Scholarship as Activism in the Field of Native Studies

• 1 Introduction

  This article explores the challenging task of embodying the role of both scholar and activist¹x In using the term ‘activist’, I am encompassing a range of activities from action in social movements to consulting with governments or non-governmental organizations, or direct work with communities making transitions from war to peace. in academia through an examination of an approach taken by scholars in the interdisciplinary field of Native studies. In particular, I offer interviews that reflect the lived experience of scholars in Native studies, who navigate the challenges of their dual commitment to rigorous research and improving the lives of Native communities in ways that may be useful to scholars who are similarly committed to both scholarship and practice within the field of peace studies.
  My arguments are premised on certain assumptions that I do not fully explore here, but which are highlighted and expanded upon in the introductory article to this Special Edition. First, because of the nature of the academic advancement process, scholarly research that appears in peer-reviewed publications is privileged over-and-above other forms of scholarly work. Because it seeks to contribute to alternative goals, such as those defined by conflict-affected communities, the research of peace scholars may also appear in organizational studies, consultation, mediation and training reports or training manuals. These diverse scholarly endeavours are relegated to the category of practice and excluded from consideration, mainly in the process of promotion and tenure at universities. Secondly, at many academic institutions, even teaching is secondary to the endeavour of formal ‘knowledge production’. This current division of types of labour leaves scholars who are dually committed – out of personal obligation, interest or otherwise – in the difficult position of making choices about which work to pursue and how to present it in ways that have direct and immediate effects on their livelihoods. Intended or unintended, this privileging of scholarly outputs has implications not only for scholars but also for (often vulnerable) conflict-affected communities, and for the overall quality and impact of academic scholarship.
  In many ways, peace studies mirrors (overlaps with, and encompasses) the field of Native studies in several critical areas. Both often conduct research with vulnerable populations, span disciplines and advocate for a particular normative commitment (Fontan, 2012; Grounds et al., 2003; McCaslin, 2005). Native (or indigenous) studies is a field where many scholars overtly view the defence of Native communities as a primary aim, concurrent with the project of advancing knowledge for the academy, and the field of study itself was founded on this commitment (Cook-Lynn, 1997; Simpson and Smith, 2014). Scholars in peace studies, too, have a normative preference for the establishment of peace in the contexts they study, and many (though certainly not all) are actively engaged in the project of advancing peace on the ground.
  Scholars and teachers of Native studies fight an uphill battle against stereotypes of Native peoples that have been ingrained by centuries of written and oral history (Blackhawk, 2007). Peace studies scholars and teachers often similarly encounter biases to the notion of peace itself that are a result of centuries of history written to glorify war and privilege actors at the state level (MacGinty and Richmond, 2013). Scholars in both fields often are consciously working to combat centuries of existing scholarship that privileged certain populations, essentially advocating for a different and more inclusive worldview while using scholarship to illuminate people and ways of being that were once invisible.
  Based on a series of interviews with scholars in the field of Native studies, I demonstrate that Native studies is a uniquely situated field that produces scholars who identify their scholarship itself as activism or a closely connected project, and thus as a form of ‘practice’. I offer this finding as a unique potential model to be discussed in peace studies, as our field, while generally normatively committed to peace, still consists in large part of studies conducted by scholars trained in social science disciplines whose research is unlinked to service (though many in the field clearly understand a more direct linkage). If the study of peace does not itself embody scholarly work intended to directly foster peace in particular contexts, or worse, replicates the privileging of certain knowledge that has been shown to contribute to conflict on the ground, then the normative preference for peace imagined to be central to the field is in question. This makes the relationship between scholarship, practice and activism one worth considering more carefully.
  My research suggests that there are scholars, particularly in interdisciplinary fields such as Native studies, who have converged purposefully around a common aim and who reject the division of scholarship from normative and political aims. I propose that peace studies could benefit from closer interaction with the field of Native studies – a field that has from the outset explicitly acknowledged the intended political ramifications of its scholarship. I argue for a peace studies framework that counts scholarship itself as a form of activism and suggest that Native studies may serve as a welcome conversation partner, offering insights into how best to construct this framework.

