When I first heard the news that an Italian doctoral student had gone missing in Cairo, during the fifth anniversary of the uprising against Hosni Mubarak in 2016, I had a bad hunch. Doctoral students usually don’t go missing, do they? My hunch was proven right, though, and Giulio Regeni’s corpse, showing signs of terrible torture, was found a few days later in a ditch on the outskirts of Egypt’s capital.

Unfortunately there is nothing extraordinary about stories of violence and death. What changes, at most, is the level of the horror inflicted upon the victims, especially when these are innocent civilians. But the idea that a promising doctoral student, registered at Girton College, Cambridge, found death in such a barbaric way, left a mark on me.

My dismay grew as troubling details emerged: 28-year-old Regeni was conducting research on Egyptian trade unions and labour rights, and it appeared that he was targeted by Egyptian intelligence services precisely because of his research. It was Mohammed Abdullah, the local head of the street vendors’ union and Regeni’s guide during his field work in Cairo, who had alerted Egyptian authorities to his work on labour movements, a sensitive topic in post-Mubarak Egypt. Clearly, Regeni was suspected of espionage and was being monitored by Egypt’s National Security Agency, when he disappeared on January 25^th 2016.[1]

The reasons for Abdullah’s betrayal turned out to be economic. Abdullah had helped Regeni by offering advice and introducing him to potential interviewees, but then he started asking for money. A video that was released earlier this year shows Regeni speaking to Abdullah, who secretly recorded the conversation. When Abdullah asks Regeni to give him grant money in order to pay for medical treatments, the Italian doctoral student replies that he cannot give him grant money for personal reasons. Instead, he offers to apply for a so-called scholar activist grant from a British nonprofit group.[2] This, apparently, was enough to sign his own death warrant.

What struck me in this story, other than the terrible details of Regeni’s assassination, was the fact that we as researchers run risks when doing field research, in particular if this involves sensible data and human participants. It reminded me of an oral history interview that I conducted a few years ago, as part of my postdoctoral fellowship on the legacy of Italian second-wave feminism. I had written to a feminist association in Milan, which at the time was raising funds, through crowdfunding, for the creation of a women’s centre in the heart of the city. One of the promoters, a renowned feminist activist lawyer of the second-wave generation, enthusiastically invited me to come and visit the future women’s centre, where work was in progress. At the end of the visit-interview, she gently suggested that I could, perhaps, get hold of money from my university to support the cause? Slightly embarrassed I tried to explain, like Regeni, that grant money can only be used for research costs and expenses, not crowdfunding. I too proposed, vaguely and unconvinced, to apply for some other grant, making it clear that this nevertheless involved a formal procedure and specific requirements.

Given the general difficulty of securing internal funds, at least in my experience, I did not pursue my offer, and in the end I think I just made a personal donation. Of course the invitation of my stylish, feminist lawyer friend to help finance a worthy project is miles away from Abdullah’s greedy claims on Regeni’s grant money, and I can’t even come close to thinking that I may have run the risk of torture by local mafia (although I do find the idea of a feminist criminal gang intriguing). Still, it made me wonder about interviewees’ reasons to participate in an interview, how these might possibly influence their account, their behaviour towards us as interviewers, their (un)availability to liaise with other potential interviewees.

These are relevant issues for researchers working on delicate and controversial topics (war, genocide, social movements, human rights), who at some point of their project will find themselves engaging with human participants. Naturally, university ethics committees do their best to limit risks by assessing potential conflicts of interest and dangerous situations, prior to the field research period. But often this implies no more than ticking boxes on a checklist and getting it signed by a supervisor. After that, it’s down to you.

Oral history manuals also don’t speak much of personal risks; the usual advise is to do a check on interviewees in advance, meet up in public locations, etc. They don’t explain, though, how to avoid being tortured to death by secret services…

Of course the Regeni assassination is complex and strongly determined by (geo)political factors, and I in no way am saying that oral historians are risking their lives. But it might be worth thinking about some of the hazards of oral history interviewing. Perhaps ethical committees should be made more involved in field research after approval, and universities could reconsider their guidelines on protecting students and researchers? In the least, they should be prepared to take some level of responsibility, especially when students put their lives at risk for the benefit of research.

A timely opportunity to discuss the challenges of oral history will be the upcoming joint conference of the Oral History Society and the Oral History Network of Ireland, Dangerous Oral Histories: risks, responsibilities and rewards, held at Queen’s University Belfast on 28 and 29 June 2018. Details and a CFP can be found at this link.

Andrea Hajek, Independent Scholar

[1] Although the case is still open and unlikely to ever be solved, the most credible thesis is that Regeni fell victim of a conflict between two competing security agencies in Egypt, and that his death was a message to foreign activists and governments “to stop playing with Egypt’s security”.  Declan Walsh, ‘The strange twists in the case of Giulio Regeni’s disappearance in Cairo’, New York Times, 15 August 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/15/magazine/giulio-regeni-italian-graduate-student-tortured-murdered-egypt.html.

[2] Stephanie Kirchgaessner, ‘A year on, Giulio Regeni death casts shadow over Italy-Egypt relations’, The Guardian, 25 January 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jan/25/giulio-regeni-death-italy-egypt-libya-cambridge-student.