de Koeijer, Valerie, Sarah E. Parkinson, and Sofia J. Smith. 2023. “‘It's Just How Things Are Done’: Social Ecologies of Sexual Violence in Humanitarian Aid.” International Studies Quarterly. Online (open access) at: https://doi.org/10.1093/isq/sqad065
ABSTRACT
Increasing research on the humanitarian sector examines how its organizational cultures affect both aid outcomes and humanitarian workers’ private lives. The #MeToo movement and several public scandals have brought to light patterns of sexual violence in crisis zones perpetrated by humanitarian aid workers; surveys suggest rates of sexual assault within the humanitarian community comparable to, if not higher than, those on US college campuses. How do the conditions that produce sexual violence persist in a sector governed by strong, mission-centric principles, professional codes of conduct, and oversight?
This article uses participant observation in Iraq and Uganda, in-depth interviews, and textural analysis to examine the social origins of sexual violence in humanitarian communities. It builds on studies of aid organizations to argue that the humanitarian sector operates similarly to a “total institution” (Goffman 1961). Then, it draws upon recent work on sexual violence to demonstrate how within-sector social ecologies and informal socialization practices create the conditions of possibility for sexual violence. It identifies two key factors that constitute the emergency aid world—sexual scripts and projects, and sector-specific sexual geographies—and argues that they produce conditions that facilitate sexual violence while labeling them “just how things are done.”
Parkinson, Sarah E.. 2022. “(Dis)Courtesy Bias: “Methodological Cognates,” Data Validity, and Ethics in Violence-Adjacent Research.” Comparative Political Studies. Online at: https://doi.org/10.1177/00104140211024309
ABSTRACT
In settings where war, forced migration, and humanitarian crisis have attracted international attention, research participants’ prior experiences with journalists, advocacy groups, state security, and humanitarian organizations influence scholarly work. Building on long-term fieldwork in Iraq and Lebanon, this paper argues that individuals’ and communities’ previous and ongoing interactions with these actors affect the content, quality, and validity of data gathered as well as shaping possibilities for ethical academic research. Drawing on observational and interview-based research with humanitarian service providers, journalists, and displaced persons, this paper argues that the cross-sector use of “methodological cognates” such as surveys and structured interviews shapes data validity and reliability via four mechanisms: regurgitation, redirection, reluctant participation, and resistance. I contend that these features of the research process should centrally inform academics’ research designs, project siting, case selection, and data analysis.
Parkinson, Sarah E.. 2021. “Practical Ideology in Militant Organizations.” World Politics 73(1): 52-81. Online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0043887120000180
ABSTRACT
Ideology shapes militant recruitment, organization, and conflict behavior. Existing research assumes doctrinal consistency, top-down socialization of adherents, and clear links between formal ideology and political action. However, it has long been recognized that ideological commitments do not flow “all the way down” from overarching cleavages or elite narratives; they are uneven, contingent, fraught with tension, and often ambivalent. What work does ideology do in militant groups if it is not deeply studied, internalized, or sincerely believed? How can scholars explain collective commitment, affinity, and behavioral outcomes among militants who clearly associate themselves with a group, but who may not consistently (or ever) be 'true believers' or committed ideologues? I argue that “practical ideologies”—sets of quotidian principles, ideas, and social heuristics that reflect relational worldviews rather than specific published political positions, platforms, or plans—play a key role in militant socialization via everyday practices. Ethnographic evidence collected during fieldwork among Palestinians in Lebanon demonstrates how militants and affiliates render ideas about ideological closeness and distance accessible via emotional, intellectual, and moral appeals. This approach reaffirms the role of discourse and narrative in creating informal mechanisms of militant socialization without expressly invoking formal doctrine.
Parkinson, Sarah E.. 2019. “Humanitarian Crisis Research as Intervention.” Middle East Report 290 (Spring 2019): 29-37. Online at https://merip.org/magazine/290/.
EXCERPT
Given that research in crisis-affected settings necessarily involves intervention, important questions arise about how academic projects interact with those of other actors and how these can produce harmful effects. When are researchers unknowingly reproducing sensitive and dehumanizing interactions; fetishizing and commodifying human tragedy; or engaging in problematic labor dynamics? In a regional situation where reinvigorated authoritarian regimes are ratcheting up surveillance, harassment and violence against researchers, the ‘crisis zones’ of displaced persons and refugees have emerged as alternative sites where the state’s official coercive presence is seen as less obtrusive or threatening to researchers. As larger numbers of scholars gravitate toward these locales one must ask what benefit such research—as carried out by social scientists—in fact provides. Drawing upon a decade of observations and experiences from field-based research with armed actors, displaced persons and humanitarian responders in Lebanon and Northern Iraq, I ask if “do no harm” is a sufficient pre-condition for conducting social science research in crisis zones, and what kinds of practices research communities should consider moving forward.
