The binaries are alive: can we get rid of a/b thinking in conflict studies?

By Mareike Schomerus

This week, Busara is represented at the Conflict Research Society Annual Conference in Edinburgh. In preparing for her sessions, Mareike Schomerus reflects on what she thinks about the most at the moment: the mental models of international engagement in situations of violent conflict.?

The clue is in the name: many university departments offer ‘peace and conflict’ studies, instantly setting up the imagination of two states on opposite ends of a scale. Conflict studies has grappled with this binary imagination of peace and conflict ever since the discipline was first named. The annual conference of the Conflict Research Society (CRS), coming up in Edinburgh this week,? increasingly showcases that peace and conflict is more than studying a phenomenon on a sliding scale: the vast variety of papers and sessions shows that understanding conflict of course requires interdisciplinary research and multi-method approaches.

Still, the binaries linger. Peace and conflict. Democracy and autocracy. Numbers and words. Fragility and resilience. Imagining the world in a/b is comforting: the binary mental model is something that, theoretically, conflict researchers have long abandoned, but that still creeps in nonetheless.

At this week’s CRS, I will grapple with how to abandon our mental model of binary thinking in two sessions: a workshop and a joint methodology paper.??

Think a/b divides across disciplines no longer exist? Try talking to a researcher from a different field

Yes, sure, social sciences, conflict studies included, champion interdisciplinarity. But interdisciplinarity is not a language that is easily learned. It is still the case that interactions between people from entirely different disciplinary backgrounds can be very constructive or—very often—be confusing and unhelpful. Methodological silos continue to exist, meaning that many necessarily multifaceted ways to explore complex social topics get stopped at the door of disciplinary bias.

Imagine a conversation between an ethnographer and a quantitative political scientist, both wanting to understand voting behaviour in conflict contexts. The quantitative political scientist might ask: ‘what’s your data?’, to which the ethnographer answers: ‘election posters have taught me a lot about the social norms of election behaviour.’ That response will likely leave the quantitative political scientist confused and wondering: what’s the data in posters? In return, their data set will to the ethnographer look like a collection of meaningless numbers. More often than not, the two researchers are likely to nod at each politely…and continue on their disciplinary paths.

Stop and think: A new framework for practicing scientific reflexivity in conflict studies

But it doesn’t have to be that way, if we believe Pierre Bourdieu, who 25 years ago suggested practicing ‘scientific reflexivity’ (Bourdieu, Pierre. 2003. "Participant Objectivation."? The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 9 (2):281-294.). He argues that every scholar ought to think reflectively—and not as a one off!— about why they cherish certain types of information, and why their research designs tend to look very similar each time. In behavioural language, we could think of this working in methodological silos as the researcher’s disciplinary bias in action. Overcoming one’s bias—any bias—requires an active process. The same applies for when we want to combine different types of knowledge to increase understanding of complex topics. Easier said than done? What this might look like, practically, is what Shriyam Gupta, Anouk S.Rigterink and I are outlining in our paper ‘Reflexivity, Decisive Scientific Choices and the Research Flow’, which we will present at CRS.

The perils of explaining a nuanced phenomenon with one word

The words ‘fragility’ and ‘resilience’ are also often presented as opposite ends on a sliding scale. Both catchy terms are suggesting a clarity of concept that, honestly, one word just cannot deliver. The expectation that it can also expresses a version of a/b thinking, and of the desire to find ways to work with such complex concepts. Humans are often pulled in two directions: wanting to simplify in order to function (a/b thinking), and then missing out on depth and nuance that a more complex concept (maybe we call that across-the-alphabet thinking?) offers. In a workshop at the CRS with Sara Batmanglich and Catherine Defontaine from the World Bank, we will be working through some of the contradictions and benefits that this pull in in two directions brings.

Can we shift the mental model of binaries?

Binary thinking is, to me, an endearing observation of the human condition (we want to so badly understand things, we want to know which side we stand on, we want to have a reliable shorthand to communicate). It is also one of the great challenges for advancing interdisciplinary research, as well as peace and conflict policy and practice.

Underneath this challenge sits the even bigger question: how can we find ways to support—in a constructive, reflective, friendly way—the required shift in mental models from a/b thinking to, dare I say it, embracing complexity? I keep thinking about this a lot (and have written more about it in the book Lives Amid Violence: Transforming Development in the Wake of Conflict, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc , 2023, open access here). And I hope to think about it even more at CRS 2024.