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Ethnography’s Kitchen
Ethnography
2022, Vol. 0(0) 1–21
© The Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/14661381221090895
journals.sagepub.com/home/eth
Towards a politics of
collaborative worldmaking:
ethics, epistemologies and
mutual positionalities in conflict
research
Christoph Vogeland Josaphat Musamba
Ghent University, Gent, Belgium
Abstract
Scholarly engagement with ethics, epistemologies and positionalities dilemmas in conflict re-
search 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.
Keywords
Ethics, epistemologies, positionalities, knowledge production, worldmaking, conflict, violence
Introduction
As Feyerabend says about the scientific method: anything goes (Callon 1984: 209).
Conditions in many civil wars simply preclude ethical field research (Wood 2006: 384).
Provocative or depressing, these statements speak to often withheld realities of
Corresponding author:
Christoph Vogel, Ghent University, Universiteitstraat 8, Gent ,9000 Belgium.
Email: christoph.vogel@ugent.be
research in places called ‘unstable’,‘under fire’,or‘dangerous’and the inherent
laundry list of ethical and epistemological questions that accompany such research
(Greenhouse et al., 2002;Nordstrom and Robben, 1996;Kovats-Bernat, 2002;Lee-
Treweek and Linkogle, 2000). While Callon’squipisnocarte blanche to avoid
thorny interrogation, Wood’s caveat is not a call to abandon conflict research al-
together, but a reminder to take ethics seriously in their very pluriversal emanations.
The suggestion of ‘anything goes’thus hints at the serendipitous potential of
ethnographic work to produce valuable insight into questions of violence and war,
but also to reflect critically on how we activate this potential in our work. Like Levi-
Strauss’‘laissez-vous porter par le terrain’(Descola, 2005: 69), these epigraphs thus
merely signpost how the startling nature of ethnography features a perpetual, critical
dialogue between researchers and places where they work.
Drawing from a decade of collaborative ethnographic work in eastern Democratic
Republic of the Congo, this essay problematizes the practice of research in conflict
zones, proposing a genuine streamlining of collaboration across all stages of
knowledge production. Based on a reckoning that ‘warisnotamatterof‘all terror all
the time “all over the place”’ (Korf et al., 2010: 386, emphasis in original), we argue
for a sober reflection that refutes Orientalism (Said, 1978) and the essentializing
of Africa. This, we suggest, can be a starting point to work towards a research
politics of collaborative worldmaking that embraces the relational, pluriversal
character of ethics, epistemologies and positionalities in ethnographies of conflict
(see Kondo, 2018). Problematically called “field,”the construction of these places as
a‘discursive and geographical space different from their own echoes a mixture of
colonialist, orientalist, and vanguardist [sic!] modernisation thinking’(Richmond
et al., 2015:24).
Literatures on “field”research in conflict zones have abundantly discussed the po-
sitionality of foreign researchers (Hoffman & Tarawalley, 2014;Vlassenroot, 2006),
leading to numerous counterpoints focussing on so-called ‘research assistants’and re-
spondents (Mwambari, 2019;Eriksson Baaz and Utas, 2019;Parashar, 2019;Peter and
Strazzari, 2017). Discussing positionality is both fruitful and hurtful for it is a most
intimate part of scholarly work, especially in the context of ethnography as an ‘embodied
research practice’(Krause, 2021: 330). Here, however, we are interested a grey zone in
between –the mutually constituted identity of mixed research teams. In the context of
political ethnography (Schatz, 2009), our mutual positionalities followed the principle of
‘collective work as a modality of objectivation, (Baczko et al., 2021:13–14). In our
context, this consisted of planning, conducting and exploiting research jointly and thus
had repercussions as to how we as team negotiate the ‘friction’(Tsing, 2005) of contested
research terrains with our positionalities, which are ‘never fixed or unitary, but multiple
and shifting, partly [...] reflecting changing conflict dynamics and allegiances.’(Eriksson
Baaz and Utas, 2019: 171).
In order to approach these questions, we have structured this essay into six parts:
after a brief review of key debates, we introduce the empirical, practical, logistical
and biographical origins of our reflections. We then dedicate three interconnected,
interlocking sections to the key themes of this essay. We begin with epistemological
2Ethnography 0(0)
and methodological questions, followed by a discussion of our respective and
mutual positionalities and end with a section titled ‘politics of research’in which we
address ethical debates. These different streams of reflection lead us to a set of
concluding thoughts where we demonstrate why collaborative ethnography in
conflict zones may hardly tick all the boxes of textbook ethics but offer the chance
for constant reflection about how we act towards our environment and embrace
epistemic diversity.
Locating debates: Ethics, epistemologies, positionalities
Based on the methodological and ethical observations we accumulated in 10 years of
collaborative research in eastern Congo, this essay looks at how we have tried to
make sense of violence and contestation in a zone of ‘no peace, no war’(Richards,
2005). It seeks to further problematize debates often framed by the political cor-
rectness of institutional review boards (in North America), other university-based
ethics and safety clearance processes (mostly in Europe) and a persisting ‘gap
between “procedural ethics”and “ethics in practice”’ that can easily develop into
questionable, uneven practice (Fujii, 2012: 717; Bhattacharya, 2014:842;
Shesterinina, 2019). In our case, to offer but one example, it allowed universities to
not worry about one of us to be sent back ‘home’without safety concerns, while the
other was once denied permission to travel on the basis of scientificconflict
mappings he had produced himself. Ethnographic conflict research complicates the
sequential pathways alluded to by research designs and ethics boards. More spe-
cifically,it questions the global trend of corseting research into replicable bureau-
cratic standards and its capacity to reckon with the relational and situated political
and social contours of a context.