Ghosn, Faten and Parkinson, Sarah, E.. 2019. “‘Finding’ Sectarianism and Strife in Lebanon.” PS: Political Science and Politics 52 (3): 494-497. Online at http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S1049096519000143
EXCERPT
Lack of contextual knowledge among both qualitatively and quantitatively oriented scholars substantiates overused categories of analyses, undermines data validity, and inhibits ethical production of knowledge. This article addresses three distinct, interrelated predicaments in the Lebanese context: (1) a generally uncritical focus on sect/sectarianism as the primary explanatory factor in Levantine politics; (2) research tourism/voyeurism; and (3) effects of these two factors on the survey-firm industry in Lebanon.
We first focus on the trap of seeing Lebanon exclusively through the prism of sect, partly because most previous work has centered on this form of identification. Second, we identify how this trend interacts with the growing valorization of “dangerous” research, which has played out in Lebanon in both the aftermath of the 2006 July War and the context of the Syrian refugee crisis. We identify problems associated with “academic tourism,” including ignorance of local histories and its effects on research design and analysis. Third, we note how Lebanese actors have responded by offering survey services tailored to the foreign-researcher market and shaped by its expectations. We conclude by arguing for more careful historical contextualization, creative casing of research, responsible research practices, and critical engagement with the production of academic knowledge.
Hundman, Eric, and Parkinson, Sarah E.. 2019. “Rogues, Degenerates, and Heroes: Disobedience as Politics in Military Organizations.” European Journal of International Relations 25(3): 645-671. Online at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1354066118823891.
ABSTRACT
Disobedience in military organizations affects critical outcomes such as the quality of civil-military relations, the likelihood of civilian abuse, and battlefield effectiveness. Existing work on military disobedience focuses on group dynamics; this paper instead investigates the circumstances under which individual officers disobey. We argue that officers interpret military orders based on their concurrent positions in multiple social networks and that, contingent on the soldier’s environment, such orders can “activate” tensions between overlapping social network identifications. These tensions create motivations and justifications for disobedience. We develop this theory via in-depth case studies of individual officers’ disobedience in the Chinese military and the Palestine Liberation Organization, combined with an examination of ten additional cases outlined in an appendix. Relying on primary sources, we demonstrate how identifications with overlapping social networks led two ostensibly dissimilar officers to disobey in similar ways during the Sino-French War (1883-85) and the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1989). Our theory thus shows how overlapping social networks create conditions of possibility for even well-trained, loyal commanders to disobey their superiors. In doing so, it highlights the critical fact that even within the context of intensive military discipline and socialization, individuals draw on identifications with varied social networks to make decisions. Further, it implies that individual disobedience should be studied as conceptually separate from collective events such as mass desertion or unit defection.
Parkinson, Sarah E., and Sherry Zaks. 2018. “Militant and Rebel Organization(s).” Comparative Politics, 50 (2): 271-293. Online at https://doi.org/10.5129/001041518822263610
ABSTRACT
An emerging trend in research on militant groups asks how structures, dynamics, and relationships within these organizations influence key wartime and postwar outcomes. While the analytical pivot toward organizations advances the field in essential ways, scholars still lack a unified conceptual approach to organization-centric analyses of militancy. This article distills four key dimensions for analysis from organizational sociology: roles, relations, behaviors, and goals. It then reviews four new works on militant organizations and outlines their place in this emergent research trajectory. These books, we argue, underscore how situating research at the organizational level sheds new light on political outcomes such as rebel resilience, social service provision, and deployment of violence. We then highlight two related and promising organizational research agendas for future studies.
Gordon, Anna and Parkinson, Sarah E.. 2018. “How the Houthis Became “Shi’a”.” Middle East Report Online. January 27.
