Institutional ethnography

Institutional ethnography (IE) was originally developed by Dorothy E. Smith as a methodological realisation of a Marxist feminist sociology project (Smith 2002). According to DeVault, ‘[i]nstitutional ethnographies are built from the examination of work processes and study of how they are coordinated . . . Work activities are taken as the fundamental grounding of social life, and an institutional ethnography generally takes some particular experience (and associated work processes) as a point of entry’ (DeVault 2006: 294).

IE permits an examination into how people are drawn into a common set of organisational processes (Gubrium and Holstein 2001). It seeks to explore how people’s lives are socially controlled, and how individuals are bound to institutional activity without their knowledge. As with other types of ethnography, IE is an investigation of social organisation concerned with and situated in ordinary daily activity and a method by which to explore the social relations13

that structure everyday life.

IE is generally concerned with the extra-local and trans-local influences on people’s social activities within institutions, which are thought to be increasingly replacing social organisation with ‘technologies of social control’ (DeVault 2006: 6). DeVault (2006) describes these technologies as discursive by nature, and Smith refers to them as ‘exogenous systems of rationally designed textually-mediated forms of organisation’ (Smith 2002: 39). Indeed, text plays a critical role, and as such it is ‘a method of inquiry that problematizes social relations at the local site of lived experience and examines

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The term ‘social relations’ is taken in its Marxist sense to mean connections made between people through activity, rather than relationships.

how textual sequences coordinate consciousness and ruling relations’ (Walby 2007: 1008).

This extra-local discourse acts as a mutual point of reference in the local context, even as the authors of external discourse/text transcend the local historical context (Luken and Vaughan 2014). At local levels people use this external discourse to coordinate and rationalise their activity and enter into local discourse with others who do the same. Thus, the uniqueness of individual experiences and perspectives appear to be overridden by these forms of social organisation (institutions) that generalise and objectify through discourse (reading, talking or acting), initiated by the standardised and replicable form of extra-local text. The aim is to unravel the interconnectedness of activities in different sites, as well as to learn about the individual’s location in the relations of ruling or to learn what the individual does with texts (Walby 2007).

For the purpose of this thesis, and the fieldwork undertaken, it should also be recalled that IE involves sampling institutional processes (in this case regional peacebuilding processes) and social relations, rather than a population (Smith 2002: 26). As Smith explains: ‘institutional ethnographers are not using people’s experiences as a basis for making statements about them, about the population of individuals, or about events or states of affairs described from the point of view of individuals’ (Smith 2005: 125). Smith’s contribution has been ‘to discover how ideas, legitimated through coordinated discourses, organize knowledge and action’ (Smith and Turner 2014: 261) in everyday life. But she also recognises that people’s lived experiences are organized by processes that ‘extend outside the scope of the everyday world and are not discoverable within it’ (Smith 1987: 178).

This is particularly pertinent for this thesis, which explores how extra-local UN policy (largely embodied in texts, as is common with most large bureaucracies) and the resulting practice (as defined in the previous chapter) mediate social relations with regard to regional peacebuilding vis-à-vis their day-to-day interpretation, adaptation or indeed abandonment on the ground, and how this interacts with the narratives and discourses of target beneficiaries, in this case ex-combatants. Thus, I seek to understand how peacebuilders’ daily practice is shaped by (and indeed shapes) extra- local discourses derived from official texts.

In my methodology, I used the range of institutional ethnography tools, primarily textual analysis, but also interviews and participant-observation to analyse and illustrate how people’s lived experiences are organised by, and in turn shape to the extent possible, processes beyond their everyday. For the textual analysis, I limited myself to publicly available documents for the most part. Apart from ethical concerns (see below), I was interested in dominant narratives and discourses, and documents in the public domain are indicative of the collective acceptance of a prevailing narrative related to an official approach or strategy. These documents include Security Council and General Assembly resolutions and documents concerning peace operations, reports of the UN Secretary-General, UN Headquarters’ assessment reports, and Panels of Experts reports, among others.

As may be expected, participant-observation also featured heavily in my research. This included participation in internal and cross-UN mission policymaking and cooperation on cross-border stabilisation; involvement in developing and implementing sub- regional cross-border security strategies; and countless meetings with regional peacebuilding institutions, including Liberian Government ministries and agencies, MRU, ECOWAS, international and national NGOs, and specialised agencies of the UN, among others. The research also drew directly and indirectly on statements and observations made in public gatherings by government officials, employees of non- governmental organisations, academics and other stakeholders involved in regional peacebuilding practice throughout the conduct of this study. I further conducted formal, semi-formal and informal interviews, and held innumerable conversations with representatives of these institutions. Table A2.1 in Annex 2 provides a summary of formal and semi-formal interviews conducted.