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This article scrutinizes and reconceptualizes covert research in social science. Surveying recent literature about this research method, we reflect on the ethical and safety implications stemming from the widespread, even if well-intended, lack of transparency characterizing many research projects, especially ones conducted in difficult research contexts. While the standard definition of covert research holds that researchers deliberately do not declare to research subjects that academic research is taking place, we argue that the remoteness of Western academia from most researched contexts often a priori renders field research at least partially covert, irrespective of the researcher's intentions. This is because its aims, utility, and expected outputs are hard to understand for research participants unrelated to academia. We illustrate this argument by analyzing our own fieldwork experiences in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. In conclusion, we emphasize the need to critically reflect on the de facto use of covert techniques by social researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasingly complex and differentiated field of security sector and police reform has given rise to extensive research into such processes, but also the stalemate and contradictions they are facing. Recent analyses have shown how civil society actors can successfully influence reform and hold authorities accountable, but are also facing limits in terms of their own expertise, capacity and representativeness. This article presents new evidence of interactions between civil society, state authorities and international organizations on the basis of participatory fieldwork and public discourse analysis in the Kyrgyz Republic in Central Asia. Taking particular interest in practices, expertise and knowledge production, I show how the organization in focus, an NGO network promoting alternative approaches to police reform, had to live up to different roles in trying to effect change: that of activists who mobilize popular support; of experts who apply novel, participatory community security approaches in piloting communities; and lastly, that of knowledge producers providing evidence of the need for reform. These roles and practices, and their implications for the network's reform impact are critically assessed and, in conclusion, developed into the need for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article illustrates the ‘dilemma of difference’ of post-conflict peacebuilding in the Kyrgyz Republic in Central Asia. Following inter-communal clashes in 2010, the country has received significant support in the form of peacebuilding and conflict prevention programmes and aid. Still, national policy makers retained their sovereignty and carried out peacebuilding in line with the country’s historical legacy and cultural specificities. I illustrate the ‘dilemma of difference’ precluding sustainable peacebuilding and conflict transformation in this context because, as Minow argues, difference and the disadvantage and stigma associated with it is either silenced and ignored or over-emphasised, leading to marginalisation through victimisation. I trace the establishment of a territorialised and essentialised understanding of ethnicity through the social transformations of Kyrgyzstan in the early Soviet and the post-Soviet period. I then show how, since the ‘2010 events’, authorities attempted to do peacebuilding and conflict prevention with appeals to multicultural peace and diversity through the Soviet-era idea of ‘people’s friendship’. Such efforts and corresponding peacebuilding initiatives in southern Kyrgyzstani communities face, as I show, inherent contradictions given exclusionary national-level language and cultural policies and a focus on donor satisfaction which serve to brush over reported tensions, exclusion and conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much security-related research conducted in Central Asia appears to disregard the nexus between the data gathered and participants’ and researchers’ experiences of safety during the research. This article explores the interconnectedness of these factors and their effects on the knowledge produced on security. It investigates the legal and institutional context researchers encounter when conducting research in Kyrgyzstan; namely, a state monopoly over knowledge on certain subject matters linked to political stability and security. Furthermore, drawing on the combined fieldwork experience of the authors, the article explores the roles of cooperation, networks and framing in navigating the security implications of doing research. To conclude, we suggest a long-term and collaborative production of knowledge on security in Central Asia to counter the prevailing modes of knowledge production which lean towards epistemically violent and politically provocative topics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]