Description
Participatory approaches are often presented as a means of redistributing power and fostering more equitable relationships between academics and communities. Yet participation itself does not eliminate hierarchy. This paper examines how power was negotiated, resisted, and reproduced within a long-term collaboration between a PhD researcher and community partner leads from Cambodia and Thailand undertaking conflict research. Drawing on autoethnographic vignettes and interviews with collaborators, the analysis explores how power surfaced through three dimensions of the partnership: academic affiliation, funding, and friendship. Findings demonstrate that efforts to create more equitable forms of collaboration were continually unsettled by institutional identities, resource control, prior relationships, and differing understandings of authority and expertise throughout research implementation. Power repeatedly resurfaced in unexpected ways, attaching itself to university affiliations, budget responsibilities, and even the long-standing friendships among the research leads. At times, practices intended to foster inclusion generated new forms of exclusion, particularly around who felt able to shape decisions, influence research directions, and define the meaning of participation itself. Rather than presenting participation as inherently empowering within research design, the paper argues that participation is better understood as an ongoing negotiation of power. Examining these tensions contributes to broader debates on justice, inequality, and exclusion within community–academic partnerships