I. Introduction

1In the field of forced migration studies, certain terminologies and common agenda items such as: decolonisation, localisation, equitable research collaborations and knowledge co-production have come to be widely used. Related efforts have been focused on addressing the long legacy of domination by Global North institutions over scholarship and resources in many fields including forced migration. To address this legacy of domination, several global, large scale funding schemes have been introduced aimed at providing more funding to local or regional organisations in humanitarian responses. The UK allocated over £1.5 billion in Overseas Development Institute (ODI) funding to conduct research in “developing” countries covering the period from 2016-2021. The Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) is a UK aid strategy and an umbrella under which this investment in research aims «to ensure UK science takes the lead in addressing the problems faced by developing countries, whilst developing our ability to deliver cutting-edge research» (UK GCRF, 2017:2). As part of this scheme, research partnerships have been promoted as one of the objectives and means for releasing funds and achieving its objectives. Under that pretext, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) published guidelines for equitable partnerships.

3Lebanon became the country hosting the largest percentage of refugees per capita (UNHCR, 2021). As the conflict evolved into a protracted one, education for refugee children became part of the humanitarian response. Since 2011 organisations like UNICEF and UNHCR have raised hundreds of millions of dollars, with the Lebanese government, to develop an education programme for Syrian children within the Lebanese public school system (RACE I and RACE II). Over $300 million USD have been spent on this programme. Yet, the challenges Syrian refugee children face in accessing formal education are humongous (Shuayb, 2021). They include difficulties in finding a place in public schools, discrimination practiced against Syrian children by teachers and students, reduced learning timetables and poor quality of teaching, particularly for those attending second shifts in public schools, restrictions on using school space and amenities, languages used for instruction and exams, and confused policy regarding residencies and other legal documentation required for school enrolment (Abu Moghli, 2020).

4Alongside these mass-funds dedicated to developing education systems, since the start of what has been dubbed the “Syrian Refugee Crisis”, we have witnessed a proliferation in the number of research projects and publications in the field of migration – with a particular focus on education (Shuayb/Crul, 2020). This proliferation has been encouraged by substantial financial support by governments in the Global North for research on the impact of the Syrian refugee crisis.

5As director of a research institute in Lebanon (and this paper’s 2nd author), both my email inbox and my office have been inundated with meeting requests from scholars from the Global North interested in conducting research or applying for funding to study the situation of Syrian refugees in Lebanon. While studying the impact (of) and response (to) a new refugee crisis is understandable, what has been taking place since 2011 in terms of encounters and research “partnerships” between us as two scholars from Lebanon and Palestine and “colleagues” from the Global North has prompted us to write this paper in the hope of encouraging reflection on the ethics and ethos of research collaborations between scholars form the Global North and those from global majority countries.

6This article comprises six main sections. We start by explaining our theoretical framework: political reflexivity, which is the lens used to critically engage with and reflect on our experiences. In the second section, we engage with the ideas of claimed and assigned positionalities, and how they shaped our research experiences and decisions. In the third section, we problematise the concept of partnerships by highlighting unequal power dynamics that stem from varied positionalities. The fourth section provides some examples of how and why these partnerships are unequal and exploitative. Our penultimate section is a deeply personal reflection on the relationship between the self and the other, where the other refers to those benefiting from colonial privilege. Finally, we conclude with precepts which, if considered and enacted, could make our partnerships more equitable and capable of adopting more humanised and humanising ethical frameworks.

II. Our theoretical framework: Political reflexivity

7In the field of Education in Emergencies (EiE), its vital to be able to interrogate how knowledge and power structures impact the field of education, including structure, content, and policies, as well as how research practices may undermine and harm communities we work with. To be able to conduct this interrogation, awareness of one’s positionality is needed. Positionality enables us to problematise claims of objective, singular, universal, and natural descriptions of the world, and to question issues related to hierarchy and power (Abu Moghli/Kadiwal, 2021). However, Abdelnour and Abu Moghli (2021), prompt us to problematise beyond mere critical positionality and urge us to adopt political reflexivity where researchers are encouraged to examine their positionality and privilege in relation to the geopolitics of the research setting, epistemic privilege of marginalised participants, and political implications of their work. They state that:

Practicing political reflexivity can help researchers situate their work along a decoloniality continuum, which includes complicity with the maintenance of violence, a hybridity approach that aims to understand and challenge the (colonial) underpinnings of violence by centering marginalized knowledge, and reparation or liberation, meaning redress and radical equality for marginalized peoples, ideas and histories (Ibid.:1).

