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Critical methodologies in International Political Sociology (IPS) and its intersecting fields and research traditions have increasingly coalesced around the idea that research should be done in dialogue, and possibly cooperation, with people rather than only about them. Drawing together research under this theme and wider debates on participatory, activist, and action research, alongside our own research experience, this article proposes the notion of cooperative research to capture and further develop this research agenda. In the context of neoliberal academia and its narrow insurance-based conception of research ethics and safety, we argue that cooperative and ethical research can be done and developed further both in the cracks and margins of the system, and in a gradual reform process within it. Starting with a survey of existing traditions and recent advances towards cooperative research, we proceed to unpack what cooperative research looks like in practice and how it benefits the involved parties. The article then explores structural and epistemic obstacles that cooperative research faces within the current institutional, body, and geo-politics of knowledge production. It also reflects on future avenues to productively deal with the inherent contradictions of cooperative research, not only by embracing the "ethos of critique", but also by trying to make (even small) changes within the Western knowledge production system by promoting, and rendering more legitimate, alternative forms of knowledge and storytelling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 seeks to show how the ethnographic peace research agenda can benefit from long-standing discussions in the anthropological literature. It sets out by arguing that the ‘anthropological imagination’ apparent in recent debates in peace and conflict studies is informed by an empiricist positivism that conceives of ethnography as a data-gathering tool. By drawing insights from the ‘writing culture’ and ‘Third World feminism’ debates, I will show how such empiricism was challenged and partly done away with in favour of new dialogical and collaborative approaches to knowledge production. In the second part, focussed on the context of the Kyrgyz Republic in Central Asia, I will illustrate the limits and blind spots of the prevalent empiricist approach to studying peace and conflict by showing how discourses and imaginaries of a ‘culture of peace’, tolerance and multiculturalism conceal forms of exclusion, marginalization and hidden conflict. I will show how my own collaborative research sheds light on community security practitioners’ efforts to understand and tackle security challenges. This practico-discursive analysis exemplifies how critical ethnographic peace research can help to uncover patterns of conflict management, post-conflict governmentality, and the construction and ‘othering’ of group identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]