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

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article seeks to show how the ethnographic peace research agenda can benefit from long-standing discussions in the anthropological literature. It sets out by arguing that the ‘anthropological imagination’ apparent in recent debates in peace and conflict studies is informed by an empiricist positivism that conceives of ethnography as a data-gathering tool. By drawing insights from the ‘writing culture’ and ‘Third World feminism’ debates, I will show how such empiricism was challenged and partly done away with in favour of new dialogical and collaborative approaches to knowledge production. In the second part, focussed on the context of the Kyrgyz Republic in Central Asia, I will illustrate the limits and blind spots of the prevalent empiricist approach to studying peace and conflict by showing how discourses and imaginaries of a ‘culture of peace’, tolerance and multiculturalism conceal forms of exclusion, marginalization and hidden conflict. I will show how my own collaborative research sheds light on community security practitioners’ efforts to understand and tackle security challenges. This practico-discursive analysis exemplifies how critical ethnographic peace research can help to uncover patterns of conflict management, post-conflict governmentality, and the construction and ‘othering’ of group identities.