Making local knowledge: Ethnographic authority in the German intervention in Afghanistan

Abstract

This article analyzes the production of local knowledge in peacebuilding. The local turn has criticized liberal peacebuilding’s exclusion of local knowledge. Still, aside from the binary of inclusion/exclusion of the local in knowledge production, we need more nuanced analyses of how the local is understood, accessed, and produced as local knowledge. I draw on Sending’s work on ethnographic sagacity and the anthropology of colonialism to show that the ability to deploy local knowledge confers authority and that this carries an essentialist understanding of local knowledge. Empirically, I rely on 18 interviews with German experts on Afghanistan to analyze how and what was produced as local knowledge in peacebuilding in Afghanistan. The analysis shows that due to the structural pressures created by ethnographic sagacity, an essentialist understanding of local knowledge may continue to exist even if knowledge producers do not support it. Essentialism arises from the expectations for knowledge producers to demonstrate authenticity, maintain a strategic distance, and adhere to simplified ethics. The findings highlight the significance of relational modes of thinking about local knowledge production in peacebuilding.

Ethnographic sagacity and the local turn

What do we talk about when we refer to “the local” in peacebuilding? More precisely, how do structural pressures in the field of peacebuilding impact what is produced as local knowledge, and how? The local turn has flagged the exclusion of local perspectives and argued for more bottom-up approaches to peacebuilding (Mac Ginty, 2014; Mac Ginty, 2015; Mac Ginty and Richmond, 2013; Paffenholz, 2015; Richmond, 2009). This intervention was crucial; however, subsequent scholarship has highlighted the danger of an essentialist understanding of the local due to a limited understanding of the local turn and ethnographic practice. Essentialism posits a clearly delineated Us and Them, global and local; yet local knowledge is not simply gathered “out there” but is formed through specific, material practices. These practices do not occur in a power-neutral environment, and at its worst, the incorporation of local knowledge may amount to exploiting local knowledge to uphold existing power structures (Randazzo, 2021: 288). In the first instance, this points to the importance of knowledge producers’ critical reflection on their practice to avoid the pitfalls of essentialist thinking. Puzzlingly, however, essentialism may persist even in critical circles (Barnett and Zarakol, 2023). How to explain this endurance of essentialist and extractivist local knowledge production practices even when knowledge producers are reflexive? I argue that structural incentives in the field of peacebuilding favor knowledge products exhibiting a flat, essentialist understanding of the local. To escape the “essentialism trap” (Barnett and Zarakol, 2023), we must understand these structural conditions, too.

The conditions of peacebuilding, which I understand as a professional field of expertise (Goetze, 2016; Sending, 2015), place pressure on producing local knowledge in a specific manner. Even those critical of the dynamics feel obligated to conform. Ethnographic sagacity (Sending, 2015) explains this phenomenon: The concept conveys how the ability to deploy local knowledge confers authority, and how this mechanism is effective even when actors do not believe in its legitimacy. Essentialism is implicit in ethnographic sagacity but not explicitly developed. We must link ethnographic sagacity to additional tools to understand how ethnographic sagacity impacts the actual “doing” of knowledge production and the underlying understanding of the local. I derive these tools eclectically from the anthropology of colonialism (Pels, 2008). Together with ethnographic sagacity, they yield a new framework to unearth the effect of ethnographic sagacity’s essentialism on how local knowledge is “sourced” and selected.

This theoretical innovation is required to execute the empirical contribution of the article, namely, to uncover the functioning of unintended essentialism. In addition, the analysis shows that ethnographic sagacity governs academics and think tankers outside the formal peacekeeping environment, too. More precisely, I focus on the production of local knowledge by Afghanistan experts in Germany. This is a timely endeavor: Since the takeover of the Taliban in August 2021, identifying the reasons for the failure of international and German engagement has become a declared goal across party lines in Germany. The question of knowledge looms large: Who knew what? Did interveners know too little, especially about “the local”? Since 2021, commissions of inquiry have enrolled experts on a fact-finding mission to identify the deficiencies of the intervention, while experts have lamented that their central criticisms have been ignored by policymakers too long before (Schetter, 2021). There has been a lot of focus on these issues of science-policy communication. However, this article takes a step back and looks at the knowledge production process itself. The aim is not to suggest that experts and policymakers have generated “bad” knowledge and failed to understand the “true” Afghanistan. This would do grave injustice to the, however, small number of experts in Germany with a significant depth of knowledge of Afghanistan. Rather, my point is that even self-reflexive knowledge producers are subject to structural logics that limit how they can produce knowledge and how local knowledge comes to be understood by their audiences. In the case of the German intervention in Afghanistan, efforts were made to understand the situation “on the ground” by different actors, including experts. The problem is that the logics of the field favor understandings and procedures for producing local knowledge that impede an open engagement with its embeddedness and limits.

In the following section, I explore the discussion on local knowledge in peacebuilding, the roles of anthropology in these contexts, and how this relates to expertise. The third section sketches out a theoretical framework departing from Sending’s “ethnographic sagacity” (Sending, 2015: 55); the framework is complemented with insights from the anthropology of colonialism, which outlines the ontological, epistemological, and ethical stance underlying the production of local knowledge as ethnographic sagacity. In the fourth section, the analysis based on 18 interviews with German think tank and academic experts working on Afghanistan shows that local knowledge about Afghanistan is a currency for authority and that its production is permeated by essentialist underpinnings (an ontology of cultural authenticity, epistemology of strategic distance, and a dyadic conception of research ethics). The pressures of ethnographic sagacity persist even when the experience of knowledge production clashes with its essentialist assumptions. This is because experts, like other peacebuilding professionals, depend on ethnographic sagacity for recognition in the peacebuilding field. This discourages them from challenging it even when they experience that essentialism does not provide the full picture.