8We ascertain that political reflexivity is needed when funding, planning and conducting EiE research, as EiE is embedded in a humanitarian discourse of neutrality contradicting the fact that EiE has itself evolved within an extremely political process, particularly as there has been a shift towards including refugees in the host country’s national educational system at the very time their integration into the whole society is often denied. Thus, researchers, particularly those foreign to the context they are studying, need the relevant knowledge, experience, and language to be aware of the political dimensions of the context they are working in. They need to have historical awareness of the context on which they aim to produce knowledge about.

9This article emphasises two aspects of positionality: the self-assigned and the imposed, which we discuss in the next section. It is imperative that researchers ask themselves why they are conducting this research in this particular context, and what gives them the right to do it. Researchers aware of their positionality are more able to unlearn the assumptions about the context they are working on/in and be open to relearning and acknowledging their biases. The process of acknowledging and problematising our positionality requires commitment and strong ethical standards that enable us to say no to working in particular contexts in which we might cause harm. It requires courage to acknowledge that knowledge does not flow in one direction. In addition to reflecting on our positionality, adopting political reflexivity in our analysis prompted us to think of our research findings beyond just their local context or the humanitarian education response but rather as encompassed in global, regional and national agendas and interests. Many of the refugee education policies have been developed to please the host country and curb the mobility of refugees to the Global North. Political reflexivity also induces us to take no concepts for granted or as unmitigated goods – including education. This also applies to reflecting critically and politically on the existing power dynamics within current networks, frameworks and strategies.

10Our political reflexivity has also meant that we are not approaching the field neutrally. We are not merely documenting and reporting evolving policies and practices; we have been part of the evolving scene (Sheridan, 2013; Bochner, 1997). As a result, we often struggle when reading academic papers or listening to academic presentations that fail to take a clear position or stand or express an opinion, whereas the consequences of existing policies and practices were quite damaging. We are aware that this has exposed us to accusations of being unobjective and/or overly emotional. However, our positionality and identities as we shall discuss later, form an integral part of how we approach our field of study. While academics are often asked and expected to be objective and disconnected from what they are studying as emotions are deemed to be unscientific, at the same time, policy makers often manipulate the use of emotions (especially fear) in public and policy discourse (Askins/Sawson, 2019; Boler/Davis, 2018). Refugee education, where humanitarian agencies dominate, is plagued with emotional appeals and policies, whether favoring a cause or arousing fear. Academics are often called on to inform this discourse, yet their academic writings are expected to remain emotionally detached and distant. That detachment ran up against our political consciousness. Thus, instead of denouncing and disclaiming our subjectivity, we saw it as an important condition for conducting critical and relevant research, recognising that we are part of our own field of enquiry (Bhaskar, 1989). Additionally, we could not overlook the colonial legacy embedded in the relational structures of humanitarian agencies or in the engineering of some of the policies in the field or the power dynamics in knowledge production and research collaborations. Adopting a recognitive justice view on education, led us to challenge the assumption that education is an unmitigated good. While the common discourse on education focuses on access, and more recently on certified and accredited access, educational outcomes and wider participation in the society, whether economically, socially, culturally or politically, was driving our analysis of existing policies and practices. One key factor helping us do this is largely reliant our “academic hats” and a funding which liberated us from being beholden to any humanitarian agency or INGO.

III. Positionally: claimed and assigned

11In reflecting on over a decade of our research work, as well as the partnerships we have been involved in, we identified two levels of positionalities. The first involves our own assumed positionalities as we perceive them, and the second an assigned positionality imposed by the other and, in this case, assigned by partners or collaborators from the Global North.

A. Our assumed positionality

12The authors’ collaboration began before 2011, when we worked on an education project aimed at reforming the Lebanese citizenship curriculum. That experience exposed us to the internal dynamics of the Lebanese Ministry of Education and Higher Education (MEHE). At the same time, as the director of a research institute (the second author), I have worked for over 10 years researching education inequalities in Lebanon. We have always identified ourselves as activists and public academics which, although more often intended as a critique than a compliment (Borroway, 2004), encouraged us to embrace and acknowledge the fact that we are engaged academics. We have been unabashedly active in co-establishing several collectives and have joined many other existing ones. We have also written in mainstream media platforms in both English and Arabic. For us our context is not merely “a field” for mining data but rather a lived experience of direct concern to us.

