| Summary/Abstract |
In this article, I focus upon the notion of suspicion as a lens to better understand the distinct challenges that local researchers from the Global South encounter in ethnographic fieldwork when studying peace and peacebuilding in the context of active armed conflict within their countries. Over the last decade, scholars have increasingly deployed ethnographic approaches to better understand peacebuilding, devoting careful attention to local actors and processes that shape the practices and outcomes of international peacebuilding efforts in post-conflict environments in the Global South. While this local turn in Peace Research has led towards a renewed awareness of the challenges in ethnographic fieldwork in situations of war, armed conflict and political violence, most of the conversations in the emergent Ethnographic Peace Research (EPR) literature focus upon and draw from the experiences of researchers from the Global North who conduct ethnographic research in the Global South. Begging to be considered in the EPR literature are the experiences of local researchers from the Global South who are immersed in ethnographic research in their countries, and what these experiences tell us about the differential politics in ethnographic research.
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