The patch as method: The arts’ contribution towards understandings of conflict

Abstract

This article asks: how do art practice and research give form to changing dynamics of conflict? Its argument is two-fold: art’s contribution can be developed from empirical considerations (what art finds out), and from methodological ones (how art finds something out). Bringing in art practice and the research methods it informs into political science helps understand conflict and its changes: by engaging simultaneously with the interaction between the collective and the personal, art practice and research elucidates those complex and layered narratives used by various actors in conflict that often resist approaches rooted in social and political sciences. By paying attention to everyday interactions and emphasizing dynamism, art provides a different way to chart changes in armed conflict. Art documents discourses that are difficult to communicate otherwise and allows us to detect and engage with the grey areas, transformations, processes and ambivalences of conflicts that escape neat categorizations.