Insurgent peace research: affects, friendship and feminism as methods

ABSTRACT

Affect and friendship change the way we think about research (epistemology) and conduct research (methodology). This article accounts for affect and friendship as feminist methods in peace research. It argues that affective feminist conversations, practices and actions through friendship can drastically modify how we think about peace. Based on fieldwork conducted in Colombia (2019 and 2022) with female ex-guerrilleras from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – People’s Army (Farc-ep), it (1) draws upon the concepts of camaradería and being insurgent proposed by the women of the Farc-ep to (2) trace how affect and friendship can change the way we do peace research. Ultimately, the article proposes four aspects for the adoption of friendship as a method in peace research by: 1) deconstructing the linearity in peace research methods; 2) multiplying data collection’s methods; 3) including affects throughout the whole research process and 4) advocating for an insurgent peace research that vindicates long-term ‘transversal politics’ and translocal coalition-building.

KEYWORDS:

• Affect
• friendship
• feminism
• peace research
• methods
• insurgent peace research

Introduction

‘Camarada’ is full of emotions!¹

I think it was a brightness in their eyes and a levity in their bodies. These were the bodily impressions I could perceive and sense during the conversations we had about camaradería [comradeship] with the farianas, the women ex-guerrilleras from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – People’s Army (FARC-EP).² Their posture changed; their sight became ‘full of emotions’, as Antonia so vividly expressed. Camaradería – a particular way of seeing friendship tied to the leftist insurgent armed struggle – was a reiterative concept during conversations, workshops, and interviews. But it was nowhere on the lips of peacebuilders, peace researchers and peace workers. It was not part of the frame of reference to understand peacebuilding or how to do ‘peace research’.

When we conversed about ‘transitions’ from combatant militarised life to the ‘civilian’ setting, farianas would insist on their feeling of nostalgia about the loss of comradeship.³ I was struck by the fact that in my research design for my PhD thesis, deeply oriented towards ‘affect’ and ‘embodiment’, camaradería was initially not even a category of analysis – and was thus far from being part of my methods. After all, it was ‘unscientific’ to think about friendship as a method of inquiry. Worse, to feel affectively attached to your research participants is ‘unobjective’ and methodologically biased. In this article I propose the opposite thesis: that it is epistemologically and methodologically productive to cross over those boundaries. I contend that feminist epistemologies, affect and friendship should be brought to the centre stage of peace research. I account for affect and friendship as feminist methods in peace research, arguing that affective feminist conversations, practices, and actions through friendship can drastically modify how we think about peace.

Echoing the introduction of this special issue, ‘affect is key to capture how fear and insecurity, or security and trust, is experienced’. As argued by Söderström and Olivius, the emotions of researchers shape the research process, but also, the ‘making of peace’.⁴ Thus, affect and friendship change the way we think about research (epistemology) and conduct research (methodology). Yet, both are still not key sites of inquiry in peace research, which has only recently engaged with feminist epistemologies and methodologies, and this largely because of the active insistence of feminist peace researchers and feminist security studies’ increasing contestations of the field.⁵ Although critical scholarship in peace and conflict studies increasingly mobilises gender as an analytical category, sustained epistemological and methodological conversations with feminist theories are still lacking. I would argue that this continues to be a tokenist form of including feminist research methods in (critical) peace studies, with no long-term engagement or commitment to dismantling the sexist and colonial foundations of the field.⁶

In this article I follow Sara Ahmed’s proposal⁷ on the sociality of emotions, and her critique against analytically and practically distinguishing affects from emotions. I am interested on how affects can enable us to do peace research differently. Based on fieldwork conducted in Colombia in 2019 and 2022, and ongoing feminist translocal conversations since the main fieldwork, the article first engages with two concepts that have been at the core of feminist conversations with the farianas and their centrality in rethinking peace and peace research: camaradería and being insurgent. The second part of the article draws on this fieldwork experience to theorise affect and friendships as methods in peace research. The article concludes by showing how friendship and affect challenge peace research with four specific elements: 1) deconstructing the linearity in peace research methods; 2) multiplying data collection’s medium; 3) including affects through the whole research process and; 4) advocating for an insurgent peace research. This opens the possibility for being insurgent with peace research: it vindicates long-term ‘transversal politics’⁸ and translocal coalition-building. In turn, this contributes to everyday peacebuilding as a feminist praxis of refusing to align with the unjust status quo.

Touching grounds, connecting feelings

The encounter of bodies

The methodological reflections contained in this article draw upon fieldworks conducted in 2019 and 2022 in the north-eastern region of Colombia and a series of ongoing feminist – formal and informal – conversations and practices since then. It is based on my doctoral research that focused on the farianas’ reincorporation process into civilian society, paying particular attention to the embodied and emotional dynamics of their post-peace agreement militancy. In this article, I specifically refer to the biographical interviews and fieldwork observations about camaradería and feminismo insurgente compiled in my diary to make my point on the importance of affect and friendship in peace research. Observations took place in two territorial spaces for reincorporation – Filipinas, in the Department of Arauca, and Caño Indio, in the Department of Norte de Santander – as well as in the cities/municipalities of Bogotá, Bucaramanga, Cúcuta and Tibú. I interviewed sixteen female ex-combatants, 5 female urban militants and 4 key stakeholders in the reincorporation process (mostly working with the UN Verification Mission and the implementation of the Peace Agreement). The notes taken during the observations and the transcripts of the interviews were subsequently analysed in NVivo software. Ethics approvals were obtained from the ethics committees of the Université du Québec à Montréal in Canada (2019) and from the Etikprövningsmyndigheten in Sweden (2022).⁹

