Trust after Betrayal: Global Development Interventions in Contexts of Organized Violence

This UKRI-funded project challenges existing paradigms in the field of interventions targeting those who have taken up and laid down arms in war and organized violence. It draws from major theoretical strands in anthropology and the organizational sciences and integrates thinking from the fields of peacebuilding, security studies, and feminist studies to interrogate existing approaches to “community stabilization” in violent contexts. 

You can access a specially-dedicated webpage on the project here. It includes the project's findings, resources and other interesting insights.

First, this work examines interpersonal trust among violence-affected individuals in communities in which former perpetrators of violence, former victims of violence, and the many who straddle the distinction between the two, build together their everyday lives. To date, organized attempts to increase security have worked towards social changes that require trust (e.g., reconciliation, respectful coexistence) without explicitly addressing the phenomenon. Trust constitutes the necessary foundation for all social, political, and economic life. As such, it remains at the forefront of thinking for this multi-sited ethnography among former members of non-state armed groups in Colombia, Mexico, and El Salvador, and military veterans in the United States. 

Second, this project moves measurement and evaluation of policy and programming in this area to the beginning of the development process rather than at the end, where such concerns are often tacked on as an afterthought to satisfy current and potential future donors. We have long known that people perform differently according to how they are measured, and it is no surprise that both organizational professionals and intervention beneficiaries alike adjust their engagement in these contexts in part according to how that participation is being evaluated. After more than a decade conducting research in this area, including two years working in an international cooperation agency in a program on ex-combatant reintegration, Dr Erin McFee has found that assessments are not capturing the phenomena that they intend to. Yet, at the same time, the desired phenomena – e.g., reconciliation, social repair – do occur; they are simply not captured by extant methods. This project closes that gap.  

Dr Erin McFee (LSE Latin America and Caribbean Centre) serves as the Principal Investigator and the project also includes a UK-based research associate, as well as supporting researchers from the countries featured in the study. Professors Gareth Jones (LSE) and Angelika Rettberg (Universidad de los Andes) act as advisors. These project design elements facilitate transnational collaboration from design to data collection, evaluation, and dissemination stages of the work. Furthermore, it equips young scholars with the opportunity to begin to build valuable networks both nationally in the multiple sectors with which this project engages (public, private philanthropy, international, and non-governmental) and internationally across hemispheres and disciplines. This work represents a collaborative enterprise among ten organizations and institutions spanning five countries and three continents. 

Methodologically, the research deploys a collaborative, multi-sited ethnographic approach, which includes semi-structured interviews, participant observation, archival research and occasional mixed methods, such as survey instruments and field experiments. In addition to a variety of academic inputs, it will also generate regular policy and program recommendations in all field sites, training materials for researchers, and contributions to contemporary international debates and developments in the field of interventions against the backdrop of war and violent oppression.