Inhabiting the Space Between Search and Research

This article explores the connections between personal and research journeys as a central aspect of positionality and reflexivity. It develops in conversation with ethnographies produced by feminist, diasporic and ‘halfie’ researchers. Based on fieldwork extracts from my doctoral research with Palestinian museums in the West Bank, I discuss the possibility of using our vulnerabilities to displace discourses that portray research participants as ‘those in need’. I use the concept of bahth, in Arabic ‘to search, to seek, to pursue’, as a means to connect personal and research journeys. Building on Naeem Inayatullah’s notion of the insecure self, I suggest that inhabiting the research/search boundary requires stressing one’s lacks and vulnerabilities. This is not a call on reflexivity for its own sake but a means to unsettle assigned roles with research participants, even if only in provisional and contextual ways.

Limits at the Limes. Diffracted Sovereignty inside the Border Zones

This paper questions state sovereignty at borders, by referencing the contradictions that a border control approach based upon security concerns creates, and the distortions between societies of norms and situations of exception that the European migration and asylum policies generate. Meanwhile, whilst sovereignty should correspond in a legal theory perspective to authority, its expressions manifested in the European borders consists essentially in domination as bare violence is deployed. By investigating the hiatus between how sovereignty ought to be in theory and how it is observed in practice, it is possible to consider that the very sovereignty is diffracted in the thickness of the frontiers (i). This paper explores the methods states develop directly or indirectly in the borders, inside the border zones, basing the analysis on the notion of heterotopia Michel Foucault forged. Such a conceptual tool is deployed in order to underscore how states construct and exploit frontiers as useful margins and establish them as dissolution zones. Three methods – extraction, classification and obliteration – are highlighted that correspond to the main purposes of border surveillance – control, selection and removal – (ii).

To Stop and See: Contemplative Fieldwork as Thoughtful Observation

Contemplation, or the practice of sitting still to ‘stop and see’, can expand one’s embodied awareness. This expanded awareness resembles ethnographic sensibility, a disposition practiced by researchers to generate an understanding of the ‘field’. My fieldwork on contemplative activism involves a double thoughtful observation: once as contemplation, and once as ethnographic sensitivity. How do I make sense of data as I cannot distinguish between my own embodied experiences of contemplation and my methodological practices as a fieldworker? How do I engage with ‘data’ that escape words when contemplative activism takes place in silence? Rather than making the familiar strange -as much literature on fieldwork suggests- keeping the ‘strange’ strange might be similarly productive, especially when it concerns esoteric experiences fieldworkers (perhaps) have in the field. Instead of ethnographic sensibility being about seeing differently, ‘learning’ in the field can be about practicing to ‘stop and see’ different things.

Becoming Fluent in Fieldwork: (Un)learning What Is Good/Ethical/Responsible Fieldwork

This running theme’s introduction rethinks fieldwork as an ongoing process. It explores experiences and conceptions of ‘becoming fluent in fieldwork’: the contextual processes through which we do, learn, and unlearn practices of fieldwork. It sees fieldwork as a collective project. Recognising the entanglement of field sites and travelling with fields to certain other fields, we become multiply entangled, and thus we ask: what do these plural relations demand from us? We turn to the concept and praxis of love as it considers the responsibility, care work and thinking-working together that is needed to respect other people’s realities together with them. We foreground the notion of ‘becoming fluent’ that reflects fieldwork as a work in process, and emphasises the processual aspects of fieldwork: the journey that spans the time before, during and after the fieldwork. This process involves engaging meaningfully with relations, relationality and collaboration, ‘ongoingness’ and ethics in motion.

Legitimizing the Shrinking of Democratic Space in Western Liberal Democracies

This paper aims at making a synthesis of the main discursive schemes at work across Western liberal democracies that have sought to legitimize the introduction of liberty-restricting counter-terrorism policies since the September 11th attacks. Redefinition of the nature of threat, of the attackers’ key features and of endangered values has gone along with the conceptual reversal of the definition of democracy and freedom as political value. The normalization of the ensuing illiberal forms of governance arguably suggests that the shrinking of post-war democratic achievement uncovers above all liberal democracy’s inherent political vulnerability.

