The Ethics of Social Research: Perspectives from the Study of the Middle East and North Africa

To illuminate the context within which the rest of the contributions of this volume are located, we provide a historical perspective on the development of “Middle East studies” in the modern university. Arguing that this history reflects both the varied and rarely congruent political contexts and the converging institutional evolution of universities globally, we examine how the study of the Middle East and North Africa illustrates an uneasy tension in simultaneously fostering critical inquiry, producing educated elites, serving national interests, meeting international markets, and producing truly global knowledge. These different aims of the university not only exist in tension but might, under certain conditions, become actual contradictions. We may be experiencing such a moment of contradiction at the present time, both in the United States and in the Middle East and North Africa itself.

Social science research on the Middle East and North Africa depends heavily on external funding. In this essay, we consider the implications of this reliance. In our review of calls for proposals and 924 grants and projects from 23 organizations, we find that this funding often centers the issues that Western policymakers view as salient but does not necessarily reflect the major concerns of those in the region; the funding recipients favor political science, leaving other disciplinary perspectives less developed; and the funding focuses heavily on select countries, while others remain understudied. Our investigation also uncovered a lack of coordination in funding that, combined with a fragmented research landscape, impedes knowledge accumulation. We conclude our findings with recommendations for steps that can be taken to overcome these problems.

Disseminating new research findings and integrating them into future research are crucial tasks for cumulative knowledge production. We address the challenges of dissemination and integration of research in the social sciences of the Middle East and North Africa region, where scholarship written in Arabic is often overlooked by scholars writing in English. Although this marginalization reflects differences in taste, quality, method, and theory, some of the hierarchy is due to English-language scholars’ lack of awareness of relevant Arabic-language work. This ignorance is perpetuated by inaccessibility. We propose an open-source translation tool to aggregate relevant articles based on artificial intelligence models to lower the cost of cross-language literature review. If English-language researchers are willing to commit to the ethical value of integrating work published in local languages, recent technological developments make it feasible.

In the post–Cold War era, “Islamic terrorism” has taken the place of the Communist threat. The Middle East, a construct developed in nineteenth- and twentieth-century European colonialism, is the region from which this threat is said to emanate. Teaching politics of the Middle East is therefore by definition a political endeavor: even if students arrive to the classroom with very little factual knowledge about this region, they will, through media portrayals, inevitably bring a certain image of the region and its inhabitants. In this essay, I examine ways educators can promote critical, self-­reflective connected decolonial thinking. I argue for the importance of a critical theoretical toolkit, drawing on anticolonial pedagogy and self-reflective praxis. Teaching in universities of the Global North to a mostly white, non–Middle Eastern student body, I encourage students to embrace self-reflexivity and develop embodied and connected feminist learning skills through self-reflective journaling.

This essay analyzes the institutional management of field-intensive social science research in U.S.-based universities. I argue that administration and mentorship of field-intensive projects at the department and university level encompass well-known perverse incentives, pedagogical pitfalls, risks, and concurrent consequences for knowledge production. I outline three common ideal-typical models: the Indiana Jones model, the legal-securitization model, and the Procrustean design model. Specifically, I elucidate the underlying priorities, the nature of mentorship, the relationship to rules and norms, the approach to ethics, and the systems of administrative power embedded in each. Further, I discuss the consequences that result from the dominance of these three models of scholarship, including the pathologization of particular regions, the sensationalization of particular research topics, and the channeling of knowledge production by external priorities rather than intellectual merit.

The essay draws on my experience in an international research project exploring the concept of vulnerability within the international protection regime and the work of formulating a new institutional ethical review process at the Centre for Lebanese Studies. I draw on my experiences to explore the ethical consequences of using vulnerability as a lens to assist and understand refugees in policy and in research. I identify the main ethical dilemmas we faced in the context of our research project and in the institutional ethics review processes and ethical scholarship more generally to reflect on the contested and often charged meanings and uses of concepts such as “vulnerability” and categories like “refugees.” The essay also shows how refugees themselves relate to these meanings and practices.

Drawing on thirteen years of personal experience researching Middle Eastern politics, I examine how digitality has eroded traditional boundaries between safety and danger, public and private, and democratic and authoritarian spaces. While digital tools initially promised to make research more accessible and secure, they have instead created new vulnerabilities through sophisticated spyware, state-sponsored harassment, and transnational repression. These challenges are compounded by the neoliberal university, which pushes researchers toward public engagement while offering little protection from its consequences. Moreover, the integrity of digital data itself has become increasingly questionable, as state actors and private companies deploy bots, fake personas, and coordinated disinformation campaigns that create “authenticity vacuums” in online spaces. This essay argues that these developments necessitate a fundamental reconsideration of digital research methodologies and ethics, offering practical recommendations for institutions and researchers to navigate this complex landscape while maintaining research integrity and protecting both researchers and their subjects.