The ticking-the-box and one-size-fits-all approaches by which ethics committees and
institutional review boards often brush over complexity and thus reproduce an inwards-
oriented sense of ethics (Yanow and Schwartz-Shea, 2008;Fujii, 2012;Bhattacharya,
2014), even more so since the Covid-19 pandemic kicked in (Mwambari et al., 2021;
Nyenyezi Bisoka, 2020). Yet, even before that, intense discussion over ethics and its
associated institutional and political dynamics culminated in the US-dominated
‘Qualitative Transparency Debate’tackling a host of issues such as openness, trans-
parency, informed consent, safety (for researchers as much as research participants) and
adjacent questions (Parkinson and Wood, 2015). This debate also re-contextualized the
ambiguity of ethical principles, such as by conjugating openness and transparency to
cater for an academic public with the imperative to respect and protect research par-
ticipants, but also the interplay of ethical and epistemological standards with regards to
the positionalities of conflict scholars (Kapiszewski and Wood, 2021:2–3)
This essay speaks to these different debates and audiences on the basis of concrete,
lived experience of fully integrated, joint research. If based on ethnography as a distinct
methodological strand –including targeted and accidental versions of it (see Fujii,
2015)–it is less a contribution to specific ethical dilemmas or disciplinary discussions
already covered by numerous other contributions. Rather, it is a comprehensive reflection
Vogel and Musamba 3
on how we approach the knowledge production in conflict areas as a whole. Moreover, the
essay contributes to discussions about decoloniality and power inequalities between
researchers from the South and the North (Fahey, 2019). In so doing, we juxtapose ethical
and epistemological problems, including ethics definitions that exclude the very people
concerned by research, advocating for more emic and situated visions on ethics and
joining broader calls for epistemic freedom (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018;Bashizi, 2020).
Building collaborative ethnographic practice
We met in eastern Congo in 2012 by chance and over a drink with others, and quickly
became friends regularly hanging out and discussing. While one of us worked for a local
research centre, the other one was on an internship with a regional organisation working
on peace and conflict. Having stayed in touch since, we began doing research on the
demobilisation of combatants a few months later. While short on means (except for a
modest scholarship), we had ample time, shared the curiosity for understanding conflict
and decided to use the stipend to jointly conduct research –sharing beers, beds and
backseats of motorbikes during numerous trips. A little later, one of us was recruited to do
a PhD in a larger project. That same project also offered the other one a direct contract
rather than a sub-contracting arrangement so frequent in academia, and thus meant that
both of us where recognized in our respective terms by the university (Eriksson Baaz and
Utas, 2019;Cronin-Furman and Lake, 2018). For the better part of the following years, we
conducted ethnographic research on ‘conflict minerals’, however not without side-
projects we ran together or individually. Hence, we need to note the following ca-
veats: our broader research interest (before, during and after our work on minerals) covers
conflict dynamics at large, including very operational aspects of armed mobilisation,
insecurity and violence, which may indirectly influence this essay. We have both also
conducted extensive research individually and with other colleagues, even though the
examples and reflections we present here focus on our joint work alone. In that sense, we
are also aware of the limited range of our reflections, representing a (as repeatedly
recognized by our peers) a unique set-up of two male individuals with respective
characters, upbringing and life histories and should be read as such (for a more feminist
and intersectional perspective in the same region, see Bahati, 2019 and Verweijen, 2020)
Our identities as researchers of different origin (African and European), straddling
different worlds (academic and not)
1
impact on power relations between us and towards
interlocutors. Our relationship was and is a close, complicit friendship but also features
constant quarrel about the content and form of our work. Yet, that was crucial for our
mutual intellectual development and for acquiring a shared ‘knowledge of the local rules
of the game acquired through lived experience’(Hoffmann, 2014: 5). As opposed to
conventional approaches, we ran a system of shared leadership when conducting research,
including veto power in decisions and complementary roles and responsibilities. This
included not only practical aspects of our work, but sensitivity and adaptation to racialised
dynamics. We operated both with the function of ‘autochthony’as a mechanism of access
and that of whiteness as perceived neutrality (see James, 2022: 5). We did so consciously
and strategically used ourselves mutually as protection for the other one. Initially
4Ethnography 0(0)
experimental, this close form of collaboration turned out to be efficient in jointly handling
what others called the ‘rough and tumble world of bargaining and brokerage in the
economy of the Congo’(Hoffmann, 2014: 14), including at roadblocks, in dangerous
moments and while seeking authorisation and access.
Yet, we often had fundamental disagreements requiring controversial debate on
conceptual, political, practical and ethical questions. This constant exchange even
extended into prolific social media groups involving other colleagues and friends and
cametohaveanimportantinfluence on our work. The resulting debate and
triangulation –pretty much a collective ‘chatnography’(K¨
aihk ¨
o, 2020), but done as a
two-way street –became essential for us to cultivate a pluriversal understanding of
contested narratives and ‘facts’,amplified by politicised frames and the spread of
social media.
2
Similar to our building of networks with ‘key informants’(Kovats-
Bernat, 2002), the collective triangulation of rumours and stories was important to
increase our own and our interlocutors’safety. If in classic nomenclature, the term
triangulation is often invoked for techniques to make research replicable and gen-
eralizable, our deep ethnographic approach to conflict research used triangulation to
contrast different sources over one respective issue at play –moreoftenthannot
safety-related matters –rather than in an orthodox comparative angle (Ve r w e i j e n ,
2020).
