Marnie Howlett (University of Oxford)
Even under ideal conditions, collecting empirical data is often challenging. Designing a rigorous empirical research project involves the navigation of numerous methodological and ethical considerations alongside practical constraints such as time, funding, and access to participants and field sites. These challenges intensify in conflict settings, where dangerous, volatile environments shape how and what data can be collected, inform the ways they are interpreted, and ultimately, complicate efforts to maintain research integrity. Scholars must consequently often adapt their methods in real time while upholding ethical standards, protecting participants and themselves, and ensuring data validity and reliability.
In this short piece, I illustrate how these challenges have emerged in practice during my experiences conducting nearly 200 online interviews and running six public opinion and conjoint survey experiments in Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion. Although the obstacles I encountered are shaped by my specific discipline (political science), topics, methods, timings, and field context, they reflect broader difficulties in studying conflict-affected societies, and offer guidance for producing ethical, transparent, and decolonial knowledge in such settings – both in Ukraine and elsewhere.
Flexibility and Adaptability
A key lesson I have learned from researching Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine is the importance of building flexibility into research design. While institutional ethics review boards often require rigid, pre-approved protocols before data collection, war is inherently unpredictable. Researchers in conflict settings must therefore be prepared to continuously adapt and, if necessary, change their approaches as conditions evolve.
I have encountered this repeatedly while collecting data in Ukraine since 2022. For instance, several of my interviews have been interrupted by air raid sirens or attacks on participants’ locations or my own; a few were paused until conditions stabilised, while others were stopped and rescheduled at different times or days. Participants have also withdrawn from my studies after initially agreeing or missed scheduled interviews due to security risks and last-minute schedule changes. Although I have not observed a quantifiable uptick in withdrawals, my data collection since the full-scale invasion has proven comparatively slower than my pre-2022 research because of these unpredictable events. Similarly, the fieldwork for one of my team’s survey experiments was slowed in autumn 2025 after attacks on Ukrainian power stations significantly disrupted electricity and internet access, which were essential for the work of our enumerators. These examples illustrate that war creates disruptions during data collection that are unavoidable even with thorough planning, making flexibility and adaptability essential to conducting safe and rigorous research.
Indeed, it must be recognised that excessive or frequent methodological adjustments can compromise data consistency and comparability. Real-time adaptation also requires careful ethical reflection, balancing the urgency of data collection against privacy concerns, data quality, and potential harms. Yet, in my experience, rigid adherence to predetermined plans can itself cause serious harm in volatile contexts, including endangering researchers and participants, weakening trust, and threatening access and rapport. Flexibility and adaptability are thus not just practical necessities, but core principles of ethical research in conflict settings, where both methods and ethical considerations must remain responsive to changing realities.
Ethics and Morality
Researching Russia’s war against Ukraine has also prompted me to reflect seriously on the ethics of knowledge production. As Valeria Lazarenko and I argue elsewhere, conflict raises fundamental questions about when, how, and whether scholars should conduct research, especially when complying with institutional ethics protocols may be difficult or impossible. While war demands timely analyses, it also creates significant ethical and methodological hurdles by heightening vulnerability, trauma, and power asymmetries, which are further complicated by researchers’ positionalities.
Since 2022, I have learned that ethical wartime research requires particular care to ensure it resonates with – and does not harm – the societies and individuals involved. This is not always straightforward in politically and emotionally charged contexts, like war and conflict, as topics and questions can carry unforeseen consequences, including misinterpretations or causing or even exacerbating harm. For example, when conducting a survey in July 2022, my team removed an entire oblast (region) from our sample after an enumerator was arrested (and later released) on suspicion of intelligence gathering. On two other occasions, my interviews had to shift from videocalls to asynchronous WhatsApp exchanges over several days because participants were under surveillance by Russian drones. While remote methods are often seen as safer alternatives, this latter example particularly show how these approaches can introduce new ethical challenges, particularly in contexts of digital surveillance. They can also pose technical difficulties for researchers in ensuring participants’ and their own security against risks such as tapped phone calls or intercepted emails. Much further deliberation is therefore needed to establish best and safest practices for conflict research.
