The Unintended Consequences of Risk Assessment Regimes: How Risk Adversity at European Universities Is Affecting African Studies

Abstract

Many European universities have introduced procedures for assessing risks to social researchers. These procedures are inspired by occupational and safety health standards, whose logic is driven by the suppression of uncertainty. The rise of risk assessment also fits into a broader global trend of increasingly representing marginalised areas of the world as risky and insecure. While there is a lack of evidence about the actual impact of these procedures on mitigating risks, they are posing an increasing burden on researchers in terms of time, effort, and financial resources, affecting particularly research in and about Africa. Risk assessment can also influence the choice of research methods and reinforce neocolonial patterns of knowledge production by encouraging the transfer of risk to local partners, whose views are rarely integrated in the risk assessment process. This analysis discusses the unintended impact of risk assessment and gives some suggestions for improving processes of preventing risk to social researchers.

Introduction

In the last decade, many European universities introduced procedures for assessing risks to researchers who intend to conduct fieldwork abroad. Researchers have debated the challenges to conduct research in conflict-affected countries or those with authoritarian governments that restrict academic freedom (Glasius et al., 2017). However, in some countries, like the UK and Norway, recent developments have seen university management pushing for new risk assessment regimes, ¹ which have been introduced without much input from the researchers (Andersson, 2016; Peter and Strazzari, 2017).

Scholars conducting research in and about Africa are particularly affected, as many African countries are perceived as “high risk” by university administrators, on the basis of information provided by insurers and foreign affairs ministries. For instance, in October 2019, the website of the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), one of the main references for British university administrators, had placed travel advisories on 28 African countries and territories (FCO, 2019). Many post-conflict countries, such as Burundi, Central African Republic, Côte d’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, South Sudan and Sudan have advisories against travelling in some areas or in all their territory. Researchers might face bureaucratic hurdles to conduct fieldwork in these countries and may even be denied permission to conduct research altogether. Advocates of the new risk assessment regimes argue that these procedures are in place to protect researchers, especially junior academics (Bullard, 2010; ICS, 2017). However, there is a lack of evidence about the actual impact of risk assessment procedures on mitigating risks, while the burden that it is imposing to researchers is becoming more and more evident. We have seen cases where researchers had to obtain additional funding or even pay out of pocket for additional travel insurance for these perceived risks (Andersson, 2016; Jaspars, 2018) or have been denied travel approval to areas where they had previously conducted research without any major problems on the grounds of security and safety (Bello, 2019). The implications of risk assessment for knowledge production about Africa and its ethical impact on the relationships between Western and African researchers have also not been given due consideration.

This article does not aim to offer definitive solutions on how risks to researchers should be managed, as we believe that such solutions should come from a participative process of dialogue between researchers (including African researchers) and their institutions. Rather, we aim to open the debate on risk assessment regimes and highlight some unintended consequences of what we perceive to be an increasing framing of fieldwork through a security perspective that are rarely acknowledged by academic institutions.

The Rise of Risk Assessment

The emergence of risk assessment regimes is the product of several trends. First, it is part of a wider cultural shift in Western discourse and interventionist practices, which have remapped the world, reinforcing the divide between supposedly safe wealthy countries and poor and marginalized zones that are increasingly represented as “no-go zones” (Andersson, 2016). Additionally, it also further isolates marginalised communities inside of poor countries (Bello, 2019). Reflecting on how both the academic culture and the aid industry have changed from the 1970s to today, Mark Duffield observes that “by the end of the 2000s, inhibition and risk avoidance, as measured in growing physical remoteness, had radically transformed presence on the ground” (Duffield, 2014: 86).

The rise of risk assessments has also been driven by the perception that social and political research abroad has become increasingly dangerous. This perception has been heightened by a few high-profile cases, such as that of Giulio Regeni, an Italian PhD student at Cambridge University, who was kidnapped, tortured, and killed in Cairo while conducting research on Egyptian trade unions in 2016. ² Partly in response to the Regeni case, in 2017, the International Council for Science (ICS) adopted an “Advisory note on responsibilities for preventing, avoiding, and mitigating harm to researchers undertaking fieldwork in risky settings” (ICS, 2017).

Lastly, legal obligations underscore the introduction of risk assessment. Member states of the European Union (EU) are subject to the “Safety and Health of Workers and Work Directive” (EU, 1989), which imposes a duty of care on employers to ensure that risks at work are properly addressed and managed.

