What Is Our Research For? Responsibility, Humility and the Production of Knowledge about Burundi

Abstract

Political space in Burundi underwent a remarkable opening during the Burundian peace process and its immediate aftermath, which led to a rise in social science scholarship in Burundi. This space has increasingly narrowed, particularly since the crisis in 2015, presenting important challenges for social science scholars of Burundi. This changing political environment has consequences for the production of knowledge on Burundi. It is therefore timely to ask what purposes does research on Burundi serve. This article reflects upon different motivations and goals for social science research in Burundi and how these affect the types of research questions that are asked and the formats for knowledge dissemination. It argues that both the opening and closing of the Burundian political landscape bring into sharp relief the need for greater scholarly reflexivity. The article argues that in contexts of structural inequality and increased political control such as Burundi, we need to be particularly attentive to the need for scholarly responsibility and humility, as well as an awareness of the dynamics that have led to calls for the decolonisation of knowledge within the social sciences.

Local Positionality in the Production of Knowledge in Northern Uganda

“…As a result, new research entrepreneurs, also known as assistants, fixers, enablers, or brokers, emerged to work as mediators of knowledge production (Obbo, 1990;Schiltz & Bu ¨scher, 2018). Curtis's (2019) research shows that the International Bibliography of the Social Sciences indexed 1,689 articles with Uganda in the title between 1995 and 2018, compared to 675 peer-reviewed works on Rwanda and 136 on Burundi (p. 6). Although not all of the indexed works are on Northern Uganda, the numbers give us an idea of how important Uganda was to researchers on different topics compared to Burundi and Rwanda in the same region and period.…”

Post-genocide identity politics and colonial durabilities in Rwanda

“…The deployment of 'ethnicity' as a key category through which to glance political histories in countries such as Rwanda and Burundi remain one of the hallmarks of colonial durability (Curtis 2019). 'Ethnic conflict' has become a dominant characterization of conflicts in the Great Lakes Region, Rwanda notwithstanding (Desrosiers and Vucetic 2018), this despite a score of works highlighting the politics of exclusion and inequality as core drivers of violence, and despite scholars' exposition of more complex lines of cleavage that preceded the 1994 genocide and contributed to its emergence.…”

Dear German Academia: What is Your Role in African Knowledge Production?

“…The main contribution of this fieldwork serves the White scholars’ academic careers. Although some scholars have started to critically discuss the purpose of their field research (Curtis, 2019), the continuous practice of designing research without considering local knowledge must be avoided at all costs. Moreover, non-African Africanists tend to oversimplify and generalise local dynamics privileging breadth over depth.…”