A growing body of literature has explored the potential for arts-based methods to generate and disseminate research, particularly on sensitive or complex topics. This article presents DrawingOut, a metaphor-centred drawing workshop designed to collect visual and textual data about individuals’ experiences of sensitive or taboo health experiences. The visual data, consisting of the artwork produced by participants, and the textual data, all conversations and discussions occurring during the workshop, can also be used to create engaging outputs for dissemination. We piloted DrawingOut in a study of nine women with a minority ethnic or religious background in Cardiff, UK. The women were invited to participate in a series of structured drawing activities. The conversations occurring during the workshop were recorded and then subjected to thematic analysis. Results showed that women’s views and experiences could be grouped in eight major themes covering their wellbeing, relationship with others, and healthcare views and experiences. We produced an A5 16-page booklet that presents the pilot study results, illustrated with participants’ own drawings and quotes, which was disseminated among participants, their community and other relevant stakeholders. This pilot study supports the view that healthcare actors can use the DrawingOut method to engage people to talk about sensitive health topics, while simultaneously providing them with an enjoyable and empowering research experience. In our pilot study the DrawingOut was successful in eliciting rich visual and textual data that captures a diversity of views and experiences, with the added benefit that these can be used to produce engaging outputs for dissemination.

Critical peace and conflict scholars argue that to understand fully conflict dynamics and possibilities for peace research should incorporate 'the local'. Yet this important conceptual shift is bound by western concepts, while empirical explorations of 'the local' privilege outside experts over mechanisms for inclusion. This article explores how an epistemology drawing on feminist approaches to conflict analysis can help to redirect the focus from expert to experiential knowledge, thereby also demonstrating the limits of expert knowledge production on 'the local'. In order to illustrate our arguments and suggest concrete methods of putting them into research practice, we draw on experiences of the 'Raising Silent Voices' project in Myanmar, which relied on feminist and artsbased methods to explore the experiential knowledge of ordinary people living amidst violent conflict in Rakhine and Kachin states. ARTICLE HISTORY

Bliesemann DeGuevara, B. (2010). Introduction: The Limits of Statebuilding and the Analysis of State-Formation. Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 4 (2), 111-128The ?international community? is not the only actor engaged in statebuilding processes; contemporaneously with external intervention, at national and local levels of non-Western societies other actors are also engaged in struggles to establish their own visions of a state. The results are ambiguous: the states built tend to be hybrid, combining formal modern state fa?ades with informal ways of functioning. This essay introduces the Special Issue by outlining the importance of the analysis of the dynamics of state-formation: the deformation that statebuilding undergoes in the process of its implementation. This framework can provide new insights into the limits of statebuilding by highlighting how the negotiation processes accompanying any attempt at statebuilding are shaped to a great extent by non-Western states' and societies' specific embeddedness in global structures. These states are currently subject to deepening dynamics of internationalization and informalization which, despite a growing formal convergence of state institutions with Western models, structurally limit the probabilities of ensuing liberal-democratic state-formation.Peer reviewe

This article has a twofold aim. First, it discusses the contributions to the scholarly field of conflict knowledge and expertise in this special issue on Knowledge Production in/about Conflict and Intervention. Second, it suggests an alternative reading of the issue's contributions. Starting from the assumption that prevalent ways of knowing are always influenced by wider material and ideological structures at specific times, we trace the influence of contemporary neoliberalism on general knowledge production structures in Western societies, and more specifically in Western academia, before re-reading the special issue's contributions through this prism. Our main argument is that neoliberalism leaves limited space for independent critical knowledge, thereby negatively affecting what can be known about conflict and intervention. We conclude with some tasks for reflexive scholarship in neoliberal times.

This article discusses benefits and challenges of qualitative-interpretive research conducted in teams of outside (Northern) researchers and national (Southern) associates, in which the latter have considerable autonomy over research design and data generation. Reflecting on our collaboration with Burmese associates on arts-based workshops with violence-affected communities in Myanmar, we discuss how structures and dynamics of power and trustbuilding shaped the research process and data interpretation. Our reflective analysis suggests that interpretivist research 'by proxy' is possible and can be highly enriching but depends upon sufficient time (and funding) for meaningful, long-term engagement with 'local' research collaborators, which our project lacked.