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Wolfgang Minatti

@wolfgangminatti.com

380 followers 688 following 29 posts

Postdoc @leuphana.bsky.social | Research on Peace and Conflict | Previously @EUI_EU, @UniAndes, @LeidenHum & @PolSciUIBK | he/him | @wolfgangMinatti

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Wolfgang Minatti @wolfgangminatti.com · 01/04/2026

The first results of my research on rebel legitimacy in #Colombia are now available in the Journal of Peace Research. The link to the paper "It takes three to tango: contested authority, violence, and rebel legitimacy in Colombia" is in the first comment!

It takes three to tango: contested authority, violence, and rebel legitimacy in Colombia

Wolfgang Minatti

Why do civilians’ perceptions of the legitimacy of armed actors vary locally during civil war? Existing scholarship grounds legitimacy in the resonance between armed actors’ justifications and civilians’ beliefs, but struggles to explain why legitimacy frequently diverges across villages facing similar actors and conditions. This article argues that understanding wartime legitimacy requires attention to how legitimation processes are shaped by armed actors’ contestations of authority. I theorise two mechanistic logics of legitimation under contested authority: intra-actions between armed actors and civilians, and inter-actions between competing armed actors. Drawing on fieldwork and process tracing, the article tests these mechanisms in a most-similar case study of two Colombian villages contested by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the Colombian army between 1990 and 2010. The analysis indicates that intra-actions between armed actors and civilians cannot fully capture variation in the legitimacy of armed actors. Rather, inter-actions between the FARC and the army influenced civilian beliefs and gave credence to the FARC’s justifications in one case but not the other. These findings illustrate the role of contested authority within the literature on rebel governance and legitimacy while also informing policy debates on how to build efficient and legitimate authority during conflict.

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Wolfgang Minatti @wolfgangminatti.com · 11/02/2025

Also check out two other articles already published by Samantha Majic and @melissaditmore.bsky.social (journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...) as well as Laura Ramírez Rodríguez and myself (journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...)

Re-thinking vulnerability: Research fraud and bureaucratic harm in community-engaged online research
Samantha Majic and Melissa Ditmore

Vulnerability – understood broadly as susceptibility to harm – factors into many social science research projects, including those that are qualitative, involve collaborations between scholars and members of the group under study, and engage with online research techniques and technologies. However, guidance for how researchers and communities may understand, navigate, and mitigate vulnerability in such projects is often scattered across disciplines, making it difficult for researchers to discern relevant best practices. To further understandings of vulnerability here, we reflect in this article on our experience with a mixed-method project, where we partnered with sex workers across the United States to study their experiences with the online platforms they use to facilitate and conduct their work. Based on our encounters with university bureaucracies and research fraud over the course of this project, we argue broadly that vulnerability is not a fixed, inherent attribute of certain research participants; instead, it emerges through various relations and events in the field, and all parties involved in a research project may experience it. To illustrate this argument, we demonstrate how university bureaucratic practices and research fraud may variously harm both participants and researchers by undermining community collaborations, data collection, and researcher safety and well-being. In conclusion we suggest best practices for online research and for universities, so they may better protect researchers and the integrity of such studies.

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Wolfgang Minatti @wolfgangminatti.com · 11/02/2025

🚨 New Publication! "Being Affected: The Epistemic Value of Vulnerability in Fieldwork" 📝 We argue that fieldwork's unsettling moments are more than challenges—they're opportunities to generate crucial insights about the social worlds we study. Check it out: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... ✨

‘Being affected’: The epistemic value of vulnerability in fieldwork
Wolfgang Minatti and Frédéric Guillaume Gass-Quintero

As ethics of fieldwork gain prominence, discussions in qualitative methods have increasingly focused on the relationship between vulnerability and fieldwork practices. Existing literature provides ethical prescriptions and safety recommendations for fieldworkers in ‘dangerous places’. However, it falls short of addressing the analytic stakes created by experiences of vulnerability in the field. This is problematic because it limits the fieldworker's reflexivity, preventing them from examining unsettling situations as relevant data. To address this, the article builds on an understanding of vulnerability as a type of situation. We argue that fieldworkers gain an analytic advantage by reflecting on experiences shaped by situations of vulnerability, offering insights into the social context under investigation and the researcher's position in it. The article demonstrates the epistemic value of vulnerability by drawing on fieldwork on the Colombian conflict and peace process.

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Wolfgang Minatti @wolfgangminatti.com · 09/01/2024

New article out with my wonderful colleague Selma Kropp! How do media discourses on German national identity differ before and after the arrival of refugees in 2015/16? We explore this question in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies: tinyurl.com/yh6udset

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Wolfgang Minatti @wolfgangminatti.com · 21/10/2023

New article out! Legitimacy is a famously vague and contested concept. But many IOs including peacekeeping organisations use the term in their policies. But what do they mean by legitimacy when using the term? I explore this question @JISB! tiny.cc/6qmcvz

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