There are striking differences in the extent and manner that European academic systems have incorporated duty-of-care responsibilities into their regulations and practices. Risk assessment procedures in the UK are routinely applied and sometimes extend even to relatively low-risk activities. Both authors of this research note were requested by their institutions to fill risk assessments for travelling to conferences and workshops in other countries – in the case of the University of Westminster, risk assessment is requested for all activities that involve travelling off-campus. ³ In Germany, there is no national standard, which means that some universities and research centres have no risk assessment nor ethics procedures in place at all, while others run a blanket prohibition to travel to any country on which the German Foreign Affairs Ministry has issued a warning. ⁴ Other countries take an intermediate approach. In France, research in countries considered “dangerous” requires authorisation by the local fonctionnaire défense et sécurité (defence and security officer), the person in charge of security at each university and at the Conseil Nationale des Recherches Scientifiques (CNRS) (CNRS, 2016; Ministère de l'Enseignement supérieur, de la Recherche et de l'Innovation, 2016). In the Netherlands, formal risk assessment is considered necessary in the case of a travel alert from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In other cases, an informal risk assessment can be conducted. ⁵

For the purposes of this note, we focus on our experiences that are largely based in the UK; different countries and even institutions within the same country will have variations in their risk assessment procedures. However, our observations have relevance for other European countries in spite of differences, a general trend can be individuated towards routinisation and bureaucratisation. For instance, the ICS recommends that institutions adopt “standardized provision of information about, and adherence, to safety protocols,” develop “a code of practice for risk avoidance” and that “appropriate risk avoidance and mitigation be included in research curricula” (ICS, 2017). Such risk assessment advice is inspired by occupational and safety health (OSH) standards, whose logic is driven by the “anticipation” of harm and the suppression of “uncertainty” (Morgan and Pink, 2018: 401). This trend has resulted in the strengthening of bureaucratic procedures in some countries, like the UK, and in the introduction of risk assessment in places that did not use to have a formal procedure, like some German research institutions. ⁶ English-speaking countries, because of their centrality in the development of areas studies and the social sciences, have often provided the blueprint for risk assessment elsewhere.

Paradoxically, the rise of risk assessment regimes happened in parallel with an increased demand for evidence-based research on “fragile states,” especially when the security interests of the countries that are funding the research are involved. For instance, in 2016, the Research Councils UK (RUC) launched the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF), a £1.5 billion fund supporting research that address the challenges faced by developing countries, particularly fragile and conflict-affected states (UKRI, n.d). In France, the Direction des Renseignements Militaires (DRM), the national military intelligence agency, and the CNRS signed a convention in May 2018 that foresees the organisation of informal meetings and workshops between the DRM and researchers working on “far away regions” (Dorronsoro, 2018). As Peter and Strazzari say, at the same time “research is increasingly framed as a security concern; and it is framed by security concerns” (Peter and Strazzari, 2017: 1532).

The Costs of Risk Assessment

Risk assessment has significant costs for the researchers who undergo it, both in terms of time and in terms of financial resources. It is often the researcher’s responsibility to complete his or her own risk assessment, with little institutional support. In particular, training on risk assessment is not always provided by universities, and when it is, its content is often out of touch with the work of social researchers. One of the authors of this research note (Sabine Franklin) was a doctoral student when she had to complete her ethics and risk assessment application: she received no training about the procedure and her supervisor, who had recently been appointed at her institution, was unable to guide on the local procedures. Giulia Piccolino, on the other hand, attended in 2019 risk assessment training provided by her institution ostensibly targeted at social researchers. The training was provided by the university health and safety service and started with two examples of security incidents: a case of caffeine intoxication following a sport science experiment and the refurbishment of a building containing asbestos.

The volume of paperwork needed to undertake fieldwork in “dangerous countries” can be daunting. For instance, a British university requires all work-related trips to be authorised by the line manager by submitting a short online form. Then, travel to all areas identified by the university’s insurer as “medium risk” or above require filing a separate travel risk assessment form. ⁷ Third, all activities classified as “fieldwork” required a “generic fieldwork risk assessment form,” with more than twenty points to address, such as “transport,” “violence,” and “work pattern” (Loughborough University, 2019a). In addition to this procedure, any research with human subjects in areas classified as “high risk” by the insurers automatically triggered a full submission to the university ethics board (Loughborough University, 2019b).

Risk assessment can also impose significant financial costs. Risk assessors and guidelines produced by insurance agencies and consultancy firms often push researchers to stay in “business-class hotels” (UMAL, 2017), presumed, sometimes erroneously, to be safer than cheaper alternatives, or to avoid public transport and only rent cars from officially registered companies (UMAL, 2017). The Social Research Association (SRA) recommends to “budget for safety” (SRA, n.d.), but, in a context of increased competition for research funding, the responsibility to find ways to meet these expenses is placed on the researchers themselves. Such costs pose particular challenges to postgraduate students and early career researchers.

