Volunteering While Researching Conflict and Violence: Reflections on Listening, Solidarity, and Decoloniality in Myanmar's Borderlands

Scholars working on conflict and violence often engage with local organisations, yet the methodological and ethical implications of volunteering‐while‐researching are rarely discussed in writing. This article contributes to debates on decolonizing research by conceptualising volunteering‐while‐researching as a practice that—while imbued with tensions—can create incomplete, ambivalent, but nonetheless meaningful openings for researchers to incorporate ethical and decolonial practices into conflict research. Drawing on two volunteering stints with Karen community‐based organisations in the Thai‐Myanmar borderland, this article makes two key contributions. First, volunteering offered me opportunities for everyday listening , making day‐to‐day life replete with encounters that unsettled colonial frames for understanding conflict and violence, including those that shaped my own assumptions. Second, volunteering allowed me to enact solidarity—not by leading or defining it, but by allowing me to support the ways in which community‐based organisations were already building solidarity among people with shared experiences of state violence and war. I distinguish between solidarity with and solidarity between to conceptualise this approach. Overall, while volunteering did not free me from the colonial and neo‐colonial entanglements, it sharpened my awareness of them and allowed me to cultivate new relationalities through which I could enact research characterised by solidarity and care.