Trust after Betrayal: Global development interventions in the shadow of organized violence

This project is an interdisciplinary investigation into global development interventions that unfold against the backdrop of organised violence. It applies a novel approach to studying development interventions in situ by weaving together expertise in organizational and behavioural studies with deep ethnographic knowledge of war, post-war, and non-war violent contexts to analyse the intersection of organizational dynamics and gendered social processes that comprise everyday community life among the populations targeted by these interventions. It asks first how interpersonal trust is forged, contested, and undermined within these structured encounters that attempt to promote development and social repair, tracing these dynamics out into daily social interactions. It then asks what the implications are of these findings for program and policy design and evaluation. This project directly responds to the near complete absence of academic and practitioner attention to the topic of interpersonal trust in this domain, despite the widespread acknowledgement that mistrust is a common challenge in these environments. The project sites are located in Latin America due to the persistent high levels of organised violence in the region. Colombia, Mexico, and El Salvador, in particular, are home to nearly 80% of the homicide deaths in the region, and receive 22% of all Official Development Assistance. Despite this regional focus, however, the findings will have implications at the global level for violence-affected populations, intervention agencies, and donor communities.

The project approaches its analytic problem of from the perspective of individuals attempting (re)integration or (re)entry into a receiving community - former guerrillas, the formerly incarcerated, ex-gang members. This design decision acknowledges that the definitional boundaries of these identity categories are dynamic, often with blurred boundaries along a variety of axes (e.g., legality, violence, and governability). Nevertheless, new knowledge about trust- and community-building in these contexts can have globally relevant implications for comparable communities in substantive, even if differentiated ways. It moves away from more standard victims-centric approach because it aspires to break cycles of violence from the social position of those previously implicated in that violence and who have since decided to pursue peaceful alternatives. This positioning comes with two caveats: first, it takes seriously the complex social and historical contexts and assemblage of actors within which they embed, acknowledging that there is often no clear dichotomy between betrayers and the betrayed. Second, that such pathways to redemption are co-constructed between the individual and his or her contemporaries through daily life and the intervention encounter and are not the result of individual volition alone.

Researching trust after betrayal represents a complex undertaking, beyond the scope of a single discipline. To address this, the project deploys a primarily ethnographic research design, while also drawing from semi-structured interviews, archival research, and life histories. It builds on existing conversations with practitioners and scholars in the host countries in anthropology, organizational studies, and peace studies, drawing from emerging work on the theoretical and methodological contributions of these domains. It also works in conversation with public policy, area, international, and development studies. As a result, it will not only contribute novel theory and empirical insight, but also to the science of conducting interdisciplinary research. It uses a transnational, non-extractive research approach to ensure contextual relevance, increase the potential impact of the study's findings, and decolonise academic research through various approaches to knowledge-sharing and stakeholder engagement.

This project engages directly with multiple stakeholders across the academic, public, NGO, private, and international cooperation sectors and advances scientific knowledge, cross-sector collaborative capacity and reach, and evidence-base for policy-making and intervention programme design.

Community members and intervention professionals working in contexts trying to transition out of organized violence comprise the primary intended beneficiaries of this work. In the near- to mid-term, they will benefit from small-scale adjustments to programming resulting from policy and program recommendations provided by the project. Over the long term, they will benefit from more systematic improvements to programming in the form of the psychosocial supports, economic opportunities, and physical security promoted by these interventions.

The partner organizations named in this proposal will also benefit directly from this work in the near- and medium-term, both for the same reasons listed above (improved evaluation and monitoring metrics), and also as a result of the support in data collection, programme improvements, and improved reporting capabilities that are the outcomes of this project. When requested, organizational representatives will receive training in data collection, analysis, and reporting techniques. Project design includes supports for developing the cross-sector, transnational collaborative capacity of organizations through annual project meetings and regular knowledge sharing practices with local collaborators, academics, and officials. Hosting academic institutions will also both contribute to and benefit from the structured knowledge exchange.

Additionally, public, private, third, and international cooperation sectors will also benefit directly from this work, at the local, national, and international levels. Institutions and organizations operating under donor and government cycle deadlines are unable to conduct the nuanced and longitudinal ethnographic research proposed by the present project; it therefore represents a significant contribution to the policy and practitioner field. This will directly impact the work of donor governments. For example, the UK Department for International Development (DfID) in 2017, spent £14 million on Official Development Assistance (ODA). Yet, UK Government agencies also reported concerns with measurement and reporting, suggesting 1) a shared understanding of the importance of empirical data and 2) the inadequacy of these data to-date. The project will present policy briefs, host in-person dialogues, and collaborate over the life of the project with representatives from the DfID and members of the International Development Committee, as well as with relevant officials from agencies in the above named sectors in order to share findings regarding the realities of on-the-ground implementation and collaborate on developing a suite of measures to more effectively capture those realities. Over the long term, this work will support improved application of intervening agencies' resources and improved life trajectories for those trying to emerge from organized violence.

Indirect beneficiaries include those living in these contexts who will experience improved social conditions over the long term, as well as those scholars across a variety of disciplines who draw from the publicly available data to conduct their own independent analysis and advance scientific knowledge in this domain.

Openness: All data collected for this project will be made available to the public and other researchers as long as it does not compromise the security of participants. Site-specific data and accompanying analyses will be handed over to the organizations that hosted the research. Transcription costs and data management processes have been designed to facilitate this commitment to data sharing as much as the analysis needs of the project team.