When Doing Ethnography with Armed Movements: Participation, Rapport, Resistance – And Ethics

In this text I discuss ethical challenges concerning ethnographic fieldworks and participant observation in resistance movements with armed branches. By so doing, my point of departure will be my own ethnographic fieldwork with the Kurdish movement in Turkey’s Southeast that I conducted between May 2015 and January 2016. More precisely, I will discuss a particular instance when I was asked to participate in an unofficial weapon production workshop with militant youth activists in an autonomous Kurdish neighborhood.