Bouka is calling for scholars to broaden their understanding of what counts as an “analytical” contribution in the research process. She is also calling scholars to be more fastidious in recognizing these contributions coming from scholars living and working in the “global south.” Secondly, we should be more vocal about instances of appropriation and theft of other’s intellectual labor/contributions. And, as Mark Kramer points out, this critique could be extended to research relations between established scholars and junior scholars/students in the “West” and elsewhere.
Bouka is trying to call attention to the ways in which collaborations work better for some than others. That is, how people can manipulate/abuse power relations so as to lay claim to analytical contributions that were not their own. In this sense, Bouka is implicitly characterizing a “good” collaborator as one who puts effort and care into discerning, acknowledging, crediting, and rewarding the contributions of all research participants.
As the title indicates, Bouka is concerned with the potential for collaborative research to further/reproduce already entrenched social inequalities. So, she is not painting a panglossian picture of collaboration. Instead she sees naive notions of collaboration as an incontrovertible good as being part of the conditions that make North-South research relations ripe for exploitation and abuse.
Bouka is primarily leveraging works in post-colonial studies to critique the discourse of “‘capacity building’ and the need to bring ‘local’ perspectives to studies of war and peace” (Bouka 2018). In doing so, she argues that “some of these efforts have quickly become sites for structural violence of knowledge production by not only reifying the “local” but by also only accepting said “local” perspectives as knowledge through Western researchers and erasing intellectual input of scholars from the global south” (Bouka 2018).
As noted elsewhere (See Epistemic Cultures), enlightenment logics, colonialism, liberalism, racism, ethnocentrism, modernization dogma, development discourses, and more all come into effect in north-south relations within the knowledge production process.
The most salient material factor discussed in this post would be the difference between “resource-rich and resource-constrained institutions and researchers.” But this should not be understood as the presence or absence of “natural resources.” It is more so about how certain resources (“natural” or social) are differentially valued at different times and different places, as well as the sociotechnical systems that have been developed to extract/capture/harness, transport, distribute, and use these resources.
As pointed out by the commenter, Mark Kramer, these practices are alive and well within the Global North. Established scholars often abuse graduate students and junior scholars in much the same way Bouka describes.
This blog post is getting at assumptions about differences in “quality” between the products of the epistemic cultures of the global north and the global south. Influenced by enduring racist and ethnocentric ideologies of “enlightened” colonialism, and intertwined with contemporary strains of western liberalism, much of the discourse around development takes "cpacity building" as a given. But Bouka is arguing that scholars from "the south" have long been active and valuable participants in Western academic discourses as producers of knowledge. It’s not so much capacity building that is needed, as it a recognition of Southern scholar’s existing capacities and long-established contributions to Southern and Northern academic discourses alike.
The author is explicitly arguing to expand our conception of collaboration in the research process, particularly around the notion of analytical contributions. She argues that data collection and preparation are shot through with analytical choices that will be pivotal to whatever publication results from data analysis. Thus, the act of identifying “authorship” with the person(s) who wrote (or sometimes merely submits for publication) the words of an academic artifact is tantamount to erasure, appropriation, or at worst, theft of others’ analytical contributions.
This post is really all about reciprocity, or rather, the lack-thereof within North-South research relations. The author recognizes that, within the academy, recognition is achieved through publication. Thus, one of the primary incentives of academics all over the world is to publish findings so as to advance their careers and prestige. Given the topic she is addressing (authorship on political violence), there is often an added incentive to address, assuage/attenuate, or at the very least draw attention to the violence being studied. This incentive often transcends the researcher/researched binary, though the character and degree of intimacy of people’s investments in this goal obviously vary in important ways. And, as Bouka argues, this difference in positioning enables structural violence to be perpetuated by the practice of authorship and accreditation. In my understanding, the potential for this violence lies in distinguishing between what counts as “knowledge,” “information,” and “data,” as well as who is seen as having the authority to make such a distinction. In Bouka’s account, scholars and interlocutors from the south are often seen as capable of producing data but require the aid of Western scholars to transform that data into useful information and knowledge. Even when such transformations consist of little more than a mere stamp of approval. To correct/counteract this tendency, she problematizes current discourses around “capacity building” by pushing her readers to recognize and value the extant capacities and current, important analytic contributions being made by diverse scholars, activists, mothers, children, etc. (in other words people) from the “Global South.”