Operationalising the decentring agenda: Analysing European foreign policy in a non-European and post-western world

Spatial decentring

As Therborn asserts, ‘politics begins with place [and] the Western notion of politics derives from a particular place and the concerns of its inhabitants’ (Therborn, 2006: 509). Spatial decentring therefore looks into the basic geographic and material features of a society, country or region – geographical location and size, topographical aspects, environment, natural resources, etc. – and the way ‘space’ is organised and perceived, both internally and in relationship to other ‘spaces’. This includes infrastructure, availability of public goods and services, socio-economic features, demography, etc. (Al-Rodhan, 2009; Tickner, 2003).

Al-Rodhan’s (2009) work on ‘meta-geopolitics’ provides a useful categorisation of features that determine how space is organised. As a systematic analysis of these features is beyond the scope of this article, we only point in general terms to what spatial provincialising can imply. It means acknowledging that European foreign policy analysts see the world from within a particular European/western geographic and spatial setting, involving assumptions about how the world is or should be organised. The European conceptualisation of space is characterised by the ‘territorial trap’ (see polity decentring; Agnew, 1994), as well as by some basic features of Europe’s geographic and spatial context (Cole, 2013) which may not be taken for granted elsewhere.

Engagement and reconstruction require that analysts learn about and take into account the various spatial and geographic features of other areas, and that they try to understand their impact and potential influence on the (in)effectiveness of European foreign policy. For example, when analysing the EU’s policy towards Libya (including the EU’s Integrated Border Assistance Mission) scholars should take into account the country’s geographic features, consisting largely of desert and with a 4350 km border and 1770 km coastline. And are we fully aware of the practical implications of the EU’s call for elections in a country such as the DR Congo, which is half the size of Europe itself while having limited transportation infrastructure, a rather weak administration and a low level of literacy?

Temporal decentring

Temporal provincialising implies an awareness that, in the analysis of European foreign policy, a Eurocentric framing of history is often generalised to other parts of the world or is taken as a point of departure for assessing Europe’s relations with, and policies towards, other regions. First, modern Europe’s experiences are reflected in an ‘orthodox set’ of benchmark dates or foundational events that took place in Europe or the broader West (Chakrabarty, 2000: 7). Buzan and Lawson (2014) point to the opening of sea lanes from Europe to the Americas and Indian Ocean in 1500, the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, WWI and WWII, the start and end of the Cold War, and ‘9/11’. These events are related to specific historical experiences, collective memories and lessons learnt with regard to Europe’s external relations and policies – for example, the benchmark of opening the sea lanes reflects an imperialist, colonialist European perspective. The analysis of EU foreign policy also takes as major reference points foundational EU-related events, such as the start of European integration (partly responding to the world wars) or the Maastricht and Lisbon Treaty (creating the Common Foreign and Security Policy, and the European External Action Service and High Representative/Vice-President of the European Commission function, respectively).

Second, provincialising implies acknowledging the specificity of Europe’s historical trajectory. Chakrabarty (2000) and Bhambra (2007) highlight that western social science and social theory are generally inscribed within a modernity paradigm in which evolution is thought of as fundamentally progressive, emerging and developing first in Europe, but having a universal orientation. This specific idea of modernity is defined by Taylor (2002: 92) as ‘new practices and institutional forms (science, technology, industrial production, urbanisation) and new ways of living (individualism, secularisation, instrumental rationality)’. It is seen as the basis for ‘European political modernity’ (Fisher Onar and Müftüler-Baç, 2011: 379), the result of idealised interpretations of humanism, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution and other European ‘emancipatory’ movements and ideologies (Pasture, 2015). This modernity paradigm has often been projected onto the histories of the non-West (Buzan and Little, 2000) and influences Europe’s assumptions, expectations and judgements regarding developmental trajectories in other parts of the world. However, this idea of modernity was ‘drawn from very particular intellectual and historical traditions that could not claim any universal validity’ (Chakrabarty, 2000: xiii).

A related element of Eurocentrism is the assumption that Europe’s current situation is self-evident and that we can look to modern Europe to make judgements about how other countries should behave and develop. As Fukuyama (2011: 14) notes, ‘people living in industrialised countries now suffer from a historical amnesia regarding how their societies came to that point in the first place’, disregarding the often long, painful and non-linear evolution and the complex historical circumstances under which this occurred, and the diversified reality to which it gave rise. Provincialising thus includes an awareness of evolution and diversity within Europe and the West itself and a willingness to go beyond idealised, mythicised or simplified versions of the own historical trajectories, including the myth of the EU’s ‘virgin birth’, detached from the colonial past of its member states (Bhambra, 2016; Nicolaïdis, 2015; Pasture, 2015).

