As a graduate student in Politics at the University of York researching the master narratives of the international interventions in Cote d'Ivoire, I spent 3 months in Abidjan in 2017 improving my French, building ethnographic skills, and learning about Ivoirian political history, culture, and the daily life of the Abidjanaise.
In this presentation, I reflect on my preparation for the field as a graduate student at a British university preparing to do fieldwork in a post-conflict zone, the benefits as well as the gaps in guidance, logistics, and logic. I use my experiences with the taxicab economy of Abidjan as an optic to analyse the invisible (and sometimes visible) violence of life in the field. I reflect on how I learned to be 'neo-colonial' and describe how I learned to identify structures of exploitation in my own practice and how I re-wrote my own rules of ethics and morality in the field.
I discuss the tension between morality and ethics in the field, the un/intended consequences of the current UK academic ethics model for fieldwork, and how the 'first, do no harm,’ narrative both guides us and fails us as researchers in complex communities. I review the factors which structure guidance for fieldwork for international security studies within the neoliberal academic context and conclude by outlining individual and collective choices open to us in our quest for ethical, moral, and sound practice in 'the field'.