 Welcome back everybody this is panel three for the conflict records unit conference online conference on documenting work. The panel is on case studies in access. And Columbia as case studies I'd say that when we first put together the agenda the case studies in access for panel three and case studies and evidence for panel four looked a little bit different. We had a wider range of papers and as we as we iterated that. Basically case studies and access and case study evidence, both panels are case studies in access and evidence and other issues as well. But this was a useful way to organize the second two panels the second pair of panels of the day. And for those of you who weren't there this morning my name is Mike in a summer visiting research fellow with the Department of War Studies and in my non academic professional life. I work as a UN official in Iraq with you and investigative team for accountability of Daesh. Three panelists today for panelists today. I'm going to do my apologies if I haven't pronounced that correctly apologize to anybody. If I get names wrong. Who is a visiting researcher at the city University of New York, as well as having other. Other other affiliations. So I'm going to bring up some details here so that I don't get anything wrong. Bear with me one second. James Greg who's a PhD candidate with at the University of St. Andrews, and oxana Micaeva and Victoria Serretta oxana, who are co presenting oxana as a professor at the European University. I'm going to bring up Frank for it in order in Germany and a professor of sociology at Ukrainian Catholic University in. I'm sorry I don't know how to pronounce it. Can you can you help me out. Apologies for my, for my linguistic and capacity and Victoria is a fellow at the Emory Kritesh college Jenna and a senior research fellow at the Institute of Ethnology at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. So the order of presentation, we have we have two really interesting papers on different aspects of conflict in Donbas coming. And I think when when is about localized production of knowledge it's Victoria and oxana's paper, and James is looking at ethics of social social media as sources. So that presents a really interesting pairing of approaches in a similar regional context, and then we have a third paper, which, which Lilliana is presenting on an aspect of the FARC guerrilla archives in Columbia, and in particular, a missing piece of the archives that you were able to work with which is really interesting. So in terms of order. I don't have a particular preference I don't know if you do, but I'd like to start with oxana and Victoria presenting their paper, and now in James we can do the pairing and then the Columbia case Liana your paper presents, you know, sort of a different way of looking things as well, kind of a third wave looking things and so I might wind up well enough that way. Does that work for everybody. Yes, be very democratic about this. Okay. Yeah, I'll hand over just for everybody who is in the attendees who are people who are listening in. If you have questions please post them into the q amp a function will allow 15 minutes or so for 15 roughly 15 or 20 minutes for each of the papers, and then we'll do q amp a after that. Again just post your questions into the q amp a and those will be moderated after after the paper presentations with that I'll stop talking and oxana and Victoria the. Thank you very much for inviting us to present we are adding to your multi disciplinary approach here now as sociologist, but also as historians in our background so we can deal with both subjects. We are discussing. And in here we'll be presenting some analysis we done about knowledge production and issues of knowledge production, especially in for the pills building but not only with the focus on societies that are born torn and we were focusing when we applied for this conference we didn't know what will happen to us we were focusing on Donbass and creamy as temporary occupied territories and now, of course we have a absolutely new spin in our country. So here we will try to add or discuss a little bit at the background with the literature. First of all, we are using literature about local and practical turns in peace building, which are aiming at getting more knowledge from from the local experts or local communication. We will also tap a little bit on country how to discussion about the contribution of research and knowledge production. From academia to to the public sphere or political sphere, and we mostly will be focusing on difficulties of conducting research and discussing issues connected to that. Of course, there are many, many different issues that can be discussed and we cannot target them was then within 15 minutes presentation. There are many questions, whom to study what should be studied when we are trying to get information about war and torn societies about methodologies applied. But also, who are those who are studying or involved in the collection and ways of information functioning or dissemination. So we will be tapping on this three last issues with our presentation. First of all, when we look at the papers with debates, there are a lot of debates, exactly about ability to conflicts and develop conflict sensibility ability to understand the context of RNS of researchers role positionality in a given context. And in my part of presentation, I will be discussing exactly these issues and challenges that we are facing and many are facing in this field. So, here, quite strongly comes to play such situation as a problem of insider or outsider position of the researcher, quite often in many reports or in many conferences I was attending research conducted by a scholar or institutional institutions external to the conflict is often absolutely automatically valued as being allegedly more neutral and therefore more trustful. At the same time, if you look at the societies that function either under authoritarian regimes or in war torn regimes. You can understand that societies are quite strongly built into a social network of trust that protect people from atrocities and many different issues they are facing because of the regime or because of the war. It is very difficult for strangers to get into those networks. And at the same time, without getting into those networks without getting into the networks of trust, we have limited access to information about what is happening to the society. So, in this case, getting many information quite often requires someone to be acknowledged, someone to be trusted and quite often this might be the local expert or person who understands local sensitivities. And also knows people who might serve as a conductor so gatekeepers to certain societies or societal groups which are inaccessible in otherwise. And also what is is very important that during the discussions or talks or interviews, the person knows the language, how to address certain issues, how to pose questions, which immediately won't be recognized as offensive as sensitive or will show that person doesn't know what is happening. This could be even the way how we name what is happening, how we name certain social phenomena around. And this might really cause us a loss a lot of information. So, furthermore, some researchers also saying that there is no methodological difference between research conducted in a society with experience of war or foreign occupation and the normal societies so they come from outside and try to apply a methodologies that have been learned during their studies and saying that this might or should work, why not if we are careful enough with our ethical aspects and excesses. Respondents and interiors do not, they do not understand that rest respondents might be arrested tortured killed at any moment for asking or answering a particular question or local knowledge is similarly important at the stage of the interpretation of propaganda narratives and answers. Quite often, it is very important to have contextualized knowledge that needs to be wasted, weighted against the media and propaganda narratives. Just to bring one example, during this Donbass conflict, there were several stories in my interviews when people were saying that we saw a lot of American soldiers on tanks coming to all the cities and killing people. Of course, we understand that this is propaganda narrative, but it also very important not to dismiss these types of narratives because they look like fake or crazy narratives going through propaganda machines. This is very important to know about them, to understand them and include them into the description because quite