We each live according to our own personal code of ethics but what moral principles guide our work? The feature theme articles in this issue debate many of the ethical questions that confront us in programming, research, safeguarding and volunteering,…
Founded by Barbara Harrell-Bond in 2003, the Africa and Middle East Refugee Assistance (AMERA) organisation embodied her philosophies of promoting refugee voices, ensuring accountability among the people and institutions mandated to decide refugees’ destinies, and achieving normative change within the…
Immigration authorities across Europe are increasingly finding asylum seekers’ social media profiles to be a valuable source of information in case processing, complementing the asylum interview. Access to applicants’ travel routes, photos, network of friends and record of other online activity…
Despite the depth and breadth of the field of forced migration studies, until recently there were no specific ethical guidelines for research with displaced people. While the Refugee Studies Centre at the University of Oxford had adopted Ethical Guidelines for…
Since 2012, I have been working at the Refugee Studies Centre at the University of Oxford, undertaking data collection on the economic lives of refugees and host communities in countries including Kenya, Uganda and Ethiopia. This article is based primarily…
During my doctoral research[1] in 2009–13 with Rwandan refugees in Nakivale, one of Uganda’s oldest refugee settlements, I noted many expressions of research fatigue during interviews. Complaints about over-research tend to arise from a combination of the sheer repetition, frequency…
A few years ago, as part of my research into climate change-related migration, I carried out a pilot study to measure how best to engage with individuals and communities in remote atolls to the north and northeast of Bougainville, an…
In January 2018, the Women’s Refugee Commission (WRC) launched the Sexual Violence Project, a three-year initiative focusing on sexual violence against displaced men and boys,[1] including gay, bisexual, transgender and others with diverse sexual orientation and gender identity and/or expression…
There is a strong mandate in academic work to carefully plan and conduct research projects in alignment with the four tenets of ethical research: non-maleficence, beneficence, justice and autonomy. Indeed, university-based researchers cannot proceed without approval from an independent institutional…
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Western research bodies and governments started establishing internal ethics review committees and these have now become the main way academic institutions address ethical concerns. In the case of non-governmental organisations (NGOs), despite conducting…