When travel authorisation is denied, the only way researchers can undertake fieldwork is by presenting it as a private trip and bearing all the costs. Susanne Jaspars discusses how, despite having visited the Sudan numerous times as a humanitarian worker, she was denied insurance coverage by her university due to a travel advisory from the UK FCO (Jaspars, 2018). She had to fund the trip herself, including insurance coverage, which increased periodically starting June 2012, at its height, reaching £700 per month by September 2013 (Jaspars, 2018). Acceptance of travel restrictions does not necessarily mean cutting costs. In contrast to Jaspars, Ruben Andersson discusses his decision to renounce travelling to Northern Mali under pressure from the University of Oxford (Andersson, 2016). He was nevertheless obliged to go through a series of burdensome risk mitigation procedures and take a special kidnapping insurance amounting to £750 per month. He observes that “with such rates and procedures, none but the most dedicated would even attempt to arrive in Mali” (Andersson, 2016: 712). One could add that researchers intending to travel to countries considered dangerous have to be not only among the most dedicated but also among the best funded.

A Process Fit for the Purpose?

The way decisions about risk assessment are made is also problematic and encourages cynicism and discouragement among researchers. Researchers often find that “the underlying ethos or attitude…is that researchers…cannot be trusted to make their own informed, independent decisions regarding accepting and managing risk and danger in their fieldwork” (Sluka, 2018).

Approval routes can be confusing, with no clarity about who has the authority to give final approval and overlapping between the role of insurance companies and of ethics committees. For instance, one of the authors of this research note was asked to resubmit her application to the university’s research ethics committee, on the grounds that the researcher had not secured travel insurance yet, even though the procurement office will not issue a travel insurance note unless the research was approved first by the ethics committee. ⁸

When it comes to applications for fieldwork on the African continent, risk assessors not only typically lack direct knowledge of the areas where the researcher intends to travel but might even have no relevant social research experience. This is the case when university safety officers trained in facility management (like in the French academic system) or senior administrators with a background in a completely different discipline are asked to approve research trips.

Risk assessors depend on limited and often biased evidence to authorise fieldwork. While there are variations, universities are usually inclined to trust travel advice provided by the relevant foreign affairs ministries (i.e. FCO, 2019) and by the insurance and consultancy companies affiliated with academic institutions. We have no space here to discuss the contested and politicised nature of these ratings and “colour coding” exercises. ⁹ Suffice here to say that state agencies and insurers tend to emphasise risks related to political violence, such as warfare, kidnappings, and terrorist attacks, also because political risks have special financial implications for insurers. Less “spectacular” risks, such as road-related accidents, medical problems and common crime, are often less emphasised, despite their higher likelihood. One of the consequences of this bias is that African countries tend to be marked as a “no-go zone” (Andersson, 2016) to a disproportionate extent with respect to other potentially dangerous areas. In contrast with its approach to African countries, at the end of 2018, the FCO had placed no alerts on Latin American countries, including countries affected by some of the highest rates of criminal violence in the world, such as Guatemala and Honduras (FCO, 2019). Insurance and governmental ratings also do not consider risks that are specifically related to politically or socially sensitive research. Stable authoritarian countries are rarely identified as “dangerous” by these sources, yet it is in countries like Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Iran and Tajikistan that some of the worst recent incidents involving both foreign and local researchers have taken place. In the case of Giulio Regeni, neither governmental sources nor security specialists considered Cairo to be a dangerous travel destination. ¹⁰

The current risk assessment regime is also problematic insofar as it typically treats security as static and approval as a discrete event that happens ahead of fieldwork. This is in line with the traditional OSH approach, which operates through anticipation of risk and audits that assess security at a given point in time (Morgan and Pink, 2018). Yet travel security can change very quickly. Some universities try to manage uncertainty by requiring that researchers provide a detailed travel plan and pre-book accommodations through approved travel agents. ¹¹ This may prevent researchers from adapting their plans based on security information obtained in the field or to respond to a rapidly changing security situation. Thus, current procedures to over-prepare for “uncertainties” can be counterproductive (Morgan and Pink, 2018).

