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Kira Jumet & Merouan Mekouar’s “Doing Research as a Native: A Guide for Fieldwork in Illiberal and Repressive States” – Reflections from a MECAM Workshop

By Charlotte Fiedler

At a recent event held as part of MECAM‘s “Rencontre Ibn Khadun” series, Dr. Kira Jumet (Associate Professor of Government at Hamilton College (USA)) and Dr. Merouan Mekouar (Associate Professor at York University (Canada)) presented and discussed their book “Doing research as a native: A guide for fieldwork in illiberal and repressive states”, which has recently been published by Oxford University Press.

The edited volume brings together fascinating fieldwork accounts from social science and humanities researchers (spanning anthropology, sociology and political science amongst others) who conducted fieldwork in their 15 repressive and/or illiberal home countries across the world. This volume defines these contexts as countries where “government or non-state actors use coercive tactics against ordinary citizens to achieve political goals” and/or where liberal principles are regularly violated. The researchers are considered native if either they came from and lived in these countries or had other close ties to them (through dual citizenship, family members etc.). The binary distinction between native and non-natives is of course somewhat artificial, which is acknowledged and reflected upon by the editors in the introduction and some of the authors in their chapters. While social identities are certainly complex and can overlap, it is also important to note that whether a researcher is considered native to a country lastly does not depend on her own identification but the country’s legislation in which the fieldwork is taking place.

Interestingly, rather than regional particularities, universal challenges to doing research as a native could be identified across cases. These include 1) discrimination, harassment and particular security challenges that are based on the native researcher’s gender, race or ethnicity, 2) legal threats from local authorities, including imprisonment or banning as well as the prosecution of family members and 3) the exploitation by non-native colleagues. The book also offers practical advice on how to address the diverse challenges native researchers face, which were developed with the diverse contributors during workshops.

The book talk and ensuing workshop were followed by a lively discussion, which allowed to critically reflect on questions one should ask oneself prior to conducting research, whether as a native researcher or in research collaborations involving natives and non-natives. At the same time, the workshop also provided a space to share experiences. Many MECAM fellows are all but too familiar with many of the challenges described in the book. Several key themes emerged in the book talk and workshop.

Doing research as a native in illiberal/repressive regimes requires immense bravery. The examples given in the book talk were at times harrowing. More than half of the contributors can no longer live or work in their home countries because of the research they conducted earlier in their career. Other potential contributors had to opt out entirely as publishing on the topic would have been too risky. For me, as a non-native researcher, I must admit I had not fully grasped the unique challenges that conducting research under difficult political conditions often poses to native researchers. Reading the book is a good reminder of how privileged Western scholars are in terms of mobility, institutional protection, and publication freedom. This awareness is crucial when entering research collaborations.

Identifying clear red lines on what type of research could put someone at harm is tricky. While a political context may be difficult to read for an outsider, this also applies to native scholars. Official discourse may strongly diverge from an unofficial one. Red lines can be highly blurry in the first place, they tend to change and move, be applied differently to different people or be underestimated. Hence, there is no easy answer as to where exactly a red line runs. This also means that the weight of identifying red lines should not be held by native collaborators alone.

A man looking at his notes, sitting outside in nature.
“Reflecting on the ethics, risks, and responsibilities of fieldwork.” Photo via Pixaby.

Sometimes it’s ok to walk away. One central question the book encourages researchers to reflect on is what the costs for the researchers involved are and whether these are becoming too high for them. Doing research as a native can have very serious consequences – including (but not limited to) mental health problems, imprisonment, expulsion or putting ones family at risk. It is therefore important to continuously weigh these risks and keep in mind that ultimately there are more important things than implementing the research. This is also important for non-native scholars, for example in their role as advisors to PhD students. As formulated by one of the co-editors during the workshop: “Sometimes the brave thing is to walk away.” 

We need to find ways to better acknowledge good, but (temporarily) unpublishable work due to difficult circumstances. One strategy for dealing with the risks of publishing on critical topics for native researchers may be to withhold publications for a longer period. However, this means that the research will be less visible, which may negatively affect the researcher’s reputation and career, as publications are unfortunately still the main currency we are judged by. As a scientific community, we need to find ways to acknowledge research that is being withheld for good reasons – be it because it is endangering the researcher herself, interviewees or relatives in home countries. One positive example shared in the discussion highlighted how a university was in fact able to internally acknowledge such high quality, but unpublishable work. The same applies to well-designed research that ultimately cannot be implemented, for example, because associated risks changed or the conditions on the ground turned out to be more challenging than initially anticipated – especially among graduate students.

Exploitation in research collaborations can take many forms. As a non-native researcher, it was painful to read and hear about the diverse ways native colleagues have been exploited in research collaborations. For those Western scholars doing research beyond their home countries, this book is a must read, amongst others because it helps grasp the diverse challenges many of our colleagues are unfortunately facing. Hopefully, it will help us enter into research collaborations much more carefully and thoughtfully. But while the book brings important experiences to the forefront that have so far not been dealt with enough, it at the same time is of course only able to draw attention to one aspect of the much larger, systemic inequality that exists between scholarship from the Global North and South. Access, funding and publishing inequities as well as language hegemony continue to strongly mark academia and reduce the reach of the high quality work of many native colleagues.

Overall, the workshop truly widened my perspective on field research. Over the past 12 years, I have conducted hundreds of expert interviews focusing on democratisation and international peacebuilding aid in a highly diverse set of countries: Indonesia, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Nepal, Sierra Leone and most recently Tunisia. In these years, I have witnessed a significant shift toward a far more critical approach to the moral and ethical questions connected to doing fieldwork. For example, in the first research project I worked in back in 2012, we did not conduct an ethical appraisal, we did not obtain informed consent from our interviewees and we did not carefully discuss how we would set up the research collaboration with our local partners. Fortunately, all this has changed; although this of course does not mean we now implement field research perfectly. Books like Doing Research as a Native are vital for continuing this important conversation and for holding us all accountable to more ethical, equitable, and thoughtful research practices.


About the Author

Dr. Charlotte Fiedler is senior researcher at the German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS), a think tank based in Bonn, Germany. She spent the past year at MECAM as an affiliated researcher. She engages in research and policy advice on peacebuilding and social cohesion in post-conflict countries as well as political transformation processes and the effectiveness of international support thereto. In Tunisia she studied the country’s political transformation from a multi-level perspective, based on qualitative interviews. Her work spans a variety of methods and has been published in International Studies Quarterly, Political Studies Review and International Studies Review, amongst others.


Citation: Charlotte Fiedler, Kira Jumet & Merouan Mekouar’s “Doing Research as a Native: A Guide for Fieldwork in Illiberal and Repressive States” – Reflections from a MECAM Workshop, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 24.07.2025, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/60306


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Forum Transregionale Studien (July 24, 2025). Kira Jumet & Merouan Mekouar’s “Doing Research as a Native: A Guide for Fieldwork in Illiberal and Repressive States” – Reflections from a MECAM Workshop. TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research. Retrieved February 13, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/14f45


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