Ethnography for Peacebuilding: How anthropology might help peacebuilders return to the heart of our practice

Melissa Wild

Having spent my career in cross-cultural and cross-sectoral spaces, building and facilitating peace programs - be it intergroup dialogue, youth engagement or educational programs -, and having worked as a community mediator for the last five years as well, I have witnessed the enormous amount of creativity and innovation both required to build peace programs as well as to resolve and transform conflicts. Sometimes, such creativity and innovation can get lost when

brought to scale through the broader international development system. I recently presented at the Society for Applied Anthropology annual conference, where I explored how an applied anthropology lens might help return the heart and the magic of conflict transformation back into peacebuilding, particularly at scale and especially in digital peacebuilding, to help ensure international development more broadly is not getting caught up in the “business” of peace. In

my full reflections on peace below, I share some of my presentation from the conference: Ethnography for Peacebuilding.

As cultural anthropologist, Kim Fortun, states in her paper on Ethnography in Late Industrialism, ethnography can be designed to "bring forth a future anterior that is not calculable from what we know now, a future that surprises. Ethnography thus becomes creative, producing something that didn"t exist before. Something beyond codified expert formulas." Similarly, scholars and

practitioners in the field of peacebuilding, particularly those who have spent time within neighborhoods or communities working through problems - as opposed to those within international projects - talk about peacebuilding as an artform, an exercise in imagination. From founding scholars of peacebuilding like Jean Paul Lederach, to current practitioners and educators like my colleague, Faculty and Director of Peace and Conflict Studies at University for Peace, Dr. Uzma Rashid. In my training and practice both for mediation and more recently as an applied anthropologist, I find this curiosity about the endless multitude of possibilities through problems, of endless human potentialities - to be a shared and central orientation.

So despite what I can now trace back to a lifetime of interest in anthropology, I didn’t come to the field until this PhD program in which I am currently. Having spent most of my career - and I still am - working in community-based projects that are labeled “peacebuilding” projects, as well as acting as a community mediator, I went to applied anthropology hoping to bring back an

underrepresented method of inquiry and better more human ways of understanding a problem than what I have seen in the “business of peacebuilding”. What I share with you here are a set of connections between applied anthropology and peacebuilding that are emerging through both

my research as well as my experience as an applied anthropology student. I offer them up for consideration and welcome your feedback in further thinking through what these intellectual, professional and practitioner spaces might offer one another. First I will briefly mention who I have been thinking with, then move to connections emerging in my current research, what I am observing as a mediator while doing anthropology, and I conclude with some of my own suggestions for further research.

Thinking With

The inter-disciplinary field of peacebuilding can go by many names. At a time when peace is being coopted by authoritarian agenda, circulated as a brand for global prosperity under benevolent dictatorship, I find the field is at an urgent inflection point, where we have a necessary opportunity and obligation to recommit to principles of peace, to the critical self-reflection required to remain curious, compassionate, and oriented towards justice.

Whether defined as peace and conflict studies, conflict resolution, conflict transformation more recently, the field has a couple of perhaps competing origins, quickly fleeing from the Quakers to become absorbed in post-world war II international relations discourse.

Professionally, the pathway from peacebuilding studies to jobs in international development is very clear, making the anthropology of development a useful critical lens to understand the work that gets done by the “business of peacebuilding.” A concern I share with other scholars is that the field of peacebuilding is overly saturated with more prescriptive and quantitative approaches through other social scientific fields (Richmond, 2018). Along with what I see as a healthy pushback and resistance to both overly didactic ways of understanding such human concerns is the resistance to claims to universal ideals that ultimately are not universal and are embedded in the same shape of a colonial world order. This pushback comes with the resurgence of a call for the anthropological method to return to prominence in the research, training and activities of peacebuilders. Some of the scholars/practitioners I am thinking with are speaking directly to this call - such as Peter Black and Kevin Avruch, anthropologists by training, who have been talking about the benefits of ethnographic inquiry to the study of peace and conflict since the 1990s. They have written together on the lack of respect or attention given to people’s differing practices in dealing with conflict, suggesting a problematic effort to standardize conflict resolution interventions and recommended practices and a total erasure of indigenous and non-Western ways of dealing with conflict. Like Black and Avruch, others’ such as Douglas Fry, whose multi-sited ethnography on peace systems revealed a series of social processes present among groups that have sustained peaceful conditions over time (Fry, 2006) - perhaps a fraught

premise but nevertheless represents an effort to learn from and with ethnographers to understand peace - recently, Catherine Panter-Brick, looking at the ways in which people understand what everyday peacebuilding means for them across generations, colleague and friend Joan Camilo Lopez, who has used ethnographic methods in working with community activists in Colombia, or Adriana Salcedo, whose ethnographic research considers the ways in which people make life in the process of migration, scholars have been asserting the

importance for an anthropology of peacebuilding who are a part of this resurgence.