I have the privilege of being able to openly call myself a ‘feminist’ without having my life infringed upon; a privilege that is far from guaranteed for the farianas involved in my research. In fact, this privilege was ‘interrupted’ several times during the main field research. Building solidarities in conflict-affected areas and in-between the Global South and North is, therefore, not an easy task. As Ahmed points out, the ‘“we” of feminism is shaped by some bodies, more than others’.¹⁰ While I must acknowledge my white, based in the Global North, and relatively privileged embodied position in terms of class, taking into account my privileges (and their embodied materiality) has allowed me to attempt transcending the limitations imposed by Western scientific rationality¹¹; considering the differences that materialise between bodies is also a condition of possibility for thinking about creating bonds of solidarity. Rightly, Black and decolonial feminists have criticised feminist transnational engagement as often reproducing colonial relations by re-marginalising the communities for which they initially claimed gender justice; questioning universalising notions of global feminist solidarities is a fundamental aspect of feminist work.¹² In particular, complex research fields are sites of constant reproduction of otherness that often enclose researchers and participants in ‘uneasy sisterhoods’.¹³ Indeed, as Clair (2016) points out drawing upon the work of Abu-Lughod, it is important to go ‘against the romantic illusion of building alliances with them that they have not claimed’.¹⁴ Conscious of these obstacles to building feminist solidarities across differences and within research, I believe that it is through this particular encounter of bodies, where we built friendship – and some ties stronger than others – that we can constantly produce dissent, discomfort, joy and feminist utopias that challenge knowledge production and change the violent relationships that characterise the world we live in. Those ‘complex layers of one’s personal and collective historical situatedness’¹⁵ in knowledge production are central sites of political contestations. The reflections contained in this article speak of the conversations that have happened in-between bodies with the farianas.

On ‘Camaradería’ and being ‘Insurgent’

Engaging friendship with the farianas has changed my views on feminism and peace. Therefore, it has led me to question the very conditions in which I had thought about and conducted peace research since the beginning of my research journey in this field, 10 years ago. Friendship with them has shaken up ‘objectivity’, ‘truth seeking’ and, most importantly, methodology. I could not go back to the ‘before’ of the encounter of bodies; long-term relationships were flourishing and, with them, affective and ‘knowledge’ ties.

In the ocean of conversations that I had with the farianas about transiting from the ‘militarised’ setting of a leftist armed insurgency to the normalised ‘civilian society’,¹⁶ the first important concept relevant to thinking friendship as method is camaradería. This concept was discussed in almost every interview with the farianas: what they miss the most about the armed insurgency is their strong affective ties with their comrades. For many of them, their war experience was characterised by collective and affective experiences of love and friendship.¹⁷ On the contrary, ‘civilian society’ seems to take shape as an individualising process, relegating affects to the private sphere. While comradeship was an important part of the guerrilla, the reincorporation process is felt as a return to the individual, to the self and to a ‘personal project’ undefined. The destructuring of the ‘fariana family’ – the ‘war family’ – consequently entailed a feeling of drastic change in affect that has often led to social isolation for female ex-combatants.¹⁸ Camaradería is therefore an assemblage of ‘affective socialisation practices’ that orient ‘emotional attachments characterised by a high sense of interdependency and feeling of familial belonging’.¹⁹ Then, ‘peace’ and ‘reincorporation’ are felt as a rupture of these attachments. Following Alejandra, ex-guerrillera, it is a feeling that is uneasy to describe: ‘For the people that have not suffered the sacrifices, it is very difficult to comprehend what solidarity is, what compañerismo is, what living in harmony is’.²⁰ This attachment to the collective is linked to the ‘love-labour’,²¹ an important characteristic of totalising collectives like guerrillas, where combatants experience love, friendship and solidarity in a very particular way.

There is thus a deep contrast between the focus of peace research on indicators that attempt to verify the implementation of the agreement,²² characterise the reintegration of ‘rebel groups’ in economic and political terms²³ or, more recently, on the implementation of gender provisions in peace agreements.²⁴ Although necessary, most of the methods for these types of research rely on large scale questionnaires, interviews in series, and/or quantitative data processing about peace agreement provisions. But when I returned to the fieldwork in March 2022, farianas were clear about comradeship as the missing piece: ‘no, nobody thinks about this or how it is related to peace’.²⁵

Second, through friendship with the farianas, I have learnt that ‘peace’ needs to be an active combat – a perception of peace that is most generally absent of the literature of peace research. The farianas have been working on their own vision of feminism – the feminismo insurgente or, as some of them call it, feminismo de clase/feminismo de las del común²⁶ – and of course, in these feminist encounters, knowledge production is both critical and full of tensions.²⁷ During the workshops and collective meetings, we have discussed long and hard about which feminism(s) best represent the interests of all the militancy. In 2022, when I returned to Colombia to engage with the farianas about the results of my research, we agreed that the following method to adopt was continuing the conversations, through WhatsApp, Zoom and joint virtual conferences, about the particular feminism they want to advocate for as a peace practice. This is an ongoing debate, but the character of being an insurgent women is at the heart of the discussions. What stands out and unifies them is their rejection of ‘peace’ as ‘passive’.

In the guerrilla of the Farc-ep, many women have found a political voice and have occupied jobs that would not have been possible in their villages. Their current interest in thinking peacebuilding from a feminist perspective and women’s rights’ engagement stems from the idea that insurgent participation in arms is not reducible to violent combat, bombings, or deaths. Being part of the guerrilla is also being politically active and experiencing a wide range of emotions such as joy, love, and happiness.²⁸ In their return to civilian society,²⁹ female ex-combatants generally face a reassignment to traditional gender roles, associated in a reductionist way with patriarchal views of care and maternity, for example.³⁰ Implicitly, peacebuilding strategies expect female ex-combatants to disembody combat and detach themselves from the collective struggle to initiate a ‘normalisation’ to ‘civilian’ society.³¹ The very notion and existence of the female combatant³² further contests the idea that peace is the ‘absence of’ conflict; it contributes instead to the idea of an active combat after laying down the weapon, complexifying what ‘building peace’ means. This approach to the militancy of insurgent women recognises the continuum of their combats³³ and the possibility of theorising about the fight against systemic gender oppression from this particular standpoint. It is the idea that peace can be insurgent.

