Paper short abstract:

Critical peace scholars increasingly endorse anthropology as research partner, but do not go far enough yet due to reductionist notions of anthropology and ethnography. The paper explores how to overcome conceptual and methodological challenges of ethnographic peace research.

Paper long abstract:

Mainstream peacebuilding interventions often fail because of the refusal of local agency and eye-level participation. The local turn has not delivered the wished for results either. Culture and the local are often reified and denied its flexibility and heterogeneity for better understanding and control. Given such continuing deficiencies, some critical peace scholars began endorsing anthropology as important partner in peace research. This is a welcome turn in a research field dominated by political sciences, but as I argue in this paper, such appropriation does not go far enough yet, either taking anthropology as an auxiliary science, reducing it to the ethnographic method, or dealing with the local only as part or legitimation of larger international efforts. In this paper, I aim to promote interdisciplinary dialogue and provide suggestions how anthropology can help to overcome conceptual and methodological challenges of ethnographic peace research.