Finally, provincialising entails a consciousness about the particular European perception of time and how this impacts on the analysis of its external relations. As Birth (2016) emphasises, our understanding of temporal diversity is constrained by the logic of European-derived ideas about time. This rather short-term-oriented perspective explains, for example, misperceptions regarding long-term developments in the Islamic world, in peacebuilding processes (Langer and Brown, 2016; Reychler, 2015) or in the strategic partnerships such as with China (Stumbaum and Xiong, 2012).

Engagement demands that non-western framings of history also be taken seriously (Tickner and Blaney, 2012: 18–19). First, learning other benchmark dates or foundational events is required, calling for a thorough knowledge of histories and collective memories of other regions and societies, and the implications that these may have to this day, including for their perception of and response to EU foreign policy. Historical experiences may be unrelated to western involvement, but can also be associated with imperialism, colonialism, violence and dispossession by Europe and the West. These dynamics are often concealed in European timeframes (Buzan and Lawson, 2014; Pasture, 2015; Shilliam, 2011), but are reflected in benchmark dates in other regions. For example, commemorations of colonial suppression and independence fights, European conquest and other ‘Echoes of Empire’ (Nicolaïdis et al., 2015) all affect the external perceptions and judgements about current European involvement in other regions. Examples are various western military interventions, the 1916 Sykes–Picot Agreement drawing state borders in the Middle East, or the ‘century of humiliation’ in China.

Engaging also means paying attention to other perceptions of time and to other developmental trajectories than evolution towards European-style modernity. Not only may modernity have a different starting point elsewhere and are there different trajectories towards it (Delanty and Rumford, 2005; Fisher Onar and Nicolaïdis, 2013); modernity unavoidably adopts a hybrid character, as people revert to real or ‘invented’ traditions in shaping their perceptions of what modernity entails (Chakrabarty, 2000; Dirlik, 2003; Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1992). Engagement entails not merely seeing current differences, but also the trial and error of using western ideologies in other regions (e.g. nationalism, socialism, liberalism, secularism, capitalism), resulting in a rejection of what did/does not work and a turn to what did/does. The rise of Islamism constitutes such a hybrid modernity: a multifaceted modern political current with societies, movements and parties in different areas developing variations of this trajectory (Fisher Onar and Müftüler-Baç, 2011; Rubin, 2013). Daesh, for example, took hybridity to the extreme with its use of ‘western’ technology and social media on the one hand, but its turn to religion and rejection of state borders drawn by Europe on the other.

Temporal reconstruction in the analysis of European foreign policy towards other regions implies that scholars explicitly take into account local time perspectives and historical experiences. This knowledge can shed light on their effects on the (lack of) local receptivity to EU foreign policy initiatives. For instance, awareness of how people in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) recall European actions in the region – from the Sykes–Picot Agreement to military interventions in the Suez crisis, Iraq or Libya, or actions against Daesh – can explain the suspicion towards demands for more European involvement in mediation and peacebuilding initiatives.

Normative decentring

Finnemore and Sikkink (1998: 891) define a norm as ‘a standard of appropriate behaviour for actors with a given identity’. What is deemed acceptable not only changes over time, but also differs according to place (Postel-Vinay, 2008: 39–40), calling into question ‘EUniversalism’ (Nicolaïdis, 2015: 285) and any other claims to universality of specific normative mind-sets.

Provincialising allows analysts to become aware of norm prioritisation and the often quite specific interpretation of a norm and its field of application. In the analysis of European foreign policy, the focus generally lies on norms that fit within European and western ideas of a liberal, pluralist order. In the previous section, we already referred to norms deriving from a certain idea of ‘Enlightenment’ and modernity that have underpinned European truth claims. Within the context of the EU’s external relations, the focus is on norms which the EU ‘seeks to advance in the wider world: democracy, the rule of law, the universality and indivisibility of human rights and fundamental freedoms, respect for human dignity, the principles of equality and solidarity […]’ (Article 21(1) Treaty on European Union). These norms also permeate the widespread NPE debate (Manners, 2002; Whitman, 2011), although some get much less attention, such as solidarity and dignity. Unpacking European assumptions about norms exposes that these are not necessarily universal, nor of universal priority, although often presented as such. This points to what Tocci (2008: 4) labelled as the ‘serious pitfall that has bedevilled much of the literature on EU foreign policy: subjectivity and presumed universality’.

