An Organisational Ethnography of Geopolitical Knowledge Production

Abstract

This thesis explores how geopolitical knowledge is constructed by an important peace-focussed think tank, the European Centre for Minority Issues (ECMI). Based in the Danish-German borderlands region, the ECMI was founded in 1996, on the assumption that the lessons learned from the innovative peacebuilding solution to the ‘Schleswig-Holstein question’ could be useful in policy interventions to support the rights of other autochthonous national minorities in post-Cold War Europe. In order to explore how it produced knowledge to undertake this work, I conducted immersive organisational ethnography from October 2021 until September 2022. I held a dual role for these eleven months. Firstly, I was a member of the team, in the position of ‘visiting researcher’. I was a part of the everyday knowledge production in this role, attending and contributing to meetings, undertaking research, writing material for its website, and later, representing the ECMI as a speaker at academic conferences. Working with ECMI researchers gave me a unique insight into how institutional strategy, funding pressures and the organisation’s navigation of the field of minority issues impacted the everyday knowledge production practices. Secondly, I was an outsider who was performing a fieldwork study of them. In utilising interviews and textual analysis in a tri method approach, I had four focuses: (1) the role the Schleswig-Holstein model plays as either an intellectual tool or ‘authority signifier’; (2) how the unique institutional structure of the ECMI shapes organisational strategic objectives; (3) the organisational debate as to whether it should focus more on ‘action’ or ‘research-orientated’ projects; and (4), specifically what an ethnographic methodology can reveal about organisational knowledge production which other methods cannot. This thesis addresses a key methodological gap in political geography and critical geopolitics, where discourse has not sufficiently been investigated ethnographically.