As the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is becoming a lab for randomized controlled trials in the social sciences, this essay reflects on the use of this methodology in the region. Reflecting on earlier critiques of the method’s deployment in the Global South, we argue that the perils of its use outweigh the benefits. Unlike many of the existing critiques, we maintain that this methodology’s intrinsic flaws are further exacerbated in the context of MENA, and that its shortcomings cannot be mitigated by safeguards. So instead of trying to further refine it, researchers should seek alternative methods.

The language that researchers use to describe the increasingly violent reality in Gaza has become a contested space. Analytical terms like “genocide,” “self-defense,” “terrorism,” and “resistance,” while not inherently normative, have become tests of political loyalty. This reflects a broader struggle over the dominant narrative, particularly evident in Germany, where semantic disputes have hindered scholars’ ability to contribute meaningful analysis to public debates. Amid shrinking spaces for critical inquiry, we highlight the responsibility of scholars to counteract the expanding semantic void surrounding the Gaza war and the events of October 7 by advocating for an ethical representation of violence that honors the experiences of those affected. This responsibility rests on two foundations: 1) academic integrity, which requires naming, explaining, and contextualizing violent phenomena independent of political agendas, and 2) an ethical commitment to convey the lifeworld of research partners in terms of the meanings they attribute to it, without applying linguistic filters that distort these meanings.

I argue that despite becoming a buzzword appropriated by many, “decolonizing” is an intellectual and political project with which social researchers, including those who work on the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), should reckon. Sampling from a particular strand of decolonizing work, which came to be labeled the “Indigenous turn” in anthropology, the essay looks for what might be relevant for the ethics and practices of current social research on, and in, MENA. I also consider some cautions voiced by scholars who—with no illusions about the possibility of value-free social science or scholarship—are wary of the risks of too quickly collapsing politics and academic scholarship into each other.

The American definitions of “race” and “racism,” which often conflate academic and lay conceptions, have been exported with American social science into debates of race in the Middle East and Africa. These definitions assume that the American distinction between race, as primarily about skin color, and ethnicity, as denoting cultural difference, is universally accepted. Over the past fifty years, a semantic shift in American academia and society has redefined race from a biological term to a social construct, further confounding its use as the concept travels outside the U.S. context, imposing American understandings of difference. This confusion has both scholarly implications and political consequences.

International development organizations regularly commission social scientific studies to inform countries’ strategies and programming. While they are expected to be policy relevant, these studies can suffer from limitations related to how they are justified, framed, funded, and used, relying on levels of expertise essentially determined by commissioning organizations. With a focus on Jordan, I explore ethical dimensions of nonacademic research within the development sector. This essay is meant to be a reflective piece that draws on my personal experience as a development practitioner as well as interviews with representatives of consulting firms, academic organizations, and donors in Jordan.

This essay examines the distortions introduced into research agendas and research design by the effort to avoid seeming “political.” The rhetorical, institutional, and disciplinary operations of the social science research enterprise worldwide serve to divert attention from questions of power and collective accountability to a focus on technical interventions, institutional risk, and individual responsibility. These practices coincide with the specific circumstances of social science research in the Middle East and North Africa—where the exercise of political power in the form of international interference, irresponsible autocracy, civil disorder and violence, and protracted economic poverty and duress is difficult to conceal—to shape research terrains and agendas, and create a particularly, and tellingly, troubled research environment.

Research ethics is an increasingly important part of social science debates. Among political scientists conducting research in the Americas, much of this discussion focuses on the ethics of experiments with human subjects. The ethical challenges identified by REMENA (Research Ethics in the Middle East and North Africa) scholars clearly overlap with those faced by researchers elsewhere, but they also involve unique issues specific to the MENA region. Broad themes include power and authoritarianism, technocratic versus activist research, ownership of ethicality, and communicating clearly and honestly with vulnerable populations.

Drawing on the essays in this volume of Dædalus, as well as ­REMENA (Research Ethics in the Middle East and North Africa) workshops and meetings over the last several years, we reflect on what constitutes responsible social inquiry. We present the context for a “call to action” for universities, foundations, and other funders, publishers, and researchers. Through procedural, professional, and political recommendations, we offer guidance to address some of the ethical dilemmas in designing, monitoring, funding, conducting, and disseminating social science research on the Middle East and North Africa—and beyond.