Beyond the Methodological Fix: Militant Research, Academic Capture and the Politics of Irresolution in Crisis Borderlands

ABSTRACT

This paper examines scholar‐activist methodologies in spaces saturated by humanitarian, media and academic attention to migrant mobility. Drawing on research on the Greek migration regime, it demonstrates how commitments to ‘giving voice’, ‘democratising knowledge’ and ‘reflexivity’ can reproduce the very power asymmetries they claim to contest, particularly in ‘crisis’ settings. Engaging traditions of militant research, feminist discomfort, refusal and studying up, I argue that oppositional methods are routinely captured by the political economy of academia in ways that methodological innovation alone cannot resolve. Rather than proposing another methodological fix, the paper advances a politics of irresolution —an orientation that inhabits contradiction without resolving it into methodological closure, ethical tranquillity or political self‐assurance. Instead of seeking seamless fusion between political organising and research, I explore how their strategic differentiation, what I call militant splitting , may at times be necessary to sustain contradiction without collapsing into performative coherence.