• 2 Activism, Critique and Positionality

  Political scientist Nancy Hartsock, among other scholars in the feminist tradition, argues that all knowledge is situated. For Hartsock, the very existence of a researcher’s standpoint implies that there are multiple possible perspectives (Allen and Baber, 1992; Hartsock, 1983). She posits that some perspectives on social relations are made invisible because the perspective of the dominant group shapes social reality (Hartsock, 1983). Smith asserts that to change the dominant perspective within an academic discipline, research must do more than add to or critique the existing literature, by working instead to reconstruct the entire underlying frameworks and paradigms (Smith, 1987; Stacey and Thorne, 1985). Just as activists use their physical presence to draw attention to social issues, scholars make choices about their topics of study, the method for gathering data and the mode of presentation that have direct effects on the issues they engage.
  Charles R. Hale (University of Texas at Austin) explores the potential of what he calls ‘activist research’ within the field of anthropology (Hale, 2006). He defines this as “a method through which we affirm a political alignment with an organized group of people in struggle and allow dialogue with them to shape each phase of the process, from conception of the research topic to data collection to verification and dissemination of the results” (Hale, 2006: 97). He argues that alignment with a political struggle while conducting research on issues related to that struggle provides “profoundly generative scholarly understanding”; yet he finds that scholars who do this wind up “inevitably drawn into the compromised conditions of the political process” (Hale, 2006: 98). This contradiction makes the research process more difficult, but he and others find that this is arguably balanced out by the invaluable insight gained.
  Hale describes activist researchers as having dual loyalties, to both academia and to a political struggle that reaches “far beyond the university setting”, and contrasts this position with what he calls ‘cultural critique’, a different approach that attempts “intellectual production uncompromised by the inevitable negotiations and contradictions that these broader political struggles entail” (Hale, 2006: 100). The distinction between the two approaches is important. Hale argues that cultural critique, for all its claims to greater analytic complexity and sophistication, has succeeded in bringing a greater awareness to power inequalities inherent in research but failed to offer a different way of doing research. Bringing awareness to an issue is an important goal in itself, however, and arguably one at which every scholar making a conscious decision to produce scholarship on a particular topic is attempting to arrive.
  In contrast to Hale, George Marcus, in his series of essays on the anthropology of cultural critique, equates anthropologists engaged in cultural critique with activists, claiming that, “the anthropologist, by virtue of these changing circumstances of research, is always on the verge of activism, of negotiating some kind of involvement beyond the distanced role of ethnographer” (Marcus, 1998: 122). This version of activism, he explains, centres on the creation of ‘emancipatory knowledge’ and consists of analysis and theory that challenge existing power structures, including the power differential between the researcher and the research subject (Hale, 2006). However, Hale argues that Marcus fails to address a second critical facet of activism: alignment with an organized group in struggle. While this kind of alignment is often present automatically when Native scholars engage in Native studies scholarship for what would be termed ‘insider research’, scholars studying peace and conflict resolution often consciously avoid direct alignment with particular groups in a conflict-engaged setting.
  Hale concludes that cultural critique and the approach to ethnography it has inspired and encouraged is, “politically positioned, with primary (or even exclusive) commitments to the institutional space from which it emanates” (Hale, 2006: 104). Activist research, in contrast, affirms dual political commitments from the start, and so in that way it is perhaps more honest. Hale asserts that this honesty allows for and requires ‘constant mediation’ between the two loyalties, allowing a scholar to refrain from choosing between them or collapsing them in on each other (Hale 2006). Hale acknowledges that his contribution to the success of a political agenda is essentially useless in the current state of academia, but that it is possible to conduct rigorous research by generating “new knowledge and theoretical innovation” at the same time (Hale, 2006: 105). Feminist researchers echo the potential need for dual loyalty. Many even assert that it is imperative to move outside of the academy, which separates knowledge from the everyday actors who inform it and stand to benefit from it, in order to resist perpetuating dominant and potentially problematic narratives (Sprague, 2005).
  Within the ranks of the academy, open activism and statements of political positionality have been known to cause trouble for academics, sometimes even costing them their jobs (see the widely publicized examples of Gene Nichol in South Carolina and Steven G. Salaita in Illinois). What should come as a greater surprise, however, is that the myth of objectivity in politically oriented areas of social science research persists to extent that open claims to positionality are still being vilified at all. While not every scholar in the field of peace and conflict resolution aims to take an openly political stance, the suggestion that publishing social science research on the topic of conflict and peacebuilding in particular contexts is without political impact borders on the absurd. Even peace historians would be hard-pressed to claim that their versions of history arise from neutral vantage points (with complete information and the absence of personal or contextual bias) and are of no political import (see the 2015 example of an Oklahoma legislature attempting to block the teaching of an AP History course in high school because it presented the country in too negative light, and countless other such similar cases). This myth of the positionless scholar and impactless product, I argue, contributes in large part to an academic culture that continues to marginalize the work of practitioners in fields such as peace and conflict resolution.

