Experiences in Researching Conflict and Violence: Fieldwork Interrupted

✍ Scribed by Althea-Maria Rivas (editor); Brendan Ciarán Browne (editor)

• Publisher: Policy Press
• Year: 2018
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 265
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This international, edited collection brings together personal accounts from researchers working in and on conflict and explores the roles of emotion, violence, uncertainty, identity and positionality within the process of doing research, as well as the complexity of methodological choices. It highlights the researchers’ own subjectivity and presents a nuanced view of conflict research that goes beyond the ‘messiness’ inherent in the process of research in and on violence. It addresses the uncomfortable spaces of conflict research, the potential for violence of research itself and the need for deeper reflection on these issues. This powerful book opens up spaces for new conversations about the realities of conflict research. These critical self-reflections and honest accounts provide important insights for any scholar or practitioner working in similar environments.

✦ Table of Contents

EXPERIENCES IN RESEARCHING CONFLICT AND VIOLENCE
Contents
Acknowledgements
Notes on the editors and contributors
Editors
Contributors
Foreword
Introduction
The frame
The themes
The book
Section I. Violence
1. Conducting unleashing interviews where control means life or death
Introduction
Background
Ambivalence of relief and threat
Using the research interview to regain a sense of self
Desire and love in the unleashing interview
Conclusion
2. Qualitative research in the shadow of violent conflict
Introduction
Communicating through shame and rage
Trauma, transference and ethical entanglements
The non-overlapping contexts of victims and researchers
Recording the structure and texture of traumatic memory
Conclusion
Section II. Uncertainty
3. Ambivalent reflections on violence and peacebuilding: Activist research in Croatia and the wider post-Yugoslav space1
Introduction
Backstories
Ambivalences
Positionalities
Conclusion
4. Intervention, autonomy and power in polarised societies
Introduction
Disempowerment and research participant autonomy
Empowerment and researcher autonomy
Conclusion
Section III. Identity and power
5. Formidable fieldwork: Experiences of a lesbian researcher in post-conflict Northern Ireland
Introduction
Failures of mainstream methodologies
Depending on feminists
Fear and pressure of getting ‘close’ to LPO women
Staying far away
Conclusion
6. Insider-outsider reflections on terrorism research in the coastal region of Kenya
Introduction
Positionality and the research process
Researching youth radicalisation in the coastal region of Kenya
Spaces of solidarity
Being the outsider
Categorising and essentialing
Conclusion
Section IV. Technology and social media
7. Bodies of cyberwar: Violence and knowledge beyond corporeality
Introduction
Violence and cyberwar
Embodied experiences of cyberwar beyond corporeality
Embodiment and knowledge
8. Fields of insecurity: Responding to flows of information
Introduction
Social media, information and insecurity: making choices in the space between
Feeling insecurity in Nigeria and Congo-Brazzaville
Ebola in Nigeria, 2014
Post-electoral violence in Congo-Brazzaville
Insecurity, engagement and decision-making: anger and withdrawal as political emotions
Insecurity and anger: the precarious balance between research and activism
Conclusion
Section V. Methods
9. Writing the wrongs: Keeping diaries and reflective practice
Introduction
Research diaries
Recording emotion in conflict fieldwork
Writing emotion: practical examples of reflexivity in action
Conclusion
10. Abetting atrocities? Reporting the perspectives of perpetrators in research on violence
Introduction
Interacting with perpetrators
Aiding perpetrators and abetting atrocities
Direct assistance
Dissemination
Minimising risk: understanding FDLR motivation for participation in my fieldwork
Conclusion
11. Empathy as a critical methodological tool in peace research
Introduction
Contextualising research relations
Encountering violence in fieldwork
Emotions, ethics and representation
Conclusion
Index