The local in peacebuilding and the role of anthropology

How do we know the local? Anthropological approaches to peacebuilding and the local turn both have investigated this question from what can be termed, broadly speaking, a “practice perspective on intervention” (Koddenbrock, 2015: 2). The “local turn” critique of liberal peacebuilding and its followers notably criticized the top-down application of readymade templates of peacebuilding around the globe and the related notion that intervened countries were “blank spaces” (Tucker, 2018: 223). The lack of local knowledge was understood as a primary problem, and consequently, the local turners demanded the inclusion of bottom-up perspectives by local and native voices (Leonardsson and Rudd, 2015; Mac Ginty, 2014; Mac Ginty and Richmond, 2013; Paffenholz, 2015). Post- and decolonial scholars, too, have emphasized the continuities of (colonial) global power hierarchies reflected in liberal peacebuilding but also in its criticisms (Azarmandi, 2023; Rutazibwa, 2010; Sabaratnam, 2013). Related critical interventions have highlighted the importance of meaningfully engaging with the concrete contexts in which marginalization and the resistance to marginalization are experienced and lived (Beier, 2005; Horst, 2019; Rosenow, 2019; Suffla et al., 2020). People in intervened countries’ everyday lives and practices can become resources for “everyday peace” approaches to peacebuilding (Bourhrous and O’Driscoll, 2023; Millar, 2020). Such approaches counter an ongoing tendency to treat the “local” as a generalized Other to the “international” without defining what specifically constitutes the local in terms of experiences, practices, and materials (Bräuchler and Naucke, 2017; Kappler, 2018; Martin, 2021; Roepstorff, 2020; Schierenbeck, 2015). Given this interest in concrete sites and experiences, anthropological approaches are fruitful in studying peacebuilding differently and from the ground up (Autesserre, 2014; Bräuchler and Naucke, 2017; Denskus, 2012; Oda, 2007). This tradition of studying postcolonial marginalization had already been more firmly established in the study of development policies (Escobar, 2011). Relational approaches by Science and Technology Studies further boosted the anthropological trend in intervention research (Bachmann et al., 2015; Lewis and Mosse, 2006; Mitchell, 2002; Rottenburg, 2009).

Introducing local knowledge to peacebuilding is not a trivial process for several reasons, including practical and methodological challenges; depending on the modes of inclusion, it may be problematic in and by itself. More specifically, there is a troublesome tendency in peacebuilding and International Relations (IR) literature to “instrumentalize” anthropology (Richmond, 2018: 224) and apply it as a mere data collection tool without incorporating the epistemological requirements for reflexivity (cp. also Vrasti, 2008). The political and military cooptation of anthropological methods reaches far back into the colonial legacy of ethnographic practice. This is precisely what the literature on the anthropology of colonialism addresses (Pels, 2008; Pels and Salemink, 1994; Pels and Salemink, 1999). Ethnographically inspired tools have been coopted for operational purposes, too, for example in the United States’ (US) so-called Human Terrain Systems (HTS), which were strongly criticized by the American Anthropological Association (Albro, 2010). Ethnographic fieldwork applied in such a truncated manner loses the original critical impetus of postcolonial critique and the local turn. Sending has analyzed in depth the powerful effects of an “ethnographic sagacity” in peacebuilding, where local knowledge is most likely to be used when it furthers the program goals and the “international rule” of the peacebuilders (Sending, 2015: 74). Steinmetz had introduced the notion of “ethnographic capital” for this phenomenon in colonial times (Steinmetz, 2008a). Randazzo (2021) has cautioned that the inclusion of local and indigenous voices, if merely understood as an absorption and extraction of knowledge, may be coopted and misused for a Western peacebuilding agenda, thus mirroring other extractivist practices by colonizers (Smith, 2021). Representations of and narratives about the local are formed by the agendas and narratives of the peacebuilders rather than representing “unfiltered realities” on the ground (Bliesemann de Guevara, 2017; Hirblinger and Simons, 2015; Jabri, 2013; Mac Ginty, 2015). When the failures of intervention are merely “attributed to a lack of knowledge” at the same time that “the quest for knowledge is embedded in the managerial rationality of interventions” (Bakonyi, 2018: 256), then the inclusion of local knowledge may result in merely supporting this governing rationality and render intervention technical instead of inducing a meaningful engagement with the local lifeworlds. While anthropological approaches have undoubtedly had a fruitful impact on the peacebuilding literature, there is a danger that a flattened understanding of anthropology as a data collection machine is inserted in existing hierarchies in the field of peacebuilding.

This necessitates a stronger focus on the precise epistemological implications of anthropological thinking; the deep disciplinary engagement of anthropology’s own colonial past provides a yet untapped potential for peacebuilding research (Asad, 1973; Pels, 2008). The anthropology of colonialism helps to understand knowledge production about the local as inescapably relational. It also highlights the ongoing practices of knowledge production that negate this relationality. Relationality implies “giving greater conceptual importance [. . .] to relations over entities by attending to the effects of the interactions and exchanges” (Brigg, 2018: 4). According to (thick) relationality, there are no distinct entities before interaction (Brigg, 2016). Knowledge (on the local), too, is constituted through interactions: Knowledge production is “a materially entangled process, in which the involved parts transform one another in relation” (Torrent, 2021: 1). Relationality rejects the idea of separate, substantial entities and allows for a more nuanced understanding of difference. It invites “radical openness” to the infinite possible results of any encounter (Torrent, 2022: 211). This is particularly relevant for knowledge production on the local Other in peacebuilding, as “‘we’ are both often ‘out of place’ and engaging with socio-political difference in our processes of inquiry and knowing” (Brigg and George, 2020: 539). Relationality offers a more detailed analytical framework than extractive approaches to knowledge production. For some authors, it also carries normative and political implications (whereas others warn of a deterministic type of “entanglement” Torrent, 2021: 211): Simplistic Us-Them binaries mask the hierarchies and politics of peacebuilding; relational thinking enables greater awareness of the responsibility implied in “being with” the other (Hunt, 2017). The analysis below is based on an analytical understanding of relationality. I return to the normative-political implications to draw broader conclusions from the study.

Relationality is championed as the primary antidote against forms of essentialism that even critical scholars may be subject to (Barnett and Zarakol, 2023; see also Acharya and Buzan, 2019: 247). Barnett and Zarakol themselves provide some explanations why essentialism persists: These explanations include the need for a common language between theory and practice, but also disciplinary logics of International Relations. We can add a perspective that focuses on the power and authority structures that policy-advising experts are subject to. The literature on experts has carved out their role in knowledge production insofar as they operate between science and politics. They are influenced by logics of both fields and forced to balance different capitals against each other to remain authoritative as experts toward different audiences (Medvetz, 2012). Credibility toward their audiences is a crucial resource to bridge the value systems of the different worlds that experts inhabit (Tchilingirian, 2018). Depending on the specific claim to expertise that is made, credibility can reside in various aspects, for example, scientificity, practicality, or authenticity (Leander and Waever, 2019: 7). For peacebuilding, credibility and experts’ claims to authority are closely entangled with their knowledge of the local intervention contexts, or their ability to signal such knowledge; indeed, a “logic of ethnographic sagacity may constitute an overarching symbolic logic of peacebuilding” (Danielsson, 2020: 125).

