You might wonder why someone would be interested in the processes involved in cross-national research. One reason might be that the actual processes involved in undertaking international research reveal important issues of labour relations. Who does the work of gathering data; under what conditions of work; and with what recompense or recognition? Some aspects of the labour relations involved are local. Most of them, however, are like other domains of commerce and supply chains; they are significantly shaped by the major geopolitical powers’ global structuring of labour and resource markets and the consequences of their actions and inaction.

The front-line researchers described in Facilitating Researchers in Insecure Zones: Towards a More Equitable Knowledge Production operate in what are termed ‘insecure zones’. They are casualised, short-term, sometimes through piece-work, and not properly recognised as precarious in more substantive ways than the short-term money earned. More important than money, are the risks of working in these environments. There are, for example, potential physical dangers or psychological pressures resulting from working with traumatised individuals and communities. In such places, neutral academic research is either unknown or assumed to be some kind of covert operation by subjects. Researchers are commonly suspected of being ‘spies’ for outside interests of corporations or major political powers.

Twenty-nine authors contribute to this edited volume, telling stories of their work as researchers and the limits of being recognised for their labour. They have found work using their educated skills, and in trying to build careers, they are passionate in doing work that contributes to communities and their families. Their work is not, however, bland or safe academic research. It presents the additional burden of being conducted within researchers’ home societies, where ongoing inequality, urban–rural differences and conflicts deracinate communities. These authors are not complaining but sharing their experiences and revealing the perceptions and experiences of people they have interviewed in the course of their work. Their narratives cover periods from five years to several decades. The uncomplaining perspective of the authors is evidenced by the self-deprecating labels they use to describe their work, such as ‘facilitating researcher’.

The book frames this research work within the Global North–South, and structures social and economic relations that echo Standing’s (Reference Standing2011) description of increasingly precarious work even in Western countries and among professional workers. Standing’s book The Precariat, subtitled, ‘The new dangerous class’, is focused on potential disruptive effects of social instability from lost jobs, limited income and underacknowledged identities. Only later did Standing write about this growing cohort of destabilised workers’ transformative potential. The implications of precarity, a thoroughly written-about understanding of contemporary labour, thus cast a shadow over these international patterns of insecure research work (Vijayta et al Reference Vijayta, Segarra and Śliwa2026). Not only are the interviewees of these ‘facilitating researchers’ marginalised, but both participants and facilitating researchers also live through dangerous and often violent situations. As these facilitating researchers tell their stories in this collection, an account emerges of employment marginalisation repeated in their own working experience, not only those they speak to.

Condensed into eight chapters, the volume recounts a labour market with three main components: (1) the people who call the shots – the ‘contracting researchers’. (2) Those, such as the authors in this book, doing interviews and front-line ethnographic work – the ‘facilitating researchers’. Their work includes finding and engaging participants, organising times and sessions, writing up findings and reports from these events. (3) Those researched – individuals and groups talked to, met with, and situations observed – ‘the researched’. The editors’ explain:

Different members of the book’s writing team perform different roles and functions, so the book can be seen as juggling the positionalities of these academics and researchers. This ambiguity might easily be missed by readers. The global implications of how inequitable labour relations have been produced and are maintained simply disappear within mainstream research discourses. Positive examples of collaboration are shown, but the underlying labour disparities between countries in the Global North and the Global South – the latter being the ‘place of work’ for these researchers – feel eloquently expressed yet mute against the prevailing global neo-colonisation in an era of formal decolonisation.

The primary term in the title, ‘facilitating researchers’, can be described in parallel ways to labour markets which have little risk of death, injury and opprobrium for the workers or those who are researched. The accounts given delicately avoid saying too loudly what might be offensive or accusatory to funders or governments on either side of the north–south divide. It might be argued that this is a strategically anodyne stance of capable people with limited options. It demonstrates a necessity for self-positioning to bring to the surface inequities in this field of work while not disrupting the achievement of the research involvement and results achieved to date.

The incongruity of the north–south imbalance of funding to reward the work and the inadequate acknowledgement of the work that produces research outputs shouts loudest. This is the classic worker-funder/controller dynamic. We work between Australia, Pakistan and Aotearoa New Zealand and draw on elements of our experiences in these countries here to make further comment on this important book. Below we briefly reflect on data points from Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand and Pakistan.

