Reflecting on a security and risk management course in humanitarian contexts: ‘there is never only one story’

In this reflection blog, Agostino Luisetti, a Master’s student in Political Science at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, recounts a three-day course on Safety and Security for Researchers in Humanitarian Contexts, led by the Safety & Security Research Initiative, at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, and what it taught him about doing humanitarian and academic research.

I came to the Universidad de los Andes for a course on security and risk management for fieldwork, and what struck me first was the room itself. Around the table sat people that had worked across many parts of the world: humanitarian practitioners and academics, security experts, anthropologists, human rights lawyers, and Indigenous activists. I am a Master’s student in Political Science at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, still early in my own fieldwork, and I had the rare luck of learning alongside people who already had so much lived experience.

I had come expecting do’s and don’ts. Yet what Dr. Rodrigo Mena, who teaches the course, offered us instead, through the Safety and Security Research Initiative (SSRi), was a space of reflection, one that interrogated some of the things we usually take for granted.

Much of what is written for researchers completing ‘fieldwork’ concentrates on getting there safely. The encounter itself, and what comes after we return, receive far less attention, and closing that gap was part of what the course set out to do. Official protocols from NGOs or institutions get us to ‘the field’, but they say little about the moment we sit face to face with someone who has survived something terrible. How do I interview a person carrying trauma without inflicting further harm? How do I know that what they tell me is “true”? As we discussed in the course, memory is not a filing cabinet. Under distress, people recall events out of sequence, anchored to a smell or a sound rather than a clean timeline; pressed to produce a linear story, they may construct one, and the tidy account I write down may be the least reliable of all. As we were reminded, there is never only one story, and in areas affected by conflict or disaster, where rumour spreads and distrust runs high, that notion should make us more cautious about the accounts we gather.

What I also learnt is that when working in conflict or disaster-stricken areas, nothing we touch is neutral. As feminist scholarship has long argued, no knowledge is ever produced from nowhere: our perspective is always situated, partial and positioned. Not the conflicts and disasters we study, and not the data we collect. We arrive under pressure from our institutions to “obtain data,” and this economy of information can itself become a source of harm, especially to communities that are already vulnerable. We tend to frame our work as a “research problem”, but to name something a problem is already to treat the people involved as something to be solved. Everyone wants to be ethical; the harder question, and the one the course kept returning to, is how we operationalise that intention without causing harm.

During our work, the term “ethical” was brought down to earth: not a box to tick before departure, but a constant iterative and reflexive practice of not creating risk or harm for others, and of accepting that even transparency is never fully within our reach. What we were reminded throughout the three days was that to enter another person’s world as a researcher is a privilege, not a right, and the ethical and security dilemmas that come with it are simply the price of that privilege.

Dr. Mena also taught us that saying “no”, for example by choosing not to go somewhere when we judge the conditions unsafe, is itself a privilege many of our interlocutors do not have. This was particularly interesting to me because of my background in journalism, where we are often quick to claim the authority of “having been there”. Yet what does it really mean to say I went, and how much should it license me to say afterwards?

As I reflect on these days, one particular sentence has stuck with me, bouncing around in my head: “it is not what we do, but what we are perceived to be doing”. My relationship, as a foreigner working in a given context only temporarily, with any person in any place can put my local colleagues at risk long after I have flown home. This is because risk is transversal: it touches drivers, translators, hosts, families. Practices around “localisation” can themselves become a form of risk transfer, where a large organisation, through its work, delegates the danger to a local partner. As international researchers we can always leave; yet what do we leave behind?

Several other things stayed with me from these three, intense days. We rehearsed with our bodies: we practised where to sit during transport and where to leave a bag if riding on a bus, so we could move quickly in an emergency, and we learnt the difference between safety and security, the first being protection from an involuntary accident, the second protection from a deliberate attack. We spoke about mental health, about aggression in its different forms, and about whether, in a high risk situation, we freeze, fight or flee. We also learnt to treat our digital footprint as part of the risk picture: working with sensitive information across borders, every click is traceable, so we were urged to think before connecting and before clicking.

We closed with a final exercise that I won’t give away, both because it deserves to be met without warning and because that is part of its lesson. What I can say is that the only way through it was to communicate, to stay present, attentive, human, caring. When it ended, my colleagues applauded, and after days spent on such sensitive subjects I felt something I had not expected: joy, and a real sense of community. It became my metaphor for the whole course, the moment a blindfold lifts and the room fills with light. Though I came in as the least experienced person in the room, I left certain that this was the work I wanted to do.

In a world driven by extraction and disregard for the other, too often rewarded by those in power, this course reminded me that there are still many who want to do humanitarian and academic work diligently and with care. The security precautions we take are the least we can offer. In exchange, we are trusted with the greatest gift of all: other people’s stories and experiences. It is up to us to put ourselves in the best position to do no harm, to ourselves and, most importantly, to those who make our work possible.

About the author

Agostino Luisetti is a Master’s student in Political Science at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, with a background in journalism. His research focuses on international NGOs construct and negotiate their authority across different governance contexts, with a particular interest in the North/South dynamics of the global aid sector.