As such, I was feeling that peace research had missed a huge part of the picture of female ex-combatants’ reincorporation: affects.³⁴ By expelling affects from scientific methods, peace researchers were replicating the division between mind-body, and creating a hierarchization of ‘knowledge’. Farianas’ knowledge of war and peace was not seen as central to peace research and the praxis of peace. At the beginning, camaradería and being insurgent were part of my results, and they slowly evolved as part of my methods. I thus stumbled into the possibility of ‘touching feelings’ and ‘feeling insurgent’ while conducting my research. This led me to think about the methodological and political potential of friendship and affects: instead of trying to fit conventional ideas about methods, I just further embraced long-term conversations after the main fieldwork in 2019 – through text messages, WhatsApp, Zoom meetings, and joint Live sessions on Facebook. When I was finally able to go back to Colombia after the peaks of the Covid-19 pandemic (in 2022), I came back from my fieldwork feeling confident that friendship was an invaluable method per se in my research journey, as the motive for and the organisation of diverse individual and collective feminist encounters with the farianas to discuss peace and gender justice. I had deliberately adopted affects and friendship as methods instead of only seeing them as categories of analysis. In the remaining part of this article, I theorise this possibility and propose pathways to reflect on how those methods can change peace research.

Theorising affects and friendship as feminist methods

Do not forget us.³⁵

In 2019, some women I interviewed told me that nobody have ever asked them about their militancy, even though they found it liberating and important to do so. Among those who had been asked about their militancy, many had no faith in the academia: most of the people who had interviewed them had disappeared after the interviews. This is when I started to question what I wanted to do with my research and how I could contribute to building feminist friendship ties with them by considering our interviews as political spaces of contestation about peace. Beyond my original research plan, the method of affective friendship became more and more important in my theoretical reflections about reincorporation. But what does it mean to take affect and friendship as an epistemological and methodological starting point in peace research?

Theorists of affects do not agree on a definition of this concept and its relation to other concepts such as emotions, sensations, impressions, etc.³⁶ I therefore follow Ahmed³⁷ in considering that there is no clear distinction between affects and emotions; what interests me in thinking about friendship as a method is what emotions do; how emotional encounters occur between bodies and how they produce differently sensitive knowledges about reincorporation. According to Ahmed’s framework, affects are constituted socially and are not merely states of mind, or psychological/cognitive traits. They are relational social practices and are embedded in power relations in a dialectic and productive movement. Emotions are therefore, per se, collective as they happen between bodies. They remind us of the power of affecting and being affected.³⁸ In my fieldwork, emotions became central to interviews, focus groups and constant conversations with the farianas. We laughed, we cried, we felt rage, but also empathy. We interrogated our fears and forms of rage, and we asked ourselves if feminism might be a space for the rethinking of war and peace. As such, rather than undermining the research process, emotions deeply enriched it.³⁹ ‘Emotional involvement and emotional reflexivity’⁴⁰ during all the research steps provide critical and rich ethnographic resources.

Friendship, for its part, is widely understood to be an affective bond ‘characterised by the ongoing communicative management of dialectical tensions, such as those between idealisation and realisation, affection and instrumentality, and judgement and acceptance’.⁴¹ It involves ‘some degree of moral obligation’ and it is characterised by a ‘deeper, more intimate, relationship’ that tries to advocate for ‘cooperation, non-domination, and trust’.⁴² Friendship has been conceived to be an affect hierarchically ‘under’ kinship or romantic partnership in Westernised cultures, given that it ‘lacks canonical status’.⁴³ Since it is a ‘chosen’ affect, it has been deemed less important. It is also associated with privacy, emotionality and, partiality⁴⁴ and therefore, has been excluded from scientific, ‘objective’ methods.

Affect generally, and friendship⁴⁵ particularly, are still underexplored as methods.⁴⁶ In the social sciences, they have rather been theorised as categories of analysis – mostly because we think of friendship as opposed to the affective ‘neutrality’ of scientific knowledge. In the discipline of International Relations (IR), the binarity friend-enemy have been attributed to Schmitt’s theorisation of the ‘ontological importance of friendship for politics’.⁴⁷ From there, it has been translated to the analysis of relationships between nations and global treaties of peace.⁴⁸ In peace and conflict studies, scholars have argued for relational approaches to peace that would consider friendship,⁴⁹ emphasising the importance of relationships in peace research and peacebuilding. Söderström et al.⁵⁰ stress the difference between friendship and fellowship in building relational peace; altruism, intimacy and moral obligations, for example, differentiate these two categories of relationships. However, friendship has been mostly taken as a category of analysis to make sense of the friend-enemy dichotomy, and to give an account of ‘peaceful’ interactions in post-war settings or conflict-affected areas.

As Devere and Smith argue, it is feminism that ‘has led to the increase of interest in and attention paid to the role of friendship in politics’.⁵¹ Feminists have shown how the personal is political and international⁵²; how affects are central to politics⁵³ and how friendship and love can radically alter oppressive systems.⁵⁴ In fact, ‘friendship as a method’ was a term coined by Tillmann-Healy in 2001⁵⁵ in her research with gay men while being a heterosexual woman. From a feminist standpoint, friendship is an affective political attachment that poses questions about gender justice and oppression. Radical and critical feminist friendship as a research method directs our attention to the need to transform power relations – which are constitutive of all human relationships – and to actively take a stance for social justice.⁵⁶ Friendship as method challenges the ‘putative hierarchical separation between researcher and participant’, encouraging a more dialogical, constant relationship⁵⁷ where data are not fixed in time and space. It goes beyond the personal relationship to think about the ‘co-constitution of Self with Other, and theorises the dynamics of such co-foundation’.⁵⁸ Friendship as a method is thus about embodied sensations and emotions; these are central to knowledge and coalition building. Politics is what happens between bodies.⁵⁹ In that sense, friendship is both an emotion, a practice, and a relationship.

I argue that it is through feminism, most notably within Feminist Security Studies (FSS) and Feminist Peace Research (FPR), that affect and friendship (as well as solidarity-building) as methods have been theorised and empirically carried out.⁶⁰ This article joins the critical scholarship on FSS and FPR, with the aim of contributing to debates about the role of coalition-building and translocality in peace research. Thinking about coalition-building and translocality enables a long-term transformative approach to peace. I am therefore interested in the contentious character of engaging in friendship, not as ‘pacifist’ or ‘consensual’ dialogue, but as a radical, constant, and provocative inquiry into combative nonviolence.⁶¹ In the affective encounters with the farianas, I have felt that we could critically reflect on what reincorporation to civilian society means. As my research with the farianas was ‘piecing up’,⁶² it became increasingly clear that with the farianas, I was not merely in a researcher-participant relationship. As we progressively built comradeship, I grew increasingly engaged with a stance of ‘emancipatory research’.⁶³ My research transformed by these affective connections to begin embodying the political claims of the farianas, their auto-critique and their possibilities of ‘reinventing the combat’ peacefully.

