ABSTRACT
While collaboration may be as useful and productive as the literature suggests, it is not always innocently so. This paper discusses some of the ways power plays important, but too little discussed, roles in collaboration. First, it examines how power dynamics can distort collaboration processes. These distortions may result in outcomes that look laudable in the short term but be damaging in the long term. In such cases, the collaborative achievements are actually less than might have been attained without collaboration. Second, it considers how the valorization of collaboration may shape and censor interaction, marking contention and critique, among other things, as out of bounds. These mechanisms of social control share features with a class of social processes in which social control is achieved through discourse and the participation of those who are controlled and dominated. Such social processes are discussed in the social science literature as hegemony, governmentality, or controlling processes. This chapter focuses on the claim of collaboration being a consensual practice and presents two examples – one from humanitarian organization‒military collaboration, and one from government‒civil society collaboration in the United Arab Emirates—illustrating how power can distort collaborations, and how valorizing collaboration can support and reproduce particular social orders.