Breaking the Transitional Justice Machine: Exploring Spatiality, Space Travel, and Inbetween Spaces in Research Practice

This article offers a critical perspective on emerging and alternative spaces for emancipation within transitional justice studies. Taking into account recent critical literature and postcolonial interventions in transitional justice studies, we argue that barriers to moving our understanding of transitional justice forward are both conceptual and methodological. Conceptual hurdles are visible through narrow justice demands often limited to the context of post-conflict and post-authoritarian settings, thus normalizing injustice in liberal democratic and postcolonial contexts. Methodological impediments exist because transitional justice scholarship operates at a positivist level, or trying to explain certain, and desired, outcomes rather than destabilizing and unsettling unequal power relations. As a result, research practice in the field reflects the perspectives and preferences of elites in transition societies through a legal-technical mechanistic imagining of transitional justice that we refer to as the transitional justice machine. We argue that the needs and voices of marginalized social actors, particularly within states that are largely defined as liberal democratic or postcolonial, have long been ignored due to these practices. Against the backdrop of evolving agency patterns, including widespread global protest and demands to deal with the past across countries, we zoom in on a variety of actors who, until now, have not been at the focus of transitional justice studies. Drawing on a variety of case studies, this article contributes to the critical understanding of transitional justice studies as a Bourdieusian field. First, by expanding the conceptual lens to include racial, socio-economic, and postcolonial injustice, and, second, by advancing a more critical methodological approach that puts at its center unequal power relationships.

The Virus of Surveillance: How the covid-19 Pandemic Is Fuelling Technologies of Control

While it is too early to provide a definitive analysis of the impact that the covid-19 health crisis will have on digital state surveillance, this article aims to provide a first assessment. It starts by situating states’ response to the crisis in the longer history of epidemics and their connections to what philosopher Michel Foucault called “regimes of power.” By surveying various surveillance discourses and practices in countries like France, Italy, the United Kingdom, the United States or Israel in the Spring of 2020, the article identifies three key trends magnified by the crisis, namely, the crystallisation of new public-private assemblages in the management of health data, a shift towards health-based justification regimes for legitimising controversial surveillance and urban policing technologies, as well as mounting human rights threats and oversight failures in a context marked by a “state of health emergency”.

Designing-With/In World Politics

Why is the praxis of the International Social Sciences (iss) so limited? Why are word counts and abstracts so much more integral to our quotidian workday than datasheets or color palettes? Why do we do little more than write texts and give lectures with – perhaps – the odd foray into photography or film-making? Why are we so reluctant to practically (and so not simply conceptually) engage with the full gamut of material, aesthetic, and technological making? This essay addresses these questions by advocating for the emergence of an International Political Design. It begins from the intuition that conceptual and empirical shifts across iss towards embracing the material-entanglements of world politics, the centrality of affect and emotion to human praxis, and relational ontologies of emergence, prefiguration, and complexity, all logically demand a radical re-thinking of our praxis. Specifically, we argue that limiting our activities to the alphabetical (or visual) mediation of knowledge about world politics constrains our politicality and impoverishes our conceptual and empirical vitality. Considered in conjunction with the contemporary prevalence of global violence, injustice, and oppression, we suggest that integrating a far broader range of material-aesthetic practices into iss is now an ethical imperative. Without taking up that responsibility, we abdicate the possibility of a more worldly and socially-embedded social science. Based on these core contentions, our discussion elaborates on how we might imagine an International Political Design: a conceptually rich, empirically-grounded, and ‘applied’ material-aesthetic approach to iss. We do so in the form of a manifesto or – rather – collage of manifestos that each militates, in one way or another, towards the necessity of designing-with/in world politics.