Quick immersions and the study of Middle East politics

Introduction: the practice of quick immersion

Between 1990 and 2020, I conducted 36 immersive fieldwork trips in 14 Middle Eastern countries, but never for a year or more extended field stay. My immersions in Middle East politics range from one to nine months, and for the past 16 years, most have been compressed, by employment and personal circumstances, into short, summer immersions. Nine of the 14 countries I have visited received repeat visits (Turkey, Syria, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Egypt, and UAE), while five countries (Oman, Bahrain, Lebanon, Tunisia, and Morocco) were for single visits. Even during my two sabbaticals over the past 16 years (2013 and 2020) circumstances led to short stays (nine months divided between three different countries, via a MENA multi-country Fulbright grant in 2013; and six months reduced to two and a half months abroad, cut short by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020) (Pader, 2015; Schatz, 2009: 5).

Through these immersive fieldwork experiences, I have gained a comparative (Simmons and Smith, 2019: 341) “ethnographic sensibility” (Pader 2015; Schatz, 2009; McGranahan, 2018) that is often “doubly engaged” (Pacheco-Vega and Parizeau, 2018: 1), and only occasionally informed by what Burawoy calls “focused revisits” (Burawoy, 2003: 645). If ethnographic research produces a deep engagement with a host setting, and ideally consists of a year or more of immersion, what does a shorter, yet immersive field stay yield? A quick immersion is a fieldwork visit that is less than a year, whereby a researcher is displaced from home to learn about other's political experiences through participant observation. Quick immersions are premised on “extensive interpersonal interaction” and thus share a family resemblance with ethnography, but in a shortened time frame (Kapiszewski et al., 2015: 9). Quick immersion as a method does not presume repeat visits. It does assume that learning takes place once immersed—through every form of connection possible with a context. On a quick immersion, for example, going to the gym is never just going to the gym. Every contact with the host society provides an opportunity to learn and observe. A quick immersion is thus both fieldwork and “field being” (Perlman, 2020: 184–186). During a quick immersion, having prior language skills, previous fieldwork experience in the region, prior knowledge of the culture, can deepen the connection a scholar can establish with the context in a shortened time frame. Moreover, to say that important learning can happen even on a short field visit does not mean that one should expect to learn as much as those with the luxury or choice to stay longer. Instead, it is argued that those on a quick immersion know more about a context and their research topic than those with no immersive insights.

The method's primary value is to make fieldwork possible for a wider range of scholars who might otherwise forego immersive forms of research if an extended stay was required to conduct it. The method's key limitation is that time on the ground is potentially insufficient to enable a participant observer to transition ethnographically from “outsider” to “insider” or even a “pseudo-insider” (Kingston, 2018: 247); or to fully grasp “meaning making” in context (Wedeen, 2002: 713). In other words, scholars on a quick immersion might not obtain a deep enough embedding in the host society to detect “how and why agents on the scene act, think and feel the way that they do,” expected of ethnographic research (Aronoff and Kubik, 2013: 25). Nevertheless, being immersed even for a short visit provides insights that would be unattainable otherwise (Jourde, 2009: 201).

A quick immersion aims to provide scholars avenues for empathy, understanding, and direct observation of politics, even if the primary limitation of a short visit is that deep and lasting ties to the people in context are potentially unobtainable. As argued here, and acknowledged by other practitioners, fieldwork of any duration is potentially transformative (Brigden and Hallett, 2021: 1). Moreover, as a recent study of fieldwork in political science observes, “there is no minimum number of days or months that must be spent in the field” to qualify as “immersive” or “site intensive” (Kapiszewski et al., 2015: 252).

In spite of the wide discussion and disagreement in the social science literature on what constitutes “enough” time in the field to enable credible research, there is collective disparagement of quick visits. ¹ Short-term immersions have been described as “blitzkrieg ethnography” (Rist, 1980: 8–10), and “hit and run forays into the field” (Goodwin and Goodwin, 1996: 113). Not spending significant time immersed is equated with “academic tourism” (Abaza, 2011; Ghosn and Parksinson, 2019: 494). In other words, short-term immersions are stigmatized, by associations with “quick and dirty techniques to…report in a hurry” (Wolcott, 2008: 181), and criticized for merely producing “self-indulgent travelogues” (Abaza, 2011; Marks, 2020: 32). Short immersions are critiqued as yielding merely “ad hoc or casual observations” (Brodkin, 2017: 132), that are presumed to be “impressionistic” at best (Boswell and Corbett, 2015: 223). In a recent volume on fieldwork in political science, the editors summarize negative framings of short immersions by stating that, “enduring relationships and deep knowledge cannot be acquired through quick…visits” (Krause and Szekely, 2020: 9).

