Many forms of suffering are not caused by direct, physical, and intentional force, but they are nevertheless brought onto specific people in violent ways. That is, their origins, their persistence, the way they are created, upheld, ignored, prolonged and legitimated can be understood as inherently violent. Exclusion from basic needs, discriminatory social arrangements, inequalities that create unnecessary misery, displacement of people, loss of habitats, expulsion from homes and extinction of entire species, and loss of material and cultural values are not necessarily caused by conscious agents in deliberate acts of observable violence. They happen slowly, over time, are unrecognizable due to their normalization, out of sight, ignored by outsiders and institutions, embedded in the taken-for-granted, or hidden behind walls of hegemonic meaning.

Addressing these problems as forms of violence is complicated both conceptually and politically. Conceptually, scholars have proposed terms like structural violence and slow violence, but these are difficult to operationalize: it is not easy to identify thresholds or indicators for when a phenomenon is violent as opposed to merely problematic or tragic (think of the term “externalities”). Politically, such discussions are often met with suspicion. The accusation of conspiracy looms large, and the evidence is usually contested, let alone the solution.

One promising approach to addressing these issues is to obtain a deep understanding of and collaboration with the struggles of the oppressed. They can make visible the forms of violence that others have been failing to see (slow violence). They can counter the charge of unnecessary abstraction and conspiracy (structural violence). And they can be a reservoir of alternative views, to formulate emancipatory politics that are not designed for but by those who have experienced violence. Ethnography lends itself to this task. Unlike other social science methodologies, the strength of ethnographers is to go beyond the analysis of official narratives by immersing themselves in the lifeworlds of their subjects to understand what phenomena mean to the people who have to live (in) them. This means that, rather than being an abstraction, emotions, hopes and despair are experienced in the first person.

In this workshop, we will therefore focus particularly on ethnographic perspectives. However, ethnography has limitations in terms of its aim to not only to describe but also to transform the violent effects that evoke the very emotions that ethnography is so good at capturing. Moreover, there is a particular methodological challenge in reconstructing concrete, lived experiences that are necessarily specific in space and time, and in reconstructing violent structures that are accumulated over time and increasingly globalized.

In this workshop, we bring together scholars who approach the question of violence from a methodological perspective. We are particularly interested in ethnographic explorations of structural, slow or other forms of violence that defy simple models of direct, physical force. Part of the workshop will be a public lecture by Prof. Tania Li who will be a TRACE Fellow at Philipps University Marburg. The rest of the day will be dedicated to presentations by a selected group of scholars who will share their thoughts on the above questions. We explicitly welcome works in progress, unfinished business, and provocations. If you would like to contribute, please send us abstracts of up to 250 words by February 15 to ethnografie@dvpw.de. We will select contributions by the end of February. Papers, drafts and sketches will then be circulated to all participants by May 2.

The workshop is jointly organized by the Center for the Transformation of Political Violence (TRaCe) and the DVWP Working Group on Ethnographic Methods in Political Science. It is hosted by the Center for Conflict Studies, Philipps-Universität Marburg.

If you have questions, please contact the local organizers, Felix Anderl, Johanna Kocks (Center for Conflict Studies) and Julia Leser (CRC Dynamics of Security).