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
This chapter explores how risk assessments at universities in the Global North revolve around the Northern researcher and their associates and participants. It looks into the wider and longer-term consequences of researcher behaviour in the field that are less considered or understood. It also discusses Jesse Driscoll’s fieldwork in the context of research in illiberal states. By employing a game-theoretical model that draws on extensive fieldwork experiences in Central Asia and the south Caucasus, the chapter shows the stakes involved in the game for two types of players: a bureaucrat in the security sector of the state where the research is taking place and a researcher who wants to publish critical aspects of the politics of the state in question. It highlights the potential dangers of academic work that interprets the role of the researcher in an oppressive context, as well as that of a social and political activist.
This chapter highlights context-specific safety protocols and procedures of research in a highly violent context. It mentions the experience of Boukary Sangaré and Jaimie Bleck on conducting research in Central and Northern Mali across the lines of North–South collaboration. It discusses strategies of fieldwork in areas of armed conflict where the state of Mali has almost disappeared. The chapter recommends closed collaborations between foreign and local researchers to show that safety in high-risk contexts is dependent on up-to-date information from local networks that is continuously fed into the security assessment. It also cautions that risk assessments always have to consider the long-term effects of research as violent situations can be highly volatile, making what was safe yesterday potentially dangerous tomorrow.
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 deals with Daniela Lai’s argument on the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which explains how some forms of distance between researcher and researched are created by academic research and seen as a form of intervention. It focuses on the consequences of research-as-intervention and intervention by academia that shape the very field it sets out to research. It also discusses how the over-research of certain areas of Bosnian society are experienced due to academic biases that lead to distancing. The chapter looks into another form of distancing that concerns communities, groups, and topics that are sidelined by intervention research for not being the focus of the military and political interventions. It also addresses why there are people, places, and problems that are absent and distant from fieldwork-based research in most over-researched post-conflict societies.
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 detailed insights from those with first-hand experience of conducting research in areas of international intervention and conflict, this handbook provides essential practical guidance for researchers and students embarking on fieldwork in violent, repressive and closed contexts.
Contributors detail their own 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, they 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 covers experiences of doing fieldwork. It talks about a gender-balanced group of field researchers at different stages of their careers that work in different countries around the world. It also analyzes how the field researchers did their fieldwork in areas of international intervention into violent conflict and/or illiberal states. The chapter provides an overview of the frank and critical accounts of the field researchers who have taken the courage to publicly reflect upon some of their mistakes and to name the dilemmas of fieldwork in violent and closed contexts. It draws attention to the personal reflections of the field researchers’ practices, performances, and positionalities in the field, including their contributions to address questions currently discussed in related literatures.
This chapter focuses on Katarina Kušić’s research on conflict-affected communities in Myanmar. It analyzes travel restrictions for foreigners that are put in place by the host country of the research. It also emphasizes how the help of local associates overcome the physical distance created by a controlling state and provide advantages in terms of cultural closeness between researchers and researched. The chapter discusses the collaborative interpretivist research on conflict as it unfolded in the project “Raising Silent Voices: Harnessing Local Conflict Knowledge for Communities’ Protection from Violence in Myanmar,” which addresses the growing difficulties of access in conflict and post-conflict areas. It also looks into the involvement of a Myanmar team in the project that tackles a particular paradox in the “local turn” of intervention scholarship.
This chapter covers the case of Casey McNeill’s research on the US Africa Command (AFRICOM). It describes the mismatches that often exist between the intervention’s official narrative of its purpose and the actual priorities and practices encountered in interviews at the headquarters. It also emphasizes how intervention research based on published material such as the intervening organization’s self-descriptions, documents, and evaluations can be misguiding in understanding how staff do their day-to-day work. The chapter offers useful strategies on how to overcome challenges in interviews with the help of interpretivist methodologies. It also explains how interpretivist methodology influenced McNeill’s interview research with personnel at the AFRICOM.
This chapter looks into Markus Göransson’s reports from Tajikistan. It demonstrates how the mere use of the word “interview” could scare cautious non-elite research participants in violent and/or illiberal contexts away. It recounts Göransson’s field research while being equipped with literature-based knowledge on how to conduct oral history interviews and secure the informed consent of interlocutors. The chapter explains how Göransson gathered data ad hoc, in informal, private, and often group settings, requiring flexibility and creativity on his behalf and a willingness to relinquish control of the process to some extent. It points out the deep affinities between the states’ disciplining techniques and scientific research method.