13We are at the same time aware of our privileged positionality as international academics, facilitating our ability to conduct and reflect on existing practices. Being educated in elite universities in the UK, we are aware of our educational and class privileges. This has been reflected in our contacts and access to international academic funding, as we are in a position to apply for grants with a more open scope on education able to test the existing conventional wisdom concerning refugee education. We were not restricted to UN and INGO consultancies which would limit our ownership of the data as well as our views on current policies and practices. Our UK academic training privileges, our access to funding and, on some occasions, increase our ease to penetrate elitist academic spaces such as conferences. On the other hand, our knowledge of the Arabic and day to day experience with the Lebanese context of policy formation and formal and informal education has facilitated our understanding and following daily evolutions in the humanitarian education response. While in our research we have sought to map out and connect with various groups on the ground, we are also aware that for many we both remain privileged researchers sitting in the ivory tower of academia with connections to the Global North. Simultaneously, we have tried to establish links with the various actors in Lebanon, in particular: community led initiatives, grass-roots organisations, refugee led organisations, teachers and principals as well as representatives of government institutions. This has helped us identify what we felt were the most urgent research questions for understanding complexities and needs and conducting research that in our view was the most relevant. At the same time, this positionality made us as individuals and our organisation a partner needed by other institutes in the Global North from whom our identity was suddenly changed into “the locals” a positionality we will discuss in the next section.

14Finally, being part of marginalised groups for reasons related to our gender, (dis)-abilities, geographical location, race, and sexual orientation, made us more aware and connected to groups struggling against discrimination, not only in Lebanon but in the region. Askinsa and Sawson (2019 :1) remind us how as scholars

informed by wider feminist, critical race and queer debates, we recognise the underlying connections across these situations, namely processes of power and dominance circulated through interconnected material and emotional hardships, interwoven across geographical scales, from the international and national to the intimate and everyday.

15With this positionality we could not but be part of the study and were thus unable to speak or write on it in detachment from it.

B. Assigned positionality: on becoming the “local”

16Sitting in my seventh-floor office at the Lebanese American University of Beirut in 2015 (second author), I am sipping my coffee, reflecting on my agenda, now packed with appointments with researchers from the Global North who are seemingly on a mission to devour as much information as possible about the “phenomenon” of Syrian refugees. This was a stark change in dynamics in comparison to what went on before the Syrian crisis, when we would reach out to scholars in the Global North, seeking collaboration where research funding is more available. Suddenly, there was an influx of scholars from the Global North. Scholars curious to understand how the crisis was unfolding or fishing for research ideas in their relevant field. Typically, their small exploratory budgets, offered either through their university or other funding agencies would allow them a week at best to identify potential research ideas, after which they returned to their institutions to draft their research proposals. The researchers came with some preset assumptions, conceptions, and research interests largely influenced and shaped by Global North theories and a discourse of the humanitarian intervention. However, while our opinion was sought by scholars and different actors, we found that our contribution was limited to the new positionality imposed on us, that is “the locals”. However, the understanding of local from a Global North perspective was quite conditional and often narrow; Locals appeared to be homogenous.

17As a reductionist approach to defining the local had been adopted, her/his role had quite clear limitations and boundaries. Our opinion was sought out in attempting to understand the situation on the ground yet in many instances the agenda of the research was already predetermined and defined even when in our opinion it did not address the main needs. In other instances, we would support the conceptualisation of the proposal but when it came to implementation, our role became restricted to fieldwork and data collection. Our role was to provide the contextual information needed for projects managed by Principal Investigators in the Global North, or at best data collectors and analysers. Knowledge production and theorisation was not an arena where our local experience was needed (Shuayb, 2022). Our contribution under this notion of “local” is anecdotal. At best we are seen as a case study, while the theoretical level was often left to scholars in the Global North. Another role we were expected to perform under this assigned positionality is to act as a token for diversity and inclusion of a representative from the Global South. Some of our collaborators were not even shy about it. One of our contributors blatantly asked us to assist at a presentation because the donor was there. Others would script the content of our contribution or apologise for forgetting to include a budget for time we’d contributed to writing up the findings, leaving the option of either working for free or withdrawing from that part of the study. It was not essential to have the local’s contribution at that stage. One contributor was forced by the promotional requirements of a Global North based institute to be the sole author of a paper whose highlights we were supposed to co-author. This colonial legacy in the institutional structure of academia in the Global North has reproduced a culture of unbalanced relationships among scholars from the Global North vis-à-vis scholars from global majority countries. This is evident to academics in both regions via the existing dominance of former scholars over publication as well as research grants (McNally/Rahim, 2020).

