Abstract
Studying the military and other security organizations is challenging for both methodological and ethical reasons. Studying these domains “at home,” literally in the researcher’s own country, complicates things even further. This article discusses these intricacies by proposing a dynamic conceptualization of the subject-object relationship in the study of the military and security in Israel. This conceptualization illuminates the effects of the dynamic positioning of the researcher in four social fields: the academic, the military-security, gender, and the ethno-national. The actual influence of these fields and their interrelations changes throughout the phases of research. We argue that when researchers and their respondents have similar ethno-national affiliation and military experiences, the dichotomous relations between them break down and give way to a dense web of expectations. This brings the researcher to maneuver between two, ostensibly contradictory, research strategies: studying-up and studying-across. The paper unpacks the complexities encapsulated in these strategies by discussing methodological and ethical dilemmas in two field studies on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict conducted by the authors.
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Notes
By “things military” we refer to “social and cultural concerns related to (and derived from) the armed forces, war, and provisions for national security” (see Rosenhek et al. 2003).
Note that at-home research is not equivalent to studying-across. Research could take place at home and yet apply studying-up strategy (see, for example, Ostrander 1993).
According to the republican discourse of citizenship, serving your country is a precondition for civil-rights. Liberal discourse, on the other hand, takes civil rights as independent from civilian obligations (Shafir and Peled 1998).
Yiftachel (1999) characterizes Israel as an “ethoncracy.” Ethnocracy is a regime built on two key principals: first, ethnicity—and not citizenship—is the main logic around which the state allocates its resources; and second, the interests of a dominant ethnic group shape most public policies. The combination of these two principals typically creates an ethno-class type of stratification and segregation, particularly between Jewish and Arab citizens.
According to Israeli law, all Jewish men and women at the age of 18 years are obliged to take part in military service. Most serve in the Israeli army, but some are recruited to the Israeli police, security services, and even to the prime minister’s office. Upon their release, all Jewish Israeli men and some of the women are enlisted to a reserve service, which is the primary military component of the Israeli defense forces in times of national emergency (Ben Dor et al. 2002; Horowitz and Kimmerling 1974; Lomsky-Feder et al. 2008). While most Israeli Jewish female soldiers do not serve in combat units, their participation in the military includes them as legitimate members of the ethno-national community. At the same time, it is important to note that though military service is obligatory for both men and women in Israel, only 75% of men and 60% of women actually do military service (Levy 2007).
The most notable effect of the ideological controversies in the Israeli academia is on the paradigmatic trends that typify different generations in Israeli scholarship, particularly in Israeli sociology. The early generation of Israeli sociologists was devoted to the institutional Zionist ideology and felt committed to the advancement of Israeli Jewish society (Kalekin-Fishman 2006, pp. 67–68; Ram 1995; Yair and Apeloig 2006). This ideological inclination brought Israeli social scientists to adopt functionalist and institutionalist perspectives in the study of the Israeli state and its GVOs (e.g., Eisenstadt 1967, pp. 285–367; Horowitz and Lissak 1989). Since the late 1970s, scholars have embraced a more critical position vis-à-vis Israeli historiography and the Jewish national project in general (Kimmerling 1989, 2001; Morris 1989; Rabinowitz 1998; Ram 1993, 1995), particularly regarding the interrelations between ethnicity and citizenship in Israel (Berkovitch 1997; Yiftachel 1999; Yuval-Davis 1987).
During the second Palestinian uprising, Al-Aqsa Intifada, that erupted in October 2000, the Israeli Supreme Court banished the use of this method as a result of appeals from Israeli and international human rights organizations.
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Acknowledgments
Research for this paper was funded in part by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (file #410-2005-0026; Principal Investigator, Robert J. Brym), The Shaine Center for Research in the Social Sciences, The Harry S. Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace, and The Levi Eshkol Institute for Social, Economic, Political Research in Israel. We thank Eyal Ben-Ari, Efrat Ben-Ze`ev, Robert J. Brym, Edna Lomsky-Feder, Anat Rosenthal, Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, the Editor of Qualitative Sociology Javier Auyero, and three anonymous reviewers for constructive insights and suggestions on earlier drafts.
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Gazit, N., Maoz-Shai, Y. Studying-Up and Studying-Across: At-Home Research of Governmental Violence Organizations. Qual Sociol 33, 275–295 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-010-9156-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-010-9156-y