Ethics of archival research on political violence
| DOI | 10.1177/0022343319898735 |
| Date | 01 May 2021 |
| Author | Jelena Subotić |
| Published date | 01 May 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Ethics of archival research on
political violence
Jelena Subotic
´
Department of Political Science, Georgia State University
Abstract
While archival research most often does not include direct interaction with living subjects, ethical issues surrounding
this method are no less acute. These issues are even more profound in studies of violence, where the likely questions
are often about life, death, murder, culpability, responsibility, punishment, or remorse. Identifying answers to such
questions is a process rife with ethical minefields, including possibility of unfair affiliation of individuals with violent
groups, or tendentious interpretation of past documents, or even avoidance of specific archival material if it causes
direct and irreversible reputational harm. While other disciplines have begun a more thorough evaluation of the
ethics of archival research, political science has so far remained largely silent on this issue. To bring these conversa-
tions to political science, I discuss three main ethical challenges in conducting archival research on political violence:
the role of researcher in interpretation; harms and benefits to subjects of research; and the politics of archives and
politicization of research. I illustrate the arguments with my own archival research on Holocaust remembrance in
post-communist Europe. I discuss archives – public and private – as sites of my own research and present ethical
challenges I encountered while working with these archival materials. I then provide a possible path toward more
ethical archival research on political violence and link this path to the ongoing discussion about data and research
transparency in qualitative work.
Keywords
archives, ethics, Holocaust, qualitative research, violence
Archival research ethics have not been sufficiently pro-
blematized in political science. There is a broadly shared
understanding that archival research is difficult – it is
time consuming, and it relies on availability, access, and
openness of the archive and the professionalism and
helpfulness of the archival staff, all of which vary enor-
mously across archival sites. It can be very expensive if it
involves research in a foreign language, in a foreign coun-
try, under time, financial, and sometimes security con-
straints. We know it is difficult but we think it is
relatively straightforward: the researcher identifies the
archives that may have sources useful for the project, she
goes to the archive, reads the materials, make copies, and
then uses them as evidence in the research project, which
then ultimately gets published.
What is missing almost entirely from the discussion of
archival research in political science is the ethics of this
type of research. Archives are not just dusty repositories
of paper, opaquely classified, often inaccessible. They are
complex fields of meaning. The physical handling and
tactile power of old archival documents can be an emo-
tional experience that takes us back to the past and helps
us experience it through archival fragments of the past
that remain (Farge, 2013). Documents about the past
can be emotionally powerful, but they are also inherently
political. We use them as authoritative sources to
describe a past that we can no longer empirically observe.
The use and interpretation of archival documents
require us to make ethical choices. Archival research
often involves researching events deep in the past, and
events whose participants are no longer alive. The pur-
pose of my article, then, is to ‘disturb the artificial
Corresponding author:
jsubotic@gsu.edu
Journal of Peace Research
2021, Vol. 58(3) 342–354
ªThe Author(s) 2020
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/0022343319898735
journals.sagepub.com/home/jpr
To continue reading
Request your trial