Reinventing the insurgent combat is always problematic with peace research however, because as a field it tends to negate insurgency as part of ‘rebel politics’. On the contrary, at the heart of feminist epistemologies is the questioning of the scientific ‘rigour’ as the consequence of a neutral and objective position towards the phenomena studied.⁶⁴ As feminist researchers in conflict-affected areas have learned, it is impossible to adopt a neutral stance; the emotional and affective engagement of the researchers is inevitable.⁶⁵ In this sense, feminism brings to peace research an evolving collection of methods that 1) explicitly rely on affective bonds and 2) stand as a ‘critical inquiry and reflection on social injustice by way of gender analysis to transform, and not simply explain, the social order’.⁶⁶ This conjunction of characteristics leads to the consideration of ‘intimate and affective relations’ as ‘constitutive of’ knowledge creation.⁶⁷ Methods become therefore, a political endeavour.⁶⁸

Affects are central. The political encounters with the farianas have put to the forefront the ‘politics of emotions’: it has shown that affects are crucial to knowledge production.⁶⁹ As such, intimate relationships with the farianas have become sites of collective knowledge production, where I also try to multiply the alliances with them in ‘doing’ peace research differently, such as engaging in blogs, talks, podcasts, small projects, co-writing, etc. From these discussions, we started to think about different projects to continue our interrogation about feminism in building peace in the north-eastern region of Colombia. Therefore, friendship has a role to play in the way we think about knowledge production in the post-peace agreement; for example, the research I conducted in dialogue with the farianas gave us the opportunity to think collectively about which kinds of feminisms they want to build to contribute to peacebuilding from their own experience. Since 2019, and ‘through the sharing of perceptions’,⁷⁰ the building of affective relationships with the farianas has enabled a constant va-et-vient between the lived experience of post-peace agreement and the building of an insurgent feminism in practice. This has led also to think about how linking the post-peace agreement struggle of the farianas with the Fundación Lüvo’s work on peacebuilding, with joint blog posts writing or the participation of the female ex-combatant to the production of knowledge in the Revista Lüvo with articles about their contributions to peace.

Embracing feminist friendship in peace research: an ‘Insurgent’ approach

In this last section, I sketch what I consider to be four key elements of a feminist friendship and affect-based methodology in peace research. My aim is not to give a prescriptive or step-by-step method guideline to be applied in peace research projects. The objective is rather to find the possibilities offered by such methods for re-engaging in radical⁷¹ feminist politics within peace research. I propose four methodological paths that stand out from what I have learned from working and discussing together with the farianas. Challenging the idea of peace research as searching for ‘a never-ending promised peaceful telos’, I argue for an insurgent approach to peace research - one that maintains a feminist and subversive activity aimed to dismantle the oppressive structures that sustained the armed conflict in the first place.

Deconstructing linearity in time and space

Feminist peace research have called for consideration of the ‘epistemic violences’⁷² of our own work as peace researchers. Historically, peace research has been built on the colonial perspective that some regions of the world are ‘conflictive’ and that others, who come into those regions from without, should engage in ‘building peace’. Thus, given this implicit us/them division with respect to both knowledge production and peace construction, no affective relationships are meant to occur between the researchers and the participants.

Affect and friendship change the relation of peace research fieldwork to time and space. There has been an implicit idea of peace research: a research plan should follow the data collection-analysis-result scheme as framed within social sciences. Building friendship and affective ties amid fieldwork requires a non-linear and highly different conceptualisation of time. Research temporalities follow the pace of friendship building; slow, disruptive, and uncomfortable.

Methodologically, friendship has ethical and political objectives throughout the whole research process – friendship as a method cannot be undertaken solely in one part of the research. It plays a ‘practical role in the resistance of power and the fight for justice’.⁷³ In FPR, it connects directly to the ‘emancipatory objective’⁷⁴ of making social justice transversal to feminist research and militancy. This leads to the identification of practices, emotions, and lived realities that are otherwise left aside in traditional methods – most notably because friendship as a method engages in the long run and does not set clear spatial/research boundaries to what ‘fieldwork’ is. Relationships – and knowledge disruptions – occur ‘through interactions over time and experiences from these interactions and exchanges’.⁷⁵

In peace research, the literature tends to be focused on a vision of ‘access’ to the fieldwork⁷⁶ or the geographical and physical access to the ‘studied’ group. An approach based on feminist friendship turns the attention instead to the encounters in general, and to the emotions felt in particular. Working out of an ethics of care, feminist friendship research involves a wide range of emotions that were, in my case, felt both by the farianas and myself: insecurity, fear, a sense of constant discomfort, but also joy and affection. Therefore, ‘as we deepen our ties’, we face numerous challenges, sometimes tensions or conflicts,⁷⁷ but these are challenges that enable us to construct sense and knowledge as we work together to think differently about the return to civilian society.

Taking affective bonds as a political stance in research means that the ‘fieldwork’ is not understood solely as a ‘phase’ of the scientific research method. It is rather a continuum of events and reflections that have taken place in several territorialities and across multiple spaces and temporalities. It is a permanent ‘doing’. This includes a deconstruction of linearity – and the time/space ideas held in mainstream academia – to take a more circular approach to fieldwork; affective ties have been forged, difficult questions have emerged and maybe, strong ruptures with previous forms of knowledge have occurred.⁷⁸ In turn, deconstructing the linearity of the research process implies that we advocate for a constant loop between affects, methods, and theory-building; following Jaggar, there ‘is a continuous feedback loop between our emotional constitution and our theorising such that each continually modifies the other and is in principle inseparable from it’.⁷⁹ There is no opposition between knowledge and feeling.