• 3 Interviewing Native Scholars

  I interviewed a total of 11 scholars who locate their work in the field of Native studies over the course of a few months. Of the eleven, four are women. Eight of the eleven are tenured professors, and two are graduate students navigating the job market. Five out of eleven interviewees identified fully and openly as members of Native communities in the United States or Canada, two participants identified themselves as possessing Native American heritage but without official tribal membership, two are of Latin American descent and two identified as ‘white’.
  Three central themes emerged in my interviews. One is the role of personal identity in scholarship, and the impact of this identity on the political intent of individual scholars. A second theme is the often hidden role of scholars as educators, and the responsibility that this entails. A third theme and the binding thread of my article is the presence of activism and political language in the discourse of Native studies scholarship.
  The first and second themes of identity and teaching are both connected in different ways to a felt responsibility that was expressed by each scholar I interviewed. This sense of obligation is directly in conflict with a position of political neutrality, and highlights the problematic distinction between activism and scholarship. For many Native studies scholars these aspects of their work are indistinguishable in practice. The third theme of activism and politically engaged scholarship is evidence of a bridge that can (and I argue should) be built between practice and scholarship, offering a way to consider both publishing and teaching as forms of scholarship that are, themselves, practice.
  Native studies and peace studies are two fields that each emerged separately and interdisciplinarily around common political commitments. They both consist of scholars who are engaged in research on, about, or in collaboration with communities that aim to achieve political goals such as building peace, realizing social justice, transforming conflict or attaining political recognition. In the post-Cold War world, the field of peace and conflict resolution has been focused on more localized violence and peacebuilding. This approach has presented current peace studies scholars with the direct challenge of linking their scholarship to actually building peace in ways not considered in earlier times, whereas in many ways Native studies scholars have regarded their scholarship itself to be a practice that advances Native causes from the beginning. My interviews indicate points of convergence around which a continued conversation can be held between scholars within these fields.

• 4 Identity, Responsibility and Scholarship: Building Activist Identities

  A feature perhaps uniquely particular to the field of Native studies is the number of scholars within it who self-identify as Native people. Robert Innes discusses the flourishing of what he calls ‘insider research’ (scholars conducting research in their home communities) and its implications within the field of Native studies (Innes, 2009). The insider position is understood to imply that the researcher shares the knowledge of the studied group because of their cultural, linguistic, ethnic, national or religious association with it, while outsider researchers do not have a common heritage with their research subjects (Merton, 1972). Feminist scholarship has since highlighted the complexity of this distinction, however, given the ways that researchers and research participants negotiate their relationships over the course of the study (Chavez, 2008; Ryan et al., 2011; Soni-Sinha, 2008).
  Critics of insider research have asserted that scholars researching their own communities produce biased research findings because their views are clouded by their closeness to the issues (Innes, 2009). Insider researchers counter that their contextual understanding of the community and related issues is a unique asset. With an insider’s perspective, Innes and others argue that a scholar is uniquely able to challenge preconceived notions about their communities, ask relevant research questions and gain the trust of participants (Innes, 2009). Stressing the importance of reflexivity in social science research, however, Nowicka and Cieslik demonstrate alternatively how a researcher’s understanding of his or her own position, the public discourses surrounding his or her belonging, and the way research participants negotiate their positions all serve to expose this categorical division and render it useless (Nowicka and Cieslik, 2014). Given the reflexivity of ethnographic researchers and the increasing importance of acknowledging positionality no matter the researcher’s position, the importance of the distinction between insiders and outsiders is questionable.
  In addition to gaining the trust of the community and conducting relevant research, there is perhaps more importantly a felt responsibility that stems directly from being a community member. All of the Native scholars I interviewed expressed that their identities as members of Native communities are connected strongly to their work. A young scholar expressed:

  I am a Métis woman and identify as part of a Métis community. I do feel like I am working in a way, in service of my community. This commitment comes from working with Elders and language teachers for many years and hearing their stories and questions.