Knowing the local is not trivial for various reasons, and there is a danger of a flattened understanding of the local being instrumentalized and coopted for hegemonic purposes. The question remains: How can we more effectively trace what these conditions mean for the concrete practices of local knowledge production? In so doing, how can we explain the resilience of essentialist understandings of the local despite the extensive reflexive scholarly debate? To answer these questions, we must understand the two phenomena discussed by two different strands of literature as inherently linked: The exploitation of anthropological methods is intertwined with the power and authority structures that govern experts.

Ethnographic sagacity and the anthropology of colonialism

How does local knowledge amount to a currency of authority in global governance, and how does this affect how local knowledge is produced? Sending’s ethnographic sagacity (Sending, 2015) answers the first question; with the help of tools developed by the anthropology of colonialism (Pels, 2008), we can answer the second question. Sending applies a selective Bourdieusian framework to argue that authority in the field of peacebuilding is established through “ethnographic sagacity”; this is a concept first developed by Steinmetz (2008a) for the context of colonial ethnography. Ethnographic sagacity describes an “ability to deploy local knowledge” (Sending, 2015: 55), which grants status in the field of peacebuilding (a). However, the functioning of ethnographic sagacity also implies that the local remains subordinated to the international (b). On the first point (a): The “stakes” of the peacebuilding field (Sending, 2015: 68) are oriented around the production of knowledge about local processes and actors. Actors must demonstrate they have such local knowledge, notably by “being there” (Pels, 2008: 288), to gain a type of capital called ethnographic sagacity. Ethnographic sagacity yields recognition; therefore, actors are incentivized to follow the logic of ethnographic sagacity whether they believe in its legitimacy or not. Ethnographic sagacity, importantly, does not describe a “superior grasp” of the Other; local knowledge need not be good or correct (however defined) to become a “marker [. . .] of distinction” (Steinmetz, 2008b: 48). Different professions may also disagree over which local knowledge is valuable (Sending, 2015: 70). Speaking in terms of practical, political relevance, ethnographic sagacity ironically may incentivize researchers and peacebuilders to engage with the “local” only fleetingly; a snapshot of the situation can suffice to establish a badge of credibility. Ethnographic sagacity also does not imply that “the local” gains agency or importance in its own right (b). Local knowledge is only rewarded when “it can help smooth the implementation of predefined programs as opposed to knowledge to be used to reflect on and possibly transform these programs” (Sending, 2015: 74). Local knowledge must fit into the grand narratives of international programs, be it security discourses or “humanitarian imaginaries” (Smirl, 2015: 203). The knowledge produced will also always reflect knowledge producers’ pre-existing skills and capital (Steinmetz, 2008b: 48). Why then defer to the local at all? The answer is state sovereignty: Peacebuilding entails interfering in a sovereign country’s internal affairs, so peacebuilders must show that they understand the particular country’s context (Sending, 2015: 69).

I enhance Sending’s framework in two key areas. First, Sending’s analysis stretches from countries of intervention to the metropole, in Sending’s case, the United Nations (UN) Headquarters. This article shows that the logic also reaches beyond the UN peacebuilding environment or any political actors and extends to academics and think tankers in advisory roles. This is reminiscent of the role of ethnographers in colonial times, who were not officials of the imperial state but often materially and structurally depended on it (Asad, 1973; Pels, 2008; Steinmetz, 2008a). Second, this article provides a more granular view, praxeologically understood, of the knowledge production processes under conditions of ethnographic sagacity. For Sending, this is not of immediate concern; he is interested in how actors acquire authority by displaying local knowledge that is presented as already obtained. However, “ethnographic authority” does not only affect actors’ positions in the peacebuilding field but also carries epistemological consequences (Clifford, 1983). In a praxeological understanding, even an “epistemic hierarchy that favors the global is necessarily constituted by enactments in particular . . . contexts” (Danielsson, 2023: 12): The question of what exactly is being done to obtain what becomes recognized as “ethnographic sagacity” merits its own attention. In a praxeological-relational understanding, local knowledge is the “product of an [unequal] encounter [. . .] based on definite practices that mobilize phenomena and bring them closer for inspection, interpretation, and manipulation” (Eyal, 2006: 24). With Sending, we understand how these practices are structured through struggles for authority. We need additional tools to investigate further the material procedures, foundational ontology, and epistemology that guide these practices.

The anthropology discipline has thoroughly examined its ties to colonialism since the 1970s (Afigbo, 1975; Asad, 1973; Banaji, 1970; Lewis, 1973; Mafeje, 1976; Owusu, 1979) and for various geographic contexts (dos Santos Soares, 2019; Magubane and Faris, 1985; Mogstad and Tse, 2018; Palriwala, 2005; Shimizu, 1999). This discussion already aptly describes the problems faced today by the IR literature on knowledge production in peacebuilding and the role of the local. Acknowledging this broader debate, I especially lean on writings by Peter Pels (Pels, 2008; Pels and Salemink, 1999) because he provides a useful three-part heuristic to scrutinize how the colonial legacy of certain ontological and epistemological positions impedes the implementation of postcolonial criticism of anthropology (Pels, 2008). In doing so, his work resonates with feminist standpoint theory (Harding, 1995; cp. Leander, 2016) and postcolonial thought (Bhabha, 2012; Said, 1979). Pels’ heuristic specifically also addresses the entanglements of academic practice with the non-academic world. This echoes with the problems experts face as inbetweeners of academia and politics/society. Pels identifies three positions that, until today, interfere with reflective research practice: Ontologies of cultural authenticity, epistemologies of strategic distance, and a dyadic conception of research ethics. How do they deepen our understanding of ethnographic sagacity’s effects on local knowledge production?

Regarding ontology, Pels notes that essentialist ideas about the world’s “cultures” persist despite critical engagement with anthropology’s colonial past. The notion of “cultural authenticity” is associated with an “ontology of spatial discreteness” (Pels, 2008: 283), a type of thinking already identified by earlier postcolonial scholars (Bhabha, 2012; Said, 1979), that is, the assumption that human diversity can be mapped geographically (also pervasive in area studies, Mielke and Hornidge, 2017). How does this relate to ethnographic sagacity? Ethnographic sagacity relies on an ontology of cultural authenticity; it also actively co-produces the local as a discrete entity. For ethnographic sagacity to function, the local must be imagined as a distinct, knowable Other. More precisely, ethnographic sagacity defines the international and the local as ontologically separate and subordinates the latter to the former. As outlined above, the underlying driver for ethnographic sagacity is state sovereignty. The notion of territorial sovereign states is one particularly widespread expression of the ontology of spatial discreteness. In peacebuilding, ethnographic sagacity is essential in promoting the goal of “reshaping states as stable components of the international” (Sending, 2015: 69): It ties the ontological commitment to discrete entities to the political commitment to state sovereignty. Examples of cultural authenticity operating in peacebuilding include the idea that “authentic” insights about a country can be gathered from being within the territory of the country of intervention (Bliesemann de Guevara, 2014; Bliesemann de Guevara and Kostic, 2018) or discrete geographical mappings along concepts such as tribe (Manchanda, 2018). For policy advisors, it may prove complicated to communicate a relational rather than an essentialist understanding of locally gathered material to “extra-academic audiences” (Pels, 2008: 287).

