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- Convenors:
-
Emanuele Fantini
(IHE Delft Institute for Water Education)
Mitiku Tesfaye (EHESS and Sciences Po Paris)
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- Discussant:
-
Sabine Planel
(IRD - Institut de Recherches pour le Développement)
- Format:
- Workshop
- Streams:
- Politics and International Relations (x) Decoloniality & Knowledge Production (y)
- Location:
- Philosophikum, S78
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 31 May, -
Time zone: Europe/Berlin
Short Abstract:
Researchers with professional or personal bonds with African countries at war are encouraged to reflect on their positionality - ethical, political, methodological, and personal challenges - to imagine a more peaceful future in Africa and to speculate on the role that research should play therein.
Long Abstract:
This workshop is meant as a space for researchers with professional or personal bonds with Ethiopia and other African countries at war, to share and discuss the ethical, political, methodological, and personal challenges experienced in the past years. Some of us took position with one side in the conflict; others promoted international petitions; others preferred to keep silent; and others managed to pursue their research and fieldwork in the country. Most importantly many of us have faced tremendous challenges and hardships as they had been directly, or indirectly, exposed to war-induced violence and pressure. The destructive nature of the war and its over politicisation in Ethiopia disrupted personal relations and impacted also on academic collaborations; in other cases, the humanitarian emergency and the polarisation of the positions cemented ties among colleagues or research groups.
The workshop aims at reflecting on the role, possibility and challenges of social sciences in war contexts. Therefore, its focus will be on the methodological choices, approaches and strategies that we have adopted in the past years: pursuing fieldwork, turning to digital research and/or remote sensing, disengaging from research, avoiding the most contentious topics,.. By presenting and comparing the results of these different types of research, we wish to create a safe space to share personal experiences, moral dilemmas, and methodological challenges. By reflecting on our positionality of researchers confronted to a war, we wish to imagine a more peaceful future in Africa as elsewhere, and to speculate on the role that researcher should play therein.
Accepted contribution:
Session 1 Wednesday 31 May, 2023, -Gelila Enbaye (Global Public Policy Institute) Jakob Hensing (Global Public Policy Institute (GPPi))
Contribution short abstract:
Our contribution discusses normative challenges in a project developing an applied tool for political economy analysis and the assessment of options for external intervention. We critically reflect on simplification, a “problem-solving” outlook and our role as “outsiders” to the given context.
Contribution long abstract:
Our contribution identifies normative challenges that may arise in efforts to translate research findings on violent conflict into recommendations for Western policy practitioners, and develops positions on how these challenges can be ethically navigated. It reflects on the authors’ work on an ongoing project at the Global Public Policy Institute (GPPi), a Berlin-based think tank, with funding from and in collaboration with the German Foreign Office. The project develops a practice-oriented tool for understanding political economy dynamics in a given conflict and for assessing potential measures to externally influence those (ranging from reward-oriented strategies such as peace-positive investment and conflict-sensitive foreign aid to economically coercive tools like targeted sanctions and regulatory instruments in the resource sector). While it aims to create a generic tool that can be applied across various contexts to anticipate the prospects of such interventions and potential unintended consequences, the project engages with a concrete conflict on the African continent as a sample case. Therefore, it is embedded into a process of knowledge-translation by researchers for policymakers and seeks to reconcile demands from both perspectives. Considering especially the risk of reproducing dominant conflict narratives, our contribution discusses the tension between the complexity of any conflict setting and the simplification required to make dynamics accessible to often generalist practitioners. Additionally, we will address potential concerns arising from the project’s deliberately “problem solving”-oriented approach and our role as “outsiders” to the conflict under scrutiny with also limited possibilities for field research and immersion into the local context.