Provincialising also provides deeper insights into how prioritised norms are interpreted and applied. This can be seen in two of the dominant normative narratives in EU foreign policy: human rights and democracy. Provincialising human rights shows that attention for human rights is not only selective, but that ‘first generation’ civil and political rights are prioritised over ‘second generation’ economic, social and cultural or ‘third generation’ solidarity rights. Normative preoccupations also revolve mainly around individual liberties instead of collective rights (cf. infra) (Donnelly, 2007; Moyn, 2010; Zhang, 2012). Provincialising democracy equally shows that European attention for democracy is selective, reflects specific meanings and is evaluated within specific parameters (Lamont et al., 2015; Morozov, 2013; Youngs, 2015). For example, democracy is often analysed without taking into account the power of economic actors over democratically elected governments (e.g. influence of capital markets and ‘Troika’ on the 2015 Greek government).

Engagement requires that analysts learn about prioritised norms in other societies or regions and their specific interpretation and application. Additionally, the question rises how these norms relate to the European normative mindset, if they appear in European thinking at all. In order to allow for comparative analysis and to avoid the aforementioned dangers of knowledge fragmentation and ‘othering’, it can be analytically useful to position norms on continua of normative thinking, such as responsibilities–rights, individualism–collectivism, secularism–religiosity.

The first continuum is related to variations of the focus on rights and freedoms on the one hand and responsibilities and obligations on the other. Questions that arise are whether the emphasis is on responsibilities or rights (or both), whose responsibilities and rights are emphasised, and towards whom people or entities are responsible. When engaging, we learn that responsibilities towards society may be prioritised over the individual’s personal freedom. Examples include obligations towards one’s group being seen as morally superior to individual rights in Asian contexts (Zhang, 2012), or the discussion on duties versus rights in Islamic discourses (Orakzai, 2012). This contrasts with the current European/western focus on individual rights, often considered detached from responsibilities or obligations – although this has varied in different stages of Europe’s history and still varies throughout European societies.

Closely related is a second continuum between the individual and collective/relational. Norms can be derived from the intricate interrelation between the individual and the larger social group. Despite major differences between the historical and societal contexts in which these concepts arose, the southern African idea of ubuntu (Smith, 2012), the Russian term lichnost (Kharkhordin, 1999) and the Confusion concept guanxi (Pan, 2016) all reflect notions of relationality: an individual exists within and through a social context. Prioritizing the collective is then considered a fundamentally positive norm. ‘Stability’ or ‘harmony’, both in personal relations and in international order, can in this context be of higher priority than, for example, democracy or human rights, which can be considered as problematic if they lead to chaos or do not engender greater equality or social inclusion (Ding, 2012; Morozov, 2013). This focus on relationality also explains the prioritisation of values such as ‘justice’ in the Mediterranean world (al-‘adala or ‘giving to each his due’) (Ayubi, 2005: 18), ‘respect’ and ‘honour’, or ‘face’ (mianzi) in Asian contexts.

A third continuum lies between secular and religious/spiritual. Within the context of western secularism and due to the Enlightenment’s impact on normative presumptions, religion is a largely ignored category (Sheikh and Wæver, 2012; Wolff, 2015). However, as de Sousa Santos (2002: 48) notes, ‘the secular-religious distinction is a distinctly Western one’ and may be irrelevant within other normative mind-sets. Within the umma, the personal relationship with Allah is the principal overarching value, implying an array of norms associated with Islamic belief. In Buddhist and Hindu societies, dharma considers the individual primarily as part of a whole and rather than on rights or democracy, the focus lies on ‘the primordial imperative, the duty of individuals to find their place in the order of the entire society and of the entire cosmos’ (de Sousa Santos, 2002: 49). Both concepts point to a fundamental relationship with a divinity or cosmic order, with implications both for the (ir)relevance of norms promoted by EU foreign policy and how Europe and the West are perceived.