18This new positionality had a severe impact on how the policies, practices and research on education of refugees evolved over the following ten years (from 2011 on). When observing the terminologies and discourse in this field, we see the dominance of humanitarian rhetoric most evidently in the expansion of EiE. The field of EiE has been largely developed by humanitarian agencies in the Global North to provide education for refugees in the Global South (Brun/Shuayb, 2020). Despite the longstanding presence of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon for over seven decades, and the wealth of research documenting their conditions because of Lebanese policies and practices, both the humanitarian agencies and Lebanese government leading the response have overlooked their history/plight. Prior to the Syrian crisis, an Education Situation Analysis commissioned by UNICEF which I (second author) was commissioned to work on, revealed that Palestinian children were the most disadvantaged group in terms of access, quality and respect in Lebanon (UNICEF, 2013). The causes of a high dropout rate and low attainment rates amongst Palestinian refugees were overlooked and not considered when developing responses to the Syrian refugee crisis. Moreover, just as Palestinian refugees were excluded from any consultations concerning the educational system and policies in Lebanon, attempts to contextualise INEE minimum standards failed to include any refugees or NGOs from refugee communities (INEE, 2014).

19Despite our “local” knowledge in the context of refugees in Lebanon as a result of our research and involvement on the ground, we found that our research interests, questions and concerns to a large extent did not match the agendas or research discourse primarily developed and led by scholars in the Global North. That increasingly resulted in a research field dominated by scholars and networks in the Global North researching and writing about refugees in global majority countries, and further reproducing colonial relations.Yet what was most alarming about this new production of relations and knowledge is the a‑political approach adopted to understanding the complexities and the different agendas and interests dominated the education policies and provisions. In a context where the more powerful determined the terms of negotiations, refugees were at the greatest disadvantage.

20Another reflection on the unbalanced power dynamics can be framed within the concept and practice of reciprocity. While we will not go into detail on that aspect in this article, we believe that there is a need to acknowledge that academics from the Global South are not able to conduct the same visits or collaborations as scholars from the Global North. The “gatekeeping” imposed by border regulations (visa requirements) and the institutional structures of many higher education institutions (conditions of funding) in the Global North stand against scholars in the Global South (let alone the embedded and structural racism), often placing them in marginalised and precarious positions.

IV. Partnerships in Context

21The positionality of the local is determined mainly by the framing of partnerships which is the basis of relationships between scholars and institutions in the Global North and Global South. These partnerships exposing the local-international (expat) divide, reveal the extent to which the unequal power dynamics inherited from a long legacy of colonial practices are still present. In many of these partnerships we were again the locals in this study, tasked with doing the fieldwork. We were supposed to lead on data collection but also on any intervention. We were also expected to act as informants for our colleagues from the Global North who could not speak the language or spend adequate time in the country where the research was taking place. Yet they were the ones at the project’s steering wheel in defining the roles and funding’s distribution. In some cases, we were made to believe that we were co-leading the work, however, when we would look at the time allocated to writing and publishing, we were not equals. Even when we were in the process of data generation, colleagues from the Global North would be covered by travel insurance, but team members from the country (in this case Lebanon) would not because our safety did not pose a risk to their institution. When they had to fill out their travel risk assessments, some lives seemed to matter more than others on the project. The hierarchy of the funded projects also revealed that postdoctoral positions and fulltime posts were often allocated to scholars in the Global North while a day to two days on average were allocated to senior academics of the Global South. Full Time posts for staff in the Global South (when available) were administrative and coordination posts. Scholars from the Global South in the majority of cases were on short-term contracts and had no job security. Hence, complaining about this type of unequal treatment and discrimination would be impossible for them for fear of losing their jobs, not having their contracts renewed, or getting reputations as irksome or troublemakers. The first author faced such accusations.

22While travel costs for conferences and events were included for academics in the Global South, in one particular project, colleagues from the Global North often determined the context and, further, the nature of our participation. We were often asked to talk about “the field” as a case study. In one instance, our collaborators imposed a script which resulted in our pulling out of the conference. In another project, we suggested a reflective conference on research partnerships but as the majority of the academic team was from the Global North, their vision of what the conference would focus on was pre-selected.

