ANALYTICAL SKILLS
Modern-day Socrates
- Make your analysis more relevant
- Fill the gaps in today’s media and research landscape
HOW TO
Aparadoxical journalist and researcher, Mongi Abdennabi articulates inspiring analysis that
he never shares, other than through oral exchanges. A Tunisian intellectual who
lived much of his adult life in Syria before moving to Egypt, he has traveled
to and has friends in most Arab countries. Although he hardly writes himself,
he has a keen eye for what others publish. Meanwhile, he forms his own opinions
through an ad hoc process that makes him a modern Socrates: he spends hours
with random people hearing out their narratives, bringing their
contradictions to the surface and exploring alternatives with them, using one
tool only-questions.
As someone who
reads or scans much of what is written on the region today, what do you feel is
most missing?
To me the greatest
gap in most publications is sociology! In this part of the world, we need, now
more than ever, to understand the social dynamics at work. That cannot be done
without first getting rid of any form of orientalism. Tribes and sects have
changed dramatically in nature. The urban and the rural have been profoundly
transformed. All conflicts are deeply informed by social undercurrents, and we
lack a lucid analysis built on a much stronger, contemporary and locally-rooted
understanding of them.
Where do foreign
publications in particular, which continue to play a disproportionate role in
shaping narratives on the region, fail to make themselves relevant to a
local readership?
Beyond the
language barrier and the issue of poor translation, which are obvious, I think
we face two problems. On one side, foreign writers almost inevitably address
foreign audiences, and that shapes everything they say and how they say it. The
view is generally top-down, with a focus on topics, categories, interlocutors
and formats that make most sense abroad. The bulk of the work available is
based on encounters with usual suspects who serve as “entry points” to the
region, such as officials or intellectuals, through which you cannot access the
more relevant dynamics in societies that have changed beyond their ability to
keep up.
On the other side,
texts tend to be either short and shallow or long and unreadable. Some are very
rich in detail, sophisticated in their analysis, and potentially of great
interest to people in the region, but miss their audience because they are not
packaged the right way. Format is key right now, and you can’t ignore the
filter imposed by social media.
Indeed, so how do social media affect the way analysis will reach its audience in the region?
I feel that
analysis, to become relevant, must be very different in how it interacts with
the concerned. Fieldwork will be more granular, digging deeper into societies,
and more dynamic, sensitive to new factors of change or even shifts of mood.
Any elitist approach, based on high-level interviews, great paradigms and
static conclusions, will fall flat.
You should be nimble even in the way you convey your analysis. Of course in-depth work is necessary to support your views, but in the end, what will reach the public are discreet but compelling insights: three great paragraphs will carry more weight than the twenty page document they belong to. I believe the best of our thinking must be pulled out and shared effectively, through shorter pieces that will circulate on social media. That can be 2mn videos too, entirely devoted to unpacking one key aspect of a phenomenon or answering a question that is really on people’s minds.
It goes without
saying that format is not an end in itself. Superficial thinking won’t improve
from being packaged for social media. But deeper analysis loses from not doing
so. It’s not just that it won’t be heard. In today’s confusion, it must in fact
be built in constant interaction with the concerned, whose feedback is
indispensable. That connection brings the researcher closer to being an
activist. But I have become convinced that, in this time and age, the
researcher who doesn’t have the heart of an activist, at the end of the day,
won’t understand a thing.
23 Mars 2017
Illustration credit: Typewriter by Brett Jordan on Flickr / public domain.