The developing of political friendship, as well as ‘political connections’⁸⁰ with other women or feminised bodies takes time; seeking solutions and reflecting critically upon those connections necessarily defies the linearity of thinking expected by scientific methodologies. Developing these political connections involves discomfort, sometimes even pain, but also requires a profound methodological shift in the research. The acceptance of this discomfort is also the evidence that research processes that involve political engagement with lived experiences – in this case, of the farianas – are chaotic and circular.⁸¹ Then, the discomfort is also collective.

Multiplying data collection methods

I started my research in 2019 working out of Nieto-Valdivieso’s premise that the feminist multi-method⁸² approach is the most adequate to account for the complexity of female ex-guerrilleras’ reincorporation. This approach is pertinent for rethinking peace research from a feminist perspective for three main reasons. First, it includes the multiple positionalities and perspectives of the women to remain faithful to the polyphony of voices and the agentivity of the women who participated in the acts of violence, thus contradicting the victimising discourses on insurgent women. These methodologies draw upon female ex-combatants’ narratives and political actions – both formal and informal – to understand their ‘critical, creative, and transformative agency⁸³’ in reincorporation processes. Second, a feminist multi-method acknowledges – during the whole research process – the power relations between the researcher and the participants, as well as between participants. It therefore allows for the constant questioning of power relations, even if this is not a guarantee of reducing their effects. Thirdly, feminist multi-method research is transformative: it must contribute to social change or actions to improve the social and political status of women.⁸⁴ The multi-method approach thus makes feminist research more akin to a critical journey punctuated by self-reflection and political engagement.⁸⁵ In this regard, it is not without emotional consequences: feminist research necessarily has circular points, cul-de-sacs, setbacks, or shifts during the research process.⁸⁶

With friendship and affects as methods, the concept of ‘data’ is contested. It situates research ‘in the natural contexts of friendship’ and in the ‘flow of everyday life’.⁸⁷ It happens in usual and daily spaces such as a walk, a coffee, a Whatsapp conversation about the research, etc. As such, in my quest to understand the place of feminism in the post-peace agreement setting with the farianas, I have developed different types of data collection. Of course, in the beginning, friendship and affect were not my methods per se. They took place in the ‘doing’ of the fieldwork, where, in discussion with the farianas, we multiplied the different ways of reflecting about the return into civilian society. We discussed the terms of the research, and agreed that we needed to think about the follow-up and the possibilities for future projects. Farianas were clear about the necessity to engage in a long-standing process and not just data extractivism. As such, multiple moments have become sites of data collection: formal interviews, collective interviews, gatherings, coffee reflections, close-door feminist meetings, feminist fieldwork diary, workshops, body-mapping and generally, informal and daily conversations. For example, the farianas in Bucaramanga invited me to closed-door feminist meetings or to collective gathering where we discussed the contentious ideas about post-armed struggle feminism. Those more planned conversations always extended beyond those spaces: we started to share ideas on Whatsapp about the reincorporation process and feminism, but also, about our daily lives as women. This, in turn, has allowed different spaces for the critical reflection about the obstacles they face in building peace during the whole research process and even, beyond the final dissertation.⁸⁸

Including affects

A feminist method centred on friendship involves a politics of care.⁸⁹ The concept of camaradería has allowed the farianas to think about care as a central component of the post-peace agreement. The collective distribution of care in the guerrilla – without romanticising it – has allowed them to think about care economies⁹⁰ in the reincorporation process, an innovative approach to tackling traditional gender roles. This idea reflects the impossibility of thinking about peace without an active engagement with care and, above all, collective care.

Adopting a feminist friendship method based on affects signifies constructing knowledge though ‘emotionally-sensed knowledge’⁹¹ and accepting that facing emotions during the research process changes the data and the results. It also ‘alters and affects the researcher and the research process’⁹² as well as all the participants in the project. The sensory knowledge that derives from this politics of care not only allows us to see objects of study that have been largely neglected in IR globally, and peace research particularly, but it also helps to account for what has always remained ‘out of the frame’.⁹³ The relationship to the everyday and the micro-political are central to the pursuit of a feminist epistemology and methodology; paying attention to the interpersonal and the intercorporeal has the consequence of making visible different ‘spaces’ of peacebuilding.⁹⁴

Centering on affects and a politics of care that enables friendship as a method means that we share a political rage⁹⁵ that also sets the stage for our discussions. Using affect as a method also means embracing failure, including the failure to respond to the academic precepts of ‘rigorous’ science. It implies opposing the idea of constant production of ‘data’⁹⁶ and privileging the relationship in the research process. To the Westernised and androcentric academic world, it means, in the end, being ‘bad researchers’ because we take the risk of prioritising affective bonds and ‘passion’.⁹⁷ It is a complete rejection of the notion that ‘the political sphere can be understood without accounting for the personal and emotional’.⁹⁸ As Åhäll puts it: ‘An affective shift might in this way inspire critical thinking to imagine an alternative politics’.⁹⁹

With friendship as a method, there is a constant dialogue between the researcher and the participants about the ‘results’ of the research. This contributes in turn to the generation of ‘new forms of scientific knowledge and new types of relating’.¹⁰⁰ For example, with the farianas, we have agreed on multiple ways of engaging with the research and, sometimes, other ‘sharing moments’ appeared just out of our spontaneous meetings. Some of these sharing methods were related to co-organising public feminist events to discuss about the reincorporation process, or thinking together about future projects that would create alliances between our feminist NGO, Fundación Lüvo and the farianas collectives. We shared narratives – for example, I sent them the transcripts of our interviews or informal conversations – and we gathered together virtually during the pandemic. WhatsApp was key to that process as it has allowed us to stay in contact during these last three years despite the global circumstances. We have put in practice (virtual) caring communities¹⁰¹ and we have actively engaged in questioning feminist militancy through our friendship.