After adopting a more inclusive and comprehensive view on prioritised norms in Europe and in other regions, scholars can examine whether these norms and their relative hierarchy are similar, overlapping, complementary or competing. Normative reconstruction could entail assessments of whether or not the EU – in its agreements and political dialogues with other regions and countries – pays attention to norms considered important by external partners, such as ‘mutual respect’, ‘harmony’ or ‘stability’ in Asian countries. Scholars can investigate how inclusion or exclusion of these norms may explain (mis)understandings in diplomatic settings and successes or failures in attaining European foreign policy objectives.

Polity decentring

In this section, we employ the term ‘polity’, conceptualised by Ferguson and Mansbach (1996: 34) as political entities or authority structures that have ‘a distinct identity; a capacity to mobilise persons and their resources for political purposes, that is, for value satisfaction; and a degree of institutionalisation and hierarchy (leaders and constituents)’. Underlying polities is an ‘exchange phenomenon ³ in which loyalties and other resources are provided in return for value satisfaction (or relief from value deprivation)’ (Ferguson and Mansbach, 1996: 36). Providing the basis for the internal legitimacy of polities, this value satisfaction can be related to the provision of identity, order, security, and other vital public goods and services. It can be organised both horizontally (loyalty towards the group and mutual solidarity between its members) and vertically (loyalty and dependency between leading actors and group members) (Keukeleire and Lecocq, 2018).

Provincialising polity in the analysis of European foreign policy implies unpacking and questioning a specific set of predominant polities that reflect a Westphalian state-centric and modernity bias (Bartelson et al., 2018; Bhambra, 2007; Ferguson and Mansbach, 2000; Inayatullah and Blaney, 2004) (see temporal decentring). The state-centric bias means a focus on territorial sovereign states and relations between states (with governments as the most important agents), but also on polities based on states such as international organisations (including partly post-Westphalian polities like the EU itself). The modernity bias is reflected in the Weberian conception of the ‘modern’ state with its institutional and functional capacities and in the dominant western and European focus on individualism, citizenship and the distinctions between public/private, state/society and politics/religion. Taken together, both biases lead to assumptions about the state as the main point of reference as a legitimate authority structure and for providing identity, order, public goods and services.

Unpacking these assumptions requires an awareness of the long and difficult evolution and diversity that was, and still is, a reality within Europe and the West itself, and the fact that the ‘ideal modern state’ is more myth than reality. As Ferguson and Mansbach (2003: 25–26, 114) note, two major trends continuously lead to a recession of state influence: on the one hand ‘a growth of regional and global networks of authority that link people physically remote from one another’ but that effectively ‘consolidate governance’ (such as international, regional and non-governmental organisations); and on the other hand ‘a fracturing of existing territorial states into smaller […] islands of self-identification that localise authority and defy efforts to provide answers to the collective goods dilemma’, as is demonstrated by the ‘explosion of ethnic, religious, tribal and even “civilisational” self-identities’. This fracturing of existing states is also apparent in the growing number of ‘areas of limited statehood’ (Börzel and Risse, 2016; Risse, 2011) or supposedly ‘ungoverned spaces’ (Clunan and Trinkunas, 2010), steered by other types of polities and governance systems. Provincialising thus implies being conscious of what Agnew (1994: 77) calls the ‘territorial trap’, being the misconception of the ‘historical relationship between territorial states and the broader social and economic structures and geopolitical order’.

Engagement requires taking into account and learning about and from a larger set of polities. Apart from states and state-based international and regional organisations, engagement sheds light on various other sub- and transnational authority structures that remain largely invisible in predominant political science frameworks. Within the EU’s neighbourhood and in areas of interest to EU foreign policy, polities emerge that are based on, for instance, ethnicity, religion, warlordism or combinations thereof. Ethnicity-based polities exist in diverse forms and are labelled ⁴ differently in different regions. For example, tribes and clans in the MENA region or Central Asia (i.e. Salzman, 2015) or ethnic groups, kingdoms or chiefdoms in sub-Saharan Africa (i.e. Schröder, 2018; Chabal and Daloz, 1999). Religion-based polities are, for example, the broad array of Islamic networks ranging from the wide community of believers or umma, to movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood or, in its most radical form, Daesh (i.a. Rubin, 2013; Walby, 2004). Examples of warlordism-based polities are the myriad of warlords, their militias and armed non-state actors in conflict areas in the MENA region, Central Asia and sub-Saharan Africa (i.a. Jackson, 2003; Marten, 2012). These various types of polities can ‘overlap, layer, nest, and interact – coexist, cooperate, and conflict in the context of particular issues’, reflecting their varying functions and degrees of reach over people, resources, space and issues (Ferguson and Mansbach, 2000: 29–30).

