Towards a politics of collaborative worldmaking: ethics, epistemologies and mutual positionalities in conflict research

Abstract

Scholarly engagement with ethics, epistemologies and positionalities dilemmas in conflict research is marked by a disconnect between self-referential debates in the Ivory Tower and the very places research takes place. If there is reflection on foreign researchers, research brokers or research participants, accounts of genuinely collaborative work are rare. Drawing from a decade of collaborative research in eastern Congo, our essay targets this gap by critically discussing challenges we faced and lessons we learned with regards to our mutual positionalities. In so doing, we join debates calling for situated reflection on ethnography in and of conflict zones. Based on our research experience, we contend that a fully joint approach – including planning, execution, analysis and writing – can be an avenue toward decolonizing our ethics and epistemologies. Moreover, we argue for a pluriversal ethics that accounts for context and positionalities of the involved researchers and allows for collaborative worldmaking.