This article seeks to move beyond the Euro/North-centrism recurrent in methodological discussions on what we may learn from the COVID-19 pandemic. Such debates often centre on uncertainty and involuntary immobility – aspects which are hardly new for many researchers. In this article, we argue that the pandemic offers an opportunity to rethink research relations between what we term ‘contracting researchers’ in the Global North and ‘facilitating researchers’ in the Global South. Such relations are often marked by rampant inequalities in remuneration, working conditions, and visibility/authorship. Drawing upon experiences in DR Congo, Sierra Leone, and India, we argue that the pandemic increased the dependence on – and highlighted the invaluable contributions and skills of – facilitating researchers, in part slightly refiguring bargaining power. We also propose pathways for change, arguing for a strong collaborative approach and the need for institutional change, without discarding the responsibilities of individual researchers.
Contributing to the “Covid-19 and the Social Sciences” essay series, Oscar Abedi, Maria Eriksson Baaz, David Mwambari, Swati Parashar, Anju Oseema Maria Toppo, and James Vincent outline various paths toward reducing field research’s potential for exploitation, especially that of Global South collaborators. The pandemic has highlighted inequalities and immobility that differently affect facilitating researchers and contracting researchers. In response, the authors identify key issues that institutions, publishers, and individual researchers must reflect on in order to counteract these imbalances—and take advantage of an opportunity to fundamentally transform field research into collaborative knowledge production.
Despite the prominent attention that the problem of conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) has recently garnered globally, we still know far too little about what is sexual about sexual violence, according to whom, as well as why and how this matters in our efforts to prevent and redress its harms. A growing theoretical, political, legal and ethical imperative to ask questions about the sexual part of sexual violence across both war and peace is nonetheless emerging. This article therefore turns to the accounts of male and female survivors of CRSV at the at the Refugee Law Project (RLP) in Kampala, Uganda. In our reading of their accounts, we explore how the participants understand the possible imbrication of the perpetrator's sexual desire and pleasure with the violence they inflicted, as well as how they deem such intermeshing impossible or deeply problematic in and to the gendered frames that govern how they think about the distinctions between violence and sex, as well as themselves as sexual, social, embodied subjects. Read together, these conflicted and conflicting testimonies offer a vantage point from which to rethink some of the reductive truisms that persist in dominant policy-friendly accounts of wartime sexual violence—namely that such violence is about power and not about ‘sex’. The participants’ accounts thus urge us, as scholars and policy advocates, to resist reducing the multi-layered experiences of victim/survivors of sexual violence to fit into the palatable narratives of victimhood that prevail in humanitarian, juridical and policy spaces.
It is the case that sexual violence (when noticed at all) has historically been understood to happen largely, if not only, to women, allegedly because of their gender and their ensuing place in gender orders. This begs important questions regarding the impact of increasing knowledge about sexual violence against men, including the impact on resources, on understandings about, and experiences of masculinity, and whether the idea and practice of gender hierarchy is outdated. This book engages this diverse set of questions and offers fresh analysis on the incidences of sexual violence against men using both new and existing data. Additionally, the authors pay close attention to some of the controversial debates in the context of sexual violence against men, revisiting and asking new questions about the vexed issue of masculinities and related theories of gender hierarchy.
The development industry has been criticised recently from very diverse quarters. This book is a nuanced and original investigation of Northern donor agency personnel as they deliver aid in Tanzania. The author explores in particular how donor identities are manifested in the practices of development aid, and how calls for equal partnership between North and South are often very different in practice. She demonstrates the conflicts and tensions in the development aid process. These reflect both the longstanding critique of the eurocentric nature of development, and discourse that still assumes images of the superior, initiating, efficient ‘donor‘ as opposed to the inadequate, passive, unreliable ‘partner‘ or recipient.
In this paper, I reflect upon my experience of working with active military officerscum-research brokers in research on the Congolese (DRC) armed forces. Drawing upon the traditions of autoethnography and Narrative International Relations, I recount the story of an evolving relationship between one particular military broker and myself. It highlights how military research brokers, while frequently cast not only as capable of handling their own security, but as prime sources of insecurity, often share the general (civilian) research broker's predicaments of insecurity. In doing so, the narrative also challenges dominant gendered, as well as racialized, ideas of who is at risk when conducting research in conflict settings.
Research here in the DRC is like the coltan and other minerals. Other countries that don’t have access to it claim it and benefit from it. It is the same with research. The research would not be possible without us. Still it is people from the outside who profit from it, get visibility, funding and are called experts. At the same time we – the ones who provide access, adapt the methodology and questions and collect the data in very precarious circumstances – get little compensation and are not acknowledged. It is sort of a continuation of colonial relations.
