Notes from the Field: Methodological Opportunities and Constraints

Abstract

This paper critically reflects on the methodological and ethical challenges faced by researchers conducting fieldwork on Syria under Bashar al-Assad’s authoritarian regime. Drawing on my own experiences with interviews and archival research across Lebanon, Turkey, and Europe, I explore how war, displacement, and authoritarian legacies reshape access, data reliability, and researcher safety. Rather than treating these conditions as mere obstacles, the paper considers how they fundamentally shape the knowledge production process, and the questions researchers are able—or unable—to ask. Collaborating with Syrian interlocutors—many of whom are navigating trauma, exile, and surveillance—pushed me to reconsider what it means to conduct ethical, accountable research amid profound precarity. The analysis engages the politics of representation, researcher positionality, and the emotional and political labor embedded in fieldwork. I also interrogate the academic structures that privilege certain voices and sites of knowledge over others. While grounded in the Syrian context, the paper speaks more broadly to the dilemmas of conducting research in authoritarian and conflict-affected settings where access is limited, and knowledge is contested. By foregrounding the often-invisible labor and compromises of research, this paper calls for more honest, situated, and politically engaged approaches to studying Syria and similar contexts. In bringing these methodological struggles to the surface, it aims to open space for deeper conversations about ethics, accountability, and power in Middle East research during times of protracted crisis.