Whether collaborative or individual, conducting ethnography in eastern Congo
comes with peculiar challenges related to access and safety, which we discuss jointly
given their linkages. Whether conflict writ small or other social phenomena at large,
such ‘constraints [are] a perfect excuse to no longer invest in conflict research’
(Vlassenroot, 2006: 192). Due to volatile, blurred conflict dynamics, ‘gaining ad-
equately authoritative permission to carry out research may be impossible’(Wood,
2006: 379). When still doing so, one faces tough choices such as aborting trips or
interviews due to the risk of crossfire, ambushes or detention (Cramer et al., 2016;
Suarez Bonilla, 2014). These risks were familiar to us. For the sake of just one
example, once in 2015, we travelled back by motorcycle from a rebel-held area where
we had done interviews with armed group leaders and civilians. After a delay in
departure, we suddenly had to pause in a village due to ongoing clashes only a few
hundred metres ahead. Strikingly, this safety incident was also an example of certain
dynamics we studied, namely the evolution of armed groups driven by ideology and
aspiration to stateness into formations engaging in banditry as their more stable and
reciprocal revenue-generation strategies were taken over by ongoing conflict dy-
namics (Vogel, 2022). If such risks can never be fully controlled, previous trips had
helped us build ties with people in the area and shaped our willingness to listen and
understand risks in anticipation. Instead of disengaging entirely, we thus rather argue
that not trying do things safely would contradict our ethical commitment. This also
begs the question of how to guarantee our own safety and that of anyone actively or
otherwise involved in our research. To approximate such guarantee, we ‘wasted’alot
of time walking around and hanging out, observing everyday life to increase our
sensitivity for usual and unusual, concrete and abstract situations (Laplantine, 1996).
Intriguingly, these practices of hanging out also offered unique chances to learn:
Vogel and Musamba 5
We sat in an ironmonger’s backyard, talking local economy. All of a sudden, people arrive
with unmarked mineral bags. One of them drops and bursts, exposing the contained coltan.
As the ironmonger interrupts our discussion, a government agent enters the scene and calls
him. The porters, the ironmonger, and the agent discuss, before refilling the minerals into
new, marked bags. Later, it turns out that the agent that facilitated the operation was pre-
viously a trader. While the social and economic bonds provided necessary connections to
cover up the deal, they also trumped loyalties to his formal job.
3
Our joint ethnographic practice, in addition to the ethical and epistemic considerations
we discuss below, thus featured a particular emphasis on access and safety, as much for us
as for interlocutors or bystanders. Our observations take a holistic stance covering the
overall research process (before, during and after), but we have noted many nuances: if for
foreign researchers, this tends to begin before, for domestic researchers it continues after
finishing a project and comes with more danger, as a colleague of ours noted: ‘Young man,
be careful, as the militiamen in the forest will know that you write your dissertation on
them, they can come and hurt you’(M’munga, 2017: 49, own translation). While one of
us can escape easily, the other is born and raised in eastern Congo and still lives there with
family. Foreigners need a visa and an ordre de mission –a signed, stamped document
serving as entrance ticket to the anterooms of Congo’s proliferous red-tape bureaucracy,
the proverbial tout-´
etat congolais. Here, (foreign) researchers legitimize their project
towards government authorities. For the sake of transparency, we embarked on a plethora
of courtesy visits to receive endorsement stamps. Once in the field, the scaled-up power of
these stamps became currency for passage and sojourn. A colonial hangover, these
politics of stamps reflect authority conceptions within state institutions that also extend to
non-state actors that fight the government and, paradoxically, also aim to emulate that
same state symbolism. During our trips –each offering its own logistic challenges
4
–the
passing of frontlines between government and rebel territory hence came along with
identical procedures of stamping our ordre de mission on both fronts, just using separate
papers.
Researching illicit and informal activities such as insurgency, contraband or crime
poses an array of access challenges, as studies of cross-border dynamics demonstrated
(Ellis and MacGaffey, 1996). This holds true for places like eastern Congo too, where
frontlines roadblocks create de facto boundaries and interstitial spaces inside a national
territory, marked by fluctuating geographies of military control and differential techniques
of accumulation (Schouten et al., 2017;Roitman, 2004). The ways in which participants
of local economies deal with the resulting uncertainty resonates with the idea of navi-
gation (Vigh, 2009). This pushed us further to reflect on the contextualised aspects of our
research. Here, article quinze,afictional constitutional article to fend for oneself is il-
lustrative, as it made us rethink the need to conjugate textbook ethics and situated
knowledge.
5
Congolese soldiers and security officials are often remotely posted and
un(der)paid, relying on occasional extortion. Yet, they rarely use their full sovereign
power –knowing that without a modicum of restraint it is less sustainable to prey on
populations or businesspeople the next day. When travelling as team –a Congolese and a
foreign researcher –we often made an offering of fruit or other food at roadblocks,
6Ethnography 0(0)
discouraging extortion. Not only did it secure us from being asked for bribes, it often
turned into unexpected encounters. Yet, in certain cases we faced difficulties. During one
trip we were held by an intelligence official trying to extort us by threatening violence. His
claim over missing authorisation being false –a rare counterexample to the politics of
stamps –we drew in others, including local military and migration authorities and used
leverage with higher-ups. Despite fixing the situation, we aborted the trip, not knowing
what safety risks we may encounter if staying in the official’s area of responsibility. In
sum, access negotiation that accounts for position, interests, fears and suspicions of
interlocutors –is paramount, in spaces within and beyond government control (Musamba,
2020).
If most of these issues concern both foreign and domestic researchers, the effects on the
latter outweigh those on the former. This includes dynamics of (armed) surveillance,
being caught in between conflict parties, communities and their expectations, plain in-
timidation, cognitive dissonance between Western epistemologies and realities of the
‘field at home,’but also silencing and gendered discrimination (Musamba and Vogel,
2019;Bahati, 2019;Mudunga, 2019;Batumike, 2020;Bashizi, 2020). This leads us from
logistic and practical challenges on the ground to another important question of col-
laboration. As opposed to recent work on research brokers that highlight the colonial
practice of silencing and the unidirectional character of knowledge production (Eriksson
Baaz and Utas, 2019), we have opted for joint research that unmakes the compart-
mentalized workstream of local researchers gathering data and foreign ones analysing it.
