Emma Hebert's ARIA project: Fighting Over State or Nation: British and French Colonialism and the Type of Ethnic Warfare
My ARIA research project was undertaken as part of a larger research project by Professor Matthew Lange about the comparative impacts of British versus French colonial rule on post-colonial ethnic warfare. While the larger project involved statistical analysis, my work focused on compiling information for case studies on three colonies: Burma (currently recognized as Myanmar), Chad, and Vietnam. The purpose of compiling case studies on each of these colonies and later nations was to better ascertain causality within the larger research goal of investigating whether pluralist versus absolutist colonial systems of rule promoted nationalist versus statist ethnic warfare. To create case studies, I was tasked with compiling source lists, conducting a literature review and taking notes on a) the histories of each geographic region later designated as the aforementioned colonies, b) the nature of ethnic categories within these geographic regions pre-colonization, and c) the nature of colonial rule and policies when these geographic regions were colonized.
When looking for summer opportunities, the ARIA stuck out to me due to its emphasis on immersing students in firsthand research experience. I was unsure how to go about gaining firsthand experience due to being an undergraduate, which is why the ARIA seemed like the perfect introduction – it had an emphasis on both mentorship and learning while giving firsthand knowledge around the research process. My interest in this project came primarily from my interest in comparative historical sociology as a discipline, particularly in relation to colonialism and colonial state formation as the most harmful globalized system in our recent past. Within this my learning objectives were twofold: firstly, I wanted to expand my knowledge on colonies of occupation, as most of my previous experience and knowledge seeking had centered on colonies of settlement (such as Canada), in order to better understand the enormous changes inflicted by colonialism. My other learning objective was to expand my knowledge on the research process through firsthand experience.
While doing my project, nothing matched the joy of nearly running out of relevant sources only to find one final, perfect source (or as close to perfect as a source can get). When I was doing research on the Shan in Burma, I had scoured the entirety of the library’s catalogue on their history, yet my notes felt like they were missing some essential pieces of information, and had some methodological problems in that the accounts I was reading were fragmented due to my own language limitations. In a final attempt to find more information, I re-read the bibliography of another source and to my surprise, found a book that was everything I was looking for. When the inter-library loan for the book I needed arrived, I picked the book up to find that it was all I had hoped for and more. That was the best day of my internship.
I was confronted with some challenges during the research experience, mainly methodological ones related to the nature of my project. All three of the former colonies I was looking at had a dearth of pro-imperialist sources written on them, particularly imperialist histories that were simply reiterations of the colonial ‘mission’ they were supposed to be describing. The most obvious of these cases was with Vietnam, where the information available was often blatantly pro-imperialist or pro-interventionist, or was otherwise not relevant or accessible to me (due again to my own language restrictions). Thus, one of the main tasks that I undertook throughout my research was screening sources and constantly checking to ensure that my scholarship was not produced within this imperialist pathology.
The ARIA has given me critical experience in the research process that will greatly help me in writing my honours project as well as with future forays into graduate studies. Through this experience I have been able to better ground myself in the expectations of undertaking sustained, independent research in a field that I am interested in, something that I will carry on into my future endeavors in the field of sociology.
Finally, I would like to thank Dr. Eakin and Mr. Hoffmann for supporting my research project this summer. Prior to this I was somewhat pessimistic about opportunities for research in my undergraduate years, particularly being in a social science field. Your generous support, specific to sociology, has allowed me to take my first foray into a research area that truly interests and excites me as a student. More than that, your support has given me the confidence to continue my pursuits in this field, and for that I am especially grateful.
