This chapter discusses collaborative interpretivist research on conflict as it unfolded in the project Raising Silent Voices: Harnessing Local Conflict Knowledge for Communities’ Protection from Violence in Myanmar. The project was produced in cooperation of a team of researchers from the Global North, research associates from Myanmar and an international non-governmental organization (INGO), Nonviolent Peaceforce (NP). Specifically, based on my interviews with the research team members from the Global North and South, this chapter will highlight a paradox central to ‘interpretative research by proxy’: that even when research tries not to impose and hierarchize research relationships between North and South, it may end up creating problems by not providing those same structures.

NP is an INGO that provides direct physical protection to civilians in conflict zones, working with unarmed, civilian-to-civilian strategies. In Myanmar, NP's conflict assessment, programme planning and implementation are heavily constrained by Myanmar authorities’ travel restrictions preventing the INGO from working directly with communities in conflict zones. In conversations with the Northern research team NP staff voiced concerns that their work in Myanmar was missing something crucial about the conflict dynamics, because instead of living in the communities they sought to protect from violent conflict, they mainly held short-term trainings for local civil society organizations (CSOs) in major accessible towns, which did not allow for much interaction with or learning from CSO volunteers. Against this background, Raising Silent Voices sought for creative ways NP could access communities’ experiential conflict knowledge without being present in conflict-affected communities. Additionally, the three Northern researchers who applied for the project funding hoped to use experiential knowledge to overcome limits of mainstream conflict analyses and produce different insights into Myanmar's conflict dynamics.

Upon arrival in Myanmar, the researchers were faced with the same access issues NP faced: travel restrictions for foreigners, funding limits and time constraints meant that the team could not easily conduct research in the regions experiencing conflict. Hence, a twofold question emerged: what could local experiences tell about conflict, and how might these experiences be accessed?