23As for partnerships with the practitioners and communities included in the research, those projects’ outputs were often not translated into Arabic. In many of the events, interpretation was not made available and invitations to attend and participate and were not extended. One of the features common to many of these projects was the lack of transparency where we would hardly participate in the budget’s allocation or even see the project’s budget. In one case we were not even asked about our daily rates. One partner even failed to claim many of our expenses.

24In reacting to the inequality of those partnerships, we sought to lead our own research projects. One big limitation we had was the eligibility criteria of many of these funded research programmes, such as the GCRF and ESRC, which require that the leading institute be based in the Global North. This meant that we needed a partner in the Global North whom we could trust and who shared our values. This was possible during long-term and close collaborations versus quick “hit and run” visits. We developed our research applications and proposals in following those discussions. This approach proved to be quite successful as in a few cases we were able to co-lead the project from the conception to the budgeting, implementation and publication phases. It is important to highlight the several successful partnerships we have experienced, when the scholars from the Global North were aware of their positionalities, privileges and, most importantly, the power dynamics that can determine the contributions and outcomes, as well as responding to the needs and aspirations of both parties.

25While the GCRF fund encouraged the allocation of large funds to Global South countries, the UK government’s new ODI budget cuts meant that new grants can only allocate 30% of funding to Global South partners (ESRC, 2022). This presented some scholars in the Global North with a pretext for explaining the limited funding to be thenceforth allocated to researchers in the Global South. In the case of one grant call, we and our partner in the Global North wrote to the funder and questioned those regulations. For that case, involving a GCRF/ESRC grant, the limit on the allocation of funding was removed.

26What helped maintain these unequal collaborations was the promises made at the initial stage. As the Lebanese crisis and deflation of the Lebanese Lira worsened, any income in foreign currency was appreciated especially as even basics became unaffordable. However, despite all the good intentions, what was remarkable was the lack of interest in learning about the context and investing in that area beyond the interests and agendas specified in the project.

27Knowledge production represents an integral part of any research partnership. While most of these partnerships encouraged publications and co-authoring, the allocation of resources to cover the publishing time was not always covered in the project budget. In other instances, we were asked to write the case studies while the theory was left to the PIs. In one of the projects, partners would have access to only a few aspects of the data while access to the various components of the data necessary for answering the research question was only granted to the PI. Neither the time nor space to meet and discuss the findings was ever allocated. In one partnership, our script for presentation was already drafted; such a “predetermination” led to our withdrawal from the presentation. Our role as critical researchers appeared to be threatening rather than informative to those leading and benefiting from unequal research practices.

V. Implementation Dynamics

28The dynamics that dictate what education researchers in crisis and conflict contexts implement are framed by the idea of white saviourism and epistemic arrogance. White saviourism is reflected in the performances of do-gooders and pressumably conscientious academics and practitioners who conduct so-called consultation meetings at Western universities, INGOs and other global bodies, such as UN agencies, where what’s best for “struggling” communities in the South, their needs, the design of interventions and expected impact and project outputs are determined. Epistemic arrogance, which in our opinion leads to epistemic violence, is prominent through the academy as it privileges colonising epistemologies that embody assumptions about the “universal” researcher for whom these epistemologies are designed, and the relationship of this presumed universal researcher to the researched “other” as an object of knowledge (Al-Hardan, 2014; Mawere/Stam, 2019). The Western academy also assumes that the “other” to be researched suffers from the lack of ability to produce knowledge, hence there is a vacuum that needs to be filled through Western, assumedly universal theory, which reinforces an intellectual class hierarchy in the academy (hooks, 1991), and with it, a colonial and Eurocentric “ego-politics of knowledge” (Grosfoguel, 2011).

29By assuming “superior” epistemologies, and “universal” knowledge and skills, researchers and practitioners from the Global North can impart their “wisdom”, build capacities and empower the needy anywhere in the world, from Uganda to Lebanon and from Myanmar to Jordan. Their abundance of resources, ease of travel and apolitical approaches give them a colonial power that is hidden under a facade of good-will, while in reality, it’s at the heart of neo-imperialist and predatory practices (Novelli, 2019). The current political economy of research production in the 21st century marketised university sector (Sukarieh/Tannock, 2019) has only increased the entanglement of academic institutions and their research projects with humanitarian aid and international development, helping to reveal their academic-aid-development colonial ties. Development was itself born within and historically entangled with colonial conquest (Kothari, 2005, cited in Novelli, 2019) and the Post WWII Cold War era was similarly full of international development practices skewed by the prerogatives, politics and economic interests of Western nations in using “development assistance” [or humanitarianism] as a means of furthering Western hegemony (Novelli, 2019).

