Caught in the middle: Local researchers’ experience of mundane ethical harms in crisis settings

Most literature on research ethics originates from the perspectives of international researchers and, to a lesser extent, research subjects. This article goes beyond the prevailing understanding of ethical misconduct as a failure to secure informed consent, data breaches, coercion, or misuse of data. Instead, it seeks to develop the notion of ‘mundane ethical harms’ in conflict- and disaster-affected research, which are rooted in and shaped by the systemic power inequalities between researchers across global Northern and global Southern institutions. This article centres on mundane ethical harms from the perspective of local researchers. Drawing on interviews and workshops from the Balkans, Colombia, and Nepal, we show that local researchers are caught between formal ethical frameworks – often biomedical in origin or defined in the global North – and local understandings of, and demands for, ethical practice. Acknowledging that regional and contextual experiences and understanding of ethics matter and may differ, we highlight commonalities of ethical harms that were consistent across the three regions to inform more context-sensitive procedural ethics across global North–South research collaborations. We argue that mundane ethical harms highlight the limits of procedural ethics that may be unintentional but tend to obscure the harms experienced by those caught in the middle of an unequal research environment.