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Article History

Received: 19 May 2025

Accepted: 29 January 2026

First Online: 14 February 2026

Declarations

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: This study is based on the MIGNEX project survey data ( ). MIGNEX activities covered data collection and/or analysis in more than a dozen countries within and outside Europe. The primary institutional anchoring of research ethics and research integrity is with the Research Executive Agency of the European Commission. Since the project coordinator (Peace Research Institute of Oslo) is located in Norway, additional guidance and procedures for project-wide ethics and integrity issues are anchored with Norwegian institutions, notably the Norwegian Center for Research Data (NSD) and the Norwegian National Research Ethics Committees. The three main reference documents for research ethics and research integrity that were followed are: 1. Ethics in social science and humanities (European Commission DG RTD 2018). 2. The European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity (ALLEA 2017). 3. Guidelines for research ethics in the social sciences, humanities, law and theology (Norwegian National Research Ethics Committees 2016). The survey data collection involved research with human participants. The MIGNEX Grant Agreement (EU Horizon 2020) contains specific commitments relating to informed consent and vulnerable individuals. These are all outlined and available here: .

: Informed consent was obtained and documented for the totality of the survey participants. Requirements for informed consent were covered aligned with the relevant legislation (European Parliament 2016), data protection principles (Norwegian Centre for Research Data 2018) and ethics guidelines (Norwegian National Research Ethics Committees 2016) and reflected the specific context at hand. Within MIGNEX, a separate consent form and an accompanying information sheet are prepared for the following categories of participants. A detailed description of the survey data collection and the standards can be found here: . The informed consent sheet is available in this document in page 174. How informed consent was recorded is available in pages 89 to 90.

: The authors declare no competing interests.