What is puzzling about the stigma attached to short, immersive fieldwork is that so many of us are compelled to engage in it. Those committed to fieldwork get to the field whenever they can, staying for as long as possible (or as long as they can stand) (Green, 2020), constrained by various factors of precarity and academic life. As Nielsen has argued, an extended field stay is a rarity and a privilege (Nielsen, 2020: 356). There is also acknowledgment within academe that as a scholarly career develops, trips to the field become shorter if they occur at all, and yet few scholars if any have formally explored what immersive fieldwork on a shorter time frame might look like or yield insight-wise (McGranahan, 2018: 4; Munck and Snyder, 2007). Neilson encourages those who lack access to longer field stays by stating, “get to the field for short, focused visits and make the most of that time” (Neilson, 2020: 356).

The following pages explore the research outcomes of three quick immersions in Middle East politics as a way to examine the value of a short yet immersive field visit. The case studies question the biases against scholars who lack the privilege to engage in longer stays and encourage scholars to practice immersive fieldwork even if time seems insufficient. A quick immersion in the UAE taught me about the lengths to which an authoritarian country will go to keep sensitive information inaccessible. I also learned valuable strategies about how to route around the barriers to do good participant observation anyway (Ahram and Goode, 2016). A quick immersion in Qatar taught me about the extreme fragility of Arabian Gulf food and water security as well as how access to excess energy resources can be invested in strategies to overcome food and water weaknesses. Lebanon, the quickest immersion of the three, enabled me to empathize with the victims of the Syrian civil war, while observing the impact that their displacement had on Lebanon's own security. Surprisingly, a short time on the ground in Lebanon taught me important lessons about democracy, fragile infrastructure, and the lingering effects of civil war. In the pages that follow I will use these findings to disrupt the notion that an extended field stay is the only way to conduct meaningful immersive research.

A quick immersion in UAE (2013)

In 2013 as a part of a multi-country Fulbright, I spent six months in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), based in Abu Dhabi, but visiting all seven emirates. I went to UAE with the intent of studying the country's food, water, and energy security strategies. My host, once I was on the ground, refused to give me the support I needed to implement my research plan—a simple letter of endorsement providing permission to conduct official interviews. I was clearly asking the right questions (sensitive ones) but my host blocked access to answers. After 6 months in the country, I learned something of value about just how fragile UAE's food, water, and energy security infrastructures are, but not in ways I had intended. I also learned creative adaptations to the way authoritarianism seeks to shape fieldwork outcomes (Driscoll, 2021).

The UAE's resource security strategy was riddled with puzzles. For example, why was Masdar City–the country's “carbon-free” experimental city of the future, located next to Abu Dhabi international airport, which was being promoted as a future, regional transport hub—increasing the country's carbon footprint exponentially? At Masdar City, self-driving electric cars were fancy distractions from the ecological imbalance brewing next door. ² Moreover, I learned that the country's water security strategy was limited to the bottled water contained in supermarkets, and given the role that red tides play in shutting down desalination plants in the Arabian Gulf, water supplies for the country were perpetually at risk. The country had a plan for building a strategic water reserve in the Liwa desert, but no plan about how to transport stored water to consumer and industrial users, more than 100 miles away; a logistical nightmare. Additionally, food subsidies made waste and overconsumption a national security challenge—both cost-wise, and in terms of unintended effects such as obesity, which place additional financial burdens on the state for rising health care costs.

The trip was not an utter failure. Insights were achieved including a better understanding of UAE's contradictory resource security strategies as well as unexpected insights into the effects of authoritarianism on research design and outcomes. The banning of scholars who speak too frankly about what they learn through participant observation about the country and the treatment I received while immersed—including frequent tracking of my phone, computer, and unofficial meetings—made the publication of these insights not worth the perceived risk. Moreover, not being able to interview decision-makers directly, or to quote “off the record” comments collected from advisers to these decision-makers, made my fieldwork results insightful, but not compelling enough to feel publishable, until now, as an outcome of a failed fieldwork experiment (Hsueh et al., 2014: 391–393; Zeitzoff, 2019: 507–512). More time on the ground in Abu Dhabi would have been unlikely to produce different outcomes and might have placed me at increased risk (Ulrichsen, 2013).