This article explores methodological challenges that arose in two perpetrator-centered research projects on sexual and gender-based violence in two different armed forces contexts: the British Army and the Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of Congo. We examine how the interplay between research subjects’, in this case perpetrators’, performances and our own desires and investments as researchers shape the knowledge we produce. Ultimately, we seek to encourage continuing (self)critical discussions on how various discursive framings and ethico-political desires shape the stories we hear as well as those that we tell.
Based on original interview material, this article addresses the organization of unofficial economic activities within the Congolese (Democratic Republic of the Congo) police force. In contrast to dominant assumptions in security sector reform discourses in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in which property violations tend to be portrayed as disorganized, ad-hoc activities, following from irregular and insufficient salaries, the article shows how property violations are highly organized with large portions flowing upward in the chain of command. However, the article also argues for the need to go beyond one-dimensional notions of “unrestrained predation” and simplistic dichotomies between civilians (victims) and police/military (predators). Furthermore, it argues for a more contextual analysis in which the core security sector institutions are situated more firmly in the political and economic context in which they operate.
Based on comprehensive research among boat operators and navy personnel working on the Congo River (DRC), this article explores how assessments of ‘taxation’ are shaped by the interplay of legitimation and ‘officialisation’. As such, it draws upon and contributes to scholarly debates on taxpayers’ attitudes towards taxation. While boat operators resent having to pay a plethora of authorities, including the navy, along the Congo River, the article demonstrates how they locate these ‘taxes’ on a spectrum from more to less legitimate. These assessments are shaped by various factors: authorities’ legitimacy as ‘measured’ by their official mandate and importance; public and non-official service provision; and the deployment of symbols of ‘stateness’. In interaction, these factors legitimise and ‘officialise’ ‘taxes’ by the navy that are prohibited in legislation. These findings caution against the a priori use of the labels ‘official’ and ‘non-official’, emphasising the need to better grasp these notions’ emic understandings.
This introductory text frames the contributions of this forum, bringing together, scholars who have been working for a long time to dismantle knowledge systems that sustain whiteness, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy, in the context of recent developments. It first provides a brief overview of well-established knowledges on the various ways in which racism and racial inequalities remain deeply embedded within academia. This is followed by a snapshot of all the different essays that together make up this intervention forum.
Not surprisingly, most critique of the Eurocentrism of IR focus on (a construed notion of) ‘mainstream IR’and is delivered by self-proclaimed critical scholars (like ourselves). In this text, we instead seek to turn our attention to critical, or more precisely postcolonial or decolonial IR. We argue that much postcolonial/decolonial IR is doing the same as the mainstream, taking the Anglo-Saxon/Anglo-American departure point as the departure point of IR, thus reproducing Eurocentrism—albeit in a different manner.
Wartime sexual violence is especially egregious precisely because it is a sexualform of violence that causes particular harms. Yet, curiously, and in contrast to feminist theory on sexual violence more generally, the sexual has been erased from frames of understanding in dominant accounts of wartime rape. This article places the seeming certainty that “wartime rape is not about sex (it’s about power/violence)” under critical scrutiny and poses questions about the stakes of the erasure of the sexual in explanations of conflict-related sexual violence. It argues that the particular urgency that accompanies this erasure reflects the workings of familiar distinctions between war and peace, as well as efforts to clearly recognize violence and separate it from sex. Erasing the sexual from accounts of wartime rape thus ultimately reinscribes the normal and the exceptional as separate, and reproduces a reductive notion of heterosexual masculine sex (in peacetime) that is ontologically different from the violence of war.
This article addresses an underreported aspect of contemporary warring in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC): the experiences of women soldiers and officers in the Congolese national armed forces (Forces Armées de la République Démocratique du Congo [FARDC]). It thus addresses an empirical gap in scholarly and policy knowledge about female soldiers in national armies on the African continent, and the DRC in particular. Based on original interviews, the article explores the way female soldiers in the FARDC understand their identities as “women soldiers” and offers new insight into women soldiers’ role and responsibilities in the widespread violence committed against civilians in the DRC. Moreover, it explores how their understanding of themselves as “women soldiers” both challenges and confirms familiar notions of the army as a masculine sphere. Such insight is important for better understanding the gendered makeup of the military and for contributing to a knowledge base for Security Sector Reform in this violent (post)conflict setting.
During the last years the DRC has made itself known in the world for terrible acts of violence committed by armed men – militia and the regular army – against the civilian population. The voices of the soldiers and combatants have so far been absent in the accounts of this violence. This silence is problematic, both because it makes it harder to understand such violence, but also because it reinforces stereotypes of African warriors as primitive and anarchic, driven by innate violence and tribal hatred. Enquiry into the particular discursive as well as material circumstances of the armed conflict in the DRC, which might better redress the complex and interrelated context in which ‘people in uniforms’ commit violence, is consequently impeded. The story we recount here emerges from soldiers within the main perpetrator of violence in the DRC today: the Integrated Armed Forces. The soldiers’ interview texts challenge the dominant representation of soldiers and combatants in the DRC. The soldiers made sense of the prevalence of violence (in which they too had participated) in several interrelated ways, none of which reflected any expression of ‘natural’ (if dormant) violent tendencies, hatred or vengefulness for the enemy.
