Making local knowledge: Ethnographic authority in the German intervention in Afghanistan

Ethnographic sagacity and the local turn

What do we talk about when we refer to “the local” in peacebuilding? More precisely, how do structural pressures in the field of peacebuilding impact what is produced as local knowledge, and how? The local turn has flagged the exclusion of local perspectives and argued for more bottom-up approaches to peacebuilding (Mac Ginty, 2014; Mac Ginty, 2015; Mac Ginty and Richmond, 2013; Paffenholz, 2015; Richmond, 2009). This intervention was crucial; however, subsequent scholarship has highlighted the danger of an essentialist understanding of the local due to a limited understanding of the local turn and ethnographic practice. Essentialism posits a clearly delineated Us and Them, global and local; yet local knowledge is not simply gathered “out there” but is formed through specific, material practices. These practices do not occur in a power-neutral environment, and at its worst, the incorporation of local knowledge may amount to exploiting local knowledge to uphold existing power structures (Randazzo, 2021: 288). In the first instance, this points to the importance of knowledge producers’ critical reflection on their practice to avoid the pitfalls of essentialist thinking. Puzzlingly, however, essentialism may persist even in critical circles (Barnett and Zarakol, 2023). How to explain this endurance of essentialist and extractivist local knowledge production practices even when knowledge producers are reflexive? I argue that structural incentives in the field of peacebuilding favor knowledge products exhibiting a flat, essentialist understanding of the local. To escape the “essentialism trap” (Barnett and Zarakol, 2023), we must understand these structural conditions, too.

The conditions of peacebuilding, which I understand as a professional field of expertise (Goetze, 2016; Sending, 2015), place pressure on producing local knowledge in a specific manner. Even those critical of the dynamics feel obligated to conform. Ethnographic sagacity (Sending, 2015) explains this phenomenon: The concept conveys how the ability to deploy local knowledge confers authority, and how this mechanism is effective even when actors do not believe in its legitimacy. Essentialism is implicit in ethnographic sagacity but not explicitly developed. We must link ethnographic sagacity to additional tools to understand how ethnographic sagacity impacts the actual “doing” of knowledge production and the underlying understanding of the local. I derive these tools eclectically from the anthropology of colonialism (Pels, 2008). Together with ethnographic sagacity, they yield a new framework to unearth the effect of ethnographic sagacity’s essentialism on how local knowledge is “sourced” and selected.

This theoretical innovation is required to execute the empirical contribution of the article, namely, to uncover the functioning of unintended essentialism. In addition, the analysis shows that ethnographic sagacity governs academics and think tankers outside the formal peacekeeping environment, too. More precisely, I focus on the production of local knowledge by Afghanistan experts in Germany. This is a timely endeavor: Since the takeover of the Taliban in August 2021, identifying the reasons for the failure of international and German engagement has become a declared goal across party lines in Germany. The question of knowledge looms large: Who knew what? Did interveners know too little, especially about “the local”? Since 2021, commissions of inquiry have enrolled experts on a fact-finding mission to identify the deficiencies of the intervention, while experts have lamented that their central criticisms have been ignored by policymakers too long before (Schetter, 2021). There has been a lot of focus on these issues of science-policy communication. However, this article takes a step back and looks at the knowledge production process itself. The aim is not to suggest that experts and policymakers have generated “bad” knowledge and failed to understand the “true” Afghanistan. This would do grave injustice to the, however, small number of experts in Germany with a significant depth of knowledge of Afghanistan. Rather, my point is that even self-reflexive knowledge producers are subject to structural logics that limit how they can produce knowledge and how local knowledge comes to be understood by their audiences. In the case of the German intervention in Afghanistan, efforts were made to understand the situation “on the ground” by different actors, including experts. The problem is that the logics of the field favor understandings and procedures for producing local knowledge that impede an open engagement with its embeddedness and limits.

