ‘Ethical Engagement in Conflict Research’ workshop at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. We are grateful to Karen Brounéus, Marsha Henry, Cyanne Loyle, Sarah Parkinson, Haley Swedlund, and Elisabeth Wood for feedback on earlier stages of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kristine Eck

Kristine Eck is an Associate Professor at the Department of Peace and Conflict Research, Uppsala University. Her research interests include state repression, police oversight and political violence. She has done fieldwork in Nepal and Burma/Thailand, as well as archival work in Malaysia, Singapore and the UK.

Dara Kay Cohen

Dara Kay Cohen is Ford Foundation Associate Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. Her research interests include gender and political violence, civil war, gang governance and research ethics. She is the author of Rape During Civil War (Cornell, 2016) and the co-author of Lynching and Local Justice: Legitimacy and Accountability in Weak States (Cambridge, 2020). She has conducted fieldwork in Sierra Leone, El Salvador, Timor-Leste and Haiti.

Notes

1 For a helpful bibliography of recent research, see: https://advancingconflictresearch.com/resources-1

2 An exception is Mitchell (2013), who critically examines educational field trips to conflict zones.

3 Faculty and doctoral researchers may experience similar pressures due to competing demands for their time. Students, however, are typically bound by programme or course deadlines that circumscribe their ability to pause or delay research. Faculty generally have greater flexibility for adaptation and extension than students do.

4 Henry (2013) argues master’s theses rarely offer ‘new insight’, and instead ‘often become regurgitated and simplistic snapshots of other work, reinforcing particular perspectives and portrayals’, due in part to some of the constraints highlighted here.

5 See the excellent Bukavu Series about the nature of relationships between scholars from the Global North and research collaborators in the Global South: https://www.gicnetwork.be/introducing-the-bukavu-series-invisible-voices-in-the-production-of-knowledge/

6 This raises a broader ethical issue: even should they be able to report harms, research participants harmed by social science research rarely have legal standing to make claims for restitution.

7 This is the case for students from mostly Northern universities traveling to the Global South. However, students from conflict-affected countries may engage in research about their home country. These projects face similar ethical problems; reflexive assessments of positionality and power between privileged university students and research participants are needed even if nationality is shared. Shared nationality can also give students a false sense of confidence in their knowledge of the research environment.

8 Of course, not all local or international organisations exercise scrupulous ethical practices, nor are they free from the pressures to accede to the requests of students from foreign universities.