The second and related stumbling block is the epistemological posture of strategic distance. While cultural authenticity defines the Other, the “strategic illusion” (Pels, 2008: 289) defines the self, namely a distanced, rational, and objective researcher (Haraway, 2013), following a positivist paradigm. This ignorance of the situatedness of knowledge production is what feminist standpoint theory has also criticized (Harding, 1995; Leander, 2016). Peacebuilders can only obtain ethnographic sagacity if they maintain this imagined distance. This is because of the supremacy of the international over the local: Peacebuilding professionals need to prove “their grasp of the local context but in a way that retains distance to make possible a translation of such insights that is compatible with the positions that they have as ‘internationals’” (Sending, 2015: 64). They are anchored in the international and must produce local knowledge from an imagined “Archimedean” view (Sending, 2015: 66). Strategies to avoid getting “stained” by the local (Eyal, 2006: 22) can involve a literal, material distance (e.g. closed military compounds). The strategic distance assumption of ethnographic sagacity is upheld structurally even when the “‘field’ is [experienced] not just [as] a distant strategic target of study ‘out there’, but a social construct in which our engagement is just the most recent phase in a history of interventions” (Pels, 2008: 288). The outcome of data collection depends on people’s historically learned response, the “extent to which the people researched have already adapted to our methods’ modes of measuring” (Pels, 2008: 290). A stance of strategic distance obscures this, preventing “strongly objective” insights (Harding, 1995) because it discounts the social and historical situatedness of knowledge production (Haraway, 2013).

The third hindrance is a “dyadic” understanding of ethics (Pels, 2008: 291). It limits ethical considerations to the relationship between the researcher and the researched: Data gathered by the former must be used in a way that cannot harm the latter. This conception brackets the broader politico-economical embeddedness of the researcher-researched relationship. It originated in colonial times when anthropologists were assumed to provide neutral, unpolitical, value-free information about the colonized to colonial authorities. This knowledge was used to improve the colonial government, understood as an intrinsically moral enterprise. This functioning, in principle, also underlies ethnographic sagacity: Local knowledge is seemingly extracted from a distant, neutral position (see the strategic illusion), converted into authority, and with this authority, peacebuilders technocratically define problems, and solutions. Peacebuilders’ and researched people’s broader political entanglements with the “powers that be” (Pels, 2008: 293) are not addressed. Ethnographic sagacity itself is such an entanglement as it links local knowledge production to power. For example, what does it mean for researched people that local knowledge is a resource for researchers’ authority (cp. for instance the problem of over-researched societies, Kelly, 2021)? Dyadic ethics persist even in current anthropological associations’ ethics standards; non-academic audiences, too, perceive anthropologists as strategically distant, which co-produces these problematic ethics (Pels, 2008: 293).

In sum, the ontological-epistemological disposition of essentialism that undergirds ethnographic sagacity produces a clearly delineated Us and Them coextensive with the categories of international and local. What is implicit in Sending’s work can be carved out in more detail using Pels’ heuristic. Sending explains how local knowledge functions as a resource for the authority of peacebuilders. With Pels, we can ask more precisely what ethnographic sagacity implies for how local knowledge is produced, insofar as we can outline the essentialist underpinnings of local knowledge production in a world as described by Sending. Understanding how these underpinnings are enacted “on the ground” in a particular case requires in-depth empirical analysis.

The (In-)credibility of the local: Producing local knowledge about Afghanistan

The following analysis investigates local knowledge production by experts on Afghanistan in Germany. The inquiry rests on 18 interviews with such experts working on Afghanistan at German think tanks, research institutes, political foundations, universities, and as freelance consultants, from the fields of area studies and social sciences (see Appendix 1). Interviewees were selected based on their saliency regarding the number and visibility of their publications, their media activity, and because they were highlighted in secondary literature or other interviews. A full survey of all relevant experts on Afghanistan in Germany was not feasible for questions of access, but given the limited overall size of this research community, the analysis covers a significant part; in this regard, the sampling follows the idea of saturation in theoretical sampling (Glaser and Strauss, 2017).

The analyzed period is 2001 to 2023, beginning with the German intervention in Afghanistan; this means, first, that experts were selected as interviewees when they had widely cited media output and academic or policy publications on Afghanistan in this period. Second, it implies that interviewees were asked to report on their experiences during these years. The interviews were semi-structured; a question about the role of local knowledge and the value of “having been there” was part of the interview guide, but in some conversations, the topic emerged without a prompt. In interpreting the interviews, the analysis adheres to Bourdieusian assumptions, as does Sending’s framework. Relationally understood, interviewees’ utterances do not reflect a reality out there (Fujii, 2017) but “[interviewees’] particular locations within social space and the dilemmas that these engender” (Barrett, 2015: 5): Interviewees express their understanding of the field they are moving in. This can mean that interviewees consciously describe the functioning of their field, including ethnographic sagacity. But Bourdieu teaches us that people cannot always name the rules of the game they are playing (Barrett, 2015). Therefore, in other instances, people’s narrations reveal how they enact ethnographic sagacity without them consciously reflecting on it. It is the analyst’s task to reveal these implicit invocations of the rules of the game. In sum, interviews can demonstrate a spectrum of actors’ positions toward ethnographic sagacity from highly critical to deeply internalized and unreflected. The key finding is that even highly critical interviewees, who perform a lot of “role distance” (Goffman, 1961) toward their performance in the game of ethnographic sagacity, find themselves forced to “play along.” The structural pressures operate whether actors believe in the legitimacy of the authoritative mechanism or not, just as Sending describes.