This is different from ‘a simple conveyance of data’(Middleton and Cons, 2014: 283) for
the ‘lines between us remain intermittently stark and blurred’and we co-own the data
(Middleton and Pradhan, 2014: 371). While these debates have recently resurfaced in
general and Congo-specific debate (Cronin-Furman and Lake, 2018;Bouka, 2018;
Ansoms et al., 2020), this essay draws from research practice that predates much of these
debates and sits on a longstanding tradition of turning the vast majority of our research
into co-authored publications. In that sense, we offer a tangible, non-tokenist counterpoint
to the dominance of single authorship (Gupta, 2014), melting the situatedness of our
respective gatekeeper roles across all stages of knowledge production (Laplantine, 1996).
Towards epistemological openness
Doing ethnography is different from, say, have a seamless, invisible, noiseless drone
(pace Derek Gregory) flying over a place: it is tangible, interactional and thus fallible, but
a unique chance to acquire knowledge precluded in other methodological approaches.
Yet, this type of research heavily depends on whom does research, what is observed,
whom is interviewed, how and in what situation knowledge is produced. In a virulent plea
for ethnography, Olivier de Sardan argued for merging theoretical with empirical rigour,
for ‘interpretative virtuosity’anchored in empirics and for theory to be rooted in its
‘reference real[ity]’(Olivier De Sardan, 2008:8). This rhymes with the comparative
epistemological openness pursued by interpretivist, as opposed to positivist approaches to
social inquiry. However, this binary alone is insufficient to justify the unique value of
collaborative ethnographies of conflict. Reflecting on their joint research in Syria, Baczko,
Vogel and Musamba 7
Dorronsoro and Quesnay highlight the risk of decontextualized data ‘when studying fluid
social dynamics’and the added value of collective conceptualising with the aim of
‘putting the observed situations and the actors’narratives in a dialogue’(Baczko et al.,
2021: 3, 12). In other words, individual theorization or research limited to ‘cooking data’
(Biruk, 2018) can be ‘blind to the theoretically most interesting moments.’(Baczko et al.,
2021: 11). More broadly, research relying on remote methods and sub-contracting thus
poses severe problems of accuracy, and we will later return to how this also raises grave
ethical concerns (Bouka, 2018;Cronin-Furman and Lake, 2018).
In collaborative work, the character of a team conditions the degree of epistemological
openness. This includes all stages of knowledge production including planning, data
collection, analysis, translation (both conceptually and in bare linguistic terms) and
writing. This requires deep mutual understanding to control for bias, diversify sources and
perspectives, and saturate data beyond reasonable doubt. Olivier de Sardan’s‘reference
real’demands that researchers generate simultaneous proximity and distance in order not
get seduced by quick or epistemologically convenient conclusions. To avoid a priori
assumptions, we must therefore reconcile reflexivity, creativity and theory-led research
designs in order to disentangle the social dynamics of conflict and violence across ‘semi-
autonomous fields’(Moore, 1973) and produce ‘situated knowledge’(Haraway, 1991).
Reflexive science relies on a ‘dwelling in theory’(Burawoy, 1998: 5) that embeds singular
items of research into context instead of using them as standalone artefacts. That creates
‘hypotheses-generating uncertainty, a controlled serendipity that opens new objects and
novel research questions’(Baczko et al., 2021: 3). Reflexive science also challenges the
primacy of positivism by reckoning with empirically ‘liquefied’binaries such as state–
non-state, war–peace, or formal–informal (Arnaut et al., 2008: 6). As such, it aims
to reduce the effects of power –domination, silencing, objectification, and normalization.
Reflexive science realizes itself with the elimination of power effects, with the emancipation
of lifeworlds. […] In highlighting the ethnographic worlds of the local, it challenges the
postulated omnipotence of the global, whether it be international capital, neoliberal politics,
space of flows, or mass culture. Reflexive science valorises context, challenges reification,
and thereby establishes the limits of positive methods. (Burawoy, 1998: 30).
In our case, this meant challenging dominant epistemologies. Reports on mining and
conflict in eastern Congo sell an imagery dominated by shady traders and greedy rebels.
This triggered stubborn but false imaginations of ‘conflict minerals’(Vogel, 2022;Vogel
and Musamba, 2017;Kivu Security Tracker, 2019), leading to a ‘cargo cult science’
(Korf, 2006) that obfuscates the deeper logics and power relations linking politics, war
and business. We decided to tackle part of this problem by emphasising the emic concepts
we encountered when doing research. Emic concepts consist of terminologies and
definitions that arise from their very context, framed by interlocutors and not by ab-
straction of foreign researchers. We consciously decided to analyse data and theorize
around the grids we were offered instead of abiding to orthodoxy. This helped us frame
our arguments in a language less tainted by colonial and Orientalist imagery of corruption
and savagery in a presumed terra nullius. As opposed to seemingly clinical contours of
8Ethnography 0(0)
large-N studies, we embraced the murkiness of intersubjectivity and spatio-temporal
relativity. In analogy to works on ‘public authority’and ‘navigation’(Lund, 2006;Vigh,
2009), reflexive sociology conceives of the world as ‘simultaneously shaped by and
shaping an external field of forces’(Burawoy, 1998: 15). It calls for ‘multi-sited research
as a technique to generate context-dependent knowledge and the study of social processes
and narratives, rather than modelling events (Sambanis, 2004: 263; Marcus, 1995: 112).
As opposed to the positivist caricature of ‘context effects in empirical research as “noise”
in the obtained data’(Korf, 2006: 469), tracing narratives is crucial to avoid taking proxies
for causes. Multi-sited research offers spatial and temporal depth; it reduces selection bias
by looking at interconnected dynamics that lead to an outcome instead of merely using
outcomes for econometric inference (Bennett and Elman, 2006: 456).
