UA Little Rock Professor Explores Global Collaboration in Peace and Conflict Studies Research Amid COVID-19
A UA Little Rock professor has published a paper examining the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on global collaborations in peace and conflict studies research.
Dr. Eric Wiebelhaus-Brahm, professor of political science at UA Little Rock, was a member of three large cross-national research projects during the pandemic. He answered a call to write a paper for a special issue of a journal that brings together scholars to examine how the Covid-19 crisis affected practices on conducting field research in conflict-affected contexts.
His article, “North-South research collaboration during complex global emergencies: Qualitative knowledge production and sharing during COVID-19,” was published in Qualitative Research, a peer-reviewed international journal.
Peace and conflict studies is an academic field that examines the nature of conflict and violence, and how to prevent, resolve, and transform it.
Wiebelhaus-Brahm discusses his experiences with three large international research collaborations. These include the pre-pandemic Beyond Words: Implementing Latin American Truth Commission Recommendations; one ongoing when the pandemic began (Gender, Justice, and Security Hub); and one launched during the pandemic (Truth Commissions and Sexual Violence: African and Latin American Experiences).
The study highlights how, contrary to early predictions, the pandemic has, if anything, deepened structural imbalances between North-South research teams and raised ethical challenges in knowledge production and sharing.
“There are typically power imbalances between researchers in the North and South,” Wiebelhaus-Brahm explained. “The events that we research in peace and conflict studies are more likely to happen in the global South. The expertise of researchers in the South is critical for the success of these projects, but researchers in the North often shape the research questions, and the project is often geared to advance their careers. Meanwhile, researchers in the South are often at the most risk in order to collect data, depending on factors like potential violence from local groups and reprisal from the government.”
The pandemic had a great effect on how Wiebelhaus-Brahm and his colleagues proceeded with research. On off-campus duty assignment during the 2020-21 academic year, Wiebelhaus-Brahm was meant to travel to four continents to do field work, but the pandemic put a stop to all of that and had various effects, for better and worse, on his research collaborations.
In the Gender, Justice, and Security Hub, all of Wiebelhaus-Brahm’s field work was canceled, and the researchers in the South played a more critical role in advancing projects and collecting data. Some new research studies developed in response to the pandemic, such as exploring how the pandemic impacted women’s livelihoods.
He was able to spend more time analyzing data and writing up results for the Beyond Words project, which had finished up data collection before the pandemic started.
The third research project, Truth Commissions and Sexual Violence: African and Latin American Experiences, had issues getting started. The researchers had to rely more on secondary data and explored fewer countries because of the pandemic.
When looking back on these research collaborations, Wiebelhaus-Brahm and his co-authors said there should be a more equitable partnership between all researchers and that it’s important to find ways to ensure that projects are designed and implemented in an equitable manner, and that the research produced will benefit everyone involved.