A quick immersion in Qatar (2013)

Comparing the fieldwork experience in UAE with a much shorter immersion in Qatar illustrates that time on the ground does not necessarily shape the quality of research outcomes. A two-month immersion in Qatar in 2013 as a Fulbright scholar and advisor to the Director of the Qatar National Food Security Program (QNFSP), provided me with an insider's perspective on the actual food security document being prepared for the Crown Prince of Qatar, who during my immersion, would become Emir through a bloodless power transition. I learned more in two months of immersion in Qatar participating in government policy-making, than triple the time on the ground in UAE.

Qatar's Crown Prince established QNFSP in 2008, in response to the 2007−2008 global food crisis (Johnson, 2010: 69–71). The goal of this program was to bring together an international team of experts, under the direction of Mr. Fahad Al-Attiya to develop a National Food Security Strategy for the country (Qatar National Food Security Program, 2013). The strategy was designed to enhance Qatar's capacity as: a laboratory for dry land agricultural development, a food hub, and a more comprehensive manufacturer of food products. The strategy aimed to make Qatar more food sovereign. Qatar's food security program leverages the country's ample energy resources in order to overcome security weaknesses water and food wise (Azzam and Harb, 2018).

A two-month immersion working directly for QNFSP, yielded evidence that Qatar although small, is a country with big intentions. The national food security strategy was designed to fix food quality, supply, and price problems in advance of the ‘22 World Cup. When I arrived in 2013, Qatar had one of the worst food infrastructures in the Gulf. Markets were plagued with supply shocks. Food rot led to waste, and the availability of fresh fruit and vegetables was surprisingly tenuous for a country with such a high gross domestic product (GDP) and such elevated expectations for itself. Domestic food production was spotty. Food imports, which equal 90% of food consumed, were often single-sourced from water-scarce countries. The port, constructed in the 1980's when the population was 10% of what it was in 2013, only had cold storage for 14% of all perishables that were imported. Tons of fish spoiled daily; lettuce arrived at stores wilted, and prices were higher than in neighboring countries.

Despite being 100% dependent on desalination for fresh water, Qatar's ample energy resources enable the country to work around its other resource weaknesses. The billions of dollars the country earns through liquid natural gas exports enable Qatar to buy its food security and to seek less than cost-efficient domestic production solutions. Fieldwork revealed that the small size of Qatar's food market makes the price of imports high. Potential chokeholds in food transport routes, and the fact that a handful of countries control the bulk of Qatar's trade in daily staples, create geo-strategic limitations to the country's food security. Moreover, the fact that container ships transport relatively small quantities to the country, and depart the Qatari port empty, also increases the costs of imports.

The Qatari National Food Security strategy contains plans to diversify supply chains, improve the Doha port and storage facilities, as well as plans for engaging in “dry lands” smart agriculture for highly perishable items such as lettuce, herbs, and tomatoes. One of the most interesting findings of this immersion was that Qatar's “natural” security strategy used Israel as a model. This was surprising given the lack of formal diplomatic relations between the two countries, and Israel's pariah status among most Arab states at the time.

When Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, and Egypt blockaded Qatar in 2017, Qatar's food security was temporarily disrupted—especially in the area of poultry and dairy imports from Saudi Arabia and UAE on which Qatar was heavily dependent. It only took a week to locate alternative supply routes, and less than a month to establish a domestic dairy to achieve national self-sufficiency, in part because of the strategic plans that were developed for the country through QNFSP. My quick immersion enabled me to better understand why the 2017 blockade failed, insights that would not have been possible without immersion, even a quick one. The quick immersion in Doha provided insights with which to produce two conference papers, a manuscript on the 2017 Gulf Crisis, and inspiration for a parallel study of food security strategies in Kuwait.

A quick immersion in Lebanon (2017)

With a small research grant and a month of summer leave (2017) I went to Lebanon with the intent of learning as much as possible, through direct observation, about the Syrian refugee crisis's impact on the country's security. Reading daily news reports and emerging scholarship about the influx of more than a million Syrian refugees into an already fragile state, raised puzzling questions about Lebanon's political survival.

