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Resumo

Cross-disciplinary peace research frequently focuses on social and political power differentials between people. Like the tradition found in the broader social sciences, peace studies seeks to raise consciousness about, and address, unequal relationships and lends itself to the application of cross-disciplinary methodologies. It is concerned with relational inequities and how they might be remedied, including those between the researcher and research participants. This article discusses a suite of methods developed for a peace research agenda about Sri Lanka including intersectionality, social interactionism, semi and unstructured interviews, and interpretative phenomenological analysis. The methods were informed by Sri Lanka's conflicted social and political spaces. Through the creation of spaces influenced by democracy and rights-based approaches, the methods sought to enable the exercise of participants' democratic entitlements whilst extinguishing the potential for harm. Through the individual experiences of 22 participants, the methods selected helped to crystalise with greater clarity the structural barriers frustrating people's agency and the reasons behind their resulting marginalisations. The article affirms that with patience and resources, ground constraints can be overcome, harm mitigated, bias reflexivity and positionality managed, and a set of methods constructed consistent with achieving a peace research agenda.

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