*Originally published in 2023 and preserved as part of our archive project. E-International Relations is free to read. We rely on reader support to make this possible.

Christoph Vogel is a researcher, investigator and writer with over 15 years of experience in analysing politics and conflict across Central Africa. He is a co-founder of Ebuteli, a Congolese research institute on politics, governance and violence, and runs suluhu.org, a platform promoting researchers from the Global South. Most recently, he served as Research Director of the Insecure Livelihoods Series, a collaborative project between Institut Supérieur Pédagogique Bukavu, DR Congo and Ghent University, Belgium. Christoph is the author of numerous newspaper articles, analytical reports and scholarly publications, including the book Conflict Minerals Inc. (Hurst Publishers and Oxford University Press, 2022) based on his award-winning dissertation at the University of Zurich. A former UN Security Council expert on the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Christoph has worked for a wide range of academic and other organizations such as New York University, London School of Economics, Cologne University, Rift Valley Institute, World Bank, the United Nations, ICRC and Médecins Sans Frontières.

Where do you see the most exciting research/debates happening in your field?

That’s a tough one to start with, as there are probably as many debates as there are conflicts across the globe. One of the themes that I find fascinating is to understand the multiple motivations and aspirations that participants in conflicts have – whether combatants, elites or civilians. The study of conflict is by definition a complex endeavour, and it is hard – sometimes outright dangerous – to do rigorous research in situations of violence and insecurity. To a certain extent, this has promoted a lot of remote research as well as a tendency to conduct investigations based on our assumptions rather than actual empirical data and authentic voices from the ground. Bearing in mind these challenges of access and reliability, I consider current debates on mixed methods for the sake of triangulation as well as the use of novel methodologies – such as GIS to complement ethnographic insights – highly salient.

Another aspect, somewhat linked to that but going beyond specific conflicts, concerns the broader epistemologies that guide research on conflicts and violence. Here, we often observe the persistence of fixed narratives and frameworks that can leave little space for grounded analysis. Working with both researchers that call a conflict zone their home as well as with active current and former participants of conflict, including the adoption of their own emic concepts has therefore become a recurrent focus that helps me to balance my own positionality, as well as dominant paradigms in mainstream research.

Finally, a lot of my curiosity goes into understanding the political character of conflict. We now know that most if not all conflicts in the world are rooted in a certain degree of contestation, grievances and political visions of conflict protagonists – even if they can trigger massive violence or proverbial war economies. This, in reverse, creates a challenge whereby we must make sure to explain the multiple drivers and logics of any conflict we study without succumbing to pars pro toto or crude generalization.

How has the way you understand the world changed over time, and what (or who) prompted the most significant shifts in your thinking?

When I began studying conflict in the late 2000s, somewhere half-way through my studies, the global academic community interested in conflicts and violence still depended by and large on paradigms set by classic political science, international relations and certain strands of economics. Usually white, male authors such as Collier, Rotberg, Fukuyama to name but a few, and their grand catch-all theories and studies had a disproportional impact on how students would approach any particular case study. Yet, almost none of them has any significant empirical experience on situations of protracted crisis and violence. Voices from the ground and dissenting theories used to have little space in syllabi and public discourse. While that remains the case until today, there is a slow but gradual opening towards more interdisciplinary and collaborative research. In my case, studying a bit of an eclectic mix between political science, area studies, geography, sociology and anthropology, as well as my initially accidental and later on more consistent engagement on the ground in different conflict zones – not just as a researcher but also as a humanitarian and UN worker – has provided a much necessary widening of my own scope and toolbox to approach and understand confusing and contradictory observations.

Yet, looking at the world from a longue durée perspective, some of the broader global changes appear rather minor. The dominant post-Cold War view in conflict studies centred much on globalisation as a key shaping force on how inter-state and intra-state conflicts evolve. However, if we look at the intercontinental entanglements in trade, politics and culture that have existed for so many centuries and even prior to what is seen as the age of colonialism and imperialism, globalisation is anything but a late twentieth century phenomenon. One thing though, that certainly changes the world rather quickly, and the ways in which we look at it, is the technological revolutions that frame late-modern capitalism in the early twenty-first century. Not only do we........

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