On Speaking, Remaining Silent and Being Heard: Framing Research, Positionality and Publics in the Jihadi Field

Abstract

In April 2016 we published an explorative article about the marriages of Dutch-speaking women in jihadi-held areas in Syria. In January 2017, this article became the focus of a huge media hype in the Netherlands and beyond, after a national newspaper presented our work as a case of how cyber-jihadists had been able to influence academic research. Within days, a series of parliamentary questions were asked, followed by an audit commissioned by the Board of the University of Amsterdam. The Board concluded that we had complied with all ethics requirements. In this multi-vocal contribution, we reflect on this affair by making extensive use of posts from our three-person WhatsApp group. We present the unfolding of the affair, how we were addressed, individually and collectively, and how we responded. While we argued against publicly investigating personal (including religious) backgrounds of researchers, the force of the security discourse rendered it nearly impossible to engage in a discussion about content. Not only did we need to engage with different publics, we were also addressed in different ways by the very same publics. Only by persistently addressing sub-publics and publishing about the affair, we were able to undo some of the damage.