Reconstruction entails that scholars, when assessing European foreign policy regarding, for example, democratisation, good governance or state-building, also gain insight in the existence, nature and effectiveness of other kinds of polities. For instance, an in-depth understanding of the Arab uprisings may also require knowledge of ‘peripheral’ polities, such as tribes and religious groups, instead of focussingmerely on established power centres (Huber and Kamel, 2016). Analysts can examine how these polities – and their ability to provide identity, order, and collective goods and services – relate to structures supported or promoted by European actors. Such comparative analysis can help explain successes and failures of EU foreign policy in third regions and can make both scholars and EU practitioners pay attention to polities in a comprehensive way, beyond judgements about their ‘traditional’ or ‘illegitimate’ nature.

Linguistic decentring

Linguistic decentring is necessary, as ‘any language by its structure, its metaphors and its vocabulary imposes a pattern of thought which reflects its parent culture’ (Groom, 2005: 169–170). Provincialising requires an awareness that the analysis of European foreign policy is embedded in, and constrained by, dominant linguistic frameworks in Europe and the West. A first aspect is the predominance of English in international scholarly debates (see also disciplinary decentring). English as a lingua franca facilitates international academic interaction, but may also inhibit the participation of scholars from other language groups. Related characteristics, as Wæver (1998: 694–695) emphasised, are the dominant stylistic criteria of ‘the American brand of the Anglo-Saxon intellectual style, with brief, straightforward statements and linear progression of an argument’. Whereas this can be regarded as spelling out clearly, it may also act as a ‘barrier to expressing real complexity’ (Wæver, 1998: 694), engendering ‘stylised Manichean representations of complex phenomena’ (Fisher Onar and Nicolaïdis, 2013: 288).

Second, the majority of European foreign policy analysts rarely use primary and secondary sources in non-European languages such as Arabic, Farsi, Turkmen, Mandarin or Hausa. This implies that potentially relevant literature and data are neglected due to a linguistic barrier, and that research on, for example, EU relations with China or the Arab world is often based exclusively on western sources, raising questions about the validity of produced conclusions. Even non-western scholars who convey their research in English often adapt their language to western or European audiences, or represent a distinct socio-economic or political background that is not always representative of their country or society.

Third, European foreign policy analysts may be ignorant of basic concepts, ideas and approaches that are foreign to their own linguistic framework, conceptual lenses and cognitive world, but may be key to understanding other regions and the impact of the European foreign policy towards them. Major differences may also exist in manners of communicating, a problem which is not simply solved by translating non-European languages or concepts into European languages, as specific words may entail a different meaning depending on context, society, place and time. Chakrabarty (2000: 17) refers to the problem of ‘translating diverse forms, practices, and understandings of life into universalist political-theoretical categories of deeply European origin’, leading to ‘“rough translations” of native terms’.

Linguistic engagement thus implies analysing other regions and societies (and Europe’s relations with and foreign policy towards them) from within local linguistic frameworks and contexts. This calls for collaboration with scholars who have sound knowledge of the local language(s) and an understanding of the broader linguistic and communicative context and related conceptual lenses, needed to unveil both fundamental meanings and subtle nuances. Especially the section on normative decentring included examples of meanings getting ‘lost in translation’ when adopting western terminology for complex non-western concepts (e.g. the meaning of al-‘adala and lichnost is not covered by ‘justice’ and ‘individual’). Another example is the avoidance of the word ‘no’ in Asia and the use of indirect strategies to convey a refusal or disagreement vis-à-vis someone else, as these are less ‘face-threatening’ and in concordance with the basic values of ‘harmony’ and ‘rejection avoidance’ (Boonkongsaen, 2013; Hashimoto and Yamagishi, 2013) (see normative decentring).

Through a linguistic reconstruction of EU foreign policy analysis, analysts may, first, reveal gaps in the existing English literature dealing with EU foreign policy by including insights expressed in other languages. Second, with a better understanding of other linguistic frameworks, scholars may reveal differences in the way interests and sensitivities are conveyed as factors influencing the (in)effectiveness of EU foreign policy and public diplomacy.

