From expert to experiential knowledge: exploring the inclusion of local experiences in understanding violence in conflict

Abstract

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

‘Soft ways of doing hard things’: women mediators and the question of gender in mediation

“…It provides a set of narratives from which we can seek to better understand the ways in which women experienced working as a mediator. 46 While the period in question largely pre-dates the normative turn in mediation, the experience of these women is useful in exploring the motivations and experiences of women as mediators in ways that illuminate current debates about the role of expert versus experiential knowledge. During the interviews women were asked about three core themes.…”

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

“…Power in research relationships is most visible in the common absence of the participant-subjects from the processes of design and implementation of research about them (Janack 1997). 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).…”

“…In our project, collaboration could not have worked without this process of personally interacting and getting to know each other during two initial field trips to set up the project and several further ones to jointly work on the workshop material interpretation and preparation of dissemination materials. With the Burmese businesswoman, trust emerged during our joint meetings with artists and peace activists which she organised and interpreted (Julian et al 2019). She increasingly took on a more proactive role in explaining the research objectives and guiding the conversations.…”

Unruly wives in the household: Toward feminist genealogies for peace research

“…The quilting work springing from this network attempts to remedy peace research’s narrow construction, as well as its methodological and normative whiteness, noting how exclusions have trickle-down effects, not just in terms of knowledge creation as we have shown, but also for example, for peacebuilding interventions/practices (e.g. Baker, 2019; Julian et al, 2019; Kappler and Lemay-Hébert, 2019; McLeod and O’Reilly, 2019; Partis-Jennings, 2019; Vaittinen et al, 2019; Väyrynen, 2019). Holding these tensions, rather than resolving them, and making space for a cacophony of voices (Sylvester, 1995) and patchwork blocks, is essential to a fuller and better account of the field.…”