Central And East European Studies - University Of Glasgow

You are warmly invited to the CEES seminar on Wednesday April 17th, CEES Seminar Room, 8 Lilybank Gardens:
Human subjects, ethnography and civil war research in honour cultures: Evidence from Chechnya
Emil A. Souleimanov... Charles University of Prague
Research into political violence in general and civil war in particular has recently witnessed a turn to the micro-level of analysis. For decades, macro-level theories – primarily of political discrimination, socio-economic inequality, and ideology - have dominated the field, bringing to the forefront of academic interest greed and grievance as the major causes of armed conflict. Yet a closer look into the motivations of individuals to join, stay, or abandon armed groups, or to provide material or non-material support to armed groups, has provided different, and more spot-on, perspectives evolving around the deeply personal motives of communal revenge, social networks, and selective incentives. Ethnographic methods – and focus on human subjects as the main source of knowledge - have hence returned to the methodological arsenal of researchers dealing with various form of political violence. Yet while these epistemological modalities are considered increasingly legitimate and potent in their ability to shed light to individual motivations, intrinsic challenges pertaining to conducting research in civil war-torn communities have remained unaddressed. This holds twice for the cultures of honor, where culturally-determined setbacks on the way of researchers to access and acquire sensitive data from highly-introverted communities have been marked by notoriety.
The CEES Seminar Series is kindly supported by the Macfie Bequest
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