The analysis proceeds as follows: The first section investigates the status of “ethnographic sagacity” (Sending, 2015) in knowledge production on Afghanistan, that is, how German experts experience that they can achieve authority and gain credibility by having been to the country of intervention, and how this is entangled with the ontology of cultural authenticity. The subsequent sections focus on the “doing” of knowledge production “on the ground,” how it is permeated by essentialist ontological and epistemological underpinnings. Interestingly, the pressures of ethnographic sagacity persist even when the experience of knowledge production clashes with its essentialist assumptions. These clashes occur when the assumption of cultural authenticity collides with the high selectivity regarding interlocutors in Afghanistan (the “Kabul bubble”); when knowledge extraction from a strategic distance is impossible when human-to-human interactions evoke learned responses or trigger social conventions; and when the violent context of peacebuilding produces material distance, which contradicts the idea of intimate access to the local and creates particular personal entanglements which challenge dyadic ethics. Even when experts know these limitations, they struggle to convey them in their final outputs. This is because ethnographic sagacity, as it relies on the persistence of cultural authenticity, discourages experts from more broadly addressing the constructed nature of authenticity if they wish to be taken seriously.

Cultural authenticity and ethnographic authority: Having been there

How does the “ethnographic authority of ‘being there’” (Pels, 2008: 288) apply to German experts on Afghanistan and their production of local knowledge? “Being there” emerges as a central capital for German experts on Afghanistan both historically and recently, but this does not imply that all experts believe in the legitimacy of ethnographic sagacity. Likewise, local knowledge remains subordinated to the international, more precisely, to security policies. While the analysis focuses on the period since 2001, a relational understanding of knowledge production demands historical context: Past encounters contextualize present ones. Ethnographic sagacity about Afghanistan already played a role in early 19th-century expeditions to Central Asia by German researchers. These expeditions continued throughout Wilhelminian colonial times. Imaginaries of a much-desired untouched terra nullius, at the expeditioners’ disposal, were projected onto the region (Heyink, 2019; Torma, 2011). The 1960s and 1970s in particular saw an increase in fieldwork due to an improved (scientific) infrastructure in Afghanistan; this was followed by a decline in access during Soviet occupation and another rise after 2001 (Grötzbach, 1981). Since the early 19th century, then, German academia and (colonial) officials both have been engaged in making the “local” in Afghanistan knowable by “going there.” The local knowledge produced on these expeditions provided authority to the expeditioners and (colonial) administrations: It was deeply enmeshed in questions of international political rule during colonialism and beyond. While never fully colonized, Afghanistan was perceived as a strategically relevant buffer zone between great powers; ethnographic knowledge was employed, for example, in Western Germany to discredit the Soviet Union and its policies toward Central Asia during the Cold War (Torma, 2011: 23).

How has ethnographic sagacity been practiced by experts working on Afghanistan since 2001? Reportedly, “having been there” presented advantages before both a scientific and a political audience:

That is certainly the capital that one has, that is, one can report live from Kabul or Afghanistan. So, I see that as the greatest capital. And it is just difficult to do research from a neighboring country or Germany, or to get an overview of the situation or form an opinion. (Afghanistan expert R10, 21 October 2022)

The interlocutor described the access they had as director of the field office of a German think tank as capital awarded to them by political actors in Germany. They also frame it as a scientific necessity: One must be there to get a full picture, and it is difficult to do meaningful research otherwise. The interlocutor explicitly describes that credibility through direct contact with Afghanistan is a currency for accessing politicians. In the second part of their utterance, the interlocutor also agrees with the notion that “being there” provides better knowledge. This view presumes the impression that there is an authentic Afghanistan that can be accessed to a certain degree. In this regard, the interviewee’s expression subscribes to the legitimacy of ethnographic sagacity with its ontology of cultural authenticity. Other interlocutors, too, expressed that one is “closer to reality” when one is on the ground in Afghanistan, especially when the data are “systematically recorded” and translated into “quantitative results” (Afghanistan expert R16, 7 November 2022). This reflects a positivist view of obtaining local knowledge and “still uphold[s] [. . .] the illusion of strategic distance, preferably materialized in terms of quantitative methods of research, in most funding agencies and universities” (Pels, 2008: 290). Such an emphasis on quantifiability overlooks inherent in how numerical values “work to establish [people] as research entities [. . .] and as a concern for [. . .] the international intervention” because they are naturalized as “stable and passive tools” of knowledge production, but are themselves processed in “data cleaning, analysis, and presentation” (Holtrop, 2017: 24). In other words, the language of quantifiability obscures the relationality inherent also in numerical analyses, namely the concrete encounters and procedures through which they “mobilize phenomena [. . .] for inspection, interpretation, and manipulation” (Eyal, 2006: 4).

To be clear: Other interlocutors strongly disagreed with this positivist stance, with the idea that local visits are necessary for proper research, or with both (e.g. Afghanistan expert R01, 4 October 2022). Notably, however, all agreed that ethnographic sagacity was a source of credibility and authority. This consensus on using ethnographic sagacity as a benchmark for evaluation, coupled with disagreement over its analytical value, aligns closely with Sending's perspective on authority: Authority is not granted by a belief in inherent value but through a pragmatic recognition of what “counts.” Consider the following statement: “I am more credible on Afghanistan [. . .] than people who have never been there. But of course, I am not nearly as credible as people who have lived there for twenty years and speak the language [. . .].” (Afghanistan expert R05, 14 October 2022). Taken in isolation, this observation is agnostic about whether experts actually understood the country better after spending more time there. It simply points out that such experts gained more credibility through symbolic capital. Later in the interview, the interlocutor then opined that individuals who had spent more time in Afghanistan did indeed possess a deeper knowledge and that this was recognized by political audiences. This particular respondent, therefore, agreed with the legitimacy of ethnographic sagacity, while others did not. The idea of a bonus for “physical presence in Afghanistan for a significant period of time” (Child, 2015: 41), too, rests on the idea of cultural authenticity: It assumes there is a genuine Afghanistan out there that can be understood through scientific means. In other cases, as we will see below, the perceived depth of knowledge is less relevant to signaling authenticity and, in so doing, establishing authority. This is because ethnographic sagacity is not necessarily about “superior” knowledge (Steinmetz, 2008b: 48). Ethnographic sagacity also operates when there is disagreement over what is the best type of local knowledge (Sending, 2015: 70). All interviewees confirmed that having access to local knowledge is an implicit “evaluative criterion” (Sending, 2015: 67). In some lines of work, such as development cooperation, it is also explicitly enforced as a mandatory operating procedure to maintain contact with local beneficiaries (Afghanistan expert R16, 7 November 2022).