In the following section, I explore the discussion on local knowledge in peacebuilding, the roles of anthropology in these contexts, and how this relates to expertise. The third section sketches out a theoretical framework departing from Sending’s “ethnographic sagacity” (Sending, 2015: 55); the framework is complemented with insights from the anthropology of colonialism, which outlines the ontological, epistemological, and ethical stance underlying the production of local knowledge as ethnographic sagacity. In the fourth section, the analysis based on 18 interviews with German think tank and academic experts working on Afghanistan shows that local knowledge about Afghanistan is a currency for authority and that its production is permeated by essentialist underpinnings (an ontology of cultural authenticity, epistemology of strategic distance, and a dyadic conception of research ethics). The pressures of ethnographic sagacity persist even when the experience of knowledge production clashes with its essentialist assumptions. This is because experts, like other peacebuilding professionals, depend on ethnographic sagacity for recognition in the peacebuilding field. This discourages them from challenging it even when they experience that essentialism does not provide the full picture.

The local in peacebuilding and the role of anthropology

How do we know the local? Anthropological approaches to peacebuilding and the local turn both have investigated this question from what can be termed, broadly speaking, a “practice perspective on intervention” (Koddenbrock, 2015: 2). The “local turn” critique of liberal peacebuilding and its followers notably criticized the top-down application of readymade templates of peacebuilding around the globe and the related notion that intervened countries were “blank spaces” (Tucker, 2018: 223). The lack of local knowledge was understood as a primary problem, and consequently, the local turners demanded the inclusion of bottom-up perspectives by local and native voices (Leonardsson and Rudd, 2015; Mac Ginty, 2014; Mac Ginty and Richmond, 2013; Paffenholz, 2015). Post- and decolonial scholars, too, have emphasized the continuities of (colonial) global power hierarchies reflected in liberal peacebuilding but also in its criticisms (Azarmandi, 2023; Rutazibwa, 2010; Sabaratnam, 2013). Related critical interventions have highlighted the importance of meaningfully engaging with the concrete contexts in which marginalization and the resistance to marginalization are experienced and lived (Beier, 2005; Horst, 2019; Rosenow, 2019; Suffla et al., 2020). People in intervened countries’ everyday lives and practices can become resources for “everyday peace” approaches to peacebuilding (Bourhrous and O’Driscoll, 2023; Millar, 2020). Such approaches counter an ongoing tendency to treat the “local” as a generalized Other to the “international” without defining what specifically constitutes the local in terms of experiences, practices, and materials (Bräuchler and Naucke, 2017; Kappler, 2018; Martin, 2021; Roepstorff, 2020; Schierenbeck, 2015). Given this interest in concrete sites and experiences, anthropological approaches are fruitful in studying peacebuilding differently and from the ground up (Autesserre, 2014; Bräuchler and Naucke, 2017; Denskus, 2012; Oda, 2007). This tradition of studying postcolonial marginalization had already been more firmly established in the study of development policies (Escobar, 2011). Relational approaches by Science and Technology Studies further boosted the anthropological trend in intervention research (Bachmann et al., 2015; Lewis and Mosse, 2006; Mitchell, 2002; Rottenburg, 2009).

