Scholar-activist research method – challenging but indispensable

As many other development practitioners, I do not feign to practice disinterested research. 

In the end, ethical and political commitments permanently inform our practice: why we study certain phenomenon and not others, why we consider some as problems but others not. Thus, no social science research is politically neutral; it all has a bias. 

But some political bias and scientific rigor are two different things. Acknowledging that social research is biased does not imply a lack of rigor. As scholar-activists, our duty is to ensure that the visions we identify with are also subjected to theoretical scrutiny and peer review, and to practice honest reporting. 

The challenges are enormous. For instance, can you disagree with your local collaborator? Does scholar-activism mean 'anything goes' in terms of accepting rather uncritically whatever is being claimed by your local researcher partners? 

Collaborating with the Norman Pérez Bello Claretian organization (The Claretians, for short) in the eastern plains of Colombia taught me the often-challenging practice of scholar activism and how indispensable it is today.

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It was in the middle of the 2022 rainy season in the Altillanura, Colombia. 

Anita, a member of the Claretian organization and the leader of the field visit was confronted with a tough decision: to cancel the visit halfway – with several of the tasks we had agreed on still incomplete – or to move to another area within the region to finalize our mission. Heavy rains had turned several of the road paths impassable; and navigating the Meta River until reaching our next destination seemed the only way out. Still, traveling by river posed yet other security concerns, especially to social organizations as the Claretians, whose members have become targets of threats and persecution.

'How do you want to proceed? Shall we cancel the visit?', I asked.

'Let me think through… People are already waiting for us', Anita replied. 

Hours on the phone with members of the communities we were to visit, and with the head of the Claretian organization, to validate the security conditions in the area. The decision was made: to get on the first boat departing at 4:00 am, and to stick together during the approximately 8-hour journey, as well as to remain alert and cautious.

In recent years, the eastern Altillanura (high plains) in Colombia – encompassing the department of Vichada and portions of Meta – turned a major frontier destination for lucrative investments in land. Over a short period of time, the region moved from being a far, scattered and poorly developed landscape of tropical savannas bordering Venezuela to become the greatest and ‘last agricultural frontier’ of the country and even the new ‘promised land’. 

The Colombian Altillanura was part of a broader phenomenon of spectacular, multi-faceted land grabs across the world known as the ‘global land rush’. Roughly between 2004 and 2017, multiple corporate land deals were pursued in the area. Other land deals were halted at early stages of implementation or never really touched the ground, but nevertheless contributed to fuel the investment frenzy. Meanwhile, land accumulation by stealth, effected by low-profile actors, progressed apace – taking part of the bandwagon effect driven by the land rush.

For the indigenous peoples and the peasantry inhabiting the Altillanura, the tropical savannas were not an investment target. It constituted their home sites and key a source of livelihoods. For decades now, both communities have suffered from the effects of multiple iterations of land dispossession and forced displacement by different actors (including the state, economic elites, armed guerrilla groups, narcotraffickers and paramilitary). The recent land rush in the area, and the ensuing social and environmental crisis, further exacerbated the precarious living conditions experienced by these – making them the poorest strata of the rural population. 

Against this background, the work of the Norman Pérez Bello Claretian organization (Corporación Claretiana Norman Pérez Bello – CCNPB) is fundamental. The Claretians are a Colombian non-profit organization that works to promote social justice and peace, and accompanies peasant and indigenous communities who assert their rights through non-violent mechanisms. They offer legal advice, as well as psychological, pedagogical and communications support. Since around 2003, the Claretians have continually supported efforts by different rural peoples to improve their living conditions in Colombia’s eastern plains and other regions of the country. To this date, they are perhaps the only organization in the area whose work in the defense of rural communities has endured the test of time and the brutality of various forms of violence – including persecution to their own members and threats against their lives. 

As a PhD researcher within the European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant-funded RRUSHES-5 project, based at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) of Erasmus University Rotterdam, I am pleased to have collaborated with the Claretians and to have learned first-hand from the work they do in the Altillanura. My first engagement with their work happened when I accidentally came across short online publications by the organization, in which they denounced recent land grabs taking place in the area and its effects on Sikuani Indigenous peoples. I later heard about the organization from other researchers and investigative journalists and became an admirer of their work. 

On the basis of collaborative agreements, the Claretians facilitated a significant part of my fieldwork in the Altillanura for my doctoral dissertation. Together we visited what had become key investment sites by large corporations and political and economic elites in the municipality of Puerto Gaitán in Meta department and of La Primavera and Santa Rosalía in Vichada. We listened to people’s retelling harsh stories of dispossession associated to the investment rush and the consequences of land lost on their livelihoods, and we documented it. 

While collaborating with the Claretians, the alleged boundaries between scholarly research and activism were suddenly becoming less rigid.

On a number of occasions, I inevitably performed tasks closer to advocacy work — which clearly influenced my research outcomes. For instance, in most field sites we visited, I cooperated in setting up meetings and assemblies between indigenous community members and government officers, hoping these could lead to better addressing the challenges experienced by the indigenous (for example, in terms of their land access and their living conditions). I also helped draft press releases denouncing situations of abuse and threats of coercion by the local police and illegal armed groups, against community members and the Claretians, and demanding the state ensure the fundamental rights of the Indigenous peoples. I also devised some tools that could help to leverage indigenous’ decision power against state authorities, such as printed maps of their territories. 

Public assembly converging indigenous communities across the eastern plains and government functionaries from the National Land Agency in La Primavera, Vichada. March 2023

At the same time, the collaboration allowed the Claretians to systematize many of the evidence they had collected over the years about the politics of land access in the Altillanura, as well as to reach larger audiences – through reports and other publications that came out of our partnership. 

Of course, experiences of scholar-activism as the one at hand are not exempt of challenges. How could both parties ensure that the research project I was representing would be useful and impactful to the people on the ground? What other research strategies should I employ to validate the conclusions coming out from the collaborative work, apart from fieldwork? Also, were the Claretians – given their knowledge of the area and of the communities they accompany – the ones entitled to set up the objectives and terms of our collaboration? Could I object to the practices of the organization or disagree with the behavior of some of their members while in the field? If so, could that risk our collaboration or compromise particular outcomes from it? In the end, both the members of the organization and I had to deal with these questions and several other contradictions arising along the way. 

All in all, the underlying message is clear: in contexts of widespread land dispossession, as the one shaping the Colombian Altillanura, struggles over land remain a key axis of mobilization today, which in turn make of scholar-activism an analytically crucial and politically empowering undertaking and method of work – despite of (or even because of) the difficulties surrounding it.

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Nowadays in academia, research with positive societal impact has gained wide support. Often times, it is interpreted to mean that academic work impacts and transforms society and societal actors. This is certainly valid and important. But in my case, another dimension is also clear: non-academic societal actors can profoundly impact and transform academics and academic work. While the former is significantly explored in academic circles, the latter is relatively less so. Yet, I believe it is equally important to think about how non-academic societal actors, especially social justice activists like Anita and her Claretian colleagues positively impact and transform academic researchers like me, and for that matter, the academia and academic work I am embedded in. And that feels right.