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.