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ID:
188859
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article reflects on the use of narrative interviews alongside participatory and remote-access visual methods to produce knowledge on and in conflict-affected settings. It details our iterative and reactive experiences of navigating transnational academic, policy and humanitarian networks to attempt to undertake ethical research on the security experiences of displaced people in Somali cities and facilitate their engagement with policymakers. We explore tensions in the combined use of increasingly accessible digital tools (camera-equipped smartphones and open-access satellite imagery) in facilitating a participatory, narrative-based approach to security research while also mitigating access limitations to research sites. We argue that a holistic and reflexive approach to everyday security within a technologically mediated data-collection process – for both researchers and research participants – not only is important for negotiations around ethical fieldwork, but also can be generative of findings about the research site itself. Methods are not brought into a context and deployed by researchers in ways that are fully under their control. In the case explored here, how the researchers and research participants engaged in dialogue about various methods, reflected their connections within networks of knowledge production dominated by humanitarian donors/partners, while also highlighting important aspects of displaced people’s everyday experiences of (in)security and marginalization in Somali cities.
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| 2 |
ID:
160890
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| Summary/Abstract |
Since 2012, Mogadishu has been the site of both unprecedented optimism around the reconstruction of the Somali state, as well as persistent violence perpetrated by the Islamist militants of Harakat Al Shabaab Al Mujahidiin (Al Shabaab). In attacking hotels and restaurants, as well as other sites broadly associated with the state, Al Shabaab has prosecuted a strategy intended to foment the un-governability of the city, undermine the nascent Federal Government of Somalia’s claims to authority, and denounce the alleged ‘foreign’ capture of the re-emerging state. Based on discursive analyses of local political commentary, and fieldwork in Mogadishu, this article examines media contestation between the re-emerging state and the armed opposition in a context of prolonged political fragmentation. The article argues that not only does the highly decentralized and transnational modern media environment facilitate a dynamic and dialogic exchange of propaganda between the state and the insurgents but, furthermore, the technological context of this discursive contestation has important implications for the ways in which counter-terrorism and state reconstruction are undertaken by political and military actors on the ground.
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