EXCERPT
How, then, did the Houthis become “Shi‘a”? The process started with instrumentalist political entrepreneurship, rather than doctrinal distinctions or cultural proximity. In the 1990s, Zaydi religious and political figure Husayn Badr al-Din al-Houthi and his followers—many but not all of them also Zaydis—founded a group called the Believing Youth as a reaction against both the discriminatory policies of the central Yemeni government and the rising proselytization of Saudi-funded salafis (puritanical Sunnis) in the Houthis’ home province of Sa‘ada. [4] The Believing Youth directed their efforts at denouncing Salih and his authoritarian regime. At the same time, the salafi groups arriving in northwestern Yemen from Saudi Arabia churned out propaganda that depicted “Zaydis as pawns of Iran in a global Shi‘a conspiracy that seeks to divide the Muslim world.” [5]
In 2004, with tensions high in Yemen due to the US-led war on terror and the advent of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, war broke out between the Houthis and Salih’s regime. That summer, the regime’s anti-rebel rhetoric was fairly general, centered on accusations that the Houthis were a violent, anti-American outfit that was “inciting sectarian strife and spreading ‘deviant’ thought and ‘extremist ideology.’” [6] But the regime soon began aggressively promoting an explicitly sectarian narrative—describing the Houthis as “Iranian-backed Shi‘a”—that was adopted wholesale by English-language media despite a consistent absence of strong evidence.
Parkinson, Sarah E.. 2016. “Money Talks: Discourse, Networks, and Structure in Militant Organizations.” Perspectives on Politics 14 (4): 976–94. Online at https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592716002875.
ABSTRACT
Scholarship on militant organizations and rebel movements emphasizes the effects of fragmentation and disunity on military and political outcomes. Yet this scholarship’s focus on formal, durable, and externally observable aspects of organizational structure omits the social practices that constitute, reinforce, and reproduce intra-group schisms. How do intra-organizational divisions calcify into permanent cleavages? What processes reproduce factions over time? Using the case of Fatah in Lebanon, I argue that informal discursive practices—e.g., gossip, jokes, complaints, storytelling—contribute to the maintenance and reproduction of intra-organizational factions. Specifically, I focus on how networks of meaning-laden, money-centric discourse structure relations among militants who identify as being “Old Fatah.” I demonstrate that while these practices frequently originate in the organizational realm, cadres subsequently reproduce them within kinship, marriage, and friendship networks. This “money talk” between age cohorts within the quotidian realm connects younger members of Fatah to older cadres through collective practices and conceptions of organizational membership. These practices both exemplify an intra-organizational schism and constitute, in part, the faction called Old Fatah. Examining how symbolic practice comprises social structure thus provides important insight into the politics of organizations such as militant groups, social movements, and political parties.
Parkinson, Sarah E., and Orkideh Behrouzan. 2015. “Negotiating Health and Life: Syrian Refugees and the Politics of Access in Lebanon.” Social Science & Medicine 146: 324–31. Online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2015.10.008.
ABSTRACT
Building on the concept of “therapeutic geographies,” we argue for the integration of local socio-political context and situated knowledge into understandings of humanitarian healthcare systems. Using evidence gathered from participant observation among Syrian and Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, we demonstrate how procedures developed to facilitate care—such as refugee registration and insurance contracting—can interact with other factors to simultaneously prevent and/or disincentivize refugees' accessing healthcare services and expose them to structural violence. Drawing on two interconnected ethnographic encounters in a Palestinian refugee camp and in a Lebanese public hospital, we demonstrate how interactions surrounding the clinical encounter reveal the social, political, and logistical complexities of healthcare access. Moreover, rather than hospital visits representing discrete encounters with the Lebanese state, we contend that they reveal important moments in an ongoing process of negotiation and navigation within and through the constraints and uncertainties that shape refugee life. As a result, we advocate for the incorporation of situated forms of knowledge into humanitarian healthcare practices and the development of an understanding of healthcare access as nested in the larger experience of everyday refugee life.
Parkinson, Sarah E. 2013. “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization and Social Networks in War.” American Political Science Review 107 (3): 418–32. Online at https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055413000208.
ABSTRACT
Research on violent mobilization broadly emphasizes who joins rebellions and why, but neglects to explain the timing or nature of participation. Support and logistical apparatuses play critical roles in sustaining armed conflict, but scholars have not explained role differentiation within militant organizations or accounted for the structures, processes, and practices that produce discrete categories of fighters, soldiers, and staff. Extant theories consequently conflate mobilization and participation in rebel organizations with frontline combat. This article argues that, to understand wartime mobilization and organizational resilience, scholars must situate militants in their organizational and social context. By tracing the emergence and evolution of female-dominated clandestine supply, financial, and information networks in 1980s Lebanon, it demonstrates that mobilization pathways and organizational subdivisions emerge from the systematic overlap between formal militant hierarchies and quotidian social networks. In doing so, this article elucidates the nuanced relationship between social structure, militant organizations, and sustained rebellion.