30While there exists an ongoing critique of the marriage between academic research and it’s a‑political approaches to humanitarian-development work, there are accepted, even encouraged and celebrated, calls amongst global institutions such as the World Bank and UNESCO to fund and technically support education research programmes in contexts of crisis and emergencies, with a vision to strengthening collaboration and coordination between humanitarian responses and development initiatives. UNESCO (2016:6) has requested that education actors operate with «strong links to humanitarian response, rather than alongside it». These calls are often understood within the context of “humanitarian-development coherence” (Nicolai et al., 2019). According to the World Bank (2016:32): «education reconstruction begins at the earliest stages of a crisis... [to be] undertaken concurrently with humanitarian relief». A number of academics, practitioners and institutions claim that closer collaboration between development and humanitarian actors allows for longer-term development needs, such as learning attainment and certification in the field of education (Hinds, 2015). We believe that this is a positive expression of the need to strengthen collaboration between humanitarian response and development work. Especially when based on evidence (shorthand for academic research). We also believe that there are a number of pitfalls with this framing and vision within the field of education, particularly when it comes to research and practice; these pitfalls are reflected in implementation dynamics.

31Firstly, Shuayb and Brun (2021) argue that education is inherently a field with a long-term perspective focusing on the future. In contrast, humanitarian response primarily aims at saving lives in the immediate and short-term, with a limited view to the future. That thus makes the connection between emergency response and education under the umbrella of Education in Emergencies an oxymoron, particularly when its approach is adopted in long term refugee situations. Encouraging education as a lifesaving mechanism that goes hand in hand with humanitarian responses is a fallacy and is being used to request added funding for EiE work that serves the agendas of global institutions and governments rather than affected communities. In cases of protracted and complex emergencies, for that matter mostly marginalised, Maslow comes before Bloom. Batshon and Shahzadeh (2020) argue that

at the time of crisis, access to education might be of least concern for refugees and other vulnerable communities […] access to food, healthcare, and cash assistance are crucial in order for education interventions to be considered or adopted.

32These interventions lack an understanding of the context and the actual needs of the communities. They are at best quick fixes and smoke screens covering institutional violations, structural discrimination, and inequalities impacting the most marginalised.

33Secondly, education is marketed by international leading actors in refugee contexts as the panacea for the problem of unemployment amongst young refugees. This proposition is naive as it assumes a one-dimensional solution to a deep-rooted problem that is connected to political, legal, social and community wide economic challenges. Syrian and Palestinian refugees in Lebanon face myriad legal and political challenges that hinder their access to dignified work, regardless of their qualifications. There is also an increasing anti-refugee sentiment in the country that is linked to the worsening economic and political situation (Abu Moghli, 2022). Campaigning for education programming, particularly online and informal education for refugees, is superficial and unrelated to the deeply-rooted dynamics of inequality in the society. What makes these solutions dangerous is that they are supported by so-called evidence through EiE research funded by institutions of the Global North packaged in the language of co-design and collaborative partnerships.

VI. Our cause, your career

36There are various motives and interests that shape an academic’s decision to engage in research that requires work with partners from/in the Global South. Reflecting on our experiences, we are able to position these motives on a spectrum between cause and career. Academics who are connected to the context where the research is taking place (also known as the “field”) may be driven by the urgency of the situation, the safety of their loved ones, and a deep commitment to their community’s aspirations to thrive. As researchers from the Global South, even when working as part of institutions in the Global North, we felt that we were working from the margins. The margins that were created by an imbalance of power and an assumption that our knowledge is confined, particular and “local”, unworthy of framing a theory, but rather only relevant for a case study. Over the past 12 years, we found ourselves – in the words of Said (2012): having to be on our guard against the hierarchy and needing to develop mechanisms to fight efforts to silence our critical engagement. We, just as Said (2012) stated, continued to struggle against the efforts to deflect us from being who we are, as engaged scholars, and become who they wanted us to be, detached and allegedly objective. In the process, we wanted to demystify and expose the «capriciousness and hypocrisy of a power whose authority depended absolutely on its ideological self-image as a moral agent, acting in good faith and with unimpeachable intentions» (Ibid., 2012:230).

