Series: Spaces of Peace, Security and Development
Series editors: John Heathershaw, University of Exeter, UK; Shahar Hameiri, University of Queensland, Australia; Jana Hönke, University of Bayreuth, Germany; and Sara Koopman, Kent State University, USA
Spaces of Peace, Security and Development provides an interdisciplinary home for spatially based studies from scholars from a range of backgrounds, but in particular those who engage with one or more of: Area Studies, International Relations, Human Geography and Political Anthropology.
The series publishes research that moves away from purely abstract debates about concepts and focuses instead on fieldwork-based studies of specific places and peoples. It shows how particular spatial histories and geographic configurations can foster or hinder peace, security and development. It also encourages work that takes account of the new spatialities of conflict and charts the transnational practices of peace, security and development.
Spaces of Peace, Security and Development
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This chapter focuses on the field research of John Heathershaw and Parviz Mullojonov. It illustrates the slippery slope that research in violent and closed contexts can be despite complying with the tight institutional ethics and risk assessment procedures of a UK university. It refers to the case of the detention of a Tajik researcher by Tajik security agencies, which discuss the limits of the procedural approach to research ethics and security currently employed by many universities in the Global North. The chapter looks into the dilemmas of researcher and research participant safety and trade-offs between access and impartiality. It argues that conscious vocational engagement with the field can help make better choices and fully overcome the interlinked dilemmas explored.
This chapter refers to Francesco Strazzari and Alessandra Russo’s reflections on recent developments in research ethics and risk assessment procedures. It draws on Russo and Strazzari’s research experiences and their involvement in projects addressing institutional developments. It argues that there are two main tendencies that negatively affect research in violent and closed contexts. The chapter analyzes the securitization of ethics and risks and their bureaucratization and judiciarization. It argues that the combined processes of bureaucratization and judiciarization do not necessarily make research safer, but that they do restrict or prevent forms of much needed independent knowledge production on intervention politics in violent and/or illiberal settings.
This chapter looks into the negotiations of identity and positionality that take place during fieldwork. It conveys gender, culture, and educational and professional backgrounds as factors that contribute to the closeness and distance between researcher and researched. It also discusses Maria-Louise Clausen’s reflections on the question of distance and closeness during fieldwork in Yemen’s capital Sana’a. The chapter talks about the balance of security concerns with being a white female researcher in a highly conservative Islamic context. It highlights Clausen’s experience that shows how binary categories may be more nuanced at the interplay of gender and nationality, such as the male–female gender bias that is expected to shape conservative society.
This chapter concentrates on Mateja Peter’s experiences of doing embedded research in Darfur, Sudan. It analyzes the distances between researcher and research participants that are created through physical access restrictions to the field, which may arise from the dangers of an active conflict. It also illustrates how practical considerations of accessing sites of conflict are entangled with ethical considerations for scholarly work and for interventions. The chapter highlights how a combination of practical and ethical constraints impacts what can be said about places that are studied. It also provides a narrative of Peter’s fieldwork in Darfur, laying out the context and practical considerations, as well as the ethical challenges of the research.
Using insights from those with first-hand experience of conducting research in areas of international intervention and conflict across the world, this book provides essential practical guidance, discussion of mistakes, key reflections and raises important questions for researchers and students embarking on fieldwork in violent and closed contexts. Chapters detail personal experiences from areas including the Congo, Sudan, Yemen, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Myanmar, inviting readers into their reflections on mistakes and hard-learned lessons. Divided into sections on issues of control and confusion, security and risk, distance and closeness and sex and sensitivity, the chapters look at how to negotiate complex grey areas and raise important questions that intervention researchers need to consider before, during and after their time on the ground.
Using insights from those with first-hand experience of conducting research in areas of international intervention and conflict across the world, this book provides essential practical guidance, discussion of mistakes, key reflections and raises important questions for researchers and students embarking on fieldwork in violent and closed contexts. Chapters detail personal experiences from areas including the Congo, Sudan, Yemen, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Myanmar, inviting readers into their reflections on mistakes and hard-learned lessons. Divided into sections on issues of control and confusion, security and risk, distance and closeness and sex and sensitivity, the chapters look at how to negotiate complex grey areas and raise important questions that intervention researchers need to consider before, during and after their time on the ground.
This chapter explores the perspectives on the research of wartime and intervention-related sexual violence, which has become an important subfield of conflict and intervention studies. It discusses the practicalities and ethics of research among sex workers as part of wider peacekeeping economies. It also reflects on Kathleen Jennings’ research among sex workers in Liberia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where she observes a worrying proliferation of research with “victim-survivors” of wartime sexual violence. The chapter emphasizes the researchers’ ethical obligation to interrogate themselves and their motives when deciding to interview members of vulnerable groups. It also critically examines the ways and limits of empathic research among vulnerable subjects and addresses practical questions of access to and compensation for research participants.
This chapter analyzes Ingunn Bjørkhaug’s fieldwork that took place among refugees in a camp in Uganda. It reflects on how the research participants’ agency to engage in strategic storytelling influenced the collection of data. It also reveals how Bjørkhaug dealt with the permanent exposure to stories of human suffering within the Ugandan refugee camp. The chapter explains the power of administrative categories and procedures, in which the criteria and interview process for refugee resettlement into third countries shaped the narratives of the research. It also stresses how the power of categorizations impacts directly on the research itself, on how the researcher is perceived, which data can be generated, and what possible conclusions can be drawn from the fieldwork material.
This chapter explains interviews as an illustrative example of the effects that a violent or illiberal context can have on how informants or interviewees are accessed. It points out that what is shared in an interview is influenced in particular ways by certain contexts and on meta-data in interviews about war and mass violence. The chapter focuses on Roland Kostić, who shows how interviewing intervention elites brings about its own series of challenges and dilemmas. It discusses Kostić’s interview-based research with international intervention elites in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It also shows how long-term research is crucial for opening the door to elite networks in a way that has allowed for behind-the-scene insights and information that are far beyond a formal expert interview situation.
This chapter reviews themes that constitute ten points that all academics planning fieldwork-based research on international intervention should consider. It illustrates how even the most prepared or experienced researchers have struggled with the idea of control over the fieldwork-based research process in a closed or violent context. It also links to a broader emergent debate on researcher failure, which suggests that the perceptions of “failure” in research are not the exception but the rule. The chapter contributes to discussions of the dilemmas of balancing restrictive ethics and risk assessments of cautious universities with real risks and meaningful research in areas of international intervention. It tackles the dynamics of international organizations and actors as an integral element of challenges and dilemmas of distance and closeness.