Insurgent peace research: transversal and translocal politics

The last element I want to highlight in this article is how adopting affects and friendship as feminist methods can serve a long-term ‘transversal politics’,¹⁰² contributing, in turn, to changing peace research and to everyday peacebuilding as a praxis. From the concept of ‘insurgent feminism’, and the feeling of camaradería that have arisen throughout the research process, I have learned with the farianas that it is possible to think about peace research differently, in a more ‘active’ and ‘combative’ way. Our discussions have shown that it was possible not to align with the representational norms of what ‘peace’ means. In putting at the forefront their daily initiatives to build peace and gender justice in regions such as Caño Indio (Department of Norte de Santander), our conversations have changed the focus of reincorporation from perceiving it as a technical or economic task, towards conceiving it as a political one. As such, feminist methods based on affects challenges the norms of peace research to include the open opposition to multiple oppressive systems; they do not accept the status quo ante and further advocate for ‘affective dissonance’ against ‘acquired’ knowledge.¹⁰³ From there, we are at the stage, with the farianas of Caño Indio and Bucaramanga, of thinking about building alliances for cooperative projects regarding their reincorporation but also, their dialogue with the rural communities and the feminist movement more broadly.

As Hyndman and De Alwis (2004) assert, ‘people’s bodies are perhaps the finest scale of political space’.¹⁰⁴ Bodies are not neutral, which is why the encounter between them in a research process is also deeply political.¹⁰⁵ The encounters between bodies do not occur in a political and social vacuum: they happen in a society where bodies are hierarchised by markers of gender, race and class and where, people from the ‘Northern’ countries are often not only privileged, but also, favoured due to a colonial system that persists. Friendship as a method is not immune to the colonial system reconstituted by the global academy.¹⁰⁶ These power dynamics occur between countries of the Global North and the Global South, and also within countries, where racial and gender hierarchies continue to be very strong in academic spaces, in research processes, and also in the relationship between the academy and non-governmental organisations.

Far from advocating this idea of all-out transnational feminist alliance or solidarity¹⁰⁷ simply for the sake of being feminists, I consider that these differences – and the different struggles and pains that inhabit us – can be the grounds for knowledge production: ‘Solidarity involves commitment, and work, as well as the recognition that even if we don’t have the same feelings, or the same lives, or the same bodies, we do live on common ground’.¹⁰⁸ Munévar, meanwhile, conceptualises the conjugation of South-North epistemic knowledges and their shared critiques as a transnational political proposition that would make it possible to ‘recover embodied experiences and reconfigure situated knowledges’.¹⁰⁹

FPR emerge as a proposal for methods that acknowledge the translocal and transversal politics of doing active peace research otherwise.¹¹⁰ It is ‘about the creation process of alternative homes for feminist “outsiders” and the way comradery, engagement, and lifelong friendships enable forms of transnational belonging’.¹¹¹ Following my fieldwork, with our feminist collective established in Colombia, Canada and Brazil, Fundación Lüvo,¹¹² we have started to actively engage in promoting these feminist translocal alliances. In this context, farianas have been part of our ongoing reflection on insurgent femininities, insurgent feminism and the insurgent politics of friendship. We have built formal and informal discussions with them in numerous events, feminist meetings, conferences and activities organised by Lüvo or local organisations and universities. For example, former guerrilla Victoria Sandino agreed to participate in our thematic issue on feminist activism and a related virtual conference¹¹³ and in 2022, we co-organised also an event with Mujer Fariana in Cali.¹¹⁴

In the end, friendship and affects as methods allow for a long-term and everyday engagement between participants and the researchers, building on a feeling of attachment that keeps us insurgent against the ‘liberal peace’ apparatus. With the farianas and their proposal of building on their lived experience of camaradería and insurgency, I have learned what friendship and affect can do as a practice of peace. On the one hand, it allowed me to include affect and friendship in my methods, not just as a way to recognise affective bonds, but to politicise them.¹¹⁵ On the other hand, it opened the possibility to deal with complex emotions in the post-peace agreement research setting and to think about coalition-building across differences, time and space. But it is an ongoing, sometimes intermittent, challenge.¹¹⁶

Concluding thoughts

Perhaps love might come to matter as a way of describing the very affect of solidarity with others in the work that is done to create a different world. […] This would be an affectionate solidarity […]¹¹⁷

This article, based on the conversations and feminist contestations that have marked my research of the reincorporation of female ex-Farc-ep, explains my growing interest in proposing ‘friendship’ as a method of qualitative inquiry.¹¹⁸ I have argued, insisting on the contributions of feminists to knowledge production, that affects, and friendship change the way we do peace research and, ultimately, think about peace more broadly. Thus, I proposed ‘feminist friendship’ as a ‘lens for understanding and transforming power and trust¹¹⁹’ in the research process as well as in the praxis of building peace. In that sense, ‘solving complex global issues’ require a growing ‘focus on relationships’¹²⁰ where friendship can play an important role. In this way, this article speaks to some of the challenges raised in the introduction of this special issue such as the necessity to rethink time and affect in peace research methodologies. It responds to the feminist call for a greater attention to emotions in world politics and peacebuilding.¹²¹

Obviously, some limits come to mind. We cannot be friends with all the participants in our research – at least, in large-scale research or maybe, in contexts where the interviewees might reaffirm hierarchies and relations of domination and oppression with the researcher. Choosing friendship as a method involves being aware of the ‘ethics of care’ in relation to the participants, but also, to the researcher him/herself.¹²² This means that engaging with friendship as method might something be emotionally draining and daunting, in contrast with methods that promote ‘distance’ in the research process.¹²³ Building this space of trust and exchange is a long-term process that goes against the ‘time’ of academia; where scholars – especially junior, racialised and women – are subjected to heavy deadlines for making their way in their fields of research.¹²⁴ Additionally, as this article demonstrates, friendship as a method implies also adopting different questions; those might not fit easily within mainstream peace research and could pose limits to the researchers who want to engage in such methods.¹²⁵ Finally, as argued by Tillmann-Healy, ‘the dual role of friend/researcher makes it difficult to decide what to divulge, especially regarding information that potentially discredits our participants’.¹²⁶

However, as Ramírez-i-Ollé contends, ‘the normative argument that friendships promote better ethics and knowledge’¹²⁷ should be considered. Friendship as a method is far from easy; it is a critical and everyday methodology of ‘maintaining constructive dissent and differentiation’¹²⁸ while becoming engaged normatively towards gender justice. In this article, I have argued that, more than just a research possibility, friendship and affects can definitively change the way we think and do peace research. Adopting them as methods from the initial phase of project-building to the extension of the fieldwork as a long-term in-daily-life process – as opposed to a geographical and temporal location – can trigger new and different questions for peace research.