My expectations for outcomes, given the short time on the ground and the fact that this was my first visit to Lebanon, were limited, conditioned by notions that ethnographic research “takes time” (Wolcott, 2008: 77). During a long immersion, one has the advantage of “soaking and poking,” or “just hanging out” (Fenno, 1990: 55). Ethnographic fieldwork presumes a scholar has time to “wait for information to present itself” within the boundaries of a particular context (Kapiszewski et al., 2015: 238). It takes considerable time to immerse oneself organically in “the events of everyday life” (Wedeen, 2015: xxi). Longer immersions allow a participant observer to be “neck deep” in “a research context” to observe “the meanings that the people under study attribute to their social and political reality” (Schatz, 2009: 5). Approaching the field without a viable conceptual framework for what I could reasonably expect to learn on such a short, yet immersive stay gave this project an added layer of precarity. The uncertainty, however, led to a reconceptualization of immersive fieldwork under less-than-ideal circumstances.

While in Lebanon, I would engage in participant observation to learn as much as I could about people being political in context—but without sufficient time on the ground to gain a level of expertise expected by ethnographers and area specialists (Kapiszewski et al., 2015: 410). ³ My limited intentions were to use a month of immersion, to become more empathetic as a global citizen, better informed as a scholar of Middle East politics, and more effective in the classroom, by equipping myself with narratives from local participants with which to document the spill-over effects of regional instability at the level of everyday life (Hertel et al., 2009: 305−309). Two advantages I had in conducting this research in a shortened time frame included proficiency in Arabic, and extensive fieldwork experience in other (Middle Eastern) contexts.

While this project began as an attempt to understand the impact of the Syrian refugee crisis on Lebanon's security, the end result was a more inclusive approach to fieldwork. I am not the first scholar to suggest that “in the mundane tasks not often specified in the research design,” the field worker can “deepen her understanding of the research context and gain local knowledge that can be vital to [a] larger project” (Fujii, 2015: 526). Lee Ann Fujii notes, however, that turning unstructured, and unanticipated “revelatory moments” into data is under-theorized (Fujii, 2015: 527). Building on Fujii's observation, I argue that “revelatory moments” both intended and unintended, demonstrate the value of immersion, even a quick one.

The opportunity to study citizen and refugee survival strategies through everyday encounters and to grasp better the issue of how the state was functioning, by living in and directly experiencing its infrastructure and services, or lack thereof, yielded lessons not obtainable at home. In Lebanon I would engage in conversations about the impact of the Syrian refugee crisis on local life, with anyone who would speak with me; visiting neighborhoods in East and West Beirut; and traveling around the country in search of insights beyond the capital, including day trips to Beqaah, Tripoli, Mount Lebanon, Sidon, and Mleeta. My immersion would be organic, since no one was facilitating meetings or providing institutional support for my research (Malejacq and Mukhopadhy, 2016: 1011). I hoped I would learn more than I did in Abu Dhabi but expected my insights would be less enlightening than what was learned through direct participation in the policy process in Qatar.

Given the role that time can play in legitimating the validity of observations made during immersive fieldwork, I was appropriately skeptical that my “quick immersion” in Lebanon would be worth the huge time investment required to get there. Six months of conceptual and administrative work for one month on the ground seemed like a poor return on investment. Moreover, the time required to get to the field included at least 10 layers of planning: (1) designing a short-term research project, (2) getting a grant, (3) getting clearance from my home institution to travel, (4) getting institution review board (IRB) approval for human subject research, (5) finding affordable flights, (6) renting an Airbnb, (7) doing research to identify people with whom I wanted to meet with while on the ground, including professors, journalists, aid workers and government officials (some of this groundwork was a part of the initial research proposal), (8) writing to those contacts, (9) spending hours worrying that the trip would be a complete failure, because no one I contacted wrote back, not boding well for a scholar who was on a short time frame and had few initial contacts for doing field research in Lebanon, and (10) making sure the young adult son I was leaving at home would be able to take care of himself, the house, and the dog.

Even before leaving for the field, this project faced significant challenges. For example, during the IRB process, I was told that I could not “systematically” interview Syrian refugees themselves, because they were an “at risk” population; and what they said might get them expelled from Lebanon (Thaler, 2019; Mourad and Masterson, 2019). Thus, my only contact with refugees themselves came from casual conversations in the practice of everyday life. My focus, on the security of Lebanon, and the decision to host so many refugees, was an adaptation to the IRB process. Conversations with public officials and aid organization employees, as well as everyday interactions with Lebanese citizens to listen to their views on the impact of Syrian refugees living in Lebanon, became my main focus in order to expedite IRB clearance, and most importantly, to keep potential participants in this study safe (Lareau, 2021).

