The epistemological privilege of fieldwork: A collective investigation in war-torn Syria

Abstract

The article highlights the epistemological privilege of observation in social contexts marked by armed violence and disorder. Faced with these situations, researchers have sometimes considered that their work begins once the conflicts have stabilized, thus favouring archives (written or oral) and secondary sources over observation and interviews collected in context. Despite the difficulties it poses, however, investigation in context offers the researcher, through a sometimes-brutal confrontation with exceptional situations, the possibility of greater theoretical creativity by opening to new objects and new research questions. In return, such research requires a more reactive modality of theoretical elaboration, with a constant reciprocal interaction between hypotheses and data production. Rather than developing these themes in an abstract way, we return to the investigation we conducted on the Syrian conflict. We analyse in particular the difficulties of access, the risks of selection bias, the problems associated with remote research and subcontracting of data production, and the advantages of conducting collective fieldwork.