Access to in-country research sites in the Middle East has become increasingly difficult over the past few years, as post-Arab Spring authoritarianism and coercive governance tactics deepen. Foreign researchers must now navigate a space in which their work is viewed through a securitised lens, and they face arrest and/or deportation if the state deems them too critical; their local contacts, and local researchers, face much greater risks. Simultaneously, the discipline of Political Science has increasingly been moving towards practices of replicability and research transparency, with many journals now requiring full data sets in order to publish.

This raises important questions for research methods for political scientists in authoritarian states, where pressure to produce replicable results conflicts with the ethical need to protect interviewee identities. Further, in order to maintain access and ensure safety conducting fieldwork in the Middle East, researchers are under pressure to shift to topics that are more politically amenable to the authoritarian state. Drawing from experiences conducting over 150 in-depth interviews with citizens of GCC states from across the political spectrum, Dr Jessie Moritz discusses the realities of field research in a post-Arab Spring Middle East and implications for qualitative Political Science research design and methodology.

Biography 
Dr Jessie Moritz was appointed to CAIS as a Lecturer in July 2018. She joined CAIS following the completion of a postdoctoral research fellowship with the Transregional Institute, Princeton University, where she focused on post-2014 economic reform programs in the GCC and lectured on political and economic development of the Middle East.  She received her PhD from the ANU in March 2017.  Her dissertation, “Slick Operators: Revising Rentier State Theory for the Modern Arab States of the Gulf,” received the 2017 Dissertation Award from the Association for Gulf and Peninsula Studies. Jessie has also held a number of visiting fellow positions in the Gulf and UK. Her current research focuses on the political economy of oil in the Arabian Peninsula, with a particular focus on state-society relations and diversification strategies.