In conflict-affected societies, what researchers cannot say is shaped by safety, politics, and access. This presentation draws on fieldwork in the Nineveh Plains of Iraq after the ISIS occupation to examine both how communities endured and how the act of documenting that endurance surfaced ethical dilemmas of silence, complicity, and accountability.
Semi-structured interviews revealed practices such as faith-based coping and symbolic resistance. Documenting these everyday strategies required discretion, which in turn shaped the ethical challenges of the work. While the project was not intended as rights documentation, these survival strategies revealed human rights dimensions. Conversations often moved from experiences under ISIS occupation to the years that followed. These accounts revealed how laws and social norms continued to constrain rights and shape daily life, while also highlighting the tension between silence as protection and silence as complicity. All insights are presented in aggregated and anonymized form, with sensitive details withheld to safeguard participants, collaborators, and the researcher.
This protective stance raised difficult questions: how can researchers balance protective silences with accountability both to participants whose safety must be protected and to the integrity of the scholarly record? This presentation does not resolve these questions but argues that raising them openly is essential. Standard protocols do not anticipate such dilemmas, yet they shape both the practice of conflict-affected research and the knowledge it yields.