Walking the Line: Brokering Humanitarian Identities in Conflict Research

Abstract

Walking the Line © World Bank, published in the Civil Wars21(2) 2019 CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 IGO http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/igo http:// dx.

(Dis)courtesy Bias: “Methodological Cognates,” Data Validity, and Ethics in Violence-Adjacent Research

“…Namely, scholars working in settings affected by mass violence, humanitarian intervention, and crisis are almost always situated within a broader political and professional class that seeks information from affected populations in order to disseminate news, provide relief and services, create reports (whether humanitarian or intelligence), or advocate. Due to similarity in techniques deployed to gather data in these spaces—from survey instruments to games, semi-structured interviews, and participant observation 2 —potential participants often see researchers not as independent actors, but rather as part of a larger body of outsiders who are often better educated, wealthier, more mobile, and culturally or politically distinct from the milieu in which they work (Lewis et al, 2019). This fact is most consistently manifest in the broad trend of potential participants confusing researchers for aid workers or journalists (Foster & Minwalla, 2018; Lewis et al, 2019), though scholars also report potential respondents assuming that researchers may be intelligence agents (Driscoll & Schuster, 2017; Thaler, 2019).…”

Violence, intimacy and veins of madness in a fraught border city

“…Due to widespread, disturbing sexual violence in the Kivus, gender-based cruelty became pivotal to humanitarianism. Bukavu has been scripted by journalists and humanitarians as a 'rape capital' (Mertens 2019;Mertens and Pardy 2017;Lewis et al 2019). 6 Mental precarity and vulnerability have grown in perceptions since 1996 in this city construed as exceptional, and a set of urban spaces also known for catastrophe, disorder, maiming and bereavement (Thill 2019a;Hunt 2019).…”

Researching with ‘Local’ Associates: Power, Trust and Data in an Interpretive Project on Communities’ Conflict Knowledge in Myanmar

“…While foreigners are free to travel in large parts of the country, physical access to some (especially conflict) areas is tightly restricted for any foreigners, including humanitarian and development workers, journalists and researchers. 4 This rules out embedded research with humanitarian or aid organisations as access strategy for these areas (Lewis et al 2019, cf. Peter 2020.…”

“…Trust is usually discussed in relation to research participants (rather than collaborators), for example concerning its role in researcher access (Norman et al 2009, Lewis et al 2019 and interviewing (Fujii 2010). For Romain Malejacq and Dipali Mukhopadhyay (2016: 1017; cf.…”