Despite these obstacles, a quick immersion in Lebanon (1) resulted in the ability to road test and refine initial research questions, (2) presented opportunities to overcome competing layers of cognitive bias associated with Lebanon as a war zone, (3) enabled a nuanced understanding of the Syrian refugee crisis, (4) provided visual and participatory evidence on the legacy of civil war, (5) yielded new insights on the meaning of Middle East democracy, and (6) resulted in a new research question about state survival in Lebanon. These findings both expected and unexpected are explored in more detail below as evidence of the value of a quick immersion.

Immersion and the refugee crisis

Initial answers to my questions—why were so many Syrian refugees allowed into Lebanon and what effect did these refugees have on the country's security—were very straightforward and quickly grasped. After only a week on the ground I learned that Lebanon did not “accept” more than a million refugees; the refugees just came across the border and the government was unable to stop them. The country's proximity to Syria, and the porousness of the border, brought this human wave of refugees into Lebanon. According to a Lebanese archeologist interviewed for this project, what was different about the Syrians, however, was not that they came to Lebanon, but that they remained in Lebanon after the harvest was done and stayed for many years beyond their welcome (Chalcraft, 2009). Palpable tensions between Syrian “guests” and Lebanese hosts emerged throughout my fieldwork as evidence of this uneasy relationship.

For example, unlike in Jordan and Turkey, in Lebanon no formal camps to house Syrian refugees were allowed. The reason given by several people I interviewed was that the country wanted to keep Syrians aware that their stay in Lebanon was temporary. Past experiences with Palestinian refugees made the Lebanese wary of establishing any formal refugee camps for Syrians. Ikea designed “assemble yourself” houses for refugees and tried to send them to Lebanon to help with the crisis. The Lebanese government refused to allow any to be built. Policy makers wanted Syrian refugees to return home as soon as possible, so housing that appeared in any way to be “too permanent” was not allowed (Onishi, 2013; Rainey, 2015).

During my fieldwork I learned that Syrians find themselves repeatedly displaced within Lebanon, trying to find shelter, having exhausted their savings, and their welcome. Most are unable to find reliable work, with a salary large enough to meet even their most basic needs. Many are unregistered with the UN, thus unable to receive aid (Jamnyr, 2017). Seeing their children lose any opportunity for an education or a future creates cycles of intergenerational poverty and misery with no end in sight. Syrian children are frequently unable to continue their schooling in Lebanon because in some cases the language of instruction is in French or English; because many of them do not have official “refugee” status; and because many families do not have access to the necessary paperwork from their home country that would help with registration (Parkinson, 2014). Making it difficult if not impossible for Syrian children to get an education in Lebanon is another strategy used to encourage their stay in the country to be temporary. In these tough times, some women find themselves trafficked for prostitution (Sala, 2020) while children often end up working in the streets (Ajluni and Kawar, 2015: 29). Many Syrian families choose to return to their civil war-fractured country, revealing just how tough life in Lebanon is.

Throughout my immersion I saw evidence of child labor: refugees selling things on the street, from flowers to flip flops; performing low-skilled jobs like shining shoes, washing car windshields in traffic, or begging. Child labor problems and child marriage increased in Lebanon with the influx of Syrian refugees. In a meeting with a women's rights organization in Beirut, the staff explained that 24% of Syrian refugee girls are married before the age of 18. ⁴

Contrary to global press reports which stressed the humanitarian service Lebanon was providing for Syrian refugees, my fieldwork found evidence of a hostile environment between locals and guests. Several Lebanese citizens that I interviewed repeated the observation that aid organizations were channeling funds and opportunities to the displaced Syrians in Lebanon, rather than to local Lebanese who were often times mired in equal or worse forms of poverty. One in five residents in the country was a refugee; and given the difficulties of life in Lebanon, people looked for a scapegoat, blaming the Syrians (and the Palestinians) for the country's problems (UNDP, 2016). Resentment that Syrians had not yet returned home, and were draining resources needed for citizens, from electricity and water, to aid and medical assistance, erupted in abuse and violence toward the Syrian guests.

For example, while in Tripoli, I witnessed a heated altercation between a Lebanese army guard threatening to use his weapon on a Syrian street merchant outside the heavily guarded Citadel of Saladin. The guard hurled insults at the Syrian telling him to “go home” because seeing him “disgusted him,” claiming that the Syrian had no right to be in Lebanon. The Syrian replied, “give me a break--I’m just trying to survive.” In another example, on 2 July 2017 shortly before my arrival, a makeshift camp of an estimated 102 families burned to the ground, displacing more than 700 refugees (BBC, 2017). While the official story is that a “cooking fire” started the blaze, several people consulted for this study claimed it was arson, committed by local villagers in Baalbek who wanted the Syrians to go home. During my fieldwork, attacks on temporary camps in Arsal by Hizballah and the Lebanese Army, displaced thousands of refugees, many of whom were repatriated to Syria, under the pretext that ISIS and Nusra front were recruiting and training refugees from the camps (Collins, 2017). Two years later, Amnesty International reported that forced repatriations of Syrian refugees living in Lebanon are encouraged by acts of vigilante violence committed against them (Amnesty International, 2019).