Introducing local knowledge to peacebuilding is not a trivial process for several reasons, including practical and methodological challenges; depending on the modes of inclusion, it may be problematic in and by itself. More specifically, there is a troublesome tendency in peacebuilding and International Relations (IR) literature to “instrumentalize” anthropology (Richmond, 2018: 224) and apply it as a mere data collection tool without incorporating the epistemological requirements for reflexivity (cp. also Vrasti, 2008). The political and military cooptation of anthropological methods reaches far back into the colonial legacy of ethnographic practice. This is precisely what the literature on the anthropology of colonialism addresses (Pels, 2008; Pels and Salemink, 1994; Pels and Salemink, 1999). Ethnographically inspired tools have been coopted for operational purposes, too, for example in the United States’ (US) so-called Human Terrain Systems (HTS), which were strongly criticized by the American Anthropological Association (Albro, 2010). Ethnographic fieldwork applied in such a truncated manner loses the original critical impetus of postcolonial critique and the local turn. Sending has analyzed in depth the powerful effects of an “ethnographic sagacity” in peacebuilding, where local knowledge is most likely to be used when it furthers the program goals and the “international rule” of the peacebuilders (Sending, 2015: 74). Steinmetz had introduced the notion of “ethnographic capital” for this phenomenon in colonial times (Steinmetz, 2008a). Randazzo (2021) has cautioned that the inclusion of local and indigenous voices, if merely understood as an absorption and extraction of knowledge, may be coopted and misused for a Western peacebuilding agenda, thus mirroring other extractivist practices by colonizers (Smith, 2021). Representations of and narratives about the local are formed by the agendas and narratives of the peacebuilders rather than representing “unfiltered realities” on the ground (Bliesemann de Guevara, 2017; Hirblinger and Simons, 2015; Jabri, 2013; Mac Ginty, 2015). When the failures of intervention are merely “attributed to a lack of knowledge” at the same time that “the quest for knowledge is embedded in the managerial rationality of interventions” (Bakonyi, 2018: 256), then the inclusion of local knowledge may result in merely supporting this governing rationality and render intervention technical instead of inducing a meaningful engagement with the local lifeworlds. While anthropological approaches have undoubtedly had a fruitful impact on the peacebuilding literature, there is a danger that a flattened understanding of anthropology as a data collection machine is inserted in existing hierarchies in the field of peacebuilding.

This necessitates a stronger focus on the precise epistemological implications of anthropological thinking; the deep disciplinary engagement of anthropology’s own colonial past provides a yet untapped potential for peacebuilding research (Asad, 1973; Pels, 2008). The anthropology of colonialism helps to understand knowledge production about the local as inescapably relational. It also highlights the ongoing practices of knowledge production that negate this relationality. Relationality implies “giving greater conceptual importance [. . .] to relations over entities by attending to the effects of the interactions and exchanges” (Brigg, 2018: 4). According to (thick) relationality, there are no distinct entities before interaction (Brigg, 2016). Knowledge (on the local), too, is constituted through interactions: Knowledge production is “a materially entangled process, in which the involved parts transform one another in relation” (Torrent, 2021: 1). Relationality rejects the idea of separate, substantial entities and allows for a more nuanced understanding of difference. It invites “radical openness” to the infinite possible results of any encounter (Torrent, 2022: 211). This is particularly relevant for knowledge production on the local Other in peacebuilding, as “‘we’ are both often ‘out of place’ and engaging with socio-political difference in our processes of inquiry and knowing” (Brigg and George, 2020: 539). Relationality offers a more detailed analytical framework than extractive approaches to knowledge production. For some authors, it also carries normative and political implications (whereas others warn of a deterministic type of “entanglement” Torrent, 2021: 211): Simplistic Us-Them binaries mask the hierarchies and politics of peacebuilding; relational thinking enables greater awareness of the responsibility implied in “being with” the other (Hunt, 2017). The analysis below is based on an analytical understanding of relationality. I return to the normative-political implications to draw broader conclusions from the study.

Relationality is championed as the primary antidote against forms of essentialism that even critical scholars may be subject to (Barnett and Zarakol, 2023; see also Acharya and Buzan, 2019: 247). Barnett and Zarakol themselves provide some explanations why essentialism persists: These explanations include the need for a common language between theory and practice, but also disciplinary logics of International Relations. We can add a perspective that focuses on the power and authority structures that policy-advising experts are subject to. The literature on experts has carved out their role in knowledge production insofar as they operate between science and politics. They are influenced by logics of both fields and forced to balance different capitals against each other to remain authoritative as experts toward different audiences (Medvetz, 2012). Credibility toward their audiences is a crucial resource to bridge the value systems of the different worlds that experts inhabit (Tchilingirian, 2018). Depending on the specific claim to expertise that is made, credibility can reside in various aspects, for example, scientificity, practicality, or authenticity (Leander and Waever, 2019: 7). For peacebuilding, credibility and experts’ claims to authority are closely entangled with their knowledge of the local intervention contexts, or their ability to signal such knowledge; indeed, a “logic of ethnographic sagacity may constitute an overarching symbolic logic of peacebuilding” (Danielsson, 2020: 125).

