Contextualizing Ethnographic Peace Research

Abstract

The local or local understandings of conflict and peace cannot be grasped by quantitative means, which has made peace scholars start looking at anthropology. This chapter promotes interdisciplinary dialogue and provides suggestions for how anthropology can help to overcome conceptual and methodological challenges of Ethnographic Peace Research (EPR) through anthropologically informed multi-sited and multi-temporal field research that allows for the dynamic construction of the field, the study of complex peace processes and a perspective from below. It is an appeal to go beyond the conceptualization of EPR as yet another tool co-opted by the international peace industry. The argument is substantiated with insights from long-term fieldwork on peacebuilding in Eastern Indonesia, in which culture and the highly ambivalent revival of traditional institutions figured prominently.