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ABSTRACT
In this article, I focus upon the notion of suspicion as a lens to better understand the distinct challenges that local researchers from the Global South encounter in ethnographic fieldwork when studying peace and peacebuilding in the context of active armed conflict within their countries. Over the last decade, scholars have increasingly deployed ethnographic approaches to better understand peacebuilding, devoting careful attention to local actors and processes that shape the practices and outcomes of international peacebuilding efforts in post-conflict environments in the Global South. While this local turn in Peace Research has led towards a renewed awareness of the challenges in ethnographic fieldwork in situations of war, armed conflict and political violence, most of the conversations in the emergent Ethnographic Peace Research (EPR) literature focus upon and draw from the experiences of researchers from the Global North who conduct ethnographic research in the Global South. Begging to be considered in the EPR literature are the experiences of local researchers from the Global South who are immersed in ethnographic research in their countries, and what these experiences tell us about the differential politics in ethnographic research.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
About the author
Nerve Valerio Macaspac is a PhD candidate in Geography. His research examines the phenomenon of community-led peace zones (popularly understood as demilitarized geographic areas) in active armed conflict to better understand the sociality, temporality and spatiality of peace beyond its dominant definition as the absence of violence.
Notes
1 See, for instance, Millar, Ethnographic Approach to Peacebuilding; Moore, Peacebuilding Practices in Two Bosnian Towns; and Autesserre, Peaceland.
2 For a discussion of the local turn in Peace Research, see Autesserre, “Going Micro”; Mac Ginty, “Indigenous Peace-Making Versus the Liberal Peace”; Mac Ginty, International Peacebuilding and Local Resistance; and Richmond and Mitchell, Hybrid Forms of Peace.
3 Sluka, “Introduction.”
4 Howell, Surviving Fieldwork.
5 Pettersson and Wallensteen, “Armed Conflicts, 1946–2014.”
6 Ochs, Security and Suspicion, 81.
7 Bigo and Guittet, “Northern Island as Metaphor.”
8 Pettigrew, “Living Between the Maoists.”
9 Pettigrew, Shneiderman, and Harper, “Relationships, Complicity and Representation.”
10 Stavenhagen, “Special Rapporteur on Indigenous People.”
11 Pettigrew, Shneiderman, and Harper, “Relationships, Complicity and Representation,” 23.
12 Pettigrew, “Living Between the Maoists.”
13 Rechlin et al., “Lal Salam and Hario Ban.”
14 Hillyard, Suspect Community.
15 Chua, “Bloodshed and the Coercive Communal Peace.”
16 Howell, Surviving Fieldwork.
17 Borneman, “Fieldwork Experience, Collaboration, and Interlocution,” 238.
18 Sluka, “Reflections on Managing Danger in Fieldwork.”
19 Ibid., 240.
20 Boas, “Scientists as Spies.”
21 Borneman, “Fieldwork Experience, Collaboration, and Interlocution.”
22 Peterson, “Sheer Foolishness.”
23 Oglesby, “Myrna Mack,” 256.
24 See, for instance, Human Rights Watch, “Philippines”: Amnesty International, “Philippines: Above the Law”; Alston, “Promotion and Protection of All Human Rights.”
25 Tolentino and Raymundo, Kontra-Gahum.
26 Saligumba, “Two UP Profs Assail Surveillance.”
27 Pettigrew, Shneiderman, and Harper, “Relationships, Complicity and Representation.”
28 See, for instance, Millar, An Ethnographic Approach to Peacebuilding, 129; Autesserre, Peaceland, 287.
29 Pettigrew, Shneiderman, and Harper, “Relationships, Complicity and Representation,” 23.
30 Ibid., 21.
31 Oglesby, “Myrna Mack,” 255.
32 Moore, “Encounter and Suspicion in Tanzania,” 154.
33 Abufarha, Making of a Human Bomb, 116.
34 Oglesby, “Myrna Mack,” 255.
35 Kaomea, “Dilemmas of an Indigenous Academic”; see also Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies; Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”
36 Bell, Blythe, and Sengers, “Making by Making Strange,” 151.
37 Guyer, “Quickening of the Unknown,” 287.
38 Alvesson, “Culture Perspective on Organizations.”
39 Prasad, Crafting Qualitative Research, 87.
40 Ybema and Kamsteeg, “Making the Familiar Strange.”
41 See, for instance, Heryanto, “Can There Be Southeast Asians in Southeast Asian Studies?”
42 de Jong, Kamsteeg, and Ybema, “Ethnographic Strategies for Making the Familiar Strange,” 178.
43 Kaomea, “Dilemmas of an Indigenous Academic,” 68.
44 Email correspondence, July 2014.
45 See, for instance, Low and Merry, “Engaged Anthropology.”
46 See, for instance, Sanford and Angel-Ajani, Engaged Observer; Speed, “Human Rights and Anthropology”; Hale, “Activist Research vs. Cultural Critique”; and Scheper-Hughes, “The Primacy of the Ethical.”
47 Castillo, “Emotional, Political, and Analytical Labor.”
48 Emirbayer and Desmond, “Race and Reflexivity,” 576.
49 White normativity refers not only to practices and ways of thinking held by whites in which white people are the ‘center of the universe’, but also to the racial structures, particularly in the US, in which whites occupy ‘an unquestioned and unexamined place of esteem, power, and privilege’. Bell and Hartmann, “Diversity in Everyday Discourse,” 907.
50 Ibid., 179.
51 Lee-Treweek and Linkogle, Danger in the Field, 2.
52 Gates, Nygård, Strand, and Urdal, Trends in Armed Conflict.