often people live according to what they believe or how they see surrounding reality or behave in accordance to how they perceive this reality. And if we need to have an information about the society in war, we also have to understand different realities, including those which are heavily included in propaganda narratives. Even if it is not fact per se, it tells us a lot about everyday reality of the search participants and the facts they might have on his or her behavior. Having personal connection to the territory opens up access to the different groups and circles of the societies alerts us to appropriate vocabulary. However, rootedness in the society under study can also be very highly problematic. It is more difficult for local researcher to remain unlabeled by participants because even if we try to be neutral or play neutral roles, quite easily we can be spotted as representatives or sympathizers of one of the sites and labeled this way. And if we are labeled then of course the information we will be acquiring will be already biased depending on the way how we are labeled by the participants. We also then for the local researcher may face another major challenges such as finding balance between the contextuality and autonomy. The autonomy of researcher must be manifested in distancing from the conflict in being known involved in discourses of war parties, maintaining the highest possible level of neutrality of assessment and adequate vocabulary in putting aside empathy for one or another site of the conflict. All this in general creates a complex internal conflict for the researcher, which for example can manifest itself in a role of conflict between the researcher and the citizen. Equally difficult for local or external researcher is situation when participants perceive him either as a mediator or to inform who can inform stakeholders about the research participants problem or as a person who can provide assistance or as a spy gathering intelligence information. Understanding these nuances makes a very important building trust relationship and special understanding this new attention to the introductory part of the interview where researcher should clearly state his or her functions role and projects aims and also its limitations. Scholars insiders are confronted with a double pressure on the one hand they face pressure from the social political groups who try to censor information on the conflict. There is tension between the prospective reaction of some social groups to ongoing war, which results in demand to classify certain subjects as sensitive or potentially dangerous for people or state security or public debate and need of scholar to monitor the situation in all its complexity labeling of certain questions or topics as dangerous or separate is while the searcher programs became subjected to social security service inquiries. In the sense filled the field of what's possible to study present publicly for the researcher is narrowing and as go show takes its shrinking spaces for its researchers or we also have to deal with spaces of alternative facts actually from media for propaganda or state propaganda as a contraversion of scientific results or facts we were studying. The other change challenge for local researcher is how to reconcile the scholarly need to hear the different voices and later present them in their complexity and their own sense of social responsibility. And finally, I will just briefly mention certain dilemmas we are dealing with knowledge circulation. If we are talking about academia in academia we always have a long term this debate and we are dealing with ethical issues for example right now. Our colleagues from from also wanted to study Ukrainian refugees in Warsaw, we're dealing with ethical committee which didn't allow them to start interviewing for three months. We also have similar issues here in Germany. So, before we can go to the field work, we deal and have to answer a lot of ethical questions methodological questions and so on. At the same time, the knowledge production is for the especially for the knowledge for the peace building initiatives is needed exponentially with the local turn. Then this knowledge collection and knowledge production function is quite often outsourced to different other stakeholders, this would mainly be non governmental organizations and similar civil society institutes, which are not going or working with sometimes with all this ethical questions and methodological issues. And in addition to that, when they apply for different grants or granted money for collecting data, the requirement would be to make the knowledge they produce as public as possible. So, if scientific knowledge for us to publish an article or book will take two, three years, a lot of peer reviewing a lot of ethical committees and so on. Quite often this knowledge will be also in the closer success so people would have to pay to get access to this knowledge. The knowledge that is produced without checks and balances quite often by NGOs or some local activists would immediately go to media and create an image about what is happening to the society and inform a lot of peace building and other type of policy papers on the situation. And I will stop here and give floor to Oxana. And first of all, I would like to say that it's a great pleasure for me to be here and to participate in such great discussion. In my presentation, my part of presentation, I would like to propose to talk about the problems and issue of research design and data collection in the context of war. I would like to emphasize that we talked about our research, Victoria mentioned it. We discussed about our research experience in Ukraine from 2014 when the first wave of Russian aggression against Ukraine began and to the beginning of the full scale war in February 2022. The first challenge facing sociologies working in the war situation is the choice between quantitative and qualitative methods of data collection. Quantitative data sets allow exploring important trends and defining casual relations between human and focus. However, when planning such a study one should be aware that standard survey, it's not possible, it's not effective in situations of external aggression. One of the key challenges relates to the inability to build a representative sample for a number of reasons. Typically, conflicts cause a very intensive movement of population, seeking for temporary shelters, shelters of humanitarian aid, running from one to the conflict sites for displacement, military or job recruitment, cause big mass population to move. In case of Ukraine, escaping from political or physical persecution of military action, a part of population from Crimea, Peninsula, and from parts of territory of Donetsk and Lugansk districts flee to other regions of our country. In fact, I use the clear terminology towards the situation. For example, in Ukraine and Victoria says about these terminology play a very important role. For example, when we describe the situation in East part of Ukraine, we don't use the term Donbas, which are absolutely artificial construct, but now we very often use the full name of this territory. We talk about parts of territory of Donetsk and Lugansk region, which are not under control by Ukrainian government. The 2.4 million inhabitants of Crimea and three from three to 3.5 million inhabitants of temporary occupied territories of Donetsk and Lugansk districts found themselves behind the new dividing lines. These states formation in the occupied territories cover a third of the territory of Donetsk and Lugansk districts, which was home to more than half of their pre-war population of roughly 6.5 million people, but no reliable statistic is available to prove or correct these numbers. With limited accessibility to the temporary occupied territories, data on those who freed abroad, high percentage of non-registered IDPs, and intensive cross-contact line mobility, it is impossible to define general population and as a result to specify a sample and sample error. In the situation of undefined general population, a random or systematic sample would be a solution, but in condition of fair and limited access to the population of the temporary occupied territories, this is dangerous for interviewees and researcher participants. Another possible technique to be employed under such circumstances would be telephone interview based on random sampling. This type of interviewing is suffer for interviewees as it does not require travel to the bottom territories, but it's still in dangerous research participants. To phone call can be hacked and their voice and