Data collected on the security costs of hosting Syrian refugees included: increases in crime, disease, prostitution, child marriage, inflation, natural resource strain, and an exacerbation of sectarian tensions (Gabriel, 2019). In terms of the latter, I was told by both Christians and Shi’is that the Syrian refugees, who are predominantly Sunni, were allowed in by former Prime Minister Saʿad Hariri to tilt sectarian demographics in his favor. Identity shapes political responses to the refugee crisis. The hardships of hosting the Syrian refugees add to the challenges of everyday life in Lebanon. There is never enough food, electricity, water, opportunity, and access to everything needed to sustain life. Power and resources are channeled through personalized politics and sectarian communities. As one person I interviewed for this project stated: “in Lebanon there is no state capacity, only sects and interests and each side fights to protect its own interests.” ⁵ The refugee crisis has exasperated the strains of an already weak state. For example, since the onset of the refugee crisis, there has been a 27% increase in Tuberculosis, a 33% increase in waste-water pollution, and 29 suicide bombings and assassinations (2012–2015) (Cherri et al., 2016). Moreover, rents in Lebanon have increased by more than 44% (2012–2013), unemployment has doubled, and GDP growth has dropped from 8.03% in 2010 to 0.2% in 2018 (Gabriel, 2019: 1; World Bank, 2018).

Reading about the Syrian refugee crisis is heart-wrenching but seeing children with tears in their eyes trying to sell you something so they can eat is even more impactful. In an interview, a community volunteer observed: “Every Syrian has a tale of tragedy and risk that brought them to Lebanon.” ⁶ A quick immersion made these tragedies a part of my own political and social consciousness (Ghosn et al., 2019). I left the field with a deep sense of empathy for the suffering that takes place there and better informed about the many problems in need of solving, including corruption, economic meltdown, and fragile infrastructure.

Wartime architectural remains

One unexpected surprise of my quick immersion in Lebanon was that the remnants of the civil war (1975–1990) were still part of the urban landscape in Beirut. Architecture and memorials enabled participant observation of events that were more than three decades old. Below is a photo of The Yellow House (Figure 1), one of the most publicly accessible reminders of the costs of the civil war. This building served as a “forward control post and sniper base during the war” (Beit Beirut, 2020). Through the efforts of local activists, the building was purchased by the Municipality of Beirut and developed into a museum to commemorate the lives lost during the conflict. It is not the only building bearing scars of past communal violence. Pock marks from bullets and mortar fire remain on the surfaces of buildings throughout Lebanon. The Holiday Inn hotel in Beirut, for example, remains a charred windowless carcass of a building. It likewise served as a snipers’ bunker during the civil war and is “a tool that killed many people” (Stoughton, 2019).

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Figure 1.

The Yellow House, Beirut, Lebanon July 2017 (the author).

Buildings like this promote memory and enable a kind of participatory experience of past trauma. Moreover, they enable people, including visiting fieldworkers, to emotionally connect with the bloody history of the city (Volk, 2010). The Yellow House illustrates the degree to which the Lebanese have “lived through various forms of wartime and its aftermaths,” and thus, have “come to experience political violence as a type of normality” (Hermez, 2016: 13). They provide an unsettling reminder of how close war is.

Power outages and the legacy of civil war

Immersion allowed me to understand the ways in which war, politics, and corruption affect the distribution of public services in Lebanon. Direct participation in Lebanon's daily power outages is an unexpected lesson in the long-term implications of the civil war. In the early 1970's, prior to the civil war, Lebanon provided continuous power to its citizens. The civil war destroyed the country's power generation and distribution infrastructure, much of which has not been successfully rebuilt due to state financial troubles and corruption (Sewell, 2018). Lebanon is a relatively “developed” Middle Eastern country, known for its night clubs, liberal social values, and democratic politics; and yet even the fanciest apartment is vulnerable to power cuts without paying for private generator services.

