Ethics of Witnessing

Witnessing is a direct form of ethical and political engagement which should be regarded well beyond its original affiliation with legal evidence and testimonial accounts. The witness is an essential part of a process of transformation concerning truth claims advanced by meta-discourses.

The ethical redefinition of witnessing advanced by Jean-François Lyotard, Shoshana Felman, and Giorgio Agamben does not engage with witnessing as a political practice of the wilful self. Witnessing, especially undertaken by those who are trained to document, to archive, to preserve and to advance claims, binds individual autonomy to institutional structures, ideological edifices, state practices, and overall strategies of dominance and silencing.[1]

In legal and academic training, reflective procedures that address the pitfalls of uninformed or flat forms of witnessing are essential for maximizing its potential. Bearing witness is not a solution or a panacea to social problems or deep-seated political violence. It is, however, a very potent way of engagement with victims, perpetrators, bystanders, benefactors, concerning the re-configuration of moral and political truth claims. It has a unique capacity to question established the location, forms and dimensions of practices of societal silence and to reconceptualize what testimony stands for. In this case, the kind of testimony in question is not one of a direct victim, but that of a witness who survived.

In conclusion, retelling contemporary history through acts of bearing witness is an essential part of working with human suffering.

The No-Harm Principle

Ethical scrutiny of research in disaster and crisis situations has to abide by the same ethical principles as any research involving humans. However, due to political constraints, ethics review procedures need to be both timely and flexible. They also need to remain sufficiently stringent due to the potentially greater vulnerability of communities who are subjects of research and analysis.

Several approaches have recently been proposed either embedded in broader ethics guidelines or examining explicitly the specific requirements for what is traditionally called ‘field research.’ Some of these approaches include determining the potential risks of proposed research to the individuals and communities in question, functioning in a decentralised and coded manner through electronic and social media, and protected sharing of the results with the public at large.

Concerns such as enhanced vulnerability, harms and benefits to the disaster-stricken populations, politics of informed consent, community involvement, dual use of information are best addressed within a larger analytical context of what the research/researcher is looking for.