  One Native scholar I spoke with explained that as a Native scholar she feels a sense of responsibility that she does not feel non-Natives have. “It’s a heavy responsibility, and challenging to navigate,” she says. A striking common thread, however, is the role personal identity played in the scholarship of all of those I interviewed, both Native and non-Native. In the course of our conversation, one Native scholar explained that possessing an identity that includes a responsibility to research communities is something that can be constructed for anyone. He tries to encourage the construction of this kind of responsible identity in his students:

  If you’re not a member of the community, it’s still possible to construct an identity that takes a responsible approach and that’s what I try to do in my classroom. Even though they are not members, I want them to have that.

  The construction of an identity that included personal responsibility was present for both Native and non-Native scholars interviewed. A non-Native scholar I spoke with explained his interest in serving Native communities through his research by describing a personal feeling of embarrassment for complicity in what he saw as a problematic political relationship with Native peoples in the United States. He says:

  I grew up on the border, in close proximity to a reservation, but it was field trips, totally colonial. Once I started to think about it, it struck me as an important investment to think about [Native peoples] in contemporary politics. Once you think about it, it becomes obvious and embarrassing. The complicity is embarrassing… part of the job is understanding the world and this is one of the ways it works.

  Scholars I interviewed repeatedly described their scholarship as accountable to a broader community than the academy. Both Native and non-Native scholars alike felt beholden to the Native communities they engaged with to conduct their research and gave impeccable attention to its impact. Beyond an obligation to the advancement of Native communities specifically, scholars expressed a deeply felt responsibility to conduct and publish research conscientiously in a field where for so long the scholarship itself was an injustice. A Native scholar I interviewed expressed that working from the place of being indigenous herself has both challenges and benefits that are unique, including an incredible pressure to ‘get it right’. She explained that coming from a community where research has caused damage, she and others like her are trying to pursue research in a new and respectful way, and told me directly that there is “no margin of error for her work”. This incredible pressure itself is a violent remnant of colonialism, and its legacy is a burden shared by all scholars of indigenous issues.
  When peace studies began in the United States, it was formed and dominated by scholars with direct experience in the US civil rights movement, and by others with deep religious commitments to peace (Miall et al., 2011). The later boom in International Relations scholarship and the Cold War dramatically shifted the diversity of the field’s participants towards being heavily dominated by political scientists. Only now, in the past two decades, has the link between scholarship, a researcher’s value orientation, and the conflict or region they study become more directly challenged. As scholars in the field are once more expanding the scope of their work beyond conflict at the state level to encompass peace between individuals at every level of society, many feel that the shift to a more local focus serves to correct an injustice of exclusion that had long been sanctioned by the academy (Richmond, 2014). As Richmond and others have pointed out, heavily state-centric scholarship in the field of peace and conflict resolution often led to frameworks for peacebuilding that prioritized Western and elite voices, to the exclusion of local experts, participants and survivors.
  Native scholar Ned Blackhawk finds that his indigenous identity presents unique challenges to teaching as well. Speaking as a member of the Te-Moak Tribe, he finds that students often maintain an “undercurrent of resentment” because of their perceptions of his political intentions when he is outspoken on the issue of land rights (Blackhawk, 2007). To combat this, he tries to highlight the political diversity found in Indian country and its supporters, for example by identifying John McCain’s consistent advocacy for Indian rights, and others (Blackhawk, 2007). It is evident throughout his work, however, that his passion for the rights and history of indigenous people is tied to his identity in a pressurized and obligatory way, similarly to the scholars I interviewed. Whether Native or non-Native, scholars in Native studies have constructed identities that include responsibility to both the academy and to Native communities.

• 5 Scholars as Educators: Teaching as Activism

  The responsibility to correct the intellectual injustice of a history of exclusion from scholarship is also reflected in my interviewees’ focus on the role of scholars as educators. This role is ‘hidden’ in the sense that, at many colleges and universities, excellence in teaching is not a source of merit; time and attention to this endeavour offer little prestige and are not weighed heavily in consideration for tenure. A scholar I spoke with noted casually,

  The official line is of course teaching is an important part of the package. In reality the deal breaker is the scholarship; if you don’t have a book and articles you can’t succeed. Teaching doesn’t matter for tenure at all in reality.