The debilitating effects of daily power cuts required me to participate in the breakdown of public services like a local. Power cuts lasted for 6–8 hours at a time and occurred randomly—sometimes during the middle of a shower. When we asked our landlord to fix the problem, he explained that private generator services are very expensive, and thus, we would need to rely on the power provided by the government. He did provide us a camp stove so we could make tea or instant coffee, but we still resented (or perhaps were surprised) that this make-shift fix was the only solution. The frustration was a priceless lesson. It is no wonder Lebanese are prone to fill the streets to protest the government's shortcomings in providing public services—from garbage collection to electricity (Kraidy, 2016; Verdeil, 2018).

Graffiti and democracy? “say what you want, no one is listening!”

Immersive research in Lebanon taught me a new way to look at Middle Eastern democracy—through the lens of the country's vivid graffiti. When I asked a community activist about democracy in Lebanon, she responded, “Of course we have democracy in Lebanon. You can say whatever you want. No one is listening.” ⁷ In other Middle Eastern countries where I have conducted fieldwork—such as Jordan, Egypt, and the Arabian Gulf countries—saying whatever you want can be life-threatening. Although authoritarian states often police public and private discourse to limit oppositional speech in the public sphere, in Lebanon “you can say whatever you want” because “no one's listening.” This implies a degree of freedom of expression, perhaps fueled by the inability or disinterest of the state to listen. Rather than a sign of democratic stability, the freedom to speak in Lebanon is a sign of the state's institutional weakness.

The vibrant political graffiti spray-painted throughout the country is a sign of people speaking while no one is listening. According to Marwan Kraidy, graffiti in Beirut is a vestige of the civil war, where wall art was used to mark the territory by warlords vying to control districts of the city (Kraidy, 2013). Another study of Beirut's graffiti argues that this urban artform emerged in the aftermath of the civil war, as a part of the budding hip-hop culture in 1990's Lebanon (Holland, 2014). Lebanon's graffiti provides an affirmative answer to Saskia Sassen's question: “do cities have speech?” (Sassen, 2013: 209). Perhaps a more important question, however, would be: who is listening when the city speaks?

A form of democratic politics is highlighted in the competing messages of wall art in Lebanon. Graffiti “subverts state control and takes back the public space” (Ghanem et al., 2019) (Figure 2). Youth politics, socialism, and class consciousness, women's rights, and gay rights, critiques of government corruption, neoliberalism, sectarianism, and attempts to mobilize collective action for positive social change, via the “youth revolution” were some of the political messages articulated via graffiti collected during my fieldwork (Figure 3).

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Figure 2.

Beirut, Lebanon July 2017 (author photo).

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Figure 3.

Byblos, Lebanon July 2017 (author photo).

Urban sociologists have argued through “broken windows” theory—that urban graffiti promotes urban decay. Graffiti, like broken windows are indicators that, “no one cares about order here,” and are presumed triggers of vigilantism (Kelling and Wilson, 1982). In Lebanon, graffiti is also an indicator of democratic culture, a context of “say what you want, no one is listening” (Holland, 2014). The citizens of Lebanon are speaking loudly about their desires for change; the problem is that no one seems to be listening. Order is fragile, and voices are loud. Graffiti in Lebanon provides first-hand opportunities to participate in and observe public cultures for change and reasons for explosiveness. Graffiti is democracy in action, civic engagement in full rainbow color. Graffiti provide unexpected windows onto local politics that would have remained unseen and unheard without time on the ground.

For example, I had no idea, before my immersion in Lebanon, that lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) politics would be so progressive and so overtly a part of public discourse and civic engagement, in Byblos, and Beirut. In Lebanon, LGBT movements unite citizens across sectarian and class lines to promote democratic culture and human rights. In graffiti, we see “the city” as a “key space for the material practices of freedom” whereby urban narratives provide “key sites where new norms and identities are made” (Sassen, 2013: 210).

A study of Lebanon's graffiti reveals mobilizations for change including desires to redistribute wealth and opportunity, and advocacy for human rights and tolerance of sexual difference. Lebanon's pervasive political graffiti illustrate a vocal public sphere—policy changes like the replacement of the Prime Minister, and the appointment of six new women in the Cabinet (2020), suggest that someone is listening. Grass roots politics in the country include demands for economic reform and ending corruption; making politics more inclusive and less sectarian; and creating a state that functions (especially in light of the August port explosion that has left hundreds dead and thousands injured).