Multi-site ethnography shifts ‘locations rather than bounded fields’(Gupta and
Ferguson, 1997: 38), it is ‘research while traveling’(Spittler, 2014: 213) that pays at-
tention to ‘socio-political context that is not necessarily observed’otherwise (Moore,
2005: 9). Different sites and situations can form comparative dialogue ‘in which the
global is collapsed into and made an integral part of parallel, related local situations’
(Marcus, 1995: 102). Purist, single-site anthropology may argue this precludes ‘thick
description’or ‘thick observation’(Geertz, 1973;Spittler, 2014). Yet, the inherent
mobility of multi-site ethnography –tracing people and flows and literally ‘follow[ing]
the thing’–help us grasping ‘powerful, important, disturbing connections between
Western consumers and the distant strangers’(Cook, 2004: 642). Such research, hence, is
consciously political –not in terms of taking sides or actively partaking but in abandoning
the pretence of detached observation and take the role of an ‘ethnographer-activist,
renegotiating identities in different sites’(Marcus, 1995: 113).
6
Still, despite emphasizing
reflexivity, proximity and immersion into ‘native’environments, class and race differ-
ences between us and our interlocutors (e.g. artisanal miners or combatants) remain due to
the ‘domino-centrism’between ourselves and towards interlocutors (Lemieux, 2018).
This again speaks to the ‘illusion’of being fully immersed (Olivier De Sardan 2008) and
highlights the ways in which this illusion plays out depending on our (mutual) posi-
tionalities to which we turn now.
(Mutual) positionalities: Becoming brokers
When doing research, a scholar’s person collides with that of interlocutors, creating
relational positionality. In that sense, position and situation matter to scientific validity:
knowledge emerges within a ‘situated’context not only created by outside factors but by
the positionality of researchers and the concomitant ethical pitfalls, including the tropes
inherent in our worldviews (Rose, 1996;Haraway, 1991). Any researcher –no matter how
attentive –inevitably misses out on certain issues or discards others due to pre-defined
mind-sets. Hence, ‘the idea that researchers can wipe their mental slates clean when [on]
fieldwork is an impossible empiricist dream’(Hoffmann, 2014:9). This is not a problem
per se, but it is important to be transparent about the choices made, since ethnography
‘depends in large measure on the affective and bodily practices and peculiarities of the
ethnographer’(Gupta, 2014: 397).
7
Like brokers in other contexts, researchers connect
Vogel and Musamba 9
different worlds and people. Being a broker implies a degree of liminality between
immersion and detachment, and researchers in conflict zones can succumb to a ‘delusion
of belonging when, in fact, [they] can never become a true insider’(Malejacq and
Mukhopadhyay, 2016: 1019).
Mutual, or combined positionalities are even more complex than individual ones.
Forming a team, we often were the curious figures straddling on the spectrum of insiders
and outsiders without ever being just either or (Mwambari, 2019) and with varying
degrees of immersion (Laplantine, 1996: 20). While classic anthropology suggests that
immersion requires long-term involvement (Geertz, 1973), recent contributions by
conflict scholars have argued that short-term and repeated engagement may yield as much
success and as many or few ethical problems (Krause, 2021). In eastern Congo, we
witnessed that short stays by others were often likened with remote approaches –e.g.
researchers studying conflict without ever leaving the relatively safe, comfortable hu-
manitarian hub Goma –or so-called parachutisme in reference to some journalists’speed
visits without any prior or follow-up engagement. While immersion usually beats
armchair and dataset research by going to places and listening to people, it comes at the
price of interfering with others’lives and a more direct impact of positionalities. We chose
a middle ground of multiple medium length periods to create stable relations and trust
without staying in a very Geertzian fashion, yet not without aiming at a lived under-
standing crucial to the production of situated knowledge –such as by indulging
hardships of travel, like being stuck in the mud, seeking shelter for a downpour or having to
wait for hours after the umpteenth breakdown of the engine, turned out to be an effective way
of reducing distance [and] understand more of people’s everyday lives, and their frames of
reference and narratives. It also prompted me to constantly reflect upon my positionality as a
(privileged) researcher. (Verweijen, 2015: 14)
Our positionalities mattered with regards to how as individuals with different roles and
backgrounds we interacted with each other and how we collectively brokered ‘power
relations between researchers, […] and researched’(Deane and Stevano, 2016: 226). As
individuals and as a team, this impacted on how we would be perceived by interlocutors,
and what consequences it would have for technical (access, safety etc.) and analytical
aspects of our research (situating knowledge, reflecting etc.). Vlassenroot (2006:193)
argues that ‘research in conflict regions is strongly influenced by the relationship between
the researcher and the research subject and by the autonomy of the researcher.’We would
add that it is also influenced by how we got to be known as a collective persona in the
places we worked. Importantly, we were not exempt from ambiguity and concomitant
suspicions. Military authorities or armed groups may see human rights investigators as
spies but academics as amplifying their voices (or, depending on their previous expe-
riences and imaginations, vice versa) and we often had to go at length in trying to be as
detailed as we could when introducing our research objectives. In that, we attempted to be
as honest and transparent as possible. This also includes the question why interlocutors
should dedicate their time at all. For it was unclear if our research could yield any benefit
for them, we chose to ‘disappoint’participants during informed consent procedures
10 Ethnography 0(0)
(Campbell, 2017;Lewis et al. 2019). We told everyone that while we hoped our work
could do good, we were very sceptical whether it would. Yet, in a more narrow and
tangible sense of beneficence, we had the privilege to organize a conference to discuss and
share our findings with around 40 key stakeholders in 2018 –a rare practice outside the
affluent spheres of applied donor-steered research but copied by other academics since.
