Lee Ann Fujii

Shades of truth and lies: Interpreting testimonies of war and violence

How should researchers treat questions of veracity when conducting interviews in settings rent by large-scale violence, such as war and genocide? To what extent should researchers trust narratives that are generated in politically sensitive contexts? The article argues that the value of narrative data does not lie solely in their truthfulness or accuracy; it also lies in the meta-data that accompany these testimonies. Meta-data are informants’ spoken and unspoken thoughts and feelings which they do not always articulate in their stories or interview responses, but which emerge in other ways. This article identifies and analyzes five types of meta-data: rumors, inventions, denials, evasions, and silences. The article argues that meta-data are not extraneous to our datasets, they are data and should be viewed as integral to the processes of data collection and analysis. Meta-data indicate how conditions in the present shape what people are willing to say about violence in the past, what they have reason to embellish or minimize, and what they prefer to keep to themselves. Attending to meta-data is important for responding to informants’ fears about talking to a researcher and to ensure informants’ safety after the researcher leaves the field. It is also crucial for the robustness of researchers’ theories and knowledge about political violence and other political phenomena. The article draws from the author’s nine months of fieldwork in Rwanda in 2004, as well as the literature on conflict and violence from political science, anthropology, history, and sociology.

Research Ethics 101: Dilemmas and Responsibilities

The emphasis in political science on procedural ethics has led to a neglect of how researchers should consider and treat study participants, from design to publication stage. This article corrects this oversight and calls for a sustained discussion of research ethics across the discipline. The articles core argument is twofold: that ethics should matter to everyone, not just those who spend extended time in the field; and that ethics is an ongoing responsibility, not a discrete task to be checked off a “to do” list. Ethics matter in all types of political science research because most political science involves “human subjects.” Producers and consumers of political science research need to contemplate the ambiguous and oftentimes uncomfortable dimensions of research ethics, lest we create a discipline that is “nonethical,” or worse, unethical.

Five stories of accidental ethnography: turning unplanned moments in the field into data

Observations of daily life are the bread and butter of ethnography but rarely feature as data in other kinds of work. Could non-ethnographic studies also benefit from such observations? If so, how? This article proposes ‘accidental ethnography’ as a method that field researchers can use to gain better understanding of the research context and their own social positioning within that context. Accidental ethnography involves paying systematic attention to the unplanned moments that take place outside an interview, survey, or other structured methods. In these moments the researcher might hear a surprising story or notice an everyday scene she had previously overlooked. The importance of these observations lies not in what they tell us about the particular, but rather what they suggest about the larger political and social world in which they (and the researcher) are embedded. The paper illustrates the argument by presenting five stories from the author’s experiences conducting research on local violence in Rwanda, Bosnia, the US, and elsewhere.

The Puzzle of Extra-Lethal Violence

This article proposes the concept “extra-lethal violence” to focus analytic attention on the acts of physical, face-to-face violence that transgress shared norms about the proper treatment of persons and bodies. Examples of extra-lethal violence include forcing victims to dance and sing before killing them, souvenir-taking and mutilation. The main puzzle of extra-lethal violence is why it occurs at all given the time and effort it takes to enact such brutalities and the potential repercussions perpetrators risk by doing so. Current approaches cannot account for this puzzle because extra-lethal violence seems to follow a different logic from strategic calculation. To investigate one alternative logic—the logic of display—the article proposes a performative analytic framework. A performative lens focuses attention on the process by which actors stage violence for graphic effect. It highlights the range of roles, participants, and activities that contribute to the production process as a whole. To demonstrate the value of a performative approach, the article applies this framework to three very different extra-lethal episodes: the massacre at My Lai during the Vietnam War, the rape and killing of two women during the Rwandan genocide, and a lynching that took place in rural Maryland. The article concludes by sketching a typology of performance processes and by considering the policy implications of this type of theorizing and knowledge.

‘Talk of the town’: Explaining pathways to participation in violent display

How do people come to participate in violent display? By ‘violent display’, I mean a collective effort to stage violence for people to see, notice, or take in. Violent displays occur in diverse contexts and involve a range of actors: state and non-state, men and women, adults and children. The puzzle is why they occur at all given the risks and costs. Socialization helps to resolve this puzzle by showing how actors who have consciously adopted or internalized group norms might take part, despite the risks. Socialization is more limited in explaining how and why actors who are not bound by group norms also manage to put violence on display. To account for these other pathways, I propose a theory of ‘casting’. Casting is the process by which actors take on roles and roles take on actors. Roles enable actors to do things they would not normally do. They give the display its form, content, and meaning. Paying attention to this process reveals how violent displays come into being and how the most eager actors as well as unwitting and unwilling participants come to take part in these grisly shows. To explore variation in the casting process, I investigate violent displays that occurred in two different contexts: the Bosnian war and Jim Crow Maryland. Data come from interviews, trial testimonies, and primary sources.

Ethnicity Lived and Observed

Post-War Laos: The Politics of Culture, History, and Identity, Vatthana Pholsena (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), ix, 255 pp. þ maps, appendices. Institutions and Ethnic Politics in Africa, Daniel N. Posner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), xi, 337 pp. þ maps, illustrations, appendices. Fuir ou Mourir au Zaire, Marie Béatrice Umutesi (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000), v, 311 pp. þ maps, chronologies.

New Ways Forward for Political Science

Scholars of genocide have always been dubious of the privileged status science has claimed for itself. It was science, after all, that posited a biological basis for human intelligence and ability; it was science again that was behind the eugenics movement and Hitler’s T-4 program and made possible the Holocaust. So it was with some bemusement that I read Making Political Science Matter and Interpretation and Method. As both volumes make clear, the allure of “science”—as professional title, set of standards, body of privileged knowledge, claims to truth—has not diminished. Both volumes revisit the debate about what science is and what it should be with the aim of moving the discipline in more promising directions. While the focus of each volume is distinct, the two books converge on several fronts. Authors draw from a vast knowledge of philosophies and histories of science to make their arguments about expanding the conceptions and practices of social science beyond its current, positivist confines. In one of the more trenchant critiques of positivism, Mary Hawkesworth (chapter two in Yanow and Schwartz-Shea, hereafter YSS, pp. 28–29) lists the major events of the last 50 years that political scientists failed to predict or explain, including the end of the Cold War, political integration within Europe, and the end of Apartheid in South Africa. In the space of a single paragraph, Hawkesworth places the status of positivism on very shaky ground. Generalization is another topic both volumes address. Various authors point out different ways that generalization can occur outside a positivist framework, through theories other than predictive theory (Theodore Schatzki chapter in Schram and Caterino, hereafter SC) and through conceptualizing phenomena in general terms. Robert Adcock (chapter three in YSS), for example, points to Reinhard Bendix and Clifford Geertz as two scholars who often conceived of phenomena in universal terms, such as the concept of “legitimation.” The goal of these scholars was not to arrive at generalized theories of legitimation that obtained in all places and all times, but to uncover how different forms of legitimation arose in different settings. These areas of overlap notwithstanding, the two volumes have distinct aims. The volume edited by Sanford Schram and Brian Caterino takes as its starting point the book by Danish social scientist Bent Flyvbjerg entitled New Political Science, Volume 29, Number 4, December 2007