The ethics of security research. An ethics framework for contemporary security studies

Abstract

This paper draws attention to the ethical issues accompanying empirical research on security, offering a framework for ethical assessment. Speaking to the various subfields and schools of applied security studies broadly conceived, we classify the many ethical issues specific to empirical research on security, conflict and political violence into researcher-related problems, subject-related problems and resultrelated problems, we evaluate their importance and variations, and highlight potential mitigation pathways. This effort brings together an existing but fragmented literature and builds upon the authors’ own experiences in several subfields and schools of “hands-on” research on security and political violence.