Читать книгу Social Torture - Chris Dolan - Страница 12

2

THE RESEARCH PROCESS

The majority of fieldwork on which this book draws took place in Gulu and Kitgum districts from May 1998 to March 2000 as part of a wider DFID funded research Consortium on Political Emergencies (referred to in this text as COPE). At the time, I was working full-time for ACORD (an international Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO) with a long history of working in northern Uganda and other conflict-affected areas), and registered as a part-time PhD student. As the NGO member of COPE, ACORD had thematic responsibility for investigating the local impacts of complex emergencies and of interventions into them. Although it was initially proposed to do this in Rwanda, staff there expressed reservations about a large research project being carried out in their name, and Northern Uganda was suggested as an alternative. During my main period of fieldwork I was therefore based in Gulu town, with occasional trips to Kampala for administrative purposes. During this main research period I had a number of co-researchers, including ten fieldworkers, four part-time documentation assistants, and one full-time research assistant.

After my main period of fieldwork I made several further visits. One was in March 2000 when I returned to Gulu to co-facilitate a workshop on the implications of the research for ACORD's programming in northern Uganda. The second was from February – April 2002, just as Operation Iron Fist was getting underway. In January 2004 I visited again while conducting a Conflict Assessment for Christian Aid, and found that the humanitarian and military situation had escalated substantially (Dolan 2004). Subsequently I returned to northern Uganda during a national conflict analysis for SIDA (Dolan 2006), and for an assessment of humanitarian protection for the Overseas Development Institute (Dolan and Hovil 2006).

The approaches I adopted during the main research period were influenced by a number of factors. One was the simple fact of working within a development NGO and wishing to make the research as relevant as possible to the organisation's activities and to engage colleagues in the research process. Others were related to logistics, security and political sensitivities; rather than a post-conflict situation this was an ongoing ‘war’ with fluctuating levels of insecurity which cast a spell of uncertainty over everything and left the boundaries of what was possible or desirable distinctly unclear; in particular I did not know what my colleagues (particularly the fieldworkers based in the protected villages) would feel safe to ask or talk about.

At a much more conceptual level, I felt an urgent need to question the whole basis on which the COPE project had been structured, namely the belief that the local, national and international dimensions of conflict could be de-linked. The various fieldwork-based readings outlined in the introduction offered convincing evidence that careful attention to peoples’ subjective experiences and interpretations at a local level offered greater insights into the linkages or systemic nature of a situation than the more ‘theoretical’ studies. This went hand in hand with a more political concern to give voice where it had been silenced. I thus needed an exploratory process which was both ethically and methodologically sound.

Institutional Setting

Whereas in all my previous research work I had been a member of academic institutions, here I was in a development NGO. Although it was fairly typical of development NGOs, in that research activities were very much the lesser partner in relationship to ‘programme’ activities, it had a commitment to research built into the name (Agency for Cooperation and Research in Development) and was open to being involved in a piece of work which went beyond more traditional needs assessments or monitoring and evaluation concerns.

In Gulu itself, ACORD had had a presence since the 1980s. Unlike the majority of other agencies it had never closed its office, even during the most difficult periods. It had a correspondingly strong reputation and profile, and when I went to do fieldwork people did not respond purely to my research activity, but also to their generally positive experiences of the agency I worked for. This also substantially eased the task of persuading the authorities of the legitimacy of the project. It also brought with it certain responsibilities vis-à-vis my colleagues; although I was there on a time-bound basis and with my own funding, I was expected to fit myself to a certain degree within the agency's existing practices. At a minimum this involved things such as participation in organisational meetings, and, more importantly, it meant I had to consider what impact my work would have on theirs and whether the two could be combined to mutual advantage. It also meant that I became a participant observer in the at times complex relationships between Government, humanitarian and aid actors. For example, in the three months following ACORD being kicked out of Kitgum district by an irate LCV chairman, I attended numerous meetings at local and national levels between the agencies, the LCVs and the office of the Minister for Northern Uganda Reconstruction.

Working in a ‘War Zone’

As this example shows, even an established NGO such as ACORD faced challenges and a degree of vulnerability. The necessary authorisations were not always sufficient to gain access to individuals and places, or to address certain issues. Fluctuating security made travel outside the immediate vicinity of Gulu town unpredictable, and the context as a whole created high levels of suspicion, not just of me as an obvious foreigner, but also of colleagues whose personal political affiliations were not known but could put respondents at risk. Unlike an idealized Clausewitzian situation in which good and bad guys are clearly identifiable, here there was the official position on the ‘bad guys’ (the LRA), but no agreement on the ‘good guys’ – or if there even were any. Some people did not even see the LRA as primary protagonists, but rather as mere proxy fighters in a war between the Governments of Uganda and Sudan (see Chapter 4).