or answer be recorded and matched with the same card data. Moreover, it is difficult to build a deeper trust relationship through impersonalized telephone call. Respondents might be afraid that there are not sociologies, but military or secret services, checking their reality, and it's absolutely correspond to the real life on occupied territory. Therefore, it is difficult to expect that our interlocutors would be ready to give unconventional answers during such telephone conversation. Another possible solution is to conduct face-to-face interviews through trust networks following the quarter or snowball technique with unremised questionnaires, but this technique might lead to unpredictable bias in sample. Because in this case, there is a very high risk of remaining within the social bound and the data obtained will only characterize the situation in this one small group. Another problem is that under such condition, it is impossible to perform a routine quality control procedure or fieldwork. It does not mean that quantitative studies are not possible in one zone, but when one decides to employ it, one has to understand all limitations with something, response rate, challenges and dangers of fieldwork, limits of issue that can be discussed without putting respondents in the life-threatening situation. Services usually give us a distribution of answers to the question, which is already more or less established in public opinion. The situation in war zone or occupied territories is that active conflict is characterized by high dynamic of change and a significant level of uncertainty. Therefore, neither the sociologists can formulate the questions that are settled, finalized, nor the research participants are able to provide clear answer being located in the heart of an uncertain situation. Moreover, having a clear position in such conditions can pose a direct threat to human life. So the problem is to the ethical aspect of such research and we all talk about ethical issue because it's really very important and it's a red line which started when we start formulating our research question and before they are producing our result of the research. This marks the need in activation of the debate of ethical knowledge obtaining in the field of peacekeeping. All this issue I usually discuss in academic publication, Victoria says about this, so readers could access limitation of presented data. At the same time, in policy reports or in media, they are often missing, so peace practitioners or media take those outcomes for granted, very big issue in this context. The choice in favor of more flexible qualitative method or ethnographic research is also full of challenges. Flexible research methodologies allow to make change in the research tools in the course of the field work to follow the respondent, but at the same time possess a lot of question about the safety of the researchers and research participants, encourage reflection on the influence of researchers and how he or she is identified by the research participants on the outcome of this study. Then it is important to discuss difficulties involved in finding research participants, their availability and the reason for agreeing to participate. In our context, it's very important because usually if we conduct interview with person who live on occupied territory, people who are not agree with this reality usually don't want to communicate with other specialists and talk about the experience because they are really afraid. On the one hand, individual formats of cooperation between researcher and research participants become much more important as it allowed to create an atmosphere of trust, allow participants to speak more openly and in detail about the experience, often personal and psychologically difficult. On the other hand, qualitative forms of flexible methodologies of opus group dyadic interviews are problematic for employing them in societies from occupied or bottom areas where people may face denunciation and may be tortured where they live in condition of high distrust of anyone in the immediate surrounding and therefore may perceive as a participant as the potentials read. It is important that we take so much time and of course we have not enough time to discuss all issue in this case but let me say maybe last statements here what could be to approach to solving this problem. In my point of view the model of intersectional collaboration in much more product is much more productive under this condition, which by involving various actors, external internal researcher, civil society representatives is building production in the implementation of the project activates and engage various identities in the research processes, which can open the way to potential participants and create the necessity conditions of trust and openness. Such collaboration is equally important at the stage of interpretation of the collective data, since the researcher who is not rooted in the context. In most cases that not does not read cliches, intertext, sarcasm, it is not sensitive to degrees of retinces, etc. This is where I would like to stop to leave time for discussion, I hope and thank you very much for your attention. Thank you very much Victoria and Oksana certainly are really dense and sort on the nose. Co-presentational problems of access and evidence, I think that's a good setup for the rest of the panel. I'm going to just allow James just to step right in and carry on with his paper. Oksana Victoria if I could ask you just to close your video while James is presenting. Same for everybody if you're not presenting just mute your mic and turn your camera off. Thank you Mike I'll just go ahead and jump on in. Good afternoon. As a PhD candidate I'm particularly honored to be here listening and learning from this wonderful panel. As the title of my contribution reads. I wrote about ethical considerations that I had to deal with in examining a social media account of a Russian backed separatist militia called spar battalion. As the war in Ukraine has released this flood of conflict imagery, I think academics in particular are required to exercise restraint and introspection before proliferating conflict imagery as a research product. In the legal aspect and in the intelligence field it's, these are different considerations obviously but in my world, these are things that I had to be confronted with, or else risk exploiting or circulating images that could be potentially harmful. Studying this imagery is obviously important. It's, it lets us know how this war is going. Nonetheless, sharing these images can be potentially problematic. When I started my projects, particularly in the conflict studies world out of Scotland. No one had really heard of spar battalion. This is obviously not true in Ukraine as they were in the newspapers and videos very early on in the conflict. It's changed since the February escalation or invasion, however wish to describe it, and the death of some of their leaders who are honored by Putin. There's more international attention on the now, but back in 2014 and 2015. The group was only one of really a wide field of different upholstian see battalions, this concept of Russian migrant fighters who leave Russia to go and fight abroad in the service of Russian geopolitical aspirations. The origins of these groups, each coming up with their own naming conventions their own uniforms or military traditions. They're really starting from scratch but trying to choose what they like to create this sort of unit cohesion. And they also came with their own understanding of what they were fighting for, and how they imagined Don boss as this concept to be both physically politically geographically and socially. And bringing them in my mind is a key element to understanding Russian hybrid warfare and tactics and mobilization of irregular forces as a precursor to larger invasions and really setting the groundwork for a lot of their political narratives that we see echoed today. And these, as the Ukrainian government considers to be illegal military formations, you have a very top down system, the FSB assisted these men in getting weapons kits and transports, but upon arrival they created their own culture. Some of these cultures were successful others evaporated and could not replace casualties or levers people essentially went home. And then they moved it into other more regular units of the armies, so called of Nova Russia. Sparta battalion is a successful example, where they found a brand, they use technology efficiently to recruit. And through social media photographs and memes in particular, they told a story