Knowing the local is not trivial for various reasons, and there is a danger of a flattened understanding of the local being instrumentalized and coopted for hegemonic purposes. The question remains: How can we more effectively trace what these conditions mean for the concrete practices of local knowledge production? In so doing, how can we explain the resilience of essentialist understandings of the local despite the extensive reflexive scholarly debate? To answer these questions, we must understand the two phenomena discussed by two different strands of literature as inherently linked: The exploitation of anthropological methods is intertwined with the power and authority structures that govern experts.

Ethnographic sagacity and the anthropology of colonialism

How does local knowledge amount to a currency of authority in global governance, and how does this affect how local knowledge is produced? Sending’s ethnographic sagacity (Sending, 2015) answers the first question; with the help of tools developed by the anthropology of colonialism (Pels, 2008), we can answer the second question. Sending applies a selective Bourdieusian framework to argue that authority in the field of peacebuilding is established through “ethnographic sagacity”; this is a concept first developed by Steinmetz (2008a) for the context of colonial ethnography. Ethnographic sagacity describes an “ability to deploy local knowledge” (Sending, 2015: 55), which grants status in the field of peacebuilding (a). However, the functioning of ethnographic sagacity also implies that the local remains subordinated to the international (b). On the first point (a): The “stakes” of the peacebuilding field (Sending, 2015: 68) are oriented around the production of knowledge about local processes and actors. Actors must demonstrate they have such local knowledge, notably by “being there” (Pels, 2008: 288), to gain a type of capital called ethnographic sagacity. Ethnographic sagacity yields recognition; therefore, actors are incentivized to follow the logic of ethnographic sagacity whether they believe in its legitimacy or not. Ethnographic sagacity, importantly, does not describe a “superior grasp” of the Other; local knowledge need not be good or correct (however defined) to become a “marker [. . .] of distinction” (Steinmetz, 2008b: 48). Different professions may also disagree over which local knowledge is valuable (Sending, 2015: 70). Speaking in terms of practical, political relevance, ethnographic sagacity ironically may incentivize researchers and peacebuilders to engage with the “local” only fleetingly; a snapshot of the situation can suffice to establish a badge of credibility. Ethnographic sagacity also does not imply that “the local” gains agency or importance in its own right (b). Local knowledge is only rewarded when “it can help smooth the implementation of predefined programs as opposed to knowledge to be used to reflect on and possibly transform these programs” (Sending, 2015: 74). Local knowledge must fit into the grand narratives of international programs, be it security discourses or “humanitarian imaginaries” (Smirl, 2015: 203). The knowledge produced will also always reflect knowledge producers’ pre-existing skills and capital (Steinmetz, 2008b: 48). Why then defer to the local at all? The answer is state sovereignty: Peacebuilding entails interfering in a sovereign country’s internal affairs, so peacebuilders must show that they understand the particular country’s context (Sending, 2015: 69).

I enhance Sending’s framework in two key areas. First, Sending’s analysis stretches from countries of intervention to the metropole, in Sending’s case, the United Nations (UN) Headquarters. This article shows that the logic also reaches beyond the UN peacebuilding environment or any political actors and extends to academics and think tankers in advisory roles. This is reminiscent of the role of ethnographers in colonial times, who were not officials of the imperial state but often materially and structurally depended on it (Asad, 1973; Pels, 2008; Steinmetz, 2008a). Second, this article provides a more granular view, praxeologically understood, of the knowledge production processes under conditions of ethnographic sagacity. For Sending, this is not of immediate concern; he is interested in how actors acquire authority by displaying local knowledge that is presented as already obtained. However, “ethnographic authority” does not only affect actors’ positions in the peacebuilding field but also carries epistemological consequences (Clifford, 1983). In a praxeological understanding, even an “epistemic hierarchy that favors the global is necessarily constituted by enactments in particular . . . contexts” (Danielsson, 2023: 12): The question of what exactly is being done to obtain what becomes recognized as “ethnographic sagacity” merits its own attention. In a praxeological-relational understanding, local knowledge is the “product of an [unequal] encounter [. . .] based on definite practices that mobilize phenomena and bring them closer for inspection, interpretation, and manipulation” (Eyal, 2006: 24). With Sending, we understand how these practices are structured through struggles for authority. We need additional tools to investigate further the material procedures, foundational ontology, and epistemology that guide these practices.