Possible respondents had many interpretations of our role as researchers, including that we were spies for foreign governments, or might feed our findings to the Ugandan government, or alternatively were rebel sympathisers ourselves. It was often extremely difficult to judge where a given respondent sat on the political spectrum, and how information flows worked. It was also the case that both respondents and co-researchers were likely to have occupied several different roles in their lives (e.g. civilian, soldier, rebel), each with different political overtones. And it was not uncommon for a person to have different close family members in several different political camps. They might have a brother in the bush, a sister in local government, an uncle in central government and cousins in London, Toronto or New York.

These high levels of ambiguity about identities, affiliations and political sympathies, created serious security/confidentiality concerns for researchers and respondents alike. This was particularly the case when researching the LRA, for even to ask a question about them in Gulu was liable to raise suspicion (or fear). Not only was documentation scarce, but to attempt to talk with the LRA could be viewed by the authorities as tantamount to collaboration – as The Monitor newspaper noted, ‘When Presidential candidate Paul Ssemogerere told voters in 1996 that he would talk to Kony into abandoning the rebellion, he was branded a rebel himself’¹. Even those who had been authorised to make contact with the LRA were at times arrested by the UPDF, as happened when three priests, carrying a letter from the Kitgum Resident District Commissioner, tried to meet with LRA Commander Toopaco on 28 August 2002.² Individuals offering to make contact with the LRA on my behalf often turned out to be linked with government security services. I could have interviewed returned child abductees in centres established for their rehabilitation, such as GUSCO, but I was reluctant to follow this well-trodden path. Just as Heike Behrend had observed that well before she wrote her own analysis of the Holy Spirit Movement, it ‘had already been created by the mass media’ (Behrend, 1999: 2), in the case of the LRA it was created not only by mass media but also by the UN and Non-Governmental Organisations using the testimonies of traumatised children who had escaped captivity and been processed through reception centres such as GUSCO and World Vision. While the testimonies seemed in many respects genuine, they provided a partial picture, as adult voices were largely absent. There were though few other obvious options. At the same time, the LRA were said to have eyes and ears everywhere – at any public meeting someone would comment to the effect that ‘whatever we say here will be relayed to the LRA’ – but nobody would go so far as to point out particular individuals. As a result one could never be sure who was who and had to regard everyone as a potential informer to Government or LRA – or to both.

The sense of being under surveillance was at times acute; it was not uncommon to meet a respondent for a meal or drink and then find somebody unknown sitting exceptionally close by, despite the availability of numerous empty tables further away. On one occasion in Kitgum, I spotted such a ‘restaurant observer’ at ten o'clock the following morning sitting 100 metres away from the ACORD office on a termite mound. From there he could observe our comings and goings while reading a book. Such scrutiny from security services meant that some respondents could also be at risk from being seen to talk with us, and raised serious concerns about the confidentiality of sources and security of data collected. Returning to my hotel room in Kitgum after a day's fieldwork to find that my laptop had been tampered with brought this home to me in a very direct fashion. Furthermore, for much of my fieldwork there were only a handful of telephones in Gulu town; any call from the post-office was bound to be listened to by the queue of other people waiting, and any fax received was likely to be perused by several people before reaching its intended recipient. This also led to a form of self-imposed censorship in discussing what was happening.

Conceptual Challenges

I felt I had to go well beyond simply documenting the impact of war and humanitarian interventions on people at a local level. I did not wish to simply repeat data collection that had already been done; some issues, such as LRA abductions and other atrocities already seemed relatively well documented – indeed they seemed amongst the few elements of the situation which did not require much research.

Furthermore, I felt that such documentation had a limited impact on the situation. From a humanitarian perspective, given the multiple indicators of suffering which already existed when I first went to Gulu in January 1998, northern Uganda should have been termed a complex emergency, yet it was not recognised as such, and the humanitarian imperative did not seem to be operating. Eventually – in November 2003 – it would come to be described by Jan Egeland, the UN's Under Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs, as one of the worst humanitarian situations in the world³ but in 1998, despite being already more than a decade old, the situation in northern Uganda had attracted relatively little international attention. From day one, therefore, I was confronted by questions about whether the label had any objective meaning (i.e. was linked to specific ‘objective’ indicators) or was purely politically contingent.

Horizontal Segmentation or Vertical Linkages?