37The process of reflection and struggle to maintain our integrity over the pressure to assimilate was an effort to maintain our connection to our marginality and fight from that positionality to be respected rather than overlooked and deemed of lesser value. It is our marginality that is a «central location for the production of a counter hegemonic discourse that is not just found in words but in (a) habitus of being and the way one lives» (hooks, 1992:341). We do not wish to lose our positionality of marginality and deep connection to the people and the geography (hooks, 1999). On the contrary, we do not wish to give up and surrender as part of moving into the centre, as in becoming part of a hegemonic knowledge production and discourse. As our work, our research is our cause, the margin is where we wished to stay, to cling to, because we felt that it nourished our capacity to resist the efforts of assimilation and careerism framed within narratives of neutrality and objectivity. Our work as researchers is clearly reflected by our positionality, guided by the assumption that we are part and parcel, rather than mythically separate, from our research (Al‑Hardan, 2014). Hence, we wished to cling to the margin as «It offers the possibility of radical perspectives from which to see and create, to imagine alternatives, new worlds» (hooks, 1999:341).

38The imaginations of these alternatives for a new, more equitable and fairer world for those struggling, and possibilities to thrive are understood and acted upon differently by colleagues who are separated from the context by that gulf of language, culture, geography (Sukarieh/Tannock, 2019).

39For colleagues at the other end of the spectrum, where their careers lie: there is no problem with advancing one’s career; however, it becomes (un)ethical when one’s career is the only goal, built through silencing, objectification, extractionism and exploitation. The alternatives they propose are linked to their discriminatory governments’ policies, and emerging funding platforms that are guided by security agendas. For example, the UK’s aid strategy, while claiming to further the sustainable development and welfare of developing countries, places the UK’s security agenda at the heart of its aims (UK Strategy for the Global Challenges Research Fund, 2017). Also, EU funded research projects in the Global South, in Lebanon in our case, have typically aimed to externalise the management of refugees, and diminish the EU’s obligations under International Refugee Law and the non-refoulement principle (Diab, 2022). We have always found it curious that our colleagues from the Global North are aware of these discriminatory policies, that defy and violate international law, yet they never challenge them through their work, research or proclaimed activism. On many occasions, when we attempted to introduce the idea of reversing the gaze: looking at their positionalities through their own story, questioning one’s location as an outsider to the context while an insider to hierarchies of academia, and understanding one’s relationships to the social, cultural and political conditions forming one’s privilege/marginalisation (Sweet et al., 2021), we “got push back”, blame and confused reactions. Along with four other colleagues, the first author created a decolonising collective to work in a department that focuses on education and international development in a prestigious UK university. The collective aimed at decolonising how development and education are taught and how research is designed and conducted. As part of the collective’s activities, regular workshops were conducted with fellow academics to discuss issues of decolonisation of research and teaching. A number of white academics expressed their dismay and discomfort with the idea of reversing the gaze; the concept was taken personally, and in a number of cases the collective conveners were accused of creating an unsafe space for white academics, which was never the case nor the intention. However, those activities and attempts at decolonising higher education in the UK reveal high levels of white fragility that in effect burden those academics who are facing discrimination, inequality, and injustices. What triggered that fragility and adverse reaction to the idea of reversing the gaze came from the perception that the collective conveners were calling for the end of some colleagues’ careers. While researchers from the context in the Global South are constrained to deal with positions of job insecurity and precarity, patently hindering their career advancement, the careers that are in their majority built on colonial privileges were more important than self-reflection and questioning that might lead to more equitable research and partnerships. This leaves us with the question, what can be done to formulate equitable, less exploitative partnerships? In the next section we aim to answer that question.

VII. Concluding remarks: A vision for equitable research partnerships and representative knowledge

40In this article, we reflected on our research partnership experience(s) between the Global North and Global South in the field of refugee education. In being part of these projects for over twelve years, we experienced policies and practices that have enabled us to identify the uphill challenges impeding equitable partnerships and methods of producing knowledge and skills that are contextualised and relevant to the people we work with. In this article, we have argued that many of the partnerships now existing go on to legitimise the work of academics and institutions in the Global North. Our experiences have allowed us to reflect on our positionalities as researchers working in Lebanon. For over 12 years, we have witnessed the influxes of researchers from the Global North who found an opportunity to advance their careers with the arrival of Syrian refugees and the deterioration of the economic and political situation in the country. We witnessed the “hit-and-run” approach to fieldwork and the “fishing-for-projects” visits by Western academics, while we were solicited as legitimisers of projects and as means of promoting the careers of scholars in the Global North. Considering these dynamics, we have used the political reflexivity theory as our conceptual framework in reflecting on and analysing research partnerships. Based on these reflections and critical engagement via personal experience, we have devised ideas for inclusive and epistemologically diverse and respectful models of partnerships, and we suggest a vision for thinking about equitable research partnerships for representative epistemologies and knowledge that lead to communities thriving and not just surviving.

