This article explores practices of writing deployed in an attempt (sometimes futile) to mitigate and interrogate the relationship between researcher and informant across the unequal relations of power, economic disparities, and cultural divides – factors that create a partial and committed position for the author. In the process, and through the lens of an ethnographic study of sexual-affective economies in contemporary Cuba, storytelling emerges as a method and methodology for International Relations that facilitates (re)presentation of interviews that are unstructured, contingent, and difficult. Storytelling as a method and methodology reveals the multiplicity, contingency, and uncertainty of the research process, questioning the incitements to detachment and objectivity on which IR methodologies are built. Thus, narrative writing proves invaluable for expressing how the international acts on bodies (and vice versa), and for relating personal experiences of repression and resistance, joy and pain, in an international frame. Far from a merely stylistic choice, storytelling bears real ethical and political implications – for the research produced and for the individual subjects implicated in its production. Along the way, practices of writing themselves come to the fore, as academic conventions fall away and stories surface. Storytelling itself thus elaborates on the possibilities inherent in more creative, less structured, and more interpretive writing across the field of international politics.
In 2022, Colombia decriminalized abortion, making it ostensibly a site of progressive abortion politics. Within hours, however, the ruling was met with intense, high-level backlash that positioned abortion as a threat to the Colombian family and gestured to gendered conflict harms past and present. Colombia's legal framework on abortion has emerged largely due to campaigning that unfolded during periods of intense political violence and insecurity, in a setting where conflict and (post-)conflict exist on a continuum. Combined, this points to the significance of (post-)conflict politics to understanding abortion politics, and vice versa, in the Colombian space. Here, we use interview data gathered in 2018 to argue that the two should be understood in tandem—and, indeed, that one cannot be properly understood without the other, shaped as they both are by a militant conservative nationalism inflected by religion, machismo and natalism, and by the material legacies of conflict. Decriminalization should therefore be understood as part of resurgent conservative reproductive governance, and abortion politics itself as an agonistic space of contestation rather than straightforwardly progressive. Beyond Colombia, it is also indicative of the rich insights on gender justice in conflict spaces that can be drawn from analysing abortion politics.
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Humanitarian, development and peacebuilding work has become increasingly dangerous in recent decades. The securitisation of aid has been critiqued, alongside the racialised and gendered dynamics of security provision for aid actors. What has received less attention is how a range of intersectional marginalisations – gender, racialisation, sexuality, nationality and disability – play out in constructions of security, danger and fear in aid deployments. Focusing on sexual harassment, abuse and violence as threats to safety and security, the article examines how in training and guidance for deployment to ‘the field’ (itself a problematically securitised notion), danger is projected onto sexualised and racialised ‘locals’, often overlooking the potentially far greater threat from colleagues. Here, we employ a review of security guidance, social media groups, interviews with aid staffers and reflections on our own experiences to explore how colonialist notions of security and ‘stranger danger’ play out in training. We argue that humanitarianism is still dominated by the romanticised figure of the white, male humanitarian worker – even if this problematic imaginary no longer reflects reality – and a space where those questioning exclusionary constructs of danger are quickly silenced and even ridiculed, even in the age of #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter.
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