Terrorism Confidential: Ethics, Primary Data and the Construction of “Necessary Fictions”

Primary human sources involved with or proximate to terrorist actors can provide critical information and insights for understanding terrorist ideologies, behaviors and orientations. Yet accessing and drawing on their knowledge and experience is bound up with a range of constraints and risks. Some of these are practical, but others are either ethical, moral or both. Terrorism research can be constructed as a moral field of enquiry insofar as it proposes to generate scientifically defendable and socially useful knowledge that will help repel or mitigate the personal, social and political harms of terrorism in ways that respect human rights and freedoms. In turn, this potentially positions terrorism researchers as moral agents engaged in knowledge production for the greater collective social and political good. However, assuming the general moral orientation of terrorism researchers does not really help us understand how terrorism researchers navigate moral complexity or moral competition when faced with irreconcilable or asymmetrical ethical frameworks that can come into conflict. Indeed, terrorism researchers can become (drawing on Emmanuel Levinas’s distinction between ethics and morality) caught between “ethical” responsibility for participants on the one hand, and “moral” responsibility for the greater good, on the other. One potential response to this lies in constructing what might be called “necessary fictions” in how we represent our primary human data. However, what look like “necessary fictions” from an ethical standpoint—mitigating the vulnerability of participants through taking ethical responsibility for the others we encounter—can become shaky ground from a moral standpoint when benchmarked against expectations governing facticity and authenticity in social science research. This is a wicked problem for terrorism research: in seeking ethically to minimize vulnerabilities for participants, do such strategies create other and deeper moral vulnerabilities for the field? This paper will attempt to unpack these issues drawing on our own recent research experiences in the field of countering violent extremism.