In its current state, however, the government remains dysfunctional and paralyzed by an entrenched status quo, a faltering economy, and the persistence of the Syrian refugee crisis. The currency crisis, COVID-19 crisis and port explosion only complicate the challenges ahead for Lebanon. As Mona Yacoubian testified before Congress in July 2021, Lebanon has become the region's newest humanitarian catastrophe (Yacoubian, 2021). My fieldwork in Lebanon allowed me to see and experience the faults in the system that made state survival surprising. The quick immersion revealed evidence that state survival in contexts of extreme strain may be enabled by the presence of a strong society. In future research I will explore more fully and comparatively the degree to which if society and social ties are strong, a weak state's survivability increases. ⁸

Competing explanations

This section considers three competing explanations that may have shaped fieldwork outcomes beyond the amount of time immersed: (1) Nature of the regime, (2) Fieldworker's relationship to the regime (3) Sensitivity of the research question. First, the level of repressiveness of the host country could shape research outcomes, with the more open the regime and society, the better the research outcomes. In Lebanon, the shortest time on the ground produced some of the most insightful evidence, but was this the result of the relative openness of society and semi-democratic nature of the regime? If so, we would expect the research outcomes in the highly repressive government and very closed society of UAE to be the least impressive, which they were. The moderately repressive, but more open regime in Qatar, led to more impressive results than in Abu Dhabi, because the Qatari regime is transparent about its need for help in building the country's security.

Second, in both the UAE and Qatar, I was hosted by a government organization, the Emirates Center for Strategic Studies in UAE, and the Qatar National Food Security Program in Doha. While in Lebanon, I was not hosted by anyone—I was there on a tourist visit and constructed my own immersion organically, which ironically, might have provided the opportunity to access a wider variety of conversations and observations on a shorter time frame. In other words, the fieldworker's positionality in relation to the research context might enable different networks on the ground.

Third, variations in the sensitivity of the research question across the cases might have shaped outcomes. Resource security or lack thereof in a patriarchal Gulf state sheds light on government competence to care for citizens, residents, and visitors, which makes questions about food, water, and energy policy sensitive. Answers that yield insights about unsustainable consumption practices, or vulnerabilities in water availability, for example, can reflect poorly on the regime. In Lebanon, the question about the impact of the Syrian refugee crisis on Lebanon's security was less sensitive, and thus led to more insightful results. Who could blame the Lebanese government for being flooded with more than a million Syrian refugees? Lebanon was a victim of the Syrian civil war and people on the ground were anxious to express their views on the topic. Those considering quick immersions should consider the nature of the regime where research will take place; their relationship to the regime; and the sensitivity of their research question, all of which may affect what they will learn while immersed. ⁹

Conclusion

Quick immersions yield layers of social scientific data and meaning not accessible without fieldwork. In UAE, Qatar, and Lebanon, regardless of the time immersed, the nature of the regime, my relationship to the state, and the sensitivity of my research question, opportunities to understand Middle East politics emerged. Moreover, social scientific insights with value beyond the region were yielded by opportunities for participant observation. The effects of authoritarianism on field research, how resource security strategies work, how to refine research questions and unlearn cognitive biases—resulted from short fieldwork stays. Moreover, even in the shortest immersion considered here, one month in Lebanon, fieldwork provided the chance to connect emotionally with Syrian refugees and to observe the consequences of hosting them, to observe the lingering effects of the Lebanese civil war, and to locate new research questions with which to extend the value of the visit. Based upon these results and informed by the lessons learned during an additional 33 quick immersions conducted over the last three decades this study encourages scholars to engage in opportunities for short yet immersive field visits, even when time seems insufficient, rather than foregoing fieldwork altogether. Moreover, multi-sited immersions allow for comparative observations even if time on the ground is divided by each case added. This study would not have been possible without a comparative ethnographic approach (Simmons and Smith, 2019: 355).

Quick immersions aim to make fieldwork more accessible, and to disrupt the power and privilege embedded in the notion that time on the ground is the most salient metric with which to predict the quality of fieldwork outcomes. At the same time, forms of privilege like job security, and numerous funding opportunities enabled the development of the method. For precarious scholars lacking any time and money for fieldwork, the suggestion to engage in a quick immersion may resonate with Marie Antoinette's alleged insensitivities when she suggested that her peasants “eat cake.” Quick immersion is likewise, not a method relevant to those who live in their research context, with unlimited opportunities for participant observation. The method is primarily aimed at scholars who intend to do fieldwork beyond “their own society” and likewise have the means to support immersion, but not for a long stay (Driscoll, 2021: xiii). Those who engage in quick immersions will find that short visits can lead to insights, data and explanations not accessible without fieldwork, and that even a short stay in the field can prove transformative.