that was consumable mobilizing understandable, and within the parameters of what the Kremlin deemed to be the acceptable story. And with a level of freedom on the ground to really make it their own. The group was named interestingly after a unit from the novel and video game series Metro, which takes place in a post nuclear Moscow, where heroes fight evil monsters and have it bombed out rubble and are living also in the metros of the city. And they may be familiar with the stalker genre of film, the video games and literature. Sparta battalion sort of applied this ready made genre onto themselves and the imaginings of Donbass to contextualize their presence, and to depict Donbass as a as an imagine concept of Donbass as the site of apocalypse and post Soviet disaster that had needed to be saved to strike a romantic adventure some interest of young men to really make them choose to come and fight, along with many other narratives. As well. In essence, you got to play on video games as Spartans killing Nazis and monsters online. Now is your chance to do it. It even looks the same and this was a concerted effort. They really did this on purpose. The project as a total examines this messy imperfect sometimes contradictory photo narratives that they construct how they utilize social media as a digital site of memory. And it was also an opportunity to examine my own positionality relative to Sparta battalion, you, the Ukraine conflict in general. So the inconvenient parts of that and the anxieties that come with being an outsider looking in the corpus of the work was 2000 is 2000 to 3000 photographs posted the Russian social media page come back to you from 2015 to 2020. Images show combat concerts cultural events funerals meal times field trips. Most things that you can imagine, they curate this experience online, almost as a sort of wartime daily archive. It's a deliberate acts what they choose to show what they choose not to show. It's, it's a propaganda construction, you clearly it's not a representation of real life, or an aspect of Ukrainian culture, it's, it's a product, it's a political product. As a methodological framework, I use a used a close reading method developed by Rose and Monica where these images on social media are almost interpreted as a moving scene of political performance. The social media page flows shot by shot characters are introduced, they are removed scenes are constructed, and they tell a story of what the group wants to communicate to a very broad audience of the enemy, which is very deliberately the United States Ukraine and Europe for those who they think would be against their motives, and also to attract people, particularly young men in Russia and within the occupied territories themselves. And also producing images to this day. So tapping into these images, obviously raised serious ethical considerations, and I encountered some friction with my university, most universities require ethical review boards to, you know, approve before even touching these materials. I really dove into the literature on ethical standards and practices for social media, and it became pretty evident to me that most people who do social media research are not working in conflict. And this management computer sciences, sociology and anthropology. I'm actually an area studies and culture guy so it's it was, it was definitely a new language to learn. And there's been some bad practices in the past that they're still learning from I found the ethics literature to be particularly reactive, you know, make mistakes first and then change things later, and that the internet was considered to be this free forum of publicly available information, just like the streets and you could just take it. We don't really think that way much anymore. But in part Italian in particular I had to choose whether or not to get their consent to use their material. And the hard line institutional answer was, yes, I did have to get consent, and this was their property. They're human beings. If I wanted to use their likeness to interpret it. I need to grant them rights of withdrawal. I also data privacy concerns, I needed term limits on how to use these images. I needed gatekeeping access protocols for compliance with GDPR. And that's that really hit me the wrong way. You know, but it comes under this concept that normal people are not do not have to be a part of your research they can just exist. I disagreed with this in the case of part of Italian on six points. I did not need to get their consent for point one the page was run by individuals, not by individuals, excuse me by a social media member or manager who's in essence an agent of the narrative that they're trying to construct. Point two was the highly politicized nature and public interest really makes them public political enemies within the public domain, and that's such considered exempt from some protections risks to the Spartans is relatively low, they have bigger problems right now they're in an island interchange with with Ukrainian arm torches. VK has a site culture that is open, rather than Instagram and Facebook where pages are typically private upon creation, VK has a site culture that's default open and you, you scale down to security, asking for consent of part of Italian may further validate the political recognition of the group, which is something my own political positionality. I could not do. So asking for their consent could create a unsafe attention for me as the researcher, I could open myself up to cyber attack or potential harassment or things that can be quite nasty from Russia's cyber capabilities. My university agreed with these terms, and I was able to use their materials without asking for their consent, but I still had other requirements on data storage and who I could show the image to before the final research product. I just exercise and arguing why I did not need to get their consent, really sort of kind of made me reflect upon the deeper questions here, you know, what could I show. And I found that I really couldn't just use a well collaborate with them as a as this best practices fixed because I, I, how can you collaborate in this regard with, you know, an active group that you're opposed to. And I could not objectively relate to them. That was that would be an illusion to say that I have this researcher from nowhere, and I don't have biases or I don't have a political identity. So we these images still had power, you know, we know this you know they have propaganda effects, but the images themselves can also be very affecting. And in my opinion, taking possession of what can be the most horrific moment of a person's life, the destruction of their home or sites of memory or even their corpse, and then using it in a presentation or paper casually and we see this in these and presentations, I think it could be really dehumanizing and diminishes the human cost of the war in Ukraine. Sparta Battalion uses these bodies alive and dead as political props. So they needed to be represented in disgust, but I didn't want to be participatory in that action. So if you think about how these images reflected on Ukraine as a whole, Sparta Battalion's interpretation of Donbass as a site of apocalyptic war was a bit different from what I saw in Donbass. And my Ukrainian friends and colleagues have from that region in particular have a low grade disdain for this type of visuality coming from their home oblasts. And there's a legitimate frustration there, when an outside person takes this image attributes this geopolitical and cultural weight to it, and then presents it to this outside world, they don't really have much of the say, and this was particularly before the recent escalation. So I needed to think about who the vulnerable parties were in these images and disarm the stereotypes and propaganda within them. I also wanted to find a way to embody how I looked at these images to confront directly my own subjectivities and study them with an intensity of looking interpreting images, a particularly of conflict is subjective and politically informed. And though I empirically ground my research, I wanted to resist an authoritative final reading on them. So, last summer, I was attending a research residency in Bakrovsk in Donetsk Oblast in the Ukrainian government's controlled side, and they've been dealing with these questions and anxieties for eight years, working in the local Krajowice Museum. And they actually encouraged me to draw, you know I talked about this something what am I going to do and they said just just draw it. And drawing them also really kind of solved the problem which was it made