41For research projects to be relevant and based on equitable partnerships, they need to build on the knowledge and expertise of the communities we work with/for. The ability of researchers to unlearn their positionalities as experts and be able to reverse their gaze before embarking on new research projects is imperative to ending hierarchies in knowledge and epistemologies, as well as to ending the local-international divide. Literature written in the language of the context and by authors from the region needs to be an essential part of writing the narrative while avoiding the assumption that there is a vacuum in knowledge production. Research needs to be built on an ongoing and active engagement with people and the context we work in. Conscientious researchers should go beyond the symptoms and address root causes of the problems. That will not happen unless researchers are able to go beyond pursuing only “empirically verifiable data” and acknowledge the importance of people’s experiences and stories. Those experiences are not mere perceptions or general anecdotes, but representations of a deep understanding of their everyday contexts (Kara, 2018; Abu Moghli, 2016).

42The publicly announced aim of large research funds such as the GCRF is to

promote the economic development and welfare of developing countries by funding international research. The three key themes are: Equitable access to sustainable development; Sustainable economies and societies; and Human rights, good governance and social justice (UKRI, 2022).

43In consideration of these aims, academics in the Global North apply and implement research projects in “developing countries – according to the GCRF” – armed with good-will and the desire to help. However, engaging in such projects without considering the political baggage that conditions their agenda and impact is risky and unethical. Conscientious academics from the Global North need to question the selection criteria for those funds that dictate who is in charge. The criteria states that the projects should be led by a UK based organisation, explaining the low number of projects led by organisations in the global South. While the GCRF fund highlights the importance of ethical partnerships and draws on the Global Code of Conduct for research in Resource-Poor-Settings, researchers from the Global North never question the prerequisite dynamics or lobby for their change. It is apparent that being given the privilege of being a Principal Investigator on a GCRF project is a challenge that is both arduous to accept and hard to refuse. Higher education institutions, and not only academics, have to form a serious political will to advance a discussion – followed by conduct – to decolonise higher education as a whole and research in particular, especially research funded by North based institutions that is being conducted in Global South contexts. This is vital to being able to navigate through and redress the unequal power dynamics and longstanding history of colonial practices in research (Nagar/Ali, 2003; Sukarieh/Tannock, 2019; McNally/Rahim, 2020; Barrett et al., 2011; Landau, 2012; Novelli, 2019).

44Positionality enables us to problematise claims of objective, singular, universal, and natural descriptions of the world, and to question issues related to hierarchy and power (Abu Moghli/Kadiwal, 2021). Being aware of our positionality as researchers is vital to investigating how knowledge hierarchies and power structures impact our work and its efficacy, including how our practices could harm the communities we work with/for. Researchers, particularly those foreign to the context, who do not have the relevant knowledge, experience, or language should shed their felt need for depoliticisation. They simply need better historical awareness of the contexts knowledge is to be produced about. It is imperative that researchers ask why they are conducting this research in this context, what gives them the right to do it, and for what purpose. Researchers who are aware of their positionality are able to unlearn the assumptions about the context they are working on and thus open up to relearning and acknowledging their biases. The process of acknowledging and problematising our positionality requires strong ethical standards that enable us to say no to working contexts in which we might cause harm. Acknowledging that knowledge does not flow in one direction takes courage.

45A large part of the challenge for equitable partnerships and collaborations between scholars in the Global North and south lies in challenging the structures, ethos and practices within higher education institutes in the Global North. Before these systems and structures of knowledge production and career building are deconstructed and constructed on just grounds, unequal partnerships are likely to be reproduced. While individual efforts by academics in the Global North are to be commended yet until these efforts are focused on structural and relational systems, collaborators from both the Global North and Global South seeking equitable collaborations are destined to wage a constant struggle against a system that promotes the domination of Global North academic institutions.