Critiquing Anthropological Imagination in Peace and Conflict Studies: From Empiricist Positivism to a Dialogical Approach in Ethnographic Peace Research

Post-Liberal Statebuilding in Central Asia

“…with its grounding in practice theory and debates on collaborative and activist research (see Lottholz, 2018c), my approach was particularly careful not to impose questions, frameworks and terms of reference on research partners, but to engage with them on their own terms. This also implied conducting the research in Russian, which was the working language of most practitioners I talked to, and working with an interpreter from Kyrgyz to Russian in some cases.…”

“…Yet, to unpack the invocation and use of these registers in practices of peacebuilding and community security, the cooperative and dialogical approach I offer here has proven indispensable. As is the case in most longterm projects, this approach has evolved and been adjusted throughout time, as reflected in other more detailed discussions of the general importance of dialogical research (Lottholz and Kluczewska, 2017;Lottholz, 2018c), of its advantage in helping to avoid issues of access and personal safety of researchers and research participants (Lottholz, 2017b;Bekmurzaev et al, 2018) and of the grounding of this approach in decolonial and feminist standpoint theory (Lottholz, 2019b). Building upon these discussions and offering more detail in the chronological table of data gathered in Appendix 2, I focus my discussion here on my attempts to implement a cooperative approach in the partnership with three peacebuilding and security actors and offer reflections for further refinement of this approach in light of experiences during my research.…”

“…For instance, the articles, policy papers and blog posts in which I described the Civic Union's work in an accessible language, including in Russian (see Lottholz, 2016aLottholz, , 2016bLottholz, , 2020, helped to raise their visibility, but to what extent they may really have influenced donors' or national partners' perception of the network is hard to grasp and is most likely negligible. Further, the peer-reviewed articles on the network (Lottholz, 2018c as well as on Saferworld's work (Lottholz, 2018b), and not least this monograph, were published too late to offer significant help in positioning these actors. In terms of content, my analyses of community-level project implementation did not yield decisive insights for the practitioners and mostly served to provide further reflection on the dilemmas of community security when considered in the wider societal and political-economic context.…”

“…183 20 Part of this analysis is presented in Lottholz (2018c). 21 Communities are anonymized to rule out potential security concerns as discussed in further detail in Chapter 3.…”

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

“…Feminist approaches have explicitly worked to counter these effects of epistemic privilege (Bar On 1993, Patai 1991 and to break the assumed hierarchy between 'expert' and 'experiential' knowledge (Julian et al 2019), including in the study of peace, conflict and war (Wibben 2016, McLeod and O'Reilly 2019)an aim they share with many interpretivist approaches (Schwartz-Shea and Yanow 2012, Fujii 2018). While less often addressed in this literature than the relationship between researcher-subjects and participant-subjects, questions of epistemic privilege obviously also affect the relationship between foreign/Northern researchers and national/Southern associates (Lottholz 2018).…”