access to these images not as easy. You know people who had an interest in my research who just wanted to look at the juicy pictures would be disappointed, but others who wanted to contribute or critique my work could do so as the drawings are cited to the originals. So it would just require the extra step, which would give them that moment of pause to think, Why am I accessing this imagery. Is this a voyeuristic thing, or is this like, you know, there's a lot to say and there's legitimate reasons to do so but I think it was a little bit of a safety on the information weapon that was before them. It also drawing the images also made me think more about what I was seeing, and what I wanted to represent showing the images as drawings removes their attractive power, while still being illustrative. And more importantly, it obfuscates the identities with any potentially innocent people, although I could do the work without the consent of Sparta battalion, they also often use bystanders children, people who are arguably victims of their human propaganda construction as well. And I couldn't in good faith use that material. So in the end I chose to in my research product chose to show their pictures as drawings. I'll show also artwork from a Ukrainian artists and some of my colleagues and the textual analysis of course of Sparta Sparta's work, rather than just a photo catalog of their propaganda from year to year. And while this isn't a perfect system and sort of brings back the war illustrator of the 19th century, but with a sort of self awareness and a definite lack of artistic skill. It seems to be working in this particular case for Sparta battalions military activities. I have like a minute left. I would like to show you some of these drawings because I'm sure somebody may be interested in just very briefly I'm going to switch over to share my screen here. Yeah, start broadcast 321. So everybody sees that. So this image really kind of started me on this path. I was drawing a brigade of coal miners out of across region from the 1980s. It was a vulnerable archive. And I kind of felt bad that these, these people didn't exist or they couldn't be found anymore and I didn't want to use their, their likeness in my research product without their informed consent. So I decided to kind of draw them as a representation. This is a very common image taken again I'm not an artist so like don't get excited but you know this is a the most used image in all of their vk feed. They reproduce about six times over and over again. They really kind of punctuate this image of this man kneeling by a stairwell poking his aks 74 out of a window. This is a ritual that they performed where they burned a coffin draped in the American Ukraine and European Union flag. They nailed the flags to the coffin and then lit it on fire with some sort of flammable chemical. So this is kind of a lighter photo. This is a war correspondent here. He runs the telegram channel war Gonzo I'm sure you can look him up. This is the former commander of what it is real good who is killed in March. This is a folk singer who came and gave a concert for the guys in a parking garage of the bombed out Donetsk airport. And these are just two other people standing along. These images kind of are stand ins for illustrative points when I talk about the narrative arcs in their photo photo elicitation essentially. And that's, that's all I'm going to say about that. That's my, that's my spiel, and I'm looking forward to this discussion period later. Thank you very much everyone. Thanks very much that was absolutely fascinating and intriguing for a few different reasons but you know as with the the earlier presentation I'll save my questions until after and we'll just transition straight away to Lilliana and then come back to it. Liliana, if you're ready, the floor is yours. Yes, I'm ready. I hope you can see my screen. And my name is Lilliana and I work in issues related to environment and violence. My PhD was in anthropology, and my main interest was to understand. Some of the weapons, weapons fabricated by FARC I decided to, to go with landmines and once I just was analyzing doing like, long period of, of an of anography of fieldwork. And then I realized, and I coined this concept of landmine landscapes that I want to just to share because doing this I just a archives up here. I was, I am political scientist and geographer, and my PhD is an anthropology so I don't have the background as as a historian, but I discovered this field of ethnography of archives so treating this as a as a source so it was very interesting so First, I just want just to geolocate you. I just want to check time. Yes. Okay. So, This is Columbia the northernmost part of South America, causing the Pacific in the Caribbean and also in the Atlantic, we have like a big area in the south. That is the Amazon we share with Brazil and Peru and Ecuador. And this, this first is a natural reservation so forests. And this is a natural parks. This are in collective territories of indigenous and Afro Colombian in column of for Colombian. These are coca crops and not updated a layer. Now we have more coca crops. And there is a strong relation between coca crops and as you can see landmines so this is blue. Okay. So, with this layers overlaid. What you can see is that landmines are in the most of in the biodiverse spots. And also there are a relation between like conflict spaces, and of course landmines landmines were mainly fabricated by far the real is but not only by them, my ethnographical focus was in the Amazon mainly. And this is in that area, if I get real as the eastern block at the southern block were the main structures military structures there. What I did is ethnography for a long period. I did my ethnography there with the mining trainers, the Norwegian, the dutch, some other some international the mining companies and once I was doing my ethnography I just find that some people saw me as an outsider, and they just wanted to share this and they show me some some of this handbooks. One of the things that I just discovered more interesting that my, my, my, my span of time was 2014 2020 and my ethnography period was 2016 2019. And just after the peace process so the people was willing to talk. This is far they did this the longest gorilla in the world they demobilize in 2016. So it matched with my, with my period doing fieldwork and that was very interesting because the information was available and people was willing to talk even the same gorilla at that time, they publish all the, the, the, the archives now they are not available I was just checking that information but they have this web page, where they just tell their, their story but at the, at the very beginning they have all the, the conference and all strategic documents but not those related to, to explosives that those, those kind of handbooks was what were the, the things that I just find doing fieldwork. The other thing to have access is the, we had, we have here the court that is created after the peace process, and they even have like a section of macro case that as they call it anti personal landmines. And the other thing is that a former far combatants created a group of a demining so that allow to the to researchers to have a quite amount of information available that it was not before. And with that idea I just created this concept based on anthropological and perspective, not only fieldwork that I did and this is, for instance, a gallon kind of mine in this thermos a meta like protecting a bunker of Farc at that time but at the time I just took the picture, they were demining the bunker so you can access and ask so many questions why you have bags here and whatever you think it's possible I can ask so it was very fruitful my, my, my, my fieldwork, doing that. So, the idea of analyzing this as a landscape is that, as you all maybe are very well aware, this kind of weapons work as a network as a strategy to feel make make the enemy feel that the space is surrounded by weapons. And so at this time they just play with deceiving so I just wanted to figure it out. What were the guerrillas cunning strategies to fabricate to lay to camouflage and to mark landmines what I just found. And doing that work is not only Farc guerrillas or guerrillas in Latin America but this is an international knowledge flow that is a pattern in some other guerrillas and that is why it was so interesting to find this kind of material just to connect things that we were aware by the documentation and some studies about link international links of guerrillas. The landmines fabricated by Farc were all ideas, but