But although debates on wartime research ethics remain underdeveloped, my experience since 2022 illustrates the need for careful reflection on both the moral and ethical responsibilities of individual researchers and the larger academic community to protect participants, themselves, and the societies we study. This involves thinking beyond ethics review boards and informed consent processes to realising how understandings of ethics may evolve throughout a research project. It further requires researchers to approach ethics as an ongoing and iterative practice that occurs before, during, and also after fieldwork rather than a static institutional procedure needed to begin data collection.
Responsibility and Reflexivity
Finally, collecting data amidst Russia’s war against Ukraine has underscored the importance of conducting research both responsibly and reflexively. Bohdana Kurylo and I contend that this entails treating reflexivity as a collective practice grounded in reciprocity and epistemic responsibility to challenge entrenched geopolitical and knowledge hierarchies. Reflexivity, in this sense, is not only about researcher positionality or introspection, but about how knowledge is co-produced, whose voices are amplified, and who benefits from the research.
Crucially, this approach requires recentring the perspectives, experiences, and priorities of affected communities, while interrogating who holds the authority to produce knowledge. In practice, this may involve adapting questions in response to participants’ concerns and changing conditions, being transparent about the limits and purposes of the research, and ensuring findings are accessible, especially to the populations included in our studies. Demonstrating such an approach, my team and I now pre-test survey questions face-to-face with Ukrainian colleagues to identify misinterpretations and emotional triggers, improving both ethics and data quality. This has led us to revise and also add questions in ways we had not previously anticipated. We also maintain regular contact with in-country stakeholders during data collection and follow their lead in addressing issues in real time. By doing so, we aim to engage participants as partners and co-contributors rather than as mere data sources. This strategy is also critical for challenging dominant epistemologies and centring historically marginalised perspectives, especially those of affected communities.
Still, treating reflexivity and responsibility as ongoing, collective commitments is not only essential for remaining attentive to local knowledge, but also for recognising how research can (re)produce epistemic, institutional, and geopolitical inequalities, even unintentionally. Ukraine’s resistance and resilience amidst Russia’s aggression has particularly highlighted the need for responsible and reflexive research that centres previously excluded perspectives and challenges the dominance of Western- and Russian-centric analyses of the former Soviet region. Whilst important in the context of the Russia-Ukraine war, it is equally central to producing ethical and equitable knowledge in all contexts marked by uncertainty and violence.
Concluding Thoughts
In highlighting some of the challenges I faced and lessons I learned while studying Ukraine since Russia’s 2022 invasion, this short piece has demonstrated that research is rarely straightforward. It becomes even more complex in conflict settings marked by risk, uncertainty, and rapid change. Despite our best efforts, we cannot foresee all of the challenges we may encounter during data collection.
For empirical social scientists, this has important implications. It demands not only careful research design, but flexibility and adaptability during data collection. Researchers must remain attentive to their positionalities, collectively engage in reflexivity, and prioritise ethical commitments over data collection goals. Producing high-quality research in conflict settings also requires scholars to take seriously their responsibility to challenge epistemic hierarchies while centring the experiences of affected communities. Only by doing so can we contribute to knowledge production that is robust, ethical, and socially responsible.
About the author
Marnie Howlett is a Departmental Lecturer in Russian and East European Politics at the University of Oxford in the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies and the Department of Politics and International Relations. Her research lies at the nexus of geopolitics, cartography, borders, and nationalism within the former Soviet Union, particularly Ukraine. Marnie’s research interests also include qualitative methodologies, visual and digital methods, and research ethics. She holds a PhD in International Relations from the London School of Economics, and a MA in Political Studies and a BA (High Honours) from the University of Saskatchewan.