Consider authorship in Australia, for instance. The National Health and Medical Research Council’s guidelines demonstrate a contrasting condition of research labour:

Data collection does not automatically entitle those involved in research as merely data collectors to be authors on outputs. This may fit west–west cross-national research settings, but the supposed universality of such principles is ill-fitted for the research work described in this volume. In fact, once the putative uniformity of Western societies’ own research labour markets is unpicked (Aboriginal/Māori vs Western/White; plus early-career researchers’ precarity), it is seen to have significant limits here too. Elaborating the culturally embedded mismatch further goes beyond the scope of this review. Dunia et al.’s book shows the need for change. The ambiguous NHMRC category of ‘ghost author’ raises some possibilities:

In addition to Australian practice, the text also brings other experiences and perspectives from Pakistan and Aotearoa New Zealand into the conversation. Our first author’s fieldwork in Pashtun communities was neither a Western-funded project nor work as a ‘facilitating researcher’. Yet there are contextual parallels to several regions Dunia et al. write about, such as DR Congo, Sierra Leone, central and western African nations, and India’s eastern state of Jharkhand. Each place has constant military and para-military conflicts, community tensions, regional wars and guerrilla warfare, some new, some old, where strongmen are attempting to settle old scores. Hovering over all of this, mostly unacknowledged, are global conflicts between the United States, Russia and other major economic powers. People approached as part of on-the-ground research are immersed in generational cultural trauma inflicted by global powers using local communities as pawns for minerals, energy and other raw material contests. Research, too, is caught in this vice of global contest.

All three of us are familiar with Aotearoa New Zealand’s colonial history and the slowly emerging bicultural society under the long-ignored Treaty of Waitangi. Among the changes is a growing body of jurisprudence affecting all areas of society. These national changes provide a case study of the three-fold labour relationship Dunia et al. use to frame their descriptions of precarious research employment and career opportunities. The consciousness Tuawhai Smith’s (Reference Smith1999) kaupapa Māori Indigenous methodology evoked has caused controversies and inspired change in many areas. Protocols and ethics about how research work is conducted have dramatically changed. Although not always fully observed, the official and unofficial expectations for research projects and research participation are clear: that Indigenous and marginal peoples’ research must be done by, with and for Māori communities.

Further developments in the Aotearoa New Zealand research landscape have made Māori leadership or co-leadership expected, even if not always honoured. This goes far beyond just facilitating researcher roles to other phases of projects’ analysis phases, advisory input and authorship recognition in publications. Senior levels of Māori participation and oversight today need to be explicit in university research and PhD proposals and in applications for government research funding. This is not distanced contracting but an embedded model of research challenging the traditional top/bottom or Global North/South patterns.

Thus, in terms of the brave volume that Dunia et al have assembled, Facilitating Researchers is a concept mediating the international research work relationship, capturing features of both exploitation and enabling. The authors’ personal strength and willingness are impressive. The book’s valorisation of the phenomenon of facilitating researchers is a critique of epistemic hierarchy in insecure contexts such as the cultural minorities in Pakistan and elsewhere (Connell Reference Connell2007). The national variations chronicled in the book reflect common structuring or research in politicised and militarised regions and communities. They expose the politics of giving and not giving credit to people deeply involved in creating value with their research on the front line. Collaborators from the Global North are important and necessary, as this volume attests. However, the need going forward is not softening the hard face of the extractive labour process but shifting to sovereign ownership and control of local knowledge that stops expropriating the fruits of their labour by the Global North researcher sector.

Our review has been infused with contrasting research labour processes in the three countries in which we do our academic work, namely Australia, Pakistan and Aotearoa New Zealand. The steady, if still not yet equitable, changes being institutionalised in Aotearoa New Zealand research labour contrast to the urgent peril of Pakistan’s research labour, which more closely resembles the case studies in Dunia et al’s book. From repeated discussion between us, the words of our first author are clear:

The strength of this book lies in its detailed documentation of the labour exchange between funded academics, mostly in the Global North, outsourcing the dangerous and complex work mostly to the Global South. This binary is not an innocuous contrast but is the reason such facilitative research is needed at all. The book attests to the limited career opportunities and ability to be acknowledged. However, the analysis is restricted by being limited to the facilitating researchers themselves. Dunia et al’s text treads lightly in the larger context of labour relations of what is being facilitated, such as the outsourcing of Western labour costs, time and risk. The book’s title effectively reveals this work is a halfway stage (facilitating and mediating?) towards developing better models of local and Indigenous research and ownership of local knowledge (Williams et al Reference Williams, Umangay and Brant2020). It is valuable documentation in itself, and like similar labour relations outside the research context, it describes an intermediate solution to inadequate national recognition, along with outsider support to establish ownership of the labour and outputs of Global South knowledge production.