In conclusion, paralleling what has happened with ethics review processes (Bhattacharya, 2014; Cramer et al., 2015), a gap is emerging between risk assessment as demanded by the university management, which equates risk management to a set of rules, and risk assessment in practice, which is about taking decisions in response to the challenges and dilemmas that arise in the field. The introduction of risk assessment regimes is also reinforcing the inequalities already ubiquitous in contemporary Western academia, between senior, tenured researchers and junior staff, who are often surviving on casual contracts and hourly paid teaching, and between elite research institutions that have funding to support their staff and less prestigious institutions who do not. However, these inequalities may also be inadvertently played out between researchers based in the West and those in “high-risk” countries. The next section addresses the impact of risk assessment on knowledge production and academic collaboration between researchers based in Europe and researchers based in Africa.

Unintended Consequences for African Studies

The “unintended consequences” of risk assessment are not limited to the mental distress and bureaucratic misadventures that it might cause to Europe-based researchers but also impact how knowledge about Africa is produced, and the relationships between Western academia and African-based researchers. Current cartographies of “danger zones” carry out a distinctive neocolonial flavour and have been accused by African policymakers and academics to stigmatise entire areas of the world, condemning them to further marginalisation (Akindès, 2018; Andersson, 2016). The current trend in social research also arises two specific issues.

First, risk assessment procedures may affect the choice of research methods, discouraging long-term fieldwork and trips outside capital cities to areas that are considered too remote or “dangerous”. They might particularly affect the use of ethnographic methods, which require the researcher to live in similar conditions as local people and to share their everyday life (Andersson, 2016; Coffey, 1999). This development fits into and reinforce a broader trend within African studies that has seen some researchers shifting from “predominantly qualitative” (Cheeseman et al., 2017: 1) methodologies to quantitative methodologies that do not require the long-term presence of Western-based researchers, such as the analysis of cross-national databases, survey research, and randomised controlled trials. However, many scholars have raised important concerns about “the risk of oversimplifying a reality that is known only from afar” and of creating “a greater distance between the researcher and the people they are researching” (Cheeseman et al., 2017: 5).

Efforts to control risks by avoiding immersion in the local reality might come at the expense of the integrity and value of research findings. Cramer et al. (2015), for instance, argue that some of the risks they encountered in the course of their Fairtrade, Employment and Poverty Reduction in Ethiopia and Uganda (FTEPR) research project were a direct consequence of researchers’ efforts to protect their independence (p. 155). Extreme risk aversions would have pushed them to rely on Fairtrade organisations and employers to get in touch with local informants, preventing them to uncover unsettling findings.

Current risk assessment procedures and the way they influence the choice of research methods might also have important consequences for the relationships between Western and African scholars. Although it has resulted in more projects being implemented in collaboration with local researchers, the current shift in research methods has reinforced patterns of inequality and neocolonial structures of knowledge and science, where Africans are relegated to the role of executors of projects designed in the West. The bureaucratisation of risk-assessment procedures in European institutions might reinforce neocolonial science in global research outputs, as Western researchers try to find ways to “conduct fieldwork” without being physically present. The inequality is particularly evident in health and health-related social science research, where fieldwork is outsourced for data and sample collection, but African researchers are not always included in the intellectual design of the projects (Boshoff, 2009; Munung et al., 2017; Wight, 2008). Additionally, this labour is supplied cheaply by employing individuals privately, rather than doing an institutional collaboration and paying an institutional fee. This puts local universities at a disadvantage because the extra funding could have paid for libraries or other research facilities (Wight, 2008).

With respect to politics and international relations, current trends have resulted in Western researchers studying Africa “using techniques that are often out of reach for African-based scholars” (Cheeseman et al., 2017: 4) and the number of publications by African-based researchers in top journals has showed a disturbing downward trend (Briggs and Weathers, 2016).

There is vast scholarship examining how research partnerships tend to relegate local researchers to the role of data collection and exclude them from the intellectual or conceptual design of the research (Bouka, 2018; Chu et al., 2014; Munung et al., 2017; Wight, 2008). By discouraging Europe-based academics from undertaking extensive fieldwork, risk-assessment regimes might encourage the outsourcing of fieldwork, shifting risks to the local partners. This would parallel what has already been happening in the development and peacebuilding industry, where Western countries provide funding but peacekeeping troops and aid specialists from developing countries are routinely sent to the front lines of danger (Andersson, 2016). In spite of the existence of ethics review processes aiming, among other, to prevent harm to research partners, risk assessment at European universities is often based on protecting employees and on the assumption that it is Western-based researchers who are more at risk. In reality, however, it is often local researchers and collaborators who are most exposed (Bhattacharya, 2014; Cramer et al., 2015; Eriksson Baaz and Utas, 2019). For instance, reflecting on her experience of conducting research on the Congolese armed forces, Maria Eriksson Baaz notices that, although her identity as a white foreign woman exposed her to specific risks, her Congolese counterparts were in reality the ones truly in danger, in spite of being members of the army conventionally perceived as in a strong position (Eriksson Baaz, 2019). Moreover, the unclear division of labour within university bureaucracies results in some ethic committees giving priority to liability issues over ethical concerns, as in the case mentioned with Bello (2019).