  Yet teaching is an integral part of Native studies and peace and conflict resolution scholarship in particular, insofar as challenging dominant narratives helps students and even colleagues understand the experiences of peoples who have been historically marginalized. The experiences of Native peoples, those living in conflict-affected regions and others suffering social injustices everywhere are revealed through the postcolonial project of liberating subjugated discourses, and teaching is an important component of this project (Foucault, 1972; 1978; Said and Jhally, 1998; Spivak, 1988). Challenging dominant narratives is not a project undertaken only in academic journals and at academic conferences, but in the spaces where we provide information to a more trusting audience who is expecting not only to hear ‘the truth’ but to be taught to recognize it: the classroom. A scholar I interviewed explained her endeavour to me as translation:

  When I am in the classroom I see it as an opportunity to get students to think differently about these categories – [for me] to see teaching as activism. Everything we engage with is translation; how we think about politics shows up in how we talk to people who are not in the academy about these things.

  This approach lines up with Paulo Freire’s model of ‘problem posing’ education, where teachers empower students to explore problems, contexts and constraints in order to challenge them (Freire, 2005; Rothman, forthcoming).

  For both undergraduate and graduate students, I try to help students be aware that knowledge production is something they are a part of. That there is no magic way knowledge is delivered as if by assembly line, instrumentalized and commodified; that production is more complicated than that and students are engaged with it and take ownership of it.

  The role of academics as educators is a practice, and itself involves revealing previously invisible ways of knowing, as these scholars described, and introducing both knowledge and ways of knowing to young minds. For example, Blackhawk expresses an intense desire to foster real change in his students’ thinking through his role as a scholar, specifically as a professor. He says, “scholarly insights and public consciousness move at different speeds” indicating the need for an approach to teaching that consists of an entirely different set of skills than those needed for scholarly publication (Blackhawk, 2007). In this way, he sets teaching apart from scholarship as another form of political engagement, or activism.
  Blackhawk explains that his job of engaging students in the complex narrative of American Indian history is challenging because American history has long been taught, “without attention to the continent’s original inhabitants” and was written to “celebrate certain chapters of the national story over others” (Blackhawk, 2007). He views the history of American Indians as “one of under-recognized trauma as well as triumph”, and his class is constructed to recast various commonly held assumptions about the United States and show his students a version of history that does justice to a population that was underserved in previous historic accounts. He focuses on three themes he believes are inherent to the change he wishes to see in perception: introducing a diversity of Indian experiences to challenge stereotypes, emphasizing the centrality of Indian peoples to the making of the United States and revealing the devastating truth that the largest loss of human life in world history followed the arrival of Europeans in the Americas. Everything he uses in his classroom is aimed at this goal of recasting American history by destabilizing his students’ assumptions, including the timeline used to portray Native American history (the American Revolution is his halfway point), the literature selected for his students, the diverse set of Native experiences presented, and the terminology used. They use the term ‘Indian’, despite its painful history, in order to “recapture and revise the representational power of one of America’s oldest pejoratives” (Blackhawk, 2007).

• 6 Scholarship as Activism

  While scholarship, activism and practice are often considered to be distinct, many scholars within Native studies see these as not only deeply connected but also indistinguishable. Acts of scholarship, including publishing and teaching, can be considered as activism or political practice insofar as all acts of scholarship are an opportunity to either perpetuate or reframe historical narratives and sets of values.
  ‘Responsibility’ is a frequently recurring theme in my interviews with Native studies scholars. This term is representative of the intersection between critical theory and its real-world application, and is highly illustrative in explaining why Native studies has more boldly embraced the concept of scholarship as activism. Knowledge as a vehicle for power has been thoroughly explored in critical theory (Foucault, 1980). Scholarship is a key channel by which knowledge is transmitted, and as such, unavoidably perpetuates an existing power dynamic or begins to subvert it – both of which are inherently political acts. While this is true of all scholarship, my interviews made it clear that within Native studies this often hidden reality is widely acknowledged and overt. Two interviewees described this separately:

  Most of us who are seriously engaged within indigenous studies see the work we do as collaborative and engaged and political. There is no way of not being engaged whether you admit it or not.

  I don’t know how to see it any other way than teaching, research and commitment at the community level being part of same process of learning as a scholar and also carrying out my responsibilities.