Nonetheless, we recognize the
institutionally backed power that academic writing carries and the powerful effects it can
have. Anyone whose ethnographic description has been subject to contestation by partic-
ipants […] is likely to be aware of the power wielded […] about others. (Mosse, 2015:133)
Still, our experience made us question if this is actual power, and not just relational
power unmade by scale. The diversity of such challenges highlight that positionalities are
not limited to the rationalizing personae of researchers but involve emotional aspects
including trauma (Jamar and Chappuis, 2016;Lee-Treweek and Linkogle, 2000: 129–
130; Suarez Bonilla, 2014: 146). Qualitative empirical work exposes researchers to
emotional dangers in their relationships with participants. Experiences of violence, in-
cluding passively through interviews, affect us. While it takes time to deal with resulting
wounds (Shesterinina, 2019;Theidon, 2014), it impacts the cognitive and analytical
capacities ‘with potentially damaging consequences for the researcher herself and/or for
informants’(Cramer et al., 2011: 5). As a team, we take pride in our risk-averse approach
to research and traveling and techniques to camouflage informants, but we probably did
not always avoid traumatic moments neither for our interlocutors nor ourselves. Yet, as a
team, we learned about our differences in relation to fear and ways to deal with it, as much
as recurrent moments of exhaustion and fatigue connected to stress, uncertainty and
insecurity (see Baczko et al., 2021: 7). While we can smile about certain episodes in
hindsight, there were concrete reasons for one of us insisting to sleep in the same room in
certain areas we visited and the other one being scared by the behaviour exhibited by
certain authorities that met us with suspicion. The resulting effects accompanied us but
often remained analytically elusive –emotions are only really there as you feel them. This
taught us to balance the weakness of emotions against the feigned strength of street
credibility and adrenaline described by the ‘Barbarian syndrome’as a particular ema-
nation of Orientalism (Verweijen, 2015;Said, 1978). Experiencing our positionalities in
different ways taught us how we place ourselves within the struggle to broker a balance
between emotional proximity and rationalizing distance.
Whose ethics? The real politics of research
Beyond ethnography, there is a wide consensus across social sciences that ethics matter.
There is also little opposition to the need of informed consent as a prime practice to
conduct research with human participants, even though ‘real world conditions, however,
often call into question the way in which institutional rules conceive of this most basic
task’(Fujii, 2012: 718). The work of Lee Ann Fujii teaches us that while we have to obtain
institutional approval, that alone does not meet the requirements of ethical research and is
Vogel and Musamba 11
in itself marred by pitfalls of malpractice (Fujii, 2012: 722; Campbell, 2017). Others have
hit the same nerve:
Ethical dilemmas are difficult to generalize because they are shaped by researchers’iden-
tities. Gender, race, age, nationality, class and other background factors, as well as personality
and experience, all determine how researchers perceive their environment, conduct them-
selves, make judgements and are judged by respondents. (Krause 2021: 332)
This begs the question if –despite informed consent protocols –it is possible to offer
full transparency, protection, beneficence and confidentiality? The answer is no, and
workarounds need to be built on flexible adaption and context-sensitive restraint from
risk. Guidelines alone ‘cannot anticipate the many dilemmas other than issues of informed
consent and data security’(Wood, 2006: 380; Goodhand, 2000). In places marked by
displacement and poverty, respondents are used to applied research by aid actors, leading
to response sets not only for questions of content but also of consent. While we solved
literacy issues with oral consent, when necessary in respondents’mother tongue, we still
wonder if we did not elicit hopes by accident (Fujii, 2012: 719). In the absence of anything
better, we carried encouraged interlocutors to ask us any question as a sort of mutual
interviewing that broadened the narrow act of informed consent. As Collignon (2010: 77)
notes, compensation is important too in this context, but highly disputed between US and
European traditions (others being largely neglected). Still, spending time with researchers
implies for interlocutors to lose time for revenue-generating activities such as farming or
trading, and so we applied different compensation techniques. While we paid cash when
appropriate, such as when a person had to cover transport to meet us, we tried to focus on
non-monetary transactions whenever possible. Like Jourdan (2006: 187), we shared
meals or drinks to discuss methodological and safety issues prior to interviews. Based on
that, we decided to cancel meetings when not at ease. We aborted entire trips when
necessary, or interviews when consent was impossible due to trauma or other reasons. In
all that, we often relied on interlocutors and other sources instead of written ethics
guidance. To put it very bluntly: our assessment is that people in eastern Congo muster full
agency. Except very rare particular situations, they told us very clearly if and when things
were ok or not, and we abided by that. But does that make us ethical researchers? In the
frame of the academic debates that we address, probably yes. But who is to judge that, and
what or whose ethics are we to apply? Is it even possible, in contexts of conflict and
contestation, to comply with the ethical stances and expectations of a highly diverse set of
interlocutors?
We often felt reminded by Danny Hoffman’s (2003: 10) reflections on Sierra Leone,
that ‘scholars working in combat zones cannot escape the reality that participation and
observation […] are inseparable and are inherently political activities.’With many in-
terlocutors, we established ‘weak ties’(Granovetter, 1985), leading to relationships in
which it was not unusual to ‘being called a “frère”[which] implies for instance being loyal
to each other and helping each other out’(Hoffmann, 2014: 10). This creates moments of
seduction, when smugglers or ‘members of warring groups […] ask for advice, which
made it extremely difficult not to cross the line’(Vlassenroot, 2006: 197). We certainly
12 Ethnography 0(0)
gave advice to armed group members too –even if we limited ourselves to suggesting
turning to studies or adhering to international humanitarian law. Whether or not these
challenges are unique to areas of ongoing conflict, the politicisation of research and
knowledge production is a main ethical question, echoing the idea of the ‘politics of truth.’