Another way in which risk assessment might reinforce neocolonial relationships of inequality is the way that university bureaucracies ignore the voices of African-based partners when assessing security risks. The neglect of local knowledge might have serious consequences, leading to mistaken assumptions about where the risks lie. It might also result in calling off joint research activities that are potentially beneficial to African institutions despite evidence provided by local partners that the risks are manageable. ¹² As travelling to Europe becomes increasingly complicated for African researchers due to visa restrictions (Bailey, 2019), it becomes all the more important to ensure that some collaborative research activities take place on African soil.

What Can Be Done to Make Risk Assessment Meaningful?

We have shown in this research note that bureaucratising the security of researchers might have a series of unacknowledged unintended consequences, not only for Europe-based researchers but also for their African research partners and for knowledge production in African studies more broadly.

Burdensome risk assessment is associated with higher time and financial costs, which may dissuade some, especially early-career researchers, from conducting lengthy fieldwork. There is also evidence that the current risk assessment regimes do not factor risks to local partners in the same way for Western researchers and marginalize their voices. The bureaucratic logic of risk assessment is predicated on the fallacious idea that risks can be prevented by suppressing uncertainty rather than by encouraging researchers to learn how to respond to events in the field (Morgan and Pink, 2018). It is not adapted to the realities and needs of social research, and in some cases, can be counterproductive. However, the existence of real risks to researchers and legal obligations make it both unlikely and undesirable to scrap risk-assessment procedures completely. In this section, we offer a series of ideas for improving risk assessment.

First, institutional fears about the dangers of fieldwork in developing countries have been shaped by the exposure of a few dramatic cases and do not rely on solid evidence. Further research should assess to what extent the current securitisation trend reflects a real increase in threats to social researchers and collect systematic evidence about the nature and frequency of security incidents during fieldwork.

Second, universities should ensure that risk-assessment procedures are transparent and that there is a clear chain of authorisation. Making a checklist or guide easily available would help make the process smoother. Technology could also streamline the process and reduce redundant paperwork. Research students and new staff should be familiarised with the local risk-assessment process in induction trainings.

Training, however, should not focus on ticking boxes, but prepare researchers to the actual security challenges that they might encounter when travelling to developing countries. In the last few years, there have been a series of attempts by researchers themselves to create resources and opportunities to help researchers manage risks in the field. For example, the SAFEResearch project has created a handbook that teaches risk management before entering the field and how to manage dynamic and fluid situations that may occur during fieldwork. ¹³ Training that develop risk management skills will help researchers to mitigate any changing circumstances while in the field. In a similar spirit, a group of UK and US-based academics has created Advancing Research on Conflict (ARC) Consortium summer programme, a tailored training for PhD students intending to conduct research in fragile and violence-affected settings, which also includes training on issues such as risk management, first aid, and managing institutional review board protocols, delivered in partnership with a risk consultancy. ¹⁴ The course explicitly aims to support “the development of professional support networks that include faculty and peers working in similar settings.” ¹⁵

Universities should, to the extent possible, give training responsibilities to persons with relevant social research experience and encourage peer learning between academics working in developing countries. Researchers involved in sensitive research, such as research on armed violence, could be sponsored to attend initiatives such as the ARC summer programme or external trainings designed for civilian peacebuilders and humanitarian workers, like the EU-certified civilian crisis management courses. ¹⁶

There is also a need to broaden the evidence base used to take decisions. Crafting risk-assessment procedures and authorisation solely on information provided by foreign affairs ministries and insurers might lead to mistaken assumptions about where the risks lie. Opinions from African-based researchers would give a more realistic expectation of what may occur and should be sought, where possible. This is especially desirable when collaborating on a project with an institution located in the field, where it would make sense for research partners to be integrated into the risk assessment process.

Finally, risk assessment should be a learning process. A follow-up mechanism after the fieldwork is conducted could help guide the university to internally review its fieldwork authorisation process and develop the right trainings for its researchers.

While these recommendations may seem simple, we understand that a considerable amount of resources and time will have to be diverted to review current procedures in place. We also recognize that one of the main problems with current risk-assessment procedures is that they have been crafted without considering the views of researchers, from neither Europe nor Africa. Thus, these recommendations are meant to serve only as a starting point for what we believe should be a dialogue and debate within African studies associations and among social science researchers about how to reform and shape risk assessment.