The emergence of camaradería and being insurgent in my own fieldwork with farianas has shown me how methodological questions emerge from the repetitive and continuous feminist encounters. Taking affective relationships as the point of departure, one can bring a different level of understanding that calls for a deeper level of commitment to knowledge production than that required by ‘traditional methods’.¹²⁹ Friendship as method spurs on our curiosity and transforms us into important allies in the fight for gender justice.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the farianas of the north-eastern region of Colombia who have accepted to dialogue with me during the research and who continue to do so. Thank you for your friendship and for your fight for a more gender-just Colombia. I am also grateful to Markus Holdo, Johanna Söderström and Elisabeth Olivius for their comments on early drafts; also, to Rachel Tillman who generously commented and reviewed this paper and to the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful feedback and encouragement. This article would also not have been possible without the support of the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship during my doctoral studies and the Vinnova Marie Curie Seal of Excellence current funding for my post-doctoral fellowship.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship and by Vinnova [2021-02012].

Notes on contributors

Priscyll Anctil Avoine

Priscyll Anctil Avoine is a researcher in Feminist Security Studies and a Marie Curie/Vinnova Fellow at Lund University. She is the director of the feminist and antiracist collective Fundación Lüvo.

Notes

1. Intervention of Antonia, collective workshop, 28 October 2019.

2. I am conscious of the debates about the term farianas within the Comunes party and outside of its formal realm. Some ex-Farc-ep women (urban and rural militants included) prefer to be called comuneras, some stick to ex-guerrilleras, others still feel associated to the farianas identity. Some women also refuse those identity labels. I adopt farianas because of the historicity of the term in the armed insurgency and its affective attachments that follow in the post-peace agreement setting. See Devia López, ‘Mujer Fariana desde sus fundadoras’ for a discussion about the building of this particular identity see Anctil Avoine, ‘L’entre-deux mondes’ about the tensions arising with the fariana identity in the post-peace agreement.

3. Anctil Avoine, ‘L’entre-deux mondes’.

4. Söderström and Olivius, ‘Pluralism, Temporality and Affect’, 5, 7.

5. See for example: Wibben et al., ‘Collective Discussion’; Wibben and Donahoe, ‘Feminist Peace Research’; Väyrynen, ‘Mundane Peace and the Politics of Vulnerability’; and Väyrynen et al., Routledge Handbook of Feminist Peace Research.

6. McLeod and Maria O’Reilly, ‘Critical Peace and Critical Studies’.

7. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotions; The Promise of Happiness.

8. Wibben and Donahoe, ‘Feminist Peace Research’, 3.

9. Ethics approval numbers: Université du Québec à Montréal, pre-fieldwork 3314; fieldwork 3316 (2019) and Ethics Board in Sweden 2022–00525–01.

10. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotions, 189.

11. I must stress that I do not believe this can be completely fulfilled as I am also part of this coloniality of power (see Lugones, ‘Colonialidad y género’) that affects my views of the world, and how I shape research questions, methods, relationships, etc. I do think, however, that it is a daily responsibility to think about this position as a feminist peace researcher and I hope that my praxis engages in this direction.

12. Wibben and Donahoe, ‘Feminist Peace Research’.

13. Parashar, ‘Embodied “Otherness”’, 696.

14. Clair, ‘Faire du terrain féministe’, 77.

15. Haraway, The Haraway Reader, 246.

16. Dietrich, ‘La Compañera Guerrillera as Construction of Politicised Femininity’.

17. See Nieto-Valdivieso, ‘The Joy of Militancy’.

18. Ascanio Noreña et al., Yo no escogí mi vida; Dahal, ‘Challenging the Boundaries’; and Söderström, Living Politics after War.

19. Estrada-Fuentes, ‘Affective Labours’.

20. Interview with Alejandra, 14 November 2019.

21. Estrada-Fuentes, ‘Affective Labours’.

22. Kroc Institute, ‘Towards Implementation’.

23. See for example Luna-Amador et al., ‘Determinants of the Economic Reintegration’. 2022 International Studies Association Conference’s panels about the Colombian Peace Agreement also showed a wide range of papers focusing on large-scale research on ‘rebel groups’ reintegration.

24. See for example Saba Perez et al., The Fight for Inclusion and Kroc Institute et al., Gender Equality for a Sustainable Peace.

25. Collective meeting, Bucaramanga, March 2022.

26. Observation notes, March 2022.

27. I consider that feminist friendship is more solid and robust as a method when it skilfully uses conflicts and tensions as key sites of knowledge-building. See Anctil Avoine, ‘Las putas amas’.

28. Nieto-Valdivieso, ‘The Joy of Militancy’.

29. In the Colombian context, the ‘return to civilian society’ is understood as the transition a militarised structure, generally paramilitary or guerrilla groups, into a ‘civilian’ one. In the case of the Farc-ep, the combatants were expected to lay down weapons and reincorporate the ‘State’ and its formal institutions.

30. Dietrich, ‘La Compañera Guerrillera’; K.C., ‘Everyday Realities of Reintegration’.

31. Dietrich, ‘La Compañera Guerrillera’.

32. Boutron, ‘La participation des femmes aux luttes armées’.

33. Manchanda, ‘Difficult Encounters with the WPS Agenda’.

34. See for example Söderström, Living Politics After War for similar conclusions.

35. Interview with Deisy, March 24, 2022.

36. Hemmings, ‘Invoking Affect’.

37. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotions.

38. Chacón, ‘Displaced Affect’.

39. Parashar, Women and Militant Wars.

40. Owton and Allen-Collinson, ‘Close but Not Too Close’, 284.

41. Tillmann-Healy, ‘Friendship as Method’, 730.

42. Söderström et al., ‘Friends, Fellows, and Foes’, 13.

43. Tillmann-Healy, ‘Friendship as Method’, 730.

44. Devere and Smith, ‘Friendship and Politics’, 341.

45. The concept of friendship I address here strongly departs from the idea of ‘fraternity’ in modern political thought, assuming the feminist critique to this concept and how it has shaped political ideas in Western Philosophy. See Pateman, The Sexual Contract.