The anthropology discipline has thoroughly examined its ties to colonialism since the 1970s (Afigbo, 1975; Asad, 1973; Banaji, 1970; Lewis, 1973; Mafeje, 1976; Owusu, 1979) and for various geographic contexts (dos Santos Soares, 2019; Magubane and Faris, 1985; Mogstad and Tse, 2018; Palriwala, 2005; Shimizu, 1999). This discussion already aptly describes the problems faced today by the IR literature on knowledge production in peacebuilding and the role of the local. Acknowledging this broader debate, I especially lean on writings by Peter Pels (Pels, 2008; Pels and Salemink, 1999) because he provides a useful three-part heuristic to scrutinize how the colonial legacy of certain ontological and epistemological positions impedes the implementation of postcolonial criticism of anthropology (Pels, 2008). In doing so, his work resonates with feminist standpoint theory (Harding, 1995; cp. Leander, 2016) and postcolonial thought (Bhabha, 2012; Said, 1979). Pels’ heuristic specifically also addresses the entanglements of academic practice with the non-academic world. This echoes with the problems experts face as inbetweeners of academia and politics/society. Pels identifies three positions that, until today, interfere with reflective research practice: Ontologies of cultural authenticity, epistemologies of strategic distance, and a dyadic conception of research ethics. How do they deepen our understanding of ethnographic sagacity’s effects on local knowledge production?

Regarding ontology, Pels notes that essentialist ideas about the world’s “cultures” persist despite critical engagement with anthropology’s colonial past. The notion of “cultural authenticity” is associated with an “ontology of spatial discreteness” (Pels, 2008: 283), a type of thinking already identified by earlier postcolonial scholars (Bhabha, 2012; Said, 1979), that is, the assumption that human diversity can be mapped geographically (also pervasive in area studies, Mielke and Hornidge, 2017). How does this relate to ethnographic sagacity? Ethnographic sagacity relies on an ontology of cultural authenticity; it also actively co-produces the local as a discrete entity. For ethnographic sagacity to function, the local must be imagined as a distinct, knowable Other. More precisely, ethnographic sagacity defines the international and the local as ontologically separate and subordinates the latter to the former. As outlined above, the underlying driver for ethnographic sagacity is state sovereignty. The notion of territorial sovereign states is one particularly widespread expression of the ontology of spatial discreteness. In peacebuilding, ethnographic sagacity is essential in promoting the goal of “reshaping states as stable components of the international” (Sending, 2015: 69): It ties the ontological commitment to discrete entities to the political commitment to state sovereignty. Examples of cultural authenticity operating in peacebuilding include the idea that “authentic” insights about a country can be gathered from being within the territory of the country of intervention (Bliesemann de Guevara, 2014; Bliesemann de Guevara and Kostic, 2018) or discrete geographical mappings along concepts such as tribe (Manchanda, 2018). For policy advisors, it may prove complicated to communicate a relational rather than an essentialist understanding of locally gathered material to “extra-academic audiences” (Pels, 2008: 287).