I was also challenged by the way the larger COPE research project was effectively segmented horizontally: Officially I was supposed to focus at the local level, while others (in line with their academic disciplines – political science and international relations respectively) prioritised state and international dimensions of CPEs in their fieldwork. Although in principle each member was intended to also consider the questions identified by those working at the other two levels, in practice there was little space in this project structure for considering the linkages between levels. I found this limited and limiting, but reflected in the majority of NGO reports and policy documents; while the premise of internal wars had effectively penetrated this grey literature, the more subtle linkages between internal and external, such as are found in Kaldor and Duffield's discussions on new wars, generally had not. This suggested to me that a purely ethnographic approach to understanding the dynamics of war and its continuation would be irrelevant, and that even while conducting fieldwork at the ‘local’ level it was necessary to examine the connections between different parts of the conflict dynamic and different parts of the globe. To do this also indicated the need to go beyond the confines of traditional academic disciplines; to get away from the economist's preoccupation with economic rationality to look at more politically and psychologically complex models of behaviour and motivation; to discard international relation's fixation with two-party models of wars and their resolution and replace it with multi-actor models; and to take the anthropologist's concern with local level motivations and ideologies and integrate it with more systemic perspectives. Against the backdrop of these needs I felt that development studies, as an academic setting which embraces multi- or cross-disciplinary perspectives, was an appropriate ‘home’.

I was encouraged in the pursuit of connections across levels (and disciplines) by Colson and Kottak's writings on linkages (1996). They observe that ‘Contemporary anthropologists can no longer even hope to do ethnography among people isolated from world markets or unaffected by centers of political and economic power’. Furthermore, ‘…No matter what the subject or the research locale, we need to consider documents describing the interdependencies between local systems and larger economic and political networks’ (Colson and Kottak, 1996: 107). They propose research focused on linkages, which they define as;

…a convenient term to encompass the multistranded involvement in the world system that ethnographers must now consider in conceptualizing the influences affecting values, categories, institutional arrangements, and other symbolic systems. The linkages perspective is the antithesis of traditional anthropological ‘holism’, which looked inward, assuming the existence of some entity, either a culture or a society, complete and autonomous. Linkages, crucial to social transformations, work to destabilize, rather than maintain, local systems over time. (ibid, 1996: 104)

Acknowledging Peoples’ Agency

Furthermore, while some of the academic literature outlined above under ‘building blocks’ does explore how wars are experienced at a local level and how this feeds into the dynamics of war (and there is plenty in more theoretical models of ‘grievance’, ‘particularism’, ‘identity politics’ etc., which can be read as implying that these connections really matter), my sense at that time was that either there was something of a loud silence around this in the literature being drawn on by NGOs, or they themselves were selectively ignoring it. Much of the literature I read seemed to be peopled by concepts rather than real people, and, to the extent that people were brought into the picture, this was in terms of the impacts of war on them, rather than of their impact on war. In other words, the subjectivities and agency of those living in the most affected areas were often missing. From within the NGO sector it seemed clear to me that, as Zur commented in 1998, ‘Despite recent interest in the anthropology of war there has been little documentation of how conflict is lived by the people caught in its midst or of how they themselves represent it’ (Zur, 1998; 18).

Indeed, it could be argued that humanitarian and development agencies, by virtue of their specific mandates and the demands of funders for target groups and verifiable indicators, tend to turn people into passive victims whose objective needs can be addressed without enquiry into their subjective position or their own agency. Having just come from a year interviewing ex-combatants in Mozambique where I listened to their (extensive) grievances and wondered what this meant for the durability of the reintegration process there, and having joined an organisation with a commitment to working at the ‘grass-roots’, I felt that this silence about what motivates people living in such contexts, and about the extent to which they are actors in war despite living in difficult circumstances, needed to be both investigated and broken.

Ethical Considerations

This latter challenge was not just conceptual; I doubted that a study of this nature could be considered either methodologically or ethically sound if it failed to give space to the subjective voices of both respondents and co-researchers. My previous research experience with Mozambican refugees in South Africa (Dolan, 1996) and ex-combatants in Mozambique (Dolan, 1997), had made me sceptical about the value of adhering to a very tight and predefined set of methods, as these tend to block the unsuspected issues and angles emerging from the respondents’ own analyses. This scepticism went hand in hand with my awareness that the thinking of everybody working in a research project is changed and deepened by the experience, and that there should be some scope for accommodating the ideas that result. In other words, in addition to reflecting the subjectivity of respondents in the research findings, enabling the subjectivity of my co-researchers within the research process was also an important consideration.

Another ethical concern was closely linked with security considerations; I did not wish to make decisions which put either my co-researchers or our respondents at risk of trouble from the authorities or other bodies (e.g. LRA, mob justice), nor did I wish to put people at risk by association with the project. My concern about safety, however, extended beyond what might be termed the political and physical safety of respondents, and into the question of psychological risk; although it was an area with very high levels of violence and violation and these were obviously issues of concern to the study, it seems to me that setting certain types of questions about deeply personal or sensitive experiences (e.g. ‘how many people did you kill?’ or ‘how many times were you raped?’) is ethically wrong if it puts the respondent under pressure to open wounds which the researcher has no way of dressing, let alone healing. Such questioning also, to my mind, implies that the questioner believes him or herself to occupy the moral high ground from which they can ask whatever they choose, because they have objectified the respondent to the point where his or her experience of being questioned ceases to matter. If, however, the respondent chooses to divulge deeply personal information, that is a different matter.