Sending assumes local knowledge awards authority but is always subordinated to the international. For Afghanistan, the international framing habitually originated in international security policy: Traditionally, local access for experts was mainly controlled by political and military authorities. This not only has practical implications for access, which will be discussed later, but also frames knowledge production in a particular context for a specific purpose (cp. Albro, 2010). Due to a “securitization of research” (Peter and Strazzari, 2017), military concepts and agendas have permeated the production of local knowledge in Afghanistan (Monsutti, 2013: 275). Knowledge production tends to focus on facilitating these agendas instead of critically deconstructing them (Sending, 2015: 74; there were, however, a few highly critical analyses by former soldiers, see; Münch, 2015). Several German experts on Afghanistan are former military themselves who believed they were recruited into think tanks because of their “practical expertise” (Afghanistan expert R02, 5 October 2022). Their perception (whether “true” or not) reflects an assumed desirability of practical military expertise. This points to ethnographic sagacity insofar as soldiers were actually “on the ground” (if not necessarily leaving their compound). It also underscores the value placed on these actors’ ability to “see like the state” (Scott, 2020): “When it comes to the fight against the insurgents or [. . .] debates about the deployment of the Bundeswehr [. . .], then of course someone who can think in military terms, and who has also been involved on one side, makes a considerable difference” (Afghanistan expert R02, 5 October 2022). Given the security concerns involved, local knowledge is particularly valued when it aligns with military strategy. Relationality points us to the encounters between experts and local contexts as the sites of knowledge formation. As ethnographic sagacity would predict, these interactions are shaped by the security policies under which they operate and are ultimately subordinated to international security priorities (Peter and Strazzari, 2017).

Cultural authenticity vs the bubble

Ethnographic sagacity rests on an ontology of cultural authenticity. How does this authenticity play out when we zoom in on the “doing” of knowledge production on the ground? Ironically, the “authentic” image of Afghanistan is created through a highly selective process that fails to reflect even a positivist notion of representativeness. This is because ethnographic sagacity does not necessarily correspond with deeper knowledge. Instead, it often involves presenting one’s “being there” in a manner that aligns with international objectives. My argument is not that local knowledge would have been authentic had it been constructed less selectively, but that the functioning of ethnographic sagacity obscures these selective knowledge production processes. This impedes the production of “strongly objective” (Harding, 1995) results, where selection procedures would be incorporated in the analysis and their implications discussed. Experts who reflect on this still feel the pressure to produce output responding to a demand for “snapshot authenticity,” thus also reinforcing essentialism against their intention.

How does selectivity materialize? First, while some experts opined that the duration of stay in Afghanistan was relevant, even brief trips seemed to award enough credibility to be worth the travel. One interlocutor cited publication pressures as a factor promoting such fleeting visits:

There are just a lot of people who would jump on any bandwagon to attend a conference in Pakistan or, if possible, to pick up a lecturer assignment or something in Kabul, to gain many impressions on the spot and then to process them quickly in some kind of publications. (Afghanistan expert R02, 5 October 2022)

When interest in Afghanistan was booming, brief visits to the country could suffice to award experts with stamps of approval. Ethnographic sagacity drives the (perceived) ability to publish. This, too, is explained through an underlying ontology of cultural authenticity, where having been there is always better than not having been there: Those who had been there are perceived to have accessed the true Afghanistan. Selectivity is caused by the brevity and highly staged nature of these visits. The shorter the visit, the more strictly planned it is, and visitors only experience “standard program points” in the “limited and sanitized space that intervening agencies create” (Bliesemann de Guevara, 2017: 11–12). Again, experts need not consider such visits productive (the interlocutor above was highly critical of them) to acknowledge that they provide symbolic capital.

The quote above cites academic pressures (publications). However, experts, as intermediaries between academia and politics, must negotiate multiple entanglements both at the local site and in the metropole. For example, politicians may desire experts to provide authenticity, but to do so in the most concise way possible:

That was always the question you get from political actors: “Well, what do the Afghans say about it?” I mean, you always had to be careful not to immediately leave the room again, but people cannot imagine that in a country of 35-40 million, there is of course a fairly large spectrum [of opinions]. (Afghanistan expert R04, 13 October 2022)

The demand for the authentic voice of “the” Afghans does not allow for variance. In Western thought, the concept of the authentic Other is often associated with pursuing a distinct, concrete essence of that Other (Handler, 1986): Authenticity must be neatly packaged into a unified impression of the local. For this interlocutor, who had been deeply engaged with the country for decades, the politicians’ demand caused outrage—they did not agree with the demand but sensed its pressure. Even experts engaging with Afghanistan more than fleetingly are asked to provide a type of snapshot for authenticity. There is not only a premium on authentic local knowledge but also on highly condensed local knowledge. The underlying driver is the hierarchical and discrete ordering of the world into the international and the local: Local knowledge is only appreciated to the extent that it can be utilized for international objectives. It is not valued for its complexity but must be simplified to meet practical needs.

Authenticity was produced through a highly selective process when research visits grew increasingly fleeting, and experts had to select what to communicate to their audiences. In addition, international actors habitually relied on “biased samples of informants” (Autesserre, 2014: 12). Respondents termed this the “Kabul bubble,” and one of them sarcastically remarked: “And those were people who were handpicked, of course. And then, above all, people who could ideally speak German, or if it was not possible, then, well, English is also possible [. . .].” (Afghanistan expert R04, 13 October 2022). Ironically, this selectivity also stretched to dialogue formats specifically designed to create more inclusivity: “And then, it was really always the same five women who were invited to all the events. [. . .] You try to create a certain diversity. But then you already have your contacts, and you talk to them.” (Afghanistan expert R07, 18 October 2022). Well-educated, internationally oriented people were more convenient interlocutors for German experts and politicians than a more varied sample would have been. People were selected because of pre-existing connections. Interveners’ skills (or lack thereof, especially in terms of language) defined the local knowledge produced (Steinmetz, 2008b: 48): To be selected as “the” voices of Afghanistan, people needed to speak the interveners’ language. Assuming that a part of a studied society can stand for its entirety is a pragmatic supposition without which fieldwork could not meaningfully operate (Pels and Salemink, 1994: 11). Yet, the selectivity of the Kabul bubble goes so far as to yield a “scrubbed, disinfected interlocutor, [. . .] a laboratory creation with suppressed, and therefore falsified, connections to the urgent situation of crisis and conflict that brought him or her to attention in the first place” (Said, 1989: 210). Said’s statement also underlines how cultural authenticity cannot in practice be disentangled from strategic distance (which “cleans” the local so that it cannot stain the international) and dyadic ethics (which bracket the broader political context).