The second and related stumbling block is the epistemological posture of strategic distance. While cultural authenticity defines the Other, the “strategic illusion” (Pels, 2008: 289) defines the self, namely a distanced, rational, and objective researcher (Haraway, 2013), following a positivist paradigm. This ignorance of the situatedness of knowledge production is what feminist standpoint theory has also criticized (Harding, 1995; Leander, 2016). Peacebuilders can only obtain ethnographic sagacity if they maintain this imagined distance. This is because of the supremacy of the international over the local: Peacebuilding professionals need to prove “their grasp of the local context but in a way that retains distance to make possible a translation of such insights that is compatible with the positions that they have as ‘internationals’” (Sending, 2015: 64). They are anchored in the international and must produce local knowledge from an imagined “Archimedean” view (Sending, 2015: 66). Strategies to avoid getting “stained” by the local (Eyal, 2006: 22) can involve a literal, material distance (e.g. closed military compounds). The strategic distance assumption of ethnographic sagacity is upheld structurally even when the “‘field’ is [experienced] not just [as] a distant strategic target of study ‘out there’, but a social construct in which our engagement is just the most recent phase in a history of interventions” (Pels, 2008: 288). The outcome of data collection depends on people’s historically learned response, the “extent to which the people researched have already adapted to our methods’ modes of measuring” (Pels, 2008: 290). A stance of strategic distance obscures this, preventing “strongly objective” insights (Harding, 1995) because it discounts the social and historical situatedness of knowledge production (Haraway, 2013).

The third hindrance is a “dyadic” understanding of ethics (Pels, 2008: 291). It limits ethical considerations to the relationship between the researcher and the researched: Data gathered by the former must be used in a way that cannot harm the latter. This conception brackets the broader politico-economical embeddedness of the researcher-researched relationship. It originated in colonial times when anthropologists were assumed to provide neutral, unpolitical, value-free information about the colonized to colonial authorities. This knowledge was used to improve the colonial government, understood as an intrinsically moral enterprise. This functioning, in principle, also underlies ethnographic sagacity: Local knowledge is seemingly extracted from a distant, neutral position (see the strategic illusion), converted into authority, and with this authority, peacebuilders technocratically define problems, and solutions. Peacebuilders’ and researched people’s broader political entanglements with the “powers that be” (Pels, 2008: 293) are not addressed. Ethnographic sagacity itself is such an entanglement as it links local knowledge production to power. For example, what does it mean for researched people that local knowledge is a resource for researchers’ authority (cp. for instance the problem of over-researched societies, Kelly, 2021)? Dyadic ethics persist even in current anthropological associations’ ethics standards; non-academic audiences, too, perceive anthropologists as strategically distant, which co-produces these problematic ethics (Pels, 2008: 293).

In sum, the ontological-epistemological disposition of essentialism that undergirds ethnographic sagacity produces a clearly delineated Us and Them coextensive with the categories of international and local. What is implicit in Sending’s work can be carved out in more detail using Pels’ heuristic. Sending explains how local knowledge functions as a resource for the authority of peacebuilders. With Pels, we can ask more precisely what ethnographic sagacity implies for how local knowledge is produced, insofar as we can outline the essentialist underpinnings of local knowledge production in a world as described by Sending. Understanding how these underpinnings are enacted “on the ground” in a particular case requires in-depth empirical analysis.

The (In-)credibility of the local: Producing local knowledge about Afghanistan

The following analysis investigates local knowledge production by experts on Afghanistan in Germany. The inquiry rests on 18 interviews with such experts working on Afghanistan at German think tanks, research institutes, political foundations, universities, and as freelance consultants, from the fields of area studies and social sciences (see Appendix 1). Interviewees were selected based on their saliency regarding the number and visibility of their publications, their media activity, and because they were highlighted in secondary literature or other interviews. A full survey of all relevant experts on Afghanistan in Germany was not feasible for questions of access, but given the limited overall size of this research community, the analysis covers a significant part; in this regard, the sampling follows the idea of saturation in theoretical sampling (Glaser and Strauss, 2017).