the thing that there is a technical issue but all the Farc landmines were fabricated in improvised manner and not not all are a homemade explosive, some of them depending on the place of the country that are for instance seen in the border with Ecuador that are a lot of smuggling of plastic explosives for instance and they just have the the mines of that area belonging to that structure at that time it had more content of some specific kind of explosives. And this is the thing that I just want the focus the focus I had on my on the on the writing on the piece. And it's why by connecting all the dots that I just find I just really like the presentations and from all of you, but particularly some of the, at the beginning of the Chinese interest, analyzing documents of, of Mao for instance, Mao Maoist popular warfare was a friend in all guerrillas in the world the popular warfare, but in Colombia was very interesting to see translated this resistance, a Vietnam resistance a handbook in Spanish in an editorial of Colombia, that is called black sheep and all the translation was a was done in in Cuba so there are a lot of things regarding which kind of text do you see all the attrition or warfare in in far guerrilla comes from a greeting of Mao through Vietnamese eyes. So you can see that in other, I did not do like a lot of research of that in my in my thesis I just mentioned, because there are all the fmln that is the Salvatore and guerrilla and deliberation a national and all the relations with guerrillas in Latin America reading all these texts in in Asia, and you can see, like the patterns, the dots connecting with a handbooks in a of explosives in with in Colombian guerrillas, and also that are some of the connections not only in the fabrication in the homemade explosives but also in the environmental way to lay in camouflage landmines that are was, for me, creating the this concept of a landscape was interesting because the, the, the training courses, not only talked how to create landmines how to just assemble all the components but also the creative and kind of the strategies to give this wilderness look to, to spaces. Some things handbooks show are, and I did like with all the documents when you were just relating how you organize in the different cases and studies you were mentioning, I had a, I have to finish my my thesis so I just focus on just this, this weapon but there are a lot of assumptions and I think some of you working with revolutionary movements, they just have a lot of documentation and was any separate problem sometimes just to focus but I categorize analyze codify and analyze some of the handbooks and, for instance, some of them just teach how to mix a night trades and things like that to pray they their homemade explosives, some of them even have the maps, but this is tricky because this numbers for instance are the number of steps, but you don't know how long a step is. So, there are tricky things there and also the type of minds was very interesting to find how this is calling Columbia it's a multivitamin very famous that is called little red jar, Tarrito rojo, and even the blueprint in the, in the, in the handbooks. It's a blueprint blueprint of that kind of of Tarrito of jar so and one thing that was interesting to is a, this is not explosives but as you can see it is a sort of trap. And here in Columbia we have it and they call it here regularly trump a Vietnam, the Vietnamese trap. So I found the, the Vietnamese, the Vietcong and handbook, and they have this sparks and kind of system of trap, they call bear trap with punji sticks. And this is FARC handbook with, I think it's almost the same device, the only thing is the direction of the, of the spike. That changes here so it was very interesting and still it could be just a coincidence, but it was very interesting to find even devices of like for instance a bomb bicycle and also a bomb bicycle used by FARC. But the relations are not only in devices but also in techniques. This supper units for instance this all it's available in internet. This is the Vietcong supper supper was a special unit to do like a pretty tactic operations and when you can see you can see one in Vietcong also in FMLN in Salvador and Guerrilla, and also in Columbia what I was that I didn't know that much of this. It was in my fieldwork, but I just found talking after the peace process, when some the miners, some of them former FARC members and one share that he, he was a former member of FARC and he was a, they call it like steps piece as well as. So, it's interesting to find also all the, the, the, that's that connect and referring to two archives. It's interesting that they mentioned even the term that is a term created by Vietcong information in only is known by sappers and chief of registry within the fields. And so it was interesting to find that tracks. And this may be closer for some of you from Ida and far connections. That was a big news here. And there in, in, in Colombia, and relating to, to, to Ida and Colombian connection, but it was not sometimes very widespread because it was in August 2001. And as you remember, September 11 2001. So this was almost, almost vanished, but it's interesting because we have some, a lot of references, analyzing the connections but it was very interesting for me, analyzing all this handbooks that after 2001, you can find this kind of drawings. Also, it's interesting. I don't know how much time I have left. Okay. This is also a methods of Vietcong marking, like stones, like broken sticks. And also you can see that kind of guidance in some of the guerrilla handbooks. For instance, you can see here in B is signalling using stones, rivers and other location points. So at some point that are a lot of hints that I just found very interesting to describe this kind of a relations, and also as this improvised technology of far creating these landmines, you can see what every other technology have a technology has that is this adaptation and innovation. So for instance, they have the skill experts kind of mine with a deceiving mechanism. This is Eastern Bloc and then just a innovative spiral from far. They know, for instance, this plunger shines with the sun is out and they just cut the head of the syringe and replace it with a stick. So when they are looking for things or even using metal detectors, they cannot be aware and just use it effectively. So as you can see, there are a lot of tips. Other thing was seeing the marking strategies to set up areas by Vietcong. This is Vietcong. And I just, once I knew that I was doing my fieldwork trying to analyze what are the main ways to mark areas and it changes depending where you are. And as you notice, we have Pacific Amazon, we have deserts, so they change just to adapt in every place and as the same gorilla mentioned be created to my enemy areas, water, mango trees, orange trees, doors and attractive spots like sightseeing points. So you have a lot of this hints in the manuals and this is another one in the last one, thinking as the enemy thinks what he's going to do, how he will react, what advantages and disadvantages he will have, where is the best place to lay mines for the true population and what will be the efficacy when they maneuver. So following the movements of the enemy to hunt them and the moment they least expect it. So there are a lot of things that I just want. I'm anthropologist this PhD was in anthropology, so I just was amazed by the amount of information that is still an opportunity just to do contrast with people in the fieldwork. So to conclude, explosives handbooks are a valuable source of what I document gorilla through their acts. The thing is, all of the experts I talk with they have access they have they just provide me some not a national archive of this court in the peace court that they were, they have this macro case that they archive they didn't give the archive to to the justice. So it's strange that's why I just when I saw this amazing space to share this, I just want to highlight how important is to have this to document this revolutionary warfare, a Latin American in order to see this loss links with some other gorillas and how the knowledge flow, so that is on my end. Lilliana thanks very much that was also really, really fascinating and intriguing and I guess we're thinking about possible questions to ask. I want to start in reverse order. Lilliana with yours and they go to James and then back to a son and Victoria. Yeah, when I when I see the core sort of evidence that you've used me these these are how to manuals and that are extraordinarily, I suppose, risky for researchers just to be accessing. 