Hate Speech - from an anthropological perspective

Now, while I am thinking with these scholars who are more explicitly operating in both spaces, I also am interested more broadly in how anthropologists have come to understand how people deal with conflicts,. While this very vast exploration conceivably touches all anthropological research, from degradation ceremonies or schismogenesis, I have followed this thread to look more specifically at how anthropologists have looked at the way people fight with

one another and resolve those fights. This curiosity relates to a line of inquiry also present in peacebuilding, often labeled “hate speech.”

“Hate speech” is a term that also goes by other names, such as extreme speech, dangerous speech, or polarizing rhetoric (Udupa, Gagliardone & Hervik, 2021). This term is used by people working in international development most often to describe online speech that can lead to violent or dangerous outcomes offline. Cultural Anthropologist, Sindre Bangstad, presented a case for an anthropology of hate speech (Bangstad, 2017) that argues anthropologists can

provide a more nuanced view of where offline and online activities relate to one another. Similarly, Boellstroff (2016) argues for an ontological turn away from this binary distinction in researching the digital. Geismar and Knox (2021) draw from Boellstroff’s thesis to frame online life as fully integrated and a part of the context of offline life – and vice versa. My current research focuses on conflict as a part of social life that exists anywhere people are, including online, and how they deal with their conflicts across contexts. I work with this anthropological approach to first asking, are we peacebuilders even framing this “problem” of hate speech

correctly, or is there a better question to be asking? And secondly, how can emerging ethnographic methods - particularly in and across the digital - support a more useful set of solutions to the problems peacebuilders are tackling?

My hope is that an anthropologist can help make sense of how “online impacts offline” in a very different (better :D ) way. Currently, my research proposal (under construction!) draws from the work of Bowker & Star and how they make sense of the ways human beings create categories to order ideas and objects in the world. I am using this framework to consider how othering is put to use, in late stage capitalism and therefore how it shows up in the peacebuilding projects, as a colonial technology of social control, one that is visible in digital

infrastructures as well (from code, to data hubs, to social organization). Instead of following how online impacts offline, I would use ethnographic methods to follow how and where “othering” happens, to show that it isn’t as simple as cause and effect but rather is a set of relations constantly in process of engagement and disengagement over time and place.

The times I have since presented this reframing of hate speech to my digital peacebuilder colleagues, I was blown away by the absolute lack of overlap in scholarship and in ways of thinking between us. It was a connecting the dots frenzy, we both were scribbling notes and adding authors to our reading lists. I have since been brought on by one of these colleagues to a working group and research project to continue this thinking together.

Mediation vs. Peacebuilding

Now, while I have been talking about “hate speech” in the context of peacebuilding, where “hate speech” really has shown up the most clearly is in my work as a mediator. And it took me reading anthropology and with a welcomed challenge by my advisor, to remember what I used to know: that peacebuilding and mediation may be more important to separate than to see as together.

Having worked for the last 15 years between roles of direct engagement as mediator or facilitator and indirect engagement through supporting programs within the international development infrastructure, I sort of began blending these lines. Constantly going back and forth between levels of abstraction, I noticed that thinking about the distinction here helps me to see more clearly the ways both ethnography - as perhaps the heart of the practice of anthropology -

and mediation - as opposed to peacebuilding - can offer critical support. Especially for peacebuilders, I think a leaning into anthropological orientation and ethnographic methods would help remind us peacebuilders what we have forgotten about the point and the way of our work.

Ethnography, like mediation, is a method that demands a leaning into the complexity of humanness, an antidote to binary categorization.

Ethnography, like mediation, demands constant self-reflection, a recognition that neutrality is an illusion.

Ethnography, like mediation, requires invitation and consent from the people with whom we are engaged in our work.

It requires engaging with people as people, not isolated variables or data points. Interlocutors, collaborators, not research participants.

It requires open-ended questions, unearthing in fact more questions than answers.

And especially, it requires that process of unearthing and making visible the forgotten, that which is left on the margins, bringing the hidden into light.

It is a strange experience losing complete faith in the field you have dedicated your professional life to while also feeling a renewed commitment to it. My hope in the resurgence of anthropologists involved in peacebuilding is a big part of that. An ethnographic lens could help return an important reflexivity back to peacebuilding as a practice that currently can feel lacking, and is more like a business.

And conversely, I wonder how anthropologists - often also referred to as mediators or cultural brokers, might benefit from some more practical training in peacebuilding, in how to respond to and help people move through conflict. For that matter, all people are mediators somewhere in some part of their lives, in some configuration of relationships - be it in a passing moment or more regularly in a position they hold. Might not all people benefit from a bit of this kind of

training?

I will conclude with a quote from Donna Haraway that I think hits on this hope I have for an anthropology of peacebuilding: “Our task is to make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places.”

Thank you!

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