(Hoffmann, 2014). In eastern Congo these politics are made of overlapping, contested
narratives that are driven ‘by a burgeoning “economy of truth-making”[…] the engine of
which is radio trottoir (pavement radio) or the rumors machine. As elsewhere, Kivutians
manufacture meaning’(Verweijen, 2015: 9). This is hardly surprising after three decades
of conflict (Vogel and Stearns, 2018;Vlassenroot and Raeymaekers, 2009), but heightens
the threshold for assessing the accuracy of data given the epistemological limits of doing
research in a region where conflict includes struggle over meaning. This relates to the
discursive construction of truth(s) –ever more so in the age of social media. Examples
regarding Rwanda’s purported or real role in eastern Congo demonstrate this as much as
our research on ‘conflict minerals.’In this context, certain ‘researchers have built ‘at-
tachments’and taken on advocacy roles’(Cramer et al., 2011: 4). For discourses’, ideas’
and policies’ability to move (Peck & Theodore, 2010) and due to the need to take an
aircraft from Congo to reach places where international policy about Congo is made,
researchers are gatekeepers and may become merchants of security or peace expertise
(Verweijen, 2020;Craze, 2021). Despite the risk to be wrong and the pitfalls of public
engagement, we deliberately chose to participate –even though this meant coping with
potential ‘public afterlives of ethnography’that are beyond our control (Fassin, 2015).
Not least for that reason, it remains important to reflect upon such engagement:
How much scope is there for doubt, for questioning, for relativizing, for nuance in the space
of even an extended tweet […]? Does the constant exposure to the iconic images of the
Congolese child soldier or rape victim, unencumbered by much text or explanation, not drive
barbarian narratives ever deeper into our minds? (Verweijen, 2015: 16)
Technological advances multiply the compression and speed of information and thus
impact on the framing and repackaging of raw data. This highly political interplay of
information and discourse generates ever-increasing contestation. Academics engaging
publicly, outside obscure corners of scholarly journals are inextricably embroiled in such,
and the politics of research are thus inherently intertwined with its ethics. Presumed
scientific neutrality and objectivity, we learned, may not be perceived as such by
stakeholders in a conflict, whether perpetrators, victims or the overwhelming majority of
other stakeholders that cannot be squeezed into this binary. To reduce such problems, we
conclude with embryonic thoughts on what we call collaborative worldmaking in conflict
research –drawing from larger political, philosophical debates and accounting for the
interlocking questions of ethics, epistemologies and positionalities discussed above.
Collaborative Worldmaking
Dorinne Kondo sees the practice of worldmaking as ‘evoking socio-political transfor-
mation’,as‘navigating violence’and ‘working towards integration’(Kondo 2018: 29, 33,
Vogel and Musamba 13
54). Using ethnography as a creative scholarly practice, this description speaks volumes to
the different aspects of collaborative work on violence and contestation that we do. It also
reminds us of some broader dilemmas around relativism, neutrality and impartiality when
it comes to ethnography in and of conflict. Scheper-Hughes (1995: 411) famously
criticized impartiality as ‘chameleon-like ambidexterity of the politically uncommitted.’
Other scholars, however, noted that ‘neutrality and impartiality (including their rejection)
constitute an immensely complex ethical minefield’(Cramer et al., 2011: 12). This is
particularly important in eastern Congo, a region that hosts the world’s most deadly
conflict since World War II. However, it begs the question if and how to take sides
ethically at all if the lines are so much blurred. Without nodding to all of Kuper’s rebuttal
of Scheper-Hughes (1995: 424–426), we concur that openly activist anthropology in
contexts of violence and injustice is a tad easier in a context of Apartheid than in eastern
Congo where, by 2020, far over 100 armed groups and a factionalized security apparatus
vie for power, violate human rights but also offer some protection.
8
Gledhill (2000a:3;
2000b: 227–234) thus cautions researchers to ‘be circumspect about […] activism in
fieldwork and […] adopting a partisan stance in complex situations.’
While full impartiality and detachment is wishful thinking, we argue that not aiming at
it is unethical too. We were thus left with no other option than attribute potential le-
gitimacy to any interlocutor. This helped us to be better listeners and observers, not least to
avoid ex-post hierarchizing of accounts and to ‘get it right’(Hastrup, 2004: 469). Our –
except for gender –diverse biographies and positionalities impacted on how we con-
ducted research together and the extended collaboration across all stages of knowledge
production offered the possibility to more easily step into each other’s world, develop a
more organic approach to how we acted towards interlocutors and were perceived. This
allowed us to contrast the situated, diverse possibilities of worldmaking. Writing (about)
Congo, the attempt to neutrality and impartiality remained our safest bet to not do harm,
even if the assassination of our colleagues when we were working with the United Nations
in 2017 has made it harder to maintain this type of moral and ethical plumb line.
9
We do
not pinpoint Congolese exceptionalism –conflict zones are barely Manichean (Richards,
2005;Kalyvas, 2006). We merely argue that taking sides is easier when these are vertical
(e.g. transnational) or polarized (e.g. apartheid or genocidal) dynamics of violence and
injustice. Our idea of ethnographic work as means of collaborative worldmaking is
anchored in the idea that ‘transnationalism is imperative if anthropology is to remain at the
forefront of cultural analysis. Refusal to engage and understand how global forces affect
our everyday lives is an intellectually untenable position’(Ong, in Scheper-Hughes, 1995:
431). Moreover, our reflections also send a cautious reminder for neither becoming too
convinced of predefined ethics established far away, nor of our own capacity to construct
rationalizing frameworks. Raeymaekers (2014: x), in his attempt to navigate the ‘spectral
realities’that researchers face when engaging the more sinister political, economic or
military stakeholders of a place, reminds us of how easily our subconscious can succumb
to imageries we would usually call off as colonial and racist tropes.