The selectivity appeared to be driven by pragmatic concerns, but the naturalization of these “necessities” conceals the underlying hierarchies and conceptual frameworks at play. Ethnographic sagacity requires that local knowledge suits the narratives of international programs. The more limited peacebuilders’ actual access to the local context, the more likely they rely on “overly simplified narratives” to make sense of “the local” (Autesserre, 2014: 12). These narratives build on “humanitarian imaginaries,” the “abstract, conceptual yet programmatic way the international community thinks about the so-called problem of underdevelopment” (Smirl, 2015: 203). Given Germany’s continuous domestic debate about the country’s military involvement, the country desperately needed a convincing legitimation narrative, which was, broadly, the idea that Afghan society could be “educated” out of violence (Afghanistan expert R03, 11 October 2022). Relationality helps us understand that authenticity was not found “out there” but had to be produced in interaction, specifically in a way that would resonate with this legitimation narrative. The urban middle classes and educated women provided such a desirable type of authenticity.

Face-to-face with the “Strategic illusion”

How does ethnographic sagacity’s demand for strategic distance take shape in the case of Afghanistan? The assumption of strategic distance underlies much knowledge production practices on the structural level, but embodied interactions and their historical reverberations complicate it. Like the assumption of cultural authenticity, the strategic illusion persists despite these challenges. Ethnographic sagacity creates incentives not to contest it on a broader scale. To analyze the challenges against the strategic illusion, we again must mobilize relationality, the idea that knowledge is always produced in situated encounters rather than from a distance. Take one common practice based on the idea of strategic distance, namely the use of surveys. The standardization involved in surveying lends itself to knowledge production “in a way that retains distance to make possible a translation of such insights that is compatible with the positions that [peacebuilders] have as ‘internationals’” (Sending, 2015: 64). In Afghanistan, surveys experienced a veritable surge in the mid-2000s, but the practice was hollowed out by the fact that those surveying could not often interpret them (Schetter, 2014). Beyond interpretation, however, data collection itself is not straightforward, as experts reflect “I have to know how credible the statements by the local population, who is studied or responding, are, and I have doubts about this for many projects.” (Afghanistan expert R03, 11 October 2022). The strategic illusion assumes that local knowledge can simply be extracted by talking to Afghans, but questions are not asked from an historical position by a detached interviewer. Interviewers were either military or associated with it, whom respondents would not necessarily talk to freely. As evaluation surveys, in particular, were a routine operation, respondents had time to adapt to this method and provide answers they believed were expected from them or resonated with former experiences of being surveyed (Pels, 2008: 290).

The selective recruitment of interlocutors, as analyzed above, also impacted interaction dynamics. Experts contemplated that many conversations were often highly performative events between international actors and “appealing, often young” interlocutors who were “extremely competent in speaking to the international community” (Afghanistan expert R07, 18 October 2022). International inquirers cannot straightforwardly obtain objective information from these conversations because their identity evokes certain behaviors and ways of talking: “People talk to diplomats the way they talk to diplomats. So, it is not like they get unfiltered information.” (Afghanistan expert R07, 18 October 2022). The fact that interactions were part of “short, penetrative missions” (Smirl, 2011) conditioned the course of the conversations, too:

[W]hen meetings are scheduled for 25 minutes or 15 minutes, especially with very high-ranking people, then, of course, you had to immediately go into medias res and then the first question was: “Where do Afghanistan’s biggest problems lie?” And Afghans are so polite, they first say, “We do not have any problems.” And before you get them to the point where they are talking about real things, the meeting is already over. (Afghanistan expert R04, 13 October 2022)

Conversation is not merely a technical procedure for extracting knowledge, but an interpersonal interaction shaped by social conventions. The assumption of strategic distance is invalid because there is no neutral vantage point from which researchers or politicians can ask questions and receive answers. This example illustrates that reflecting on embodied knowledge production itself yields significant insights, particularly about social customs and the mutual perceptions between interveners and those being intervened. Maintaining the strategic illusion of an impartial distance between the researcher and the researched hinders a deeper, more immersive understanding of the “local” context—defined not only as the country of intervention but also as the immediate setting in which local knowledge is produced. To comprehend the meaning of the interaction, the strategic illusion would have to give way to “a tactic [that] insinuates itself into the other’s place, fragmentarily, without taking it over in its entirety, without being able to keep it at a distance” (De Certeau, 1984: xix).

Given that at least some experts seem to be aware of the limits of strategic distance, how come it prevails? The structural pressures related to ethnographic sagacity discourage experts from openly communicating the limits of strategic distance:

I always felt in Afghanistan that I could not work the way I was supposed to. [. . .] [Y]ou cannot even really talk about how much you are methodically off the mark. [. . .] If you were to admit it, everyone else would have to do it still the same way anyway, because there is no other way. [. . .] You would make yourself so vulnerable. Not because the others would somehow do things better or more professionally. But because they can build a façade that makes it seem as if everything is fine. (Afghanistan expert R12, 28 October 2022)

The respondent found that the idea of a positivist, distanced extraction using rigid methods failed during the production of local knowledge in Afghanistan. Still, they felt unable to broadly communicate this complexity because it would weaken their position in the peacebuilding field. This, they insist, is not because others produce “better” knowledge, but because they are better at displaying (“façade”) themselves as more distanced researchers. This precisely describes the functioning of ethnographic sagacity: It grants recognition to those who can present themselves as strategically distant researchers with local knowledge.

Violent contexts: Materials of distance and the impossibility of dyadic ethics

The production of local knowledge in peacebuilding regularly takes place in violent contexts, which present special challenges for fieldwork (Bliesemann de Guevara and Bøås, 2020; Cronin-Furman and Lake, 2018; Krause, 2021; Shesterinina, 2019). Concerning ethnographic sagacity and its underlying commitments, two results emerge if we apply a relational lens and investigate how violent contexts frame concrete encounters with the local. First, the material technologies of accessing the local create a material type of “strategic distance” but contradict the idea of intimate access to the ground. Second, the violent context complicates research ethics, so a dyadic understanding of the research relationship is of little use. Despite all this, the assumptions on epistemology and ethics are still upheld. How do material technologies create strategic distance? I showed how security concerns frame local knowledge production ideationally, subordinating it to international security concerns. Access to local sites was also materially mediated through security infrastructures, technologies, and actors. Due to their reliance on military infrastructure and personnel, experts often found their reach limited to that of the military. Especially the German military was almost hermetically isolated from local civilian life (Schetter, 2014). Multiple experts mentioned the armored vehicles in which they and politicians traveled the country. While stressing their necessity, for security concerns, interlocutors also worried that these material affordances hindered closer engagement with the local: “Well, of course, if you drive through Kabul with an escort and at 60, 70 km/h, then you really get a view of the great distance [to] the population” (Afghanistan expert R04, 13 October 2022). The enclosure by the vehicle and its velocity materialize spatial distance. Vehicles can become “mobile zones of governance and contestation” (Walters, 2015: 47) and the expert driving through in an armored escort reenacts historical encounters (Pels, 2008: 288) between an occupying military force and the occupied. The vehicles “do things that would otherwise require the work of (usually) many human beings to achieve” (Austin, 2019: 174); here, they replace the (violent) labor of soldiers protecting the traveling expert or politician. This strategic distance is not only strategic insofar as it produces a supposedly detached standpoint from which to objectively grasp the item of study, but it also strategically protects the onlooker. Violence and power are woven into the interaction between the researcher and the researched through material means, and distance is created both physically and symbolically. The researcher remains “unstained” by the local (cp. Eyal, 2006: 22).