15 or 20 years ago where people in the UK for accessing the wrong kind of document as part of their PhD research under under terrorism laws. And so I'm just wondering at what sort, if you mentioned it, I missed it so I apologize, but how did that factor into the sort of risk assessment that had to go into your doctoral research before you even did this. It sounds like you sort of happened on these materials as kind of a fortunate byproduct of your field research. I'm just wondering how that factored in at all, and I'd be curious James at your James Greg at your view of you know you're talking about more videos of atrocities and if people doing their thing, but when it comes to, you know how to manuals. That's that's a different sort of ballgame. I'm curious your observations on that. The second point, I think James there was there was a lot that was really, that was really a tension getting about what you did. The many things that you did was struck by a couple of things one is, you know the paramilitary adoption of video game aesthetics is something that reminds me of, you know, West African Civil Wars in the 80s and 90s, where you know paramilitary and whatever would be adopting, you know, know to get from from Hollywood movies and putting on clown costumes, while slaughtering villages. And so there's an interesting interesting. I found that to be an interesting feature but what really struck me and I'd be looking to James gout and maybe comment on this is, you know, I can feel the surreality of the exercise you went through to justify your research, using. This is an ethics framework that's really oriented towards human subjects, when what you're actually dealing with is documentary evidence. And in a sense you're dealing with the publications of human subjects as human subjects, which sounds like an inversion of what James was talking James gow is talking about, in terms of you know treating the expert witness as the document and I'm kind of curious about what you guys would think of that. And then the third point or set of points I suppose comes back to oxen and Victoria and you raise some some fundamental, you know social science research methods and sources types of issues. And you're talking about local knowledge production and among other things and the risks to researchers working in a local environment how to mitigate those risks how to manage those risks. And listening to that you would assume that working remotely would be the quick fix right if you're if you're not working on the scene and you're not in direct physical harm you're potentially avoiding certain pitfalls. But as we can see with, you know, James's work which is working remotely, for the most part with these sources and Lilliana in your case, a bit of both, I think. You know, there are risks to working remotely as well, particularly with with online material or or have two menus. So I'd be curious your comments on that. And I see Joe you've got your hand up. Dude, I wonder if it just makes sense to roll my questions in with yours to some of them overlap. Yeah. If that's okay. Absolutely. Okay. A hugely fascinated Lilliana with your, your paper. Some, I shouldn't say this actually out loud, but somewhere there I know where there's a stack of manuals from a different place. It should be destroyed because of course a lot of this stuff could be a potentially dangerous, but I'm just fascinated with this. Is your whole thesis your whole PhD or was this a part of it. And, and, I mean, I know I can see, and we're so grateful that you, you, you sent us a submission and that you're here today to talk about your work because it's fascinating. How did, how did you frame is obviously sits in the Department of sociology where you submitted your anthropology. Yeah, how do the anthropologists that you know, how does this fit into the structure of the literature and debates and anthropology and how was it received by your fellow anthropologists, which takes me to James, I think you would have had less difficulties submitting your ethical approval. I'd like to think so at King's College because we just have kind of a conveyor belt of parallel problems and issues that go through our ethical committees and war studies people sit on some of those so it's a bit, you probably would. But, but, but, but, you know, I don't want to sell St. Andrew short they did it they did a good job and they did a good job. Yeah, I don't want to bad mouth them but I understand. Yeah, yeah, we've had to, it's kind of a, what's the routine rather than a unusual case but one of the other things I do. I've heard from teacher to national history and history of warfare is also I teach a course on science fiction and war. And there's just, I had no idea. I just, you know, I know I knew the original. I think the name of the original book that kicked off the stalker, the film stalker is called something like roadside picnic. And then that was the novel. And then, and then, and then it's exploded and then I had no idea it's the students of course, who are fanatics told me all about the sort of exploded this war game universe to open that up. I just just just ask you to comment on, if you wouldn't mind expanding on that because there I've also read a large number of recent both journalistic and academic accounts about science fiction or counterfactual history or, you know, sending, you know, T 72 tanks back to 1930s Soviet Union and this sort of you know, this sort of thing as kind of a huge explosion. And I guess the question is, it's obviously just not the part of Italian that's that's that's that's framed by this, but how much of this is actually deliberate in the sense that there's a deliberate attempt to create a culture of violence and aggressive nationalism that's deliberate because it's being and somebody actually said this is really important and we got to do this, or is it just really just kind of a feedback loop or they're exploiting something that's there I mean you can imagine you could do this in different English language cultures with different kinds of games and books and perhaps have similar results but it's probably wouldn't have been orchestrated but. Okay, so I'll leave that to you and then I think it was oxana who was fascinating paper and it's congratulations on a dual act. I think you were talking about using sort of a telephone survey. As a way of, in a sense, insulating the researcher, but being able to reach the human subjects. I just wish I when you were talking about I just of course it would never occurred to me to do that a and B I was just facet. You've actually tried that that it and if so, what was the what was the experience. So, I hope those mesh with your questions Mike and and I look forward to the answers. It's a long list of questions and I think maybe maybe we'll just leave it to each of the panelists to pick and choose what they want to comment on. Maybe we could start again in reverse order and then go with oxana and Victoria, and then go to James them back to liana to give everybody a first stab at that long list of questions, and then we can go back and forth as necessary after that. Hi Victoria, over to you. If you want to respond to any of that. Briefly answer to your question about remote. The idea is that we have to think about challenges and limitations of any method we are using because remote is equally challenging as anything else because even if you're doing zoom interview, for example. And then during the person the question is that someone can also hijack your interview or wherever you will be staring, or if you need, for example, to send this interview via internet or transform somewhere to the transcribers so there will be many issues, but we have to be aware and when we publish about the knowledge produced within any specific method that is applied. It's very important to put forward about the limitations. So media or policymakers everybody understand that we have very limited and possibly biased information about this this and this because of that. I will talk also on video gaming just for a few seconds recently in Ukrainian footage of war. There were several cases where there were official media videos of shots helicopters or some other war for elements. And then experts immediately discovered that these are from the video games which are very good quality. And about the literature you asked it's this question to James but but I would say that there is a very good article by Alexander Zabirko he's in German but he publishes in English as well where he analyzes all the literature which appeared in Russia after the beginning of the Donbass conflict and