Who has the right and duty to document the ongoing conflict? What is the positionality of the insider and outsider researcher when recording testimonies which might in the future become invaluable sources for scholars of the past?
Wer hat das Recht und die Pflicht, den andauernden Konflikt zu dokumentieren? Welche Positionen nehmen Wissenschaftler:innen ein, wenn sie als Betroffene oder Außenstehende Zeugnisse dokumentieren, die in Zukunft zu unschätzbaren Quellen für die Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit werden könnten?
Immediate reaction to the Russian full-scale aggression towards Ukraine was willingness to help and get involved. For me, as an oral historian, it was obvious from the very beginning, that in a few years, whatever testimony we record now, will become an extremely valuable source for scholars researching the past. Thus, in March 2022, I became involved in coordinating the Polish part of the research and documentation project „24.02.2022, 5 am: Testimonies from the War” (https://u-core.org/ ; https://swiadectwawojny2022.org/). Designed as oral history oriented and bringing agency back to the interviewees, the project involved documentation activities conducted both in Ukraine and abroad. Our aim was to record the Ukrainian experience of war in the dimension of everyday life, capturing the individual stories of people for whom full-scale war changed their entire lives and to create a collection of testimonies. The traditional tension inevitably connected to the fact of being either an insider or outsider to the field in social sciences has gained an additional dimension for me in this project.

Screenshot from the project website
The situation of my Polish team in the project was quite specific. Research work often meant that a Polish researcher with Polish citizenship, employed in a Polish academic institution, was recording an interview with a Ukrainian refugee, in a foreign country, adapting to a foreign culture, in an uncertain legal and personal situation and with a precarious economic position. From the very beginning, this implied a strong disbalance in relations of power, and numerous methodological and ethical doubts. Does being an outsider in this type of research make your situation easier than being an insider, what kind of additional responsibilities and challenges does it impose on you, and what are the possibilities of balancing the advantages and disadvantages of the „implicated outsider”, transforming Rothberg’s [1] term?
The very idea that crisis documentation should start without waiting for a safe time distance was met with fundamental criticism in Poland. The brunt of the criticism focused on the fact that academic projects are premature while the war is still ongoing, research work should be postponed until the period of stabilisation, while refugees are fundamentally unready to be the subject of academic research. In addition to the „if” and „when”, the question of „who” was also topical. Does a Polish researcher even have the right to get involved at such an early stage in an academic project on Ukrainian refugees? As someone whose living situation is not under threat and whose country is not at war, does she have the right to use her advantage to do science when her Ukrainian colleagues do not have this opportunity?
We asked ourselves all these questions long before we were asked them in public. Our main argument for deciding to go ahead with the project, however, was that the idea came to us from the Ukrainian academics themselves. We were not the ones who came up with the idea to record the Ukrainian experience, we were asked to join a wider project designed and initiated by Ukrainian colleagues. Thus, the question „who has the right” could just as well be asked in the convention of „who has the duty”. It is the privileged position of the researcher-outsider, who does not have to organize his or her life from scratch, who does not have to tremble every day for the fate of his or her loved ones, that makes the researcher-outsider have the resources necessary to undertake such a project. The researcher-outsider has the emotional and logistical resources to act and, in a sense, it is her responsibility to do so. It is the researcher who is an outsider to her subjects, but an insider to the country in which the project takes place, who has the necessary back office and might use it for the benefits of the project. The privileged position thus, in a sense, places an obligation on the researcher to use it, creates a situation of moral responsibility and solidarity with fellow researchers from an endangered country who cannot engage their limited resources.
The institutional facilities we were able to offer enabled us to include researchers from Ukraine who found themselves in Poland as a result of the Russian invasion. It was clear to us that their expertise was crucial if the project was to make a meaningful contribution. Thus, from the beginning, the core of the team recording the interviews in Poland was made up of female refugee researchers. In this way, we were able to benefit both from the fact that administrative and management issues were left on the shoulders of the Polish side, and from the fact that important issues could be consulted on an ongoing basis by Ukrainian researchers.

Project meeting in Lviv in 2024, photo by Natalia Otrishchenko.
However, the outsider position also has other implications. The outsider researcher has a greater responsibility than the Ukrainian researcher: in a sense, she can afford less, because she does not share a difficult experience with her subjects. She talks to people who are in a situation of particular vulnerability, so she has to be careful not to use her relations of power, e.g. to get someone to participate in the study. She talks to people who are not her co-citizens and co-nationals, and so she has to be careful about her choice of topics. These are all limitations that do not disqualify the researcher-outsider, but she must be aware of them and take measures to balance these limitations, both ethically and methodologically.
In a project where recruitment is based primarily on voluntary submissions from participants and on a snowball principle, it is more difficult for the researcher-outsider to enter the environment of his subjects because it is not her environment. She has to rely on recommendations from others and laboriously earn the trust of his interviewees, who have no reason to trust her. A Polish researcher recording the accounts of Ukrainian refugee women, even if best prepared, is also not familiar, unlike her Ukrainian teammates, with the entire cultural and social context in which the respondents function. She is less immersed in current events in Ukraine and does not start her day by checking where the bombs fell. She does not share all the emotions with the respondents, she cannot refer to the community of experience by saying “I know what it is like because I experienced it myself”.
This opens up the question of whether a community of experience is necessary for a good documentary project. Or is it more of a hindrance? In various contexts, it appears that although the insider researcher has invaluable insights into the group of his or her subjects, there are times when the insider position can be downright aggravating and prevent the research from being realised. The discussion about whether, in the context of research on ongoing crisis and war, the researcher-insider is too emotionally entangled to remain a trustworthy researcher did not start at the time of the Russian full-scale invasion: the issue was also raised in the context of war news reporting in Syria, Palestine or Turkey, when local gate-keepers, translators and researchers were depreciated as „fixers”, simple providers of knowledge. For our team, it was clear from the outset that in this project an emotional involvement was not only justified but, in a sense, expected. In such a situation, the commonality of experience is an asset for the researcher rather than a burden: it allows to be more sensitive and to identify more easily with the subject. As Johana Kotisova states correctly describing the position of Ukrainian and Palestinian “fixers” in the international news reporting, “in practice, emotional engagement appears to work as a form of embodied knowledge”.
With this, we come back to the „duty” notion. The researcher-outsider, when involved in crisis documentation, has a duty to use her privileges and work towards building if not embodied knowledge, then at least embodied understanding. This will not work without close and respectful cooperation with insider researchers.
[1] See: Michael Rothberg, Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019)

Photo: private.
Anna Wylegała is a sociologist and Associate Professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences.
Title picture: Center of Urban History in Lviv, George Ivanchenko.