Introduction: Telling Queer Stories of Conflict

There are multiple approaches to thinking through how scholars can conduct queer conflict research. Whether it is to queer conflict research—to disrupt and redefine existing methodological and epistemological frameworks of conflict research by drawing from queer theoretical propositions—or to engage with queer subjects during and after conflict as the focus of the research itself, the concept needs a degree of flexibility. As such, queering conflict research can extend beyond the study of LGBTIQ+ people’s experiences of political violence during conflict. Indeed, the difficulty behind this volume, as well as its strength, is the breadth of approaches that can be classified as ‘queer’. Rather than making a definitive claim about what queer conflict research is/is not, thus policing its boundaries, we aim to illuminate why queer conflict research matters. Queer scholars in this volume each take a stance on ‘the queer’ of their work and, in doing so, they ask how their positionality matters in queer conflict research. In this introduction, we detail how this volume brings together a series of different queer methodological approaches to address the epistemological (what), methodological (how), and ethical (why) issues of queer scholarship in studies on conflict and political violence.