Experiences in Researching Conflict and Violence: Fieldwork Interrupted

Description

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. Copyright Page Acknowledgements Notes on the editors and contributors Foreword Introduction 1 Conducting unleashing interviews where control means life or death 2 Qualitative research in the shadow of violent conflict Vignette 1: The play I could not publish 3 Ambivalent reflections on violence and peacebuilding: Activist research in Croatia and the wider post-Yugoslav space 4 Intervention, autonomy and power in polarised societies Vignette 2: Packing for Kabul 5 Formidable fieldwork: Experiences of a lesbian researcher in post-conflict Northern Ireland 6 Insider-outsider reflections on terrorism research in the coastal region of Kenya Vignette 3: Thinking about race and gender in conflict research 7 Bodies of cyberwar: Violence and knowledge beyond corporeality 8 Fields of insecurity: Responding to flows of information Vignette 4: Visual ethnographic encounters and silence in post-conflict Banda Aceh 9 Writing the wrongs: Keeping diaries and reflective practice 10 Abetting atrocities? Reporting the perspectives of perpetrators in research on violence 11 Empathy as a critical methodological tool in peace research Vignette 5: The limits of a part-time political ethnographer Index