Anthony Ware

Climate change is increasingly recognised as a structural influencer of insecurity, interacting with historical grievances, political exclusion, and inequalities in ways that can impact the dynamic...

Serious, repeat or prolonged violence instills a deep-seated fear of further aggression. The more frequent or intense the violence, the more profound the fear becomes. At the community level, the p...

This paper examines a partnered approach to remote qualitative fieldwork implemented in the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM), a conflict-affected region in the southern Philippines where foreign researchers are subject to travel restrictions. Through collaboration between Deakin University, Australia and Mindanao State University-Iligan Institute of Technology (MSU-IIT), we designed and supported 41 focus group discussions facilitated by 24 locally trained young researchers. Although remote fieldwork is often considered a second-best option, we argue that when carefully structured and ethically grounded, it offers distinct advantages in settings where outsider presence is constrained by insecurity or mistrust. Drawing on facilitator debriefs, author fieldnotes, and reflective discussions, we show how localised research delivery can enhance cultural relevance, ethical integrity, and data quality. The paper traces the research lifecycle from partnership formation to field training, facilitation, debriefing, and collaborative analysis—and illustrates how layered roles and structured reflexivity enabled high-quality data collection from a distance. The findings contribute to debates on remote and partnered methodologies, adapting research to complex environments, and the value of local knowledge production. We offer practical recommendations for researchers and institutions seeking to conduct inclusive, safe, and context-sensitive qualitative research in fragile or conflict-affected settings.

This volume focuses on the understanding and application of two closely related concepts, “Do No Harm” (DNH) and “conflict sensitivity”, and their critical engagement in the academic literature. It began as a special issue of the journal Development in Practice (DiP), which attracted so much interest that we were invited to publish it as an edited volume, including a later article (Barter 2024).

This paper examines conflict-sensitivity/DNH through the lens of everyday peace. It draws on data from a local non-government organisation program working on development and peacebuilding between Rohingya Muslim and Rakhine Buddhist communities in Rakhine State, Myanmar. That program is framed around the everyday peace concept, the social practices commonly adopted by ordinary people as they seek to get on with daily life in ways that minimise risk, and perhaps work to deepen inter-communal relationships. Everyday peace thus has obvious overlaps with the DNH concept of “local capacities for peace” (LCPs). This paper analyses this program to make several contributions to the understanding of conflict-sensitivity from this framework, including expanded conceptions of LCPs and new warnings of potential harm inherent in what are often perceived as LCPs, unless power imbalances are concurrently addressed. These findings aim to improve conflict-sensitivity/DNH practice.

Inspired by Mary Anderson’s influential work Do No Harm (1999), this book encourages critical reflection on the development and contemporary relevance of conflict sensitivity approaches in international development, humanitarian action and peacebuilding. Despite the widespread acceptance of conflict sensitivity, particularly in the context of worsening crises, there has been a surprising lack of critical discussion and evaluation of the framework and its application. This book fills this gap by bringing together a diverse collection of articles, practice notes and reflections from academics and practitioners in the field of conflict sensitivity. It provides a comprehensive platform for valuable debate, highlighting strengths, areas for improvement and practical guidance for real- world application, based on 25 years of conflict sensitivity/ do no harm practice and innovation. By integrating insights from practitioners, the book aims to bridge the gap between theory and practice. Advocating the systematic integration of conflict sensitivity into humanitarian, development and peacebuilding efforts, the book offers practical guidance for implementation and adaptation in different contexts and programmes. As a valuable resource, it deepens understanding and promotes accountability to the populations that humanitarian, development and peacebuilding actors seek to support, including actors advancing conflict sensitivity in their own contexts. It serves as a springboard for further academic research on conflict sensitivity. This book was originally published as a special issue of Development in Practice.

Intractable conflict and deep poverty often negatively reinforce one another. In such contexts, therefore, it is necessary to integrate peacebuilding into community development (CD) programming and vice versa to break deep oppression and deprivation. The authors integrated arts-based peacebuilding processes across two CD facilitator-training programme cohorts in Rakhine State, Myanmar, to enable participants to investigate conflict dynamics together, generating new insights that could be applied in their CD work. This chapter argues that arts processes enabled a group of relative strangers to conduct collective grassroots ‘research’ into the nature of the conflict, their role in it and how they could be agents of peacebuilding and change, contributing ultimately to reductions in poverty and conflict locally. Through their own collaborative investigation and the new knowledge generated about their own context and involvement, participants discovered that conflict and lack of cooperation within their communities contributed to poverty, as much as broader inter-ethnic tensions. Often in unanticipated ways, they creatively re-purposed their new knowledge to address the multifaceted drivers of local conflict, leading to renewed cooperation which also supported mutually beneficial development outcomes.