The analyzed period is 2001 to 2023, beginning with the German intervention in Afghanistan; this means, first, that experts were selected as interviewees when they had widely cited media output and academic or policy publications on Afghanistan in this period. Second, it implies that interviewees were asked to report on their experiences during these years. The interviews were semi-structured; a question about the role of local knowledge and the value of “having been there” was part of the interview guide, but in some conversations, the topic emerged without a prompt. In interpreting the interviews, the analysis adheres to Bourdieusian assumptions, as does Sending’s framework. Relationally understood, interviewees’ utterances do not reflect a reality out there (Fujii, 2017) but “[interviewees’] particular locations within social space and the dilemmas that these engender” (Barrett, 2015: 5): Interviewees express their understanding of the field they are moving in. This can mean that interviewees consciously describe the functioning of their field, including ethnographic sagacity. But Bourdieu teaches us that people cannot always name the rules of the game they are playing (Barrett, 2015). Therefore, in other instances, people’s narrations reveal how they enact ethnographic sagacity without them consciously reflecting on it. It is the analyst’s task to reveal these implicit invocations of the rules of the game. In sum, interviews can demonstrate a spectrum of actors’ positions toward ethnographic sagacity from highly critical to deeply internalized and unreflected. The key finding is that even highly critical interviewees, who perform a lot of “role distance” (Goffman, 1961) toward their performance in the game of ethnographic sagacity, find themselves forced to “play along.” The structural pressures operate whether actors believe in the legitimacy of the authoritative mechanism or not, just as Sending describes.

The analysis proceeds as follows: The first section investigates the status of “ethnographic sagacity” (Sending, 2015) in knowledge production on Afghanistan, that is, how German experts experience that they can achieve authority and gain credibility by having been to the country of intervention, and how this is entangled with the ontology of cultural authenticity. The subsequent sections focus on the “doing” of knowledge production “on the ground,” how it is permeated by essentialist ontological and epistemological underpinnings. Interestingly, the pressures of ethnographic sagacity persist even when the experience of knowledge production clashes with its essentialist assumptions. These clashes occur when the assumption of cultural authenticity collides with the high selectivity regarding interlocutors in Afghanistan (the “Kabul bubble”); when knowledge extraction from a strategic distance is impossible when human-to-human interactions evoke learned responses or trigger social conventions; and when the violent context of peacebuilding produces material distance, which contradicts the idea of intimate access to the local and creates particular personal entanglements which challenge dyadic ethics. Even when experts know these limitations, they struggle to convey them in their final outputs. This is because ethnographic sagacity, as it relies on the persistence of cultural authenticity, discourages experts from more broadly addressing the constructed nature of authenticity if they wish to be taken seriously.

Knowing how we know the local

The article has advanced an empirical exploration and theoretical explanation of the essentialism that persists in the construction of local knowledge in peacebuilding. The empirical case of German experts on Afghanistan has shown that even reflexive knowledge producers face incentives to provide knowledge products that obscure the relational nature of their production process. Sending’s ethnographic sagacity explains these incentives in the field of peacebuilding. Whether knowledge producers believe in the value of local knowledge or not, ethnographic sagacity operates on all of them. To understand how ethnographic sagacity operates on knowledge production practices on the ground, the analysis drew on Pels’ three-part heuristic of cultural authenticity, strategic distance, and dyadic ethics. Synthesizing Sending and Pels provides a framework that can be applied to analyze other intervention contexts, too. The analysis also updates Sending’s findings by showing that ethnographic sagacity extends to expert knowledge producers in advisory roles who are not formally part of the UN. The pressures operating on them often emanate from the demands directed at them by their policy audience. Experts find it challenging to convey a relational understanding of their findings because political counterparts continue to adhere to essentialist ways of knowing the world and demand concise input with reduced complexity. Consequently, experts risk losing their ethnographic authority if they situate their findings relationally. However, there are also intra-academic incentive structures, such as publication pressures, that reinforce ethnographic sagacity.

Where does this leave us—are knowledge producers the helpers of neo-colonialism? What good is their reflexivity when essentialism continues despite their critical thinking? Rather than dismissing knowledge producers as “primarily an aid to [neo-]colonial administration,” we can point to the capacity of even a structure such as the one described for “transcending itself” (Asad, 1973: 18). If knowledge producers see themselves forced to treat the local as stable, it is still relevant whether these are treated as “‘as if’ assumptions” (Barnett and Zarakol, 2023: 436) or understood as an essential characteristic of the local. Insisting on relationality is important from an epistemological as well as a political standpoint. It sharpens awareness of the responsibility involved in “being with” both in the practice of intervention and the practice of knowledge production.