Interview Methods in the Ethics of Political Resistance

This paper argues that empirical engagement with real-world political agents and in particular the use of interviews can help improve normative debates on the ethics of political resistance. What defines an act as ‘political resistance'? When is resistance morally justified? And what sorts of ethical constraint should it observe? It is widely accepted that empirical work has an important contribution to make in answering these questions, though there are relatively few instances of theorists conducting original empirical work of their own to address normative questions about resistance. This is consistent with the traditional ‘division of labour’ within the discipline of political theory, which focuses on the philosophical articulation of ideals and leaves the question of their realisation to social science. I argue in this paper that there is methodological benefit in empirical engagement by normative theorists to illuminate debates on resistance, which may involve drawing on historical and social science accounts of political institutions and activism, as well as biographies, media reports, court cases and the various texts and cultural materials produced by activists themselves. I focus especially on the use of interviews and reflect on why political theorists may wish to conduct such interviews themselves to engage directly with groups of interest and pose them the questions most pertinent to their interests as normative scholars. The use of interviews can mitigate against certain mistakes of abstraction and idealization that theorists are prone to in how they construct what I term the 'resistance dilemma' - that is, the imperative would-be resistors face to balance considerations of ethical appropriateness and practical efficacy in light of the various personal, institutional and strategic constraints on their conduct. In making this argument, I draw on several examples of interviews being used in the normative literature, including my own research on resistance to immigration detention that drew on interviews with ex-detainees. Focusing on Australia’s offshore detention system in the Pacific, this project aimed to understand the often extreme form resistance takes within the harsh context of detention and by agents who lack the secure political standing of citizens, including hunger strikes, lip-sewing, self-immolation and other self-harming protests. My discussion draws out some wider methodological lessons for the discipline of political theory, showing how in-depth engagement with an empirical context can support the development of theories, concepts and arguments that can be applied more broadly.