  In some cases, interviewees viewed scholarship and practice as two formulations of inherently political activism. A history professor I interviewed considers her scholarship on the decolonization of museums to be aptly termed activism. Her work is largely focused on re-examining the opportunity museums present to indigenous Americans in a critical light. She views museums as intimately tied to colonialism and the separation of indigenous people from knowledge about their history and their identities. She refers to the relationship between indigenous people and museums as one of both love and hate: “They have our stuff and we both love and hate them for that.” The history of past collecting practices for many (if not all) museums are in many cases human rights violations, but at the same time museums offer the opportunity for the history and traditions of indigenous Americans to be shared with the world in a potentially respectful context (Daehnke and Lonetree, 2011).
  One professor I interviewed recounted to me that upon accepting his current position, he had been “schooled” (his words) by a higher level administrator in his department who told him, “Native studies is too political to be a legitimate field.” He was not at all surprised by the assertion, only at how quickly it had been made. He told me this kind of pushback “comes with the territory”. He explained that from his perspective, scholarship considered to be ‘objective’ is unavoidably political in that it favours the status quo; objectivity is rooted in colonial history. As a result of his perspective and the opposition to it that he regularly faces, he has chosen to pursue and has been successful in obtaining higher-level administrative positions within the academy. He sees his position as a senior scholar as generative of responsibility: to the institution, to students and to other faculty. He told me his objectives are not only to change the discourses within the academy, but the structures too if he can.
  Ethnobotanist Kelly P. Bannister’s experience with research publication demonstrates concrete implications of the inherently political nature of scholarship. Bannister’s dissertation, researched and written in the 1990s, examined how an indigenous group in British Columbia uses plants for food and medicine. During the course of her research, she withheld extracts of the plants from her graduate supervisor who wanted to sell them to a pharmaceutical company. When she finished her dissertation, she additionally had it sealed for five years so that companies could not profit from her published work (Guterman, 2006). “What I’m trying to counter”, Bannister explains, “is the severing between the community source of knowledge and expertise, and the end publication, in which the academic authors usually are the ones who are credited for the information” (Guterman, 2006). The decisions Bannister has made cost her publications. In the years since receiving her PhD, Bannister has continued doing ethnobotanical research but only outside of the academe, working as a consultant with indigenous groups when they request it and she does not publish academic articles on that work. “I can’t continue to be here at the university if I’m not going to work on the systemic problem,” she says (Guterman, 2006). R. Michael M’Gonigle, professor of environmental law and policy also at the University of Victoria, articulates that, “What’s needed is a shift in the university reward system to value the needs of the community, to value [researchers] giving on-the-ground results” (Guterman, 2006).

• 7 Conclusion

  The experience of Native studies scholars provides one model for understanding the blurred distinctions between the categories of scholarship, activism and practice in the peace studies field. Many Native studies scholars have a deep awareness that their work is unavoidably political – with scholarship and practice both existing as forms of activism – because the perpetuation of knowledge within the academy is a way to reify societal power structures. The acts of scholarship and practice within peace studies, too, should not (and potentially cannot) be separated from their political nature and their impact on the subjects they study, as the critique and redefinition of terms within peace studies have a tangible impact on the framework for policy and action.
  The themes and structural connections between research and action in peace studies such as those embedded in conflict transformation and strategic peacebuilding mirror the changes many Native scholars are trying to achieve within the academy itself. If peace studies scholars are engaged in this same task, then it stands to reason that their commitments are born of similar identity constructions. If scholars are informed by their identities, and these identities, experiences and obligations (all intimately connected) lead to responsibilities, it is important to account for this aspect of scholarship in the academy.
  Producing knowledge that speaks to current debates but generates research questions based on social concerns typifies much of peace studies. Being attentive to the results of research and what the production of that knowledge means for the communities involved is a natural next step. But a deeper question arises: if scholarship in some areas of social science is inherently political, is there a field in which it is not? Foucault would argue that such a field does not exist. If scholarship itself is a form of activism and thus a practice of peace, is there a definable difference between scholarship and practice at all?

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Noten

• * Thanks to my colleagues in peace studies and John Paul Lederach for encouraging me to reach out to speak with people about this project, and for invaluable feedback and editing as this article took shape. Thanks especially to the scholars who agreed to be interviewed and shared their struggles and viewpoints with me so openly.

• 1 In using the term ‘activist’, I am encompassing a range of activities from action in social movements to consulting with governments or non-governmental organizations, or direct work with communities making transitions from war to peace.