Ethical considerations from the study of peacekeeping

Robert Rubinstein, a senior figure in anthropology, has developed a reputation for his equanimity and broadmindedness as it bears on the discipline’s debates about and engagements with the national security sector. When the author decided to begin my ethnographic research on peacekeeping in the mid-1980s, the author was associated with the Department of Anthropology at Northwestern University. As the author began to plan for my peace keeping research, the author discussed it with colleagues in the three main institutional settings to which professional network extended: Northwestern University, the University of Chicago, and the University of California, Berkeley. During fieldwork among military communities, and in other settings when studying up, the ethnographer may encounter practices the reporting of which would place their informant in some sort of personal danger, physical or otherwise. The author sees this exceptionalism too in the volume editors’ distinction between politically charged secrecy of studying up and the garden variety secrecy of fieldwork.