Based on that, we concur that engaged and reflected research, depend on our capacity
willingness to mutually translate our positions and develop sensible compromises. This
requires deep engagement with the consequences of our actions, putting norms and rules
14 Ethnography 0(0)
in perspective with context and intercultural, intersectional attention to ethics. These
considerations shape the ways in which we try to work, think and reflect together in our
collaborative research and how we jointly develop research strategies that strike a balance
between Ivory Tower ethics and the imbricated realities that we tap into while doing
empirical, ethnographic work. Reflecting on and engaging with our practical experiences
in navigating these frictions and our differences in upbringing and belonging, taught us
these dynamics affect us and our joint work. We therefore argue for embracing the grey
zone between textbooks and lived situatedness when doing research in and on conflict
zones –but doing so by way of building intersubjectivity based on mutual positionalities
and with the ambition towards a collaborative worldmaking exercise. This, we believe, is
not to subscribe to a cynical perspective on theoretical ethics but about taking the people
and places we research seriously and to conjugate ethical and epistemological questions
with the realities we encounter.
Acknowledgements
We thank the editors and the three anonymous reviewers and express gratitude for the trust of over
1000 interlocutors and the countless discussions with our friends Michael J. Sharp, Zaida Catal ´
an,
Timothy Raeymaekers, Koen Vlassenroot, Judith Verweijen, Godefroid Muzalia, Michel Thill,
Aymar Nyenyezi Bisoka, David Mwambari, Sonia Rolley, Lievin Mbarushimana, Chrispin Mvano,
Wolf Sinzahera, Gentil Kombi, Blaise Karege, Oscar Dunia and Giovanni Salvaggio.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/
or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article: This work was supported by throughout the years, our common research
benefitted from grants and awards by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF), the Mercator
Foundation, the Rift Valley Institute (RVI), the Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (FWO) and the
Academie de recherche et d’enseignement sup´
erieur (ARES).
ORCID iD
Christoph Vogel https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1176-376X
Notes
1. Between 2016 and 2017, we worked together for UN to investigate sanctions violations in
eastern Congo as part of a structure called ‘Group of Experts.’This implied a significant change
in attitudes, objectives and concomitant ethics, for the Group’s tasks include compiling con-
fidential reports that may or not lead to sanctioning individuals and entities linked to conflict. If
our positionality as academics had often opened up a sphere of trustful exchange with conflict
actors, including perpetrators, this role put us in a place where we could theoretically represent a
Vogel and Musamba 15
danger to the very same actors. Moreover, our practical approach changed as we switched
motorcycle taxis with UN jeeps. This jeopardized our independence from what can be considered
a party to the conflict, although the Group of Experts is supposed to be independent from UN
peacekeeping, reporting directly to the Security Council. Moreover, this position raised an
entirely new set of expectation on the sides of interlocutors, many of whom saw in us an amplifier
for their grievances relating to human rights violations.
2. Two striking observations are the convergence time in whatsapp across networks, highlighting
the digital bridge emerging across the country weak infrastructure, and odd facebook friendships
linking intelligence officers with the armed groups they fight, exposing the ambiguity of conflict
and potentially representing a research topic of its own.
3. Authors’field notes, 2015.
4. Like in other conflict areas, tarmacked roads in eastern Congo are limited to urban centres, with
few overland roads standing out in the bulk of dusty tracks. This has implications, bearing in
mind that purchasing or leasing a Land Cruiser (the only vehicle that works and is widespread
enough to find spare parts anywhere) is expensive. Most people travel with motorcycles, usually
taking 2–3 passengers. We would take one per person, for long rides were tiring and the risk of
flat tires delaying travel due to repairs, often requiring us to move on without the broken
motorcycle and close up on the second one. There were significant differences in timing and
pricing between dry and two rainy seasons. Compared to cars, motorcycles have an additional,
security-related advantage of being low-profile –there are much less ambushes on bikes than on
buses. Compared to travelling with an own car, it is much cheaper and not necessarily less secure.
Compared to buses it is faster and more secure.
5. A mix of trickery and twinkle –described elsewhere with a nod to Bourdieu as ‘habitus de la
d´
ebrouillardise’(Jourdan, 2006:183) –it is also known as système D (for d´
ebrouillardise).
However, beyond trickery and muddling through, article quinze embodies ideas of ‘real
governance’and ‘making do’(Olivier De Sardan, 2008;De Certeau, 1984).
6. Still, multi-sited research can limit immersion, or encliquage into the communities and context
researched (Olivier De Sardan, 2008:93–94). For instance, working in 4–5 different environ-
ments within the same broader area, limits researchers’capacity to anchor themselves socially in
the spaces they investigate. This anchoring involves extended presence in a place as well as
frequent returns. Multi-sited research does not preclude creating such an anchoring, but it
heightens the threshold.
7. Hence, academics should refrain from singling out culture as category and acknowledge the
fluidity of identities and repertoires. This does not mean identity is not a pivotal political vehicle,
even if construed around ‘imagined communities’(Anderson, 1983).
8. Nonetheless, reflections on the ‘grey zone’(Levi, 1986) and the ‘banality of evil’cast limits to
such arguments (Arendt, 1963).
9. The most thorough investigation on this matter is http://webdoc.rfi.fr/rdc-kasai-violences-
crimes-kamuina-nsapu/index.html.
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Author Biographies
Christoph Vogel is the Research Director of the Insecure Livelihoods Series at Conflict
Research Group, Ghent University.
Josaphat Musamba is the Deputy Director of the Conflict and Human Security Study
Group, Institut Sup´
erieur P´
edagogique de Bukavu, and a PhD student at Conflict Re-
search Group, Ghent University.
Vogel and Musamba 21
