Well beyond Ukraine, multiple forms of violence happening right now inflict tremendous suffering on millions of people across the world. My own discipline, peace and conflict studies, historically emerged with the normative goal of promoting peace and reducing violence. Recent years thereby saw a remarkable increase in ethnographic-inspired research approaches which require scholars to spend extended periods of time in highly violent settings, interacting with people who have endured almost unbearable suffering and are frequently multiply traumatised.<\/p>\n
This is also the case of the region of my research. Located in the northern Caribbean region of Colombia near the border with Venezuela, the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta (SNSM) is the highest coastal mountain range in the world and home to numerous indigenous groups, Afro-Colombian, and peasant communities. During more than five decades of armed conflict, the people whose views and lifeworlds represent the core of my thesis, have experienced inter alia massive forced displacement, massacres, disappearances, sexualised violence, forced recruitment of children. Figuring among the regions most affected by the armed conflict, the SNSM is being prioritised in the implementation of the 2016 peace accords between the Colombian government and the FARC-EP guerrilla. Nevertheless, the implementation pace of the peace agreement is slow and the failure of the Colombian state to establish a constructive presence in its rural territories \u2013 like the SNSM \u2013 has allowed other armed groups to consolidate their presence again. As I am writing this, entire communities with numerous unmet basic necessities are being forced to pay extorsions to paramilitary-criminal groups. It is physically impossible to reach their communities without passing roadblocks of illegal armed groups. Social leaders and human rights defenders are particularly at risk: Sadly, Colombia is currently the country with the highest numbers of assassinations of social leaders in the world.<\/p>\n
Given that my own research examines citizen participation in the context of the peace process, I am in touch with such community leaders almost every day. All of them have been personally threatened, all of them have scared relatives and friends who urge them to abandon their communal work, some have survived assassination attempts. Fear and perceived abandonment by the state who is unable or unwilling to change this dreadful situation is ubiquitous in the communities where I conduct my research. Scholars operating under such conditions thereby face profound challenges and ethical issues. To ensure or at least not to further risk the safety of research participants and scholars alike, it is imperative to stress that the \u201cDo no harm\u201d principle must be beginning and end point of anything that is asked, said and\/or done. Because of the specific dangers of research in violent areas, this principle must clearly take precedent before thinking of any potential benefits that might be achieved through research. Apart from general standards of ethical research (relating i. a. to transparency and honesty), the practical steps to be taken are thereby research-contingent. In my specific case for instance, I never directly ask anything concerning the current presence of illegal armed groups. However, in my view, ethnographic researchers\u2019 responsibility in (post-)war areas goes much further than that. Although time and funding pressures often constrain this, trauma knowledge must figure much more prominently in the curriculum of peace and conflict researchers. Because psycho-social support is frequently lacking, scholars working in violent research settings must do whatever is possible to avoid potential re-traumatisation, or at least be familiar with the so-called \u201cPsychological First Aid\u201d where a trauma seems to have been triggered while researching on site. This is important for research participants and researchers alike: As such, I personally found my trauma training very useful to learn how to better manage the high emotional toll and particularly the danger of secondary trauma through ethnographic research in violent contexts.<\/p>\n
In conclusion, I would like to stress the inevitable limitations of such an approach. It cannot fully prevent re-traumatisation and\/or secondary trauma. It cannot guarantee that research participants are going to feel a 100 % comfortable. And least of all, it cannot change security conditions that are at times extremely precarious and threatening \u2013 it can only attempt to mitigate their implications. Although trauma training practices may only be partially effective, their implementation is nevertheless indispensable and researchers must consider them to avoid further harm through research on communities and people who have already endured incredible suffering and cruelty.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Well beyond Ukraine, multiple forms of violence happening right now inflict tremendous suffering on millions of people across the world. My own discipline, peace and conflict studies, historically emerged with the normative goal of promoting peace and reducing violence. Recent years thereby saw a remarkable increase in ethnographic-inspired research approaches which require scholars to spend […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1314,"featured_media":3595,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[571],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3592","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-stories"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/research.kent.ac.uk\/gcdc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3592","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/research.kent.ac.uk\/gcdc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/research.kent.ac.uk\/gcdc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/research.kent.ac.uk\/gcdc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1314"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/research.kent.ac.uk\/gcdc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3592"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/research.kent.ac.uk\/gcdc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3592\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3667,"href":"https:\/\/research.kent.ac.uk\/gcdc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3592\/revisions\/3667"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/research.kent.ac.uk\/gcdc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3595"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/research.kent.ac.uk\/gcdc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3592"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/research.kent.ac.uk\/gcdc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3592"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/research.kent.ac.uk\/gcdc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3592"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}