Drawing on our experience of commissioning and co-curating an exhibition of international conflict textilesappliquéd wallhangings (arpilleras), quilts, embroidered handkerchiefs, banners, ribbons, and mixed-media art addressing topics such as forced disappearances, military dictatorship, and drone warfarethis article introduces these textiles as bearers of knowledge for the study of war and militarized violence, and curating as a methodology to care for the unsettling, difficult knowledge they carry. Firstly, we explain how conflict textiles as object witnesses voice difficult knowledge in documentary, visual and sensory registers, some of which are specific to their textile material quality. Secondly, we explore curating conflict textiles as a methodology of 'caring for' this knowledge. We suggest that the conflict textiles in our exhibition brought about an affective force in many of its visitors, resulting in some cases in a transformation of thought.
This article discusses narrative practice and textile-making as two techniques of researcher reflexivity in diverse teams conducting qualitative-interpretive research. Specifically, it suggests definitional ceremonies—a collective structured method of storytelling and group resonances—as a useful tool to interweave diverse researchers as a team, while maintaining the plurivocity that enables deeper reflexivity. Additionally, textile-making is introduced as a material and embodied way of expression, which complements narrative practice where words fail or need a non-linguistic form of elicitation. We illustrate the two techniques with examples from our international, collaborative qualitative-interpretive research project with demobilized guerrilla fighters in Colombia.
This article redirects extant critiques of the modern problem of war at this problem's underlying logic of deviance. According to this logic, war constitutes a kind of international conduct that contravenes behavioural norms and that can be corrected through diagnostic and didactic means. Thereby, war is rendered into a problem falling within the scope of human agency. However, this agency rests on and reproduces this logic's constitutive blind spots. Therefore, it seems imperative to develop ways of problematising war otherwise. The article provides two starting points for (critical) IR scholarship seeking to undertake such a project. Firstly, it combines two Foucaultian tools, the concept of problematisation and the method of genealogy, to direct critique at the logics underlying our evaluative – analytical, ethical, and political – judgements. Secondly, it uses these tools to trace the contingent emergence of the logic of deviance in a crucial example within the wider genealogy of the problem of war: the Carnegie Endowment's commission of inquiry into the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913. Based on original archival research, I highlight different elements of this inquiry's problematisation of war – its frames, assumptions, ways of knowing, and subjects of knowledge – to make them available for reconstruction.
This article examines the analytical and political potentials of creative methods for peace research. Specifically, the article argues that creative methods can textile, i.e. render material and irregularly textured, (research on) post-conflict politics. Grounded in a collaborative research project with former combatants in Colombia, the article takes this project’s methods – narrative practice, textile-making, and a travelling exhibition – as examples to demonstrate how creative methods’ element of making contributes to the development of post-conflict subjectivities and relationships. Casting the data generated by creative methods as crafted stories, the article also shows how in these stories, semantic meaning becomes entangled with material traces of emotional, affective, and embodied experiences of violence and its aftermath, effecting a shift in the post-conflict distribution of the sensible. By exploring creative methods’ capacity for textiling peace (research), the article contributes to research on creativity, the arts, and peace and on the post-conflict trajectories of former combatants.
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