Disciplinary decentring

Disciplinary decentring differs from the previous categories, as it deals with epistemology and methodology and thereby cuts across all other categories. Nevertheless, applying the various decentring dimensions is also useful in this case. To decentre on an epistemological and methodological level implies a consciousness that the analysis of Europe’s foreign policy is not only embedded in the research traditions and theoretical perspectives of IR, Political Science, Foreign Policy and EU Studies (Jørgensen, 2015a; 2015b), but also constrained by them. Despite their often implicit universal scientific claims, they are rooted in specific European or western contexts, as they are ‘the local product of a particular geo-epistemological perspective’ (Wæver and Tickner, 2009). This also explains why they are often insufficient for understanding issues and challenges faced by other parts of the world, which nevertheless also impact upon Europe and European foreign policy.

Provincialising therefore requires an awareness of the limited receptivity to ‘difference’ by the predominant research practices and methodological approaches in Political Science, IR and EU Studies. Chabal and Daloz (2006: 12–13) make the important point that the usual a priori definition of a conceptual framework and research questions can be detrimental to seeing difference, as this ‘inevitably tends to privilege ethnocentric conceptual frameworks over those that may be argued to be more appropriate for non-Western, or non-industrial societies’. Relevant here is Hudson’s (2007: 188) complaint about the continued use of ‘inappropriate methods, by employing simplifying assumptions that evade the complexity with which the methods cannot cope’.

Openness to difference is also hampered by the (explicit or implicit) positivist approach, the prioritisation of explanatory research, and the quest for theory-building (Chabal and Daloz, 2006; Thomas and Wilkin, 2004). Although the search for causal relations and explanations may in principle be considered epistemologically preferable to descriptive or exploratory analysis (Dijkstra and Vanhoonacker, 2017), a major drawback is the resulting tendency to disregard important entities and phenomena that are less easily explained and for which data are more difficult to obtain (see the various examples in the sections on normative decentring and polity decentring). In reference to linguistic decentring, the fact that most research on European foreign policy is based mainly or solely on western primary and secondary sources is also mirrored in the limited number of references to publications by non-western scholars (Keuleers et al., 2016). What Shilliam (2011) and Tickner (2013) labelled as imperialist core-periphery power relations in IR, may in this sense also be reflected in scholarship on EU foreign policy.

Disciplinary engagement follows rather logically from provincialising, providing remedies to the limitations that came to the fore. On a theoretical level, a first step is incorporating more insights from post-positivist approaches with a larger openness for difference, such as subaltern studies and post-colonial or post-modernisation theories – with the caveat that postmodern and postcolonial theorists often ‘continue to use Europe as a reference point’ (Bhambra, 2007: 1). Although a ‘non-western IR theory’ may not exist (Acharya and Buzan, 2010; Tickner and Wæver, 2009), western scholars can actively seek to learn conceptualisations offered by scholars in the Arab world, Africa, Asia and other areas and engage with different readings of concepts such as democracy, security or sovereignty (see case-studies in Morozov, 2013; Pan, 2012; Tickner and Blaney, 2012), but also with lesser known notions such as guanxi or ubuntu. Engaging with non-western scholars and literature can also help European foreign policy specialists to pay attention to a wider set of relevant research problems and questions.

Another step to strengthen engagement is to learn from other academic disciplines and their methodologies, including from how these disciplines evolved and are practiced in other parts of the world. An essential part of this much-needed interdisciplinarity is closer interaction with the already multidisciplinary area studies, which has often been accused of ‘epistemological inferiority’ (Tickner and Blaney, 2012: 8). This interaction is essential to obtain deeply needed basic information and to gain an understanding of phenomena that are largely unknown to scholars specialised in European foreign policy. Reaching out to local knowledge is thus essential (Kalb, 2006), though not always easy. Standard research guidelines in political science can prove to be of limited use, if only because of the difficulty of obtaining data and using local sources. Methodologies used in disciplines such as anthropology – including field work and (non-)participant observation – can be needed for data collection and for grounding the analysis in the interpretation of what makes sense within local contexts (see the contributions in this special issue – Schröder, 2018). However, this involves a range of specific methodological, ethical, linguistic, financial, logistical and even security challenges, which explains why such disciplinary reconstruction can be very challenging in practice, even when scholars fully acknowledge its necessity (Chabal and Daloz, 2006; Kapiszewski et al., 2015; Olivier de Sardan, 2015).