there were over 200 different books and stories of this historical artificial reality. And maybe it's several words. I'm absolutely agree that our main focus is a limitation it's very important to talk about limitation and all our discussion was about this limitation and for example. Victoria says about this remote it's absolutely possible for example it's possible to conduct in depth interview and focus group discussion but on the other side. For example, if you are working face to face it's other absolutely challenging situation when you are in the field in the center of the war usually researcher also have many different kind of challenges connected to infrastructure for me it's access to certain areas. For example, I have one of my research in zero point and we usually ask the international organization about situation on the front, because we need this information for creating the safety place for for conducting the interview so many knowledge you need to have to start such a field work in war zone conflict. And for example, in this case, it's very important to think about this situation when you need some acquiring of permission from the local authorities in this case, you have absolutely limited limited group to access. And in this case, we still talk about this limitation so so many examples of this limitation and and and and forget. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. We discussed like a separate issue. These entered this possibility to make a survey using the telephone, using the mobile phone and in this case, for example, in the next region, we face is the problem that this region switch to the Russian mobile networks. In this case, you have an access only to the part of population which has saved both cards, Russians and Ukrainian cards and it's a very big limitation in this case, because if people say the Ukrainian cards means that they have relatives in Ukraine, that they have a different kind of a situation that they need to have this context with Ukrainian territory, but it's a special group of population who live on occupied territory to steal our conversation about limitation. Thank you. Thank you. Sarah James, please go ahead. I'll go ahead and just jump in just addressing one of the earlier questions about general risk to researchers I mean I had to submit a document to my five saying that I'm accessing this extremist content on the web and although I use VPN and the virtual machine and try to protect it, I'm pretty confident that British intelligence can figure me out. But if you if those who haven't read yet Victoria and Oksana's piece I really recommend you do because they talk a lot about the psychological effects of researchers of conflict trauma. I'm losing my tongue but you know how to kind of deal with that. I think a lot of that's overlooked, and that's a real risk that people of conflicts need to contend with and I really think most of the time they just ignore it. Moving on to the second question about the human subjects as documents, I completely agree. I just think that my, my version of applying it is, you know it has to do with perspective and intent and intent. A trial is not a research product. It's a social, you know, maneuver of trying to get justice. It's not an academic level thing. As far as the, the Sparta battalion content, it's not going anywhere, it exists. This drawing was really just how I could square with myself, taking possession and disseminating potentially harmful content. But if you want to find it and access it, it's there. I would agree that those are the original documents. I think drawing it just really confronts the fact that research and creating a dissertation is a transformative act. It's, it's not without being touched by us as researchers. The last comment or last question I'm sorry on video game sci fi these things affecting the aesthetics of conflict. It's it's combination of deliberate and organic processes with Sparta battalion, we know it's deliberate they say so they're explicit on their VK page being like we named ourselves after this because it was cool and they related to some of the values that they ascribed attributed excuse me to to the fictional group of the Spartan order of Metro. But another example would be on both sides of the conflict you might see some Ukrainian sources referring to Russian forces as orcs. There's also some reference to themselves as alliance. This is, you know, not everybody does this some people refer to them as orcs just because it's a nasty thing to call them, but some others I've seen on telegram really use terms from World of Warcraft the video game these are the factions the horde versus the alliance. And it's really, I think it's not new as you said in Africa, and it's really a way to dehumanize the enemy to come to terms with the way so you don't have to confront the human side of your enemy and it's sanitizes conflict in a way that's just attractive to people who don't want to want to fight they want to have an adventure. And then they're dealing with the horrific reality, it needs to be contextualized in a way that is influenced by nice pop culture around them. I found typically the romance of it is is to get you to be there and then you're living in the reality that's very different. And that these the sci fi video game aestheticization is part of the external narrative, the propaganda narrative the competing propaganda narratives that we as people who aren't in the conflict, digest, and as part of that tug of war. So that's the end of my responses thank you. Thanks very much James Lilliana over to you. Yes. So at the end of my end, and risks, the advantage, as I mentioned is that I conducted all my field work after a park peace process. I work for 15 plus years in Colombia so I live during the active conflict and at that time maybe doing this kind of research should be like a different thing but I exactly did after doing and after they signed the peace agreement. I can say, I can certainly affirm that now it's a different thing in Colombia. Even they are using and reusing some of the handbooks and even just recruiting some former park members to lay new minds with new innovation strategies so we even we don't even have real assessment of what was this use of minds during the 90s in the 2000s and still, and now we are having a new spiral. So, with that said, I just think that I didn't have any risk. And I'm not aware of any risk that I'm having now, because it's a gorilla that find a signed the peace agreement and all the information was available and I just was an outsider and so they share this information with an outsider academic but the sad news is that they are not using this information to have better assessment in each territory in order to move forward the clearance processes in Colombia and as you can notice, we have a lot of contamination. There are a lot of places cleared, but still it is a threat, and we know the spots we because we have victims or something, some animal there but we still not have a hundred percent assessment or, or of where the minds are. And to the answer of a how did I just a yes frame up all my all my PhD this is a part, but still, and this is a part because I was not before I was doing this research, I had no idea of this of this information I just founded people share it so I use it as a way to conduct and as a little interview and as a share I did a lot of training in the mining. So it was a good way just to break the ice with the miners and with other people in the field with experts. So when I frame the thesis that one of the parts was environmental anthropology of war, analyzing context, biodiversity spots for instance landmines were used to protect cocker crops in the most biodiverse places. So there is a overlay hotspots as you can see in the in the presentation. So there is one part of environmental anthropology of war, there is a lot of law and regulation within Colombia, some part of a strategic studies of Maoist revolutionary popular warfare attritional warfare, all of these concepts that you maybe are very well aware for me was like a shot of a lot of information of strategic studies, and also the impact of victims so it's like one part was the Amazon rainforest and specifically on that part and other was documenting specifically landmines in the Amazon and some one part that is the one that I share with you I just frame it in social studies of science and technology as an improvised technology that follows all the patterns of every other technology adaptation, innovation, networks and knowledge flow and all of these things. And I think with that I answer the both questions.