ABSTRACT
The field of peace and conflict studies has seen increasingly embittered debates about the reasons for the failure of international peacebuilding and democratization interventions in post-conflict countries across the globe. This chapter aims to assess how ethnography as a method and anthropology as a discipline have been received and constructed in peace and conflict studies and how this synthesis has evolved so far. The important aspect of anthropological inquiry into post-conflict settings concerns the interpretation of research against the background of historical and collective psychological imaginaries of what is possible and desirable in life after conflict. To summarize, peace and conflict studies have envisaged a significant role for anthropology and ethnographic methods within their field, but this significance has arguably been based on a clouded vision and a degree of ignorance as to the ambiguities and contestations that have shaped anthropology in the last decades.
