'Seeing' conflicts at the margins: understanding community experiences through social research and digital narrative in Kenya and Madagascar

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This project uses participatory visual and audio methods to explore the roles of communities in conflicts in places where new resource investments become entangled with longer histories of resistance, protest and violence. East Africa is experiencing a resource boom as investors seek to access to coveted deposits of oil, gas, minerals and geothermal fields. National governments portray new investments and associated infrastructure as beneficial for growth, transforming rural margins and enhancing livelihood opportunities for communities. Yet, achieving these goals on the ground is often undermined by competition for control of resources, corruption and uneven political power. There is evidence that new extractive operations often worsen tensions at the rural margins by aggravating existing contests for wealth and power and influencing new patterns of conflict. In fact, in many rural areas of sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), politics around new resource developments are reconfiguring conflict dynamics, even in places with legacies of violence and unrest. To address these issues, this project bridges the social sciences (social anthropology and human geography), the humanities (history, digital arts and visual inquiry) and community-based participatory research (CBPR) to examine how different 'communities' of actors 'see' and experience resource conflicts in Kenya and Madagascar. We ask how different views, values and strategies for legitimising claims to resources shape relations around resource developments, contribute to conflict dynamics and reflect the changing character of resource conflicts in SSA more broadly. Conflict, in different forms, is always part and parcel of negotiating among different communities of actors - more so in places where ways of valuing and relating to important resources varies dramatically across different groups of government, private sector and local community stakeholders. While it is unsurprising that new large resource developments could spark new conflicts or renew tensions in places, the concerns and views of people in marginalized communities are often unseen or illegible to a wider range of actors. Governments and investors may introduce local compensation schemes and use local gatekeepers to champion 'development', though often without fully grasping community experiences of and responses to the increased presence and control of the state and non-state actors that is implied in new extractive development. The central proposition of this project is that varying, 'hidden' narratives of conflict must be recognised, understood, dialogued and shared to develop pathways through which conflict can be transformed from within and thus promote more peaceful outcomes in resource development contexts. Focusing on specific, contested resource development sites in the two project countries through deep collaboration with local researchers, community advocates and diverse members of local populations, the project will use qualitative fieldwork, a variety of participatory visual and audio methods, and textual analysis to document and analyse the views of (and differing perspectives within) different key groups of actors. We also ask how located histories of resistance, protest, co-option, and consent intersect with contemporary conflicts around resource developments. International teams will collaborate with conflict stakeholders to produce multimedia digital narratives, key outputs around which community-level, national and cross-national dialogues on conflict will be convened. Developing shared visions of what conflict is about requires 'seeing' not only as a state (the transformative potential of extractive industries), or as a private investor (need secure local consent through various means), but also the various ways of 'seeing' as someone who lives in a place where resources are found, extracted and resource claims are contested in complex ways.