Introduction

I came to Croatia for the first time in May 1993, to work as a volunteer with the Croatian non-governmental organisation (NGO) Suncokret (Sunflower). I spent some nine months in total in a refugee camp in Savudrija, on the Istrian coast close to Slovenia, temporary home to some 2,000 refugees, mainly from central Bosnia. I moved to the Croatian capital Zagreb in 1994 working on a UK government-funded research project ‘Social Reconstruction and Social Development in Croatia and Slovenia’, later extended to cover Bosnia and Herzegovina. I continued to be active in and around Suncokret and the Anti-War Campaign, Croatia, helping to form, in 1997, the Centre for Peace Studies, a Croatian NGO that continues to exist today. Between 1998 and 2003 I worked intensively on designing, implementing and evaluating social welfare reform projects in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia and Serbia. In November 2003, I was appointed to a research position in the Institute of Economics, Zagreb, a public research institute. I continue to be based there, researching, among other themes, social policy; activism and social movements; clientelism and political capture; poverty and social exclusion; and policy translation.

Rather than exploring a single, time-limited, period of fieldwork, my chapter addresses some of the deep uncertainties and heartfelt dilemmas inherent in living, acting, observing and writing in conflict and post-conflict environments over a long period of time. My combination of activist, advocacy, consultant and academic roles, the fact that however much I integrate into Croatian society I remain a foreigner fully formed as a scholar in the imperialist-colonialist West, and the ways in which I have intervened critically in a number of debates in Croatia and the wider post-Yugoslav space all serve to multiply the ‘messiness’ inherent in research in and on violent spaces that is a recurring theme throughout this book.

This chapter applies a post-disciplinary perspective to researching violent conflict, emphasising political and ethical dilemmas. It is organised around the concepts of ‘ambivalence’ and ‘positionality’ that have helped to frame some of my interventions in the public sphere. I refer to these in the plural form in this text as part of an ongoing commitment to pay attention to ‘the multiple, the plural, the contradictory and the awkward’ (Clarke et al, 2015a, p 44).