How to teach about rape in war and genocide? This edited volume draws on the expertise of scholars and human rights practitioners to explore that crucial question. Across the chapters its authors address five questions: Why teach about rape in war and genocide? Who should teach and learn? What needs to be taught? How should one teach? Where and when should teaching take place? Offering guidance for teaching and discussion, this study combines research and pedagogical experience to make the volume useful not only as a pedagogical guide but also as a source that advances understanding about, and resistance against, a major atrocity that besieges human flourishing.
The global attention focused on sexual violence in the DRC has not only contributed to an image of the Congolese army as a vestige of pre-modern barbarism, populated by rapists, and bearing no resemblance to the world of modern armies; it has also shaped gender and defence reform initiatives. These initiatives have become synonymous with combating sexual violence, reflecting an assumption that the gendered dynamics of the army are already known. Crucial questions such as the ‘feminization’ of the armed forces are consequently neglected. Based on in-depth interviews with soldiers in the Congolese armed forces, this article analyses the discursive strategies male soldiers employ in relation to the feminization of the army. In the light of the need to reform the military and military masculinities, the article discusses how globalized discourses and practices render the Congolese military a highly globalized sphere. It also highlights the particular and local ways in which military identities are produced through gender, and concludes that a simple inclusion of women in the armed forces in order to render men less violent might not have the pacifying effect intended.
This article explores the ways soldiers in the Congo speak about themassive amount of rape committed by the armed forces in the recentwar in the DRC. It focuses on the reasons that the soldiers give to whyrape occurs. It discusses how the soldiers distinguish between ‘‘lustrapes’’ and ‘‘evil rapes’’ and argues that their explanations of rape mustbe understood in relation to notions of different (impossible) masculinities.Ultimately, through reading the soldiers’ words, we can glimpsethe logics—arguably informed by the increasingly globalized context ofsoldiering—through which rape becomes possible, and even ‘‘normalized’’in particular warscapes.
The contribution and situation of research brokers problematically tend to be shrouded in silence in most research texts. In this article we probe into the particular ethical and methodological challenges that we may encounter when working with brokers in conflict settings, drawing upon existing literature and contributions of this special issue. Reposing on post-colonial perspectives, we problematize both the increasing securitization of conflict research with its one-sided focus on researcher safety and the notion of researcher responsibility. Moreover, we argue that the inequalities marking researcher-broker relations are often particularly glaring in conflict settings, thus increasing the risk for exploitation.
Based on extensive field research in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo), this article elucidates the logics, processes and readings surrounding certain ‘extra-military’ practices enacted by the Congolese army, namely the processing of various types of disputes between civilians. Exceeding the boundaries of the domain of ‘public security’, such activities are commonly categorised as ‘corruption’. Yet such labelling, founded on a supposed clear-cut public–private divide, obscures the underlying processes and logics, in particular the fact that these practices are located on a blurred public–private spectrum and result from both civilian demand and military imposition. Furthermore, popular readings of military involvement in civilian disputes are highly ambiguous, simultaneously representing it as ‘abnormal’ and ‘harmful’, and normalising it as ‘making sense’ – reflecting the militarised institutional environment and the weakness of civilian authorities in the eastern DR Congo. Strengthening these authorities will be vital for reducing this practice, which has an enkindling effect on the dynamics of conflict and violence
Drawing on postcolonial theory, this article queries into the ways in which the concepts of militarism/militarization and securitization are applied to ‘African’ contexts. We highlight the selective nature of such application and probe into the potential reasons for and effects of this selectiveness, focusing on its signifying work. As we argue, the current selective uses of securitization and militarism/militarization in ‘Africa’ scholarship tend to recreate troublesome distinctions between ‘developed’ versus ‘underdeveloped’ spaces within theory and methodology. In particular, they contribute to the reproduction of familiar colonially scripted imagery of a passive and traditional ‘Africa’, ruled by crude force and somehow devoid of ‘liberal’ ideas and modes of governing. Yet we do not suggest simply discarding ‘selectiveness’ or believe that there are any other easy remedies to the tensions between universalism and particularism in theory application. Recognizing the ambivalent workings of colonial discourse, we rather contend that any attempts to trace the colonial into the present use of the concepts of securitization and militarism/militarization need to acknowledge the problematic nature of both discourses of ‘African’ Otherness and those of universalism and sameness.