46. Owton and Allen-Collinson, ‘Close but Not Too Close’.

47. Devere and Smith, ‘Friendship and Politics’, 345. See also Nordin and Smith, ‘Reintroducing Friendship to International Relations’.

48. Ibid.

49. Söderström et al., ‘Friends, Fellows, and Foes’.

50. Ibid.

51. Devere and Smith, ‘Friendship and Politics’, 349.

52. Sjoberg, ‘Introduction to Security Studies’.

53. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotions; Åhäll, ‘Affect as Methodology’.

54. hooks, All About Love.

55. Tillmann-Healy, Between Gay and Straight.

56. Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought.

57. Owton and Allen-Collinson, ‘Close but Not Too Close’, 301.

58. Nordin and Smith, ‘Reintroducing Friendship to International Relations’, 370.

59. Butler, Notes towards a Performative Theory of Assembly.

60. Wibben et al., ‘Collective Discussion’.

61. Butler, Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly.

62. Wibben et al., ‘Collective Discussion’.

63. Harel-Shalev et Daphna-Tekoah, Breaking the Binaries in Security Studies.

64. Lykke, Feminist Studies.

65. Richter-Montpetit, ‘Militarised Masculinities’.

66. Ackerly and True, Doing Feminist Research, 2.

67. Ramírez-i-Ollé, ‘Friendship as Scientific Method’, 309.

68. Sjoberg, ‘Introduction to Security Studies’.

69. Åhäll, ‘Affect as Methodology’, 38.

70. Ramírez-i-Ollé, ‘Friendship as Scientific Method’, 301.

71. The normative stance of FPR has to do with its engagement with radical politics. Radical in the sense that it does not accept the current state of militarised violence; radical because it proposes a complete rethinking of our ways to enter in relation with one another; radical in its endeavour of building a gender-just future where social justice is a central concern; radical for its refusal of those systems of oppression – racism, sexism, colonialism, classism – that leads to direct, cultural, symbolic and structural violence. Methods in FPR, in my view, should try to align with this normative stance (see Anctil Avoine, ‘Feminist Peace Research as Radical Politics’).

72. Wibben et al., ‘Collective Discussion’, 100.

73. Devere and Smith, ‘Friendship and Politics’, 342.

74. Wibben et al., ‘Collective Discussion’, 88.

75. Söderström et al., ‘Friends, Fellows, and Foes’, 18.

76. Fort, ‘Acknowledging the Long-Lasting Effects of Fieldwork’.

77. Tillmann-Healy, ‘Friendship as Method’, 732.

78. Fort, ‘Acknowledging the Long-Lasting Effects of Fieldwork’.

79. Jaggar, ‘Love and Knowledge’, 170.

80. Narayan, ‘Les cultures mises en question’, 480.

81. Eriksson Baaz and Stern, ‘Researching Wartime Rape’.

82. Nieto-Valdivieso, ‘The Joy of Militancy’.

83. Björkdahl and Selimovic, ‘Gendering Agency in Transitional Justice’, 166.

84. Nieto-Valdivieso, ‘(Ex)Guerrilleras’.

85. Sjoberg, ‘Introduction to Security Studies’.

86. Eriksson Baaz and Stern, ‘Researching Wartime Rape’, 118.

87. Tillmann-Healy, ‘Friendship as Method’, 735.

88. Anctil Avoine, ‘L’entre-deux mondes’.

89. Owton and Allen-Collinson, ‘Close but Not Too Close’.

90. See their strategy about women’s reincorporation: Farc, ‘Estrategia integral’.

91. Hubbard et al., ‘Working with Emotions’, 121.

92. MacKenzie, ‘Their Personal is Political’, 692.

93. Butler, Frames of War.

94. Wibben and Donahoe, ‘Feminist Peace Research’, 4.

95. Ettorre, ‘Introduction’.

96. Kušić et Záhora, ‘Introduction’.

97. Anctil Avoine and Boutron, ‘L’épistémologie féministe’.

98. Sjoberg et Gentry, ‘Profiling Terror’, 185.

99. Åhäll, ‘Affect as Methodology’, 44.

100. Ramírez-i-Ollé, ‘Friendship as Scientific Method’, 302.

101. The Care Collective, The Care Manifesto, 45.

102. Wibben and Donahoe, ‘Feminist Peace Research’, 3.

103. Åhäll, ‘Affect as Methodology’; Hemmings, ‘Affective Solidarity’.

104. ‘Bodies, Shrines, and Roads’, 549.

105. Martín de Almagro, ‘Hybrid Clubs’.

106. Tillmann-Healy, ‘Friendship as Method’.

107. Clair, ‘Faire du terrain féministe’.

108. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotions, 189.

109. ‘Interseccionalidad y otras nociones’, 56.

110. Wibben et al., ‘Collective Discussion’.

111. Aharoni, ‘Feminist (Peace) Melancholy’, 95–96.

112. See www.fundacionluvo.org.

113. See the virtual conference with Victoria Sandino, Fundación Lüvo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUKVgLPBpco&t=309s.

114. See the hybrid event organised with Comuneras – Farianas y Diversidad: https://www.facebook.com/Comuneras/videos/351388013552763.

115. Thanks to Rachel Tillman for making an important point about camaradería as a very particular friendship bond of the farianas and how their experience changed the curse of the research itself.

116. See Ramírez-i-Ollé, ‘Friendship as Scientific Method’.

117. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotions, 141.

118. Ramírez-i-Ollé, ‘Friendship as Scientific Method’, 301.

119. Johnson and Leiper O’Malley, ‘Feminist Friendship as Method: Experiences’.

120. Ibid.

121. Sörderström and Olivius, ‘Pluralism, Temporality and affect’.

122. Owton and Allen-Collinson, ‘Close but Not Too Close’, 302.

123. Ibid., 302; Tillmann-Healy, ‘Friendship as Method’, 740.

124. Tillmann-Healy, ‘Friendship as Method’.

125. Ibid.

126. Ibid., 741.

127. Ramírez-i-Ollé, ‘Friendship as a Scientific Method’, 314.

128. Ibid.

129. Tillmann-Healy, ‘Friendship as Method’, 737.