In addition to generating specific material mediations, violent contexts are also an ethical challenge for fieldworkers (Bliesemann de Guevara and Bøås, 2020; de Vries and Glawion, 2021; Eriksson Baaz and Utas, 2019). Considering the armored vehicle, for instance, we might question the “one-sided focus on researcher safety” instead of a broader consideration for the safety of all participants (Eriksson Baaz and Utas, 2019: 1); even this would still reflect only dyadic ethics. The triadic perspective, focusing on the entanglement with the powers that be and the weaponization of knowledge, perhaps most prominently emerged in the case of the “ethnographic intelligence” (Perugini, 2008) gathered by the US Human Terrain Systems (Albro, 2010). Research partners, too, can be ambiguously entangled with these questions. As analyzed, ethnographic sagacity in Afghanistan drove the over-research of people in the “Kabul Bubble”; fieldwork beyond this “bubble” and beyond the “hygienic” spaces of military compounds in Afghanistan usually required some form of engagement with local elites, also known as warlords, as research participants or gatekeepers. An experienced fieldworker reflected on the perception of these warlords and their ethical dilemma in working with them:

[F]or a while, certain warlords were suddenly on the positive side, from an international perspective, who were otherwise always completely demonized. [. . .] So [the warlord I worked with was] certainly not somehow particularly eviler than any of the others. But he acted as a protector of science and research, which others did not. And that was extremely helpful for me, of course. (Afghanistan expert R12, 28 October 2022)

Cooperating with warlords is useful or even necessary in the production of local knowledge beyond the urban and military centers, but they are ethically problematic partners. This was a challenge for state-building in Afghanistan more broadly, as warlords’ involvement was often considered necessary to build, ironically, a strong Weberian central state (Mac Ginty, 2010; Peceny and Bosin, 2011). The interviewee critically reflects on their own interest in obtaining access and protection. They note that other international actors, too, changed their framing of warlords when their cooperation was desired (when at other times, any local elites were demonized as “blood-soaked warlords” by the interveners, (Schetter, 2014; Williams, 2007). Fieldworkers working with warlords must (dyadically) consider the harm done to research participants. However, exclusively dyadic ethics fail in such a system of interlaced powerful relations and assurances. To avoid the “caricature populated by simple binary opposites of warlords and the placemen of the global North” (Mac Ginty, 2010: 578), triadic ethics are better equipped to grasp how international interveners, local elites, the Afghan government, research participants, and researchers are positioned to one another. Triadic ethics acknowledge the ambivalence of the researcher’s position instead of insisting on its detachedness and purity. Experts may well be aware of these ethical complexities. However, as ethnographic sagacity incentivizes one’s self-portrayal as distanced, neutral, and apolitical, knowledge producers feel they cannot openly communicate the moral complications of fieldwork in their knowledge products (Afghanistan expert R12, 28 October 2022).

Local knowledge production by German experts on Afghanistan has been subject to pressures produced by ethnographic sagacity. With Pels’ heuristic, the effects of ethnographic sagacity’s essentialism on knowledge production emerge in greater detail: Experts gain credibility by “having been there.” Cultural authenticity was constructed through a highly selective process in which only people from the highly educated “Kabul Bubble” qualified as interlocutors. The illusion of strategic distance was upheld even when past and present entanglements between the intervener and the intervened complicated the distance assumption. The violent context created physical distance and complicated dyadic ethics. Some experts believe in the inherent value of “being there,” others are more critical of essentialist understandings of the local, but all are incentivized to play along and affirm an essentialist view of local knowledge to secure their authority in the field of peacebuilding.

Knowing how we know the local

The article has advanced an empirical exploration and theoretical explanation of the essentialism that persists in the construction of local knowledge in peacebuilding. The empirical case of German experts on Afghanistan has shown that even reflexive knowledge producers face incentives to provide knowledge products that obscure the relational nature of their production process. Sending’s ethnographic sagacity explains these incentives in the field of peacebuilding. Whether knowledge producers believe in the value of local knowledge or not, ethnographic sagacity operates on all of them. To understand how ethnographic sagacity operates on knowledge production practices on the ground, the analysis drew on Pels’ three-part heuristic of cultural authenticity, strategic distance, and dyadic ethics. Synthesizing Sending and Pels provides a framework that can be applied to analyze other intervention contexts, too. The analysis also updates Sending’s findings by showing that ethnographic sagacity extends to expert knowledge producers in advisory roles who are not formally part of the UN. The pressures operating on them often emanate from the demands directed at them by their policy audience. Experts find it challenging to convey a relational understanding of their findings because political counterparts continue to adhere to essentialist ways of knowing the world and demand concise input with reduced complexity. Consequently, experts risk losing their ethnographic authority if they situate their findings relationally. However, there are also intra-academic incentive structures, such as publication pressures, that reinforce ethnographic sagacity.

Where does this leave us—are knowledge producers the helpers of neo-colonialism? What good is their reflexivity when essentialism continues despite their critical thinking? Rather than dismissing knowledge producers as “primarily an aid to [neo-]colonial administration,” we can point to the capacity of even a structure such as the one described for “transcending itself” (Asad, 1973: 18). If knowledge producers see themselves forced to treat the local as stable, it is still relevant whether these are treated as “‘as if’ assumptions” (Barnett and Zarakol, 2023: 436) or understood as an essential characteristic of the local. Insisting on relationality is important from an epistemological as well as a political standpoint. It sharpens awareness of the responsibility involved in “being with” both in the practice of intervention and the practice of knowledge production.