The fourth ethical consideration, and often the hardest to address, was to do as some of my respondents asked of me, namely to use what I learned to inform people outside. In other words I was explicitly asked to take seriously my responsibilities as a witness which putting myself in that environment had created.

Methods Adopted

Given all the above considerations, I wanted an approach which maximised respondent and researcher security, and which valued the subjectivity of co-researchers and respondents alike. It needed to be sufficiently structured to be practicable, yet remain sufficiently open to allow issues and methods that emerged to be followed up, while also incorporating joint exercises with my programme colleagues. In the end four broad strands emerged; ongoing work with and through fieldworkers in the protected villages, further key informant interviews and participant observation by myself, the collection of press clippings and various audio-visual data, and discrete research exercises with colleagues from the ACORD Gulu programme in which we primarily adopted focus group methodologies.

Composition of the Research Team

As the research progressed the team of people involved grew. After a few weeks in Gulu I met Komakech Charles Okot, who had already worked as a research assistant to Sverker Finnstrom, and we agreed to work together on a part-time basis. When I found myself stuck in Gulu with no certainty about how soon or how regularly I would be permitted by the authorities to travel to the protected villages, I had to find another way to do the fieldwork. In discussion with Komakech, we decided to seek people from a number of protected villages who could carry out fieldwork in an ongoing fashion by virtue of being resident there, could report to us on a regular basis, and could provide us with entry points when we were able to visit the villages ourselves.

We identified a number of potential fieldworkers from people whom Komakech knew as a result of working in the Uganda Red Cross. On the basis of our interviews with them, eight were chosen. As the work progressed, two additional fieldworkers joined us, one based in Gulu town, the other in Awer camp, such that we ended up with a group which was highly diverse in terms of backgrounds, experiences and political positions. It included individuals who had spent time in the bush, camp leaders, religious leaders, teachers, students, district councillors, and otherwise unemployed civilians. A major weakness, however, was the lack of women fieldworkers. The one woman who came for interview was not amongst those selected.

The names of the fieldworkers were registered with the authorities and each individual received a card and a letter of introduction to present on demand. Notwithstanding these administrative safeguards I still could not realistically pre-determine what it was or was not safe for the fieldworkers to investigate; while it was likely to be acceptable to document the visits of priests and politicians, I could not decide for them if it was safe to document an LRA raid or the Government's response to that. Just because fieldworker X could talk about an incident of rape I could not assume that fieldworker Y would feel able to do so, as each person had his own particular profile in his own camp, some of which offered more protection than others (e.g. teachers, camp officials), and some of which allowed access to otherwise little represented sections of the population (e.g. youth). I therefore consciously sought to create a situation in which such decisions were left to the fieldworkers’ own judgement and individual sense of security.

In discussion with the fieldworkers we developed an approach centred around a report to be prepared and brought to Gulu for discussion on a monthly basis. This comprised several elements. The basic one was a standardised questionnaire, which covered relief deliveries (food, clothing, seeds and tools), health and sanitation services, education, sources of income, information flows (from LRA), visitors to the camp (e.g. politicians, religious leaders, journalists, cultural and recreational activities (in particular dances), deaths/burials/funerals. This was supplemented every three months with a price list of all items available in their local market. Information collected included cost of the item, and its origin, allowing us to demonstrate, for example; the sale of relief items, the importance of access to urban markets, and also the wide range of items produced, hunted or gathered locally, despite the ongoing insecurity.

To capture people's subjective experience and interpretation of the dynamics within the war zone, and for the fieldworkers to bring their own subjective view of what was significant to bear, they were given event and incident report sheets on which to write about any incident or event or issue they felt would be of interest to someone who knew nothing about life in the protected villages. This resulted in reports on a whole range of issues which it would have been impossible to specify in a pre-formulated questionnaire. In identifying incidents and events of interest, the fieldworkers became ‘co-investigators’ in the Freirean sense of taking an active attitude ‘to the exploration of their thematics’ (see Freire, 1996: 87). I subsequently clustered the reports as demonstrated in Table 2.1.

I have drawn heavily on these in providing qualitative evidence for the arguments made in the thesis. Wherever quotations have been used they seek to be as representative of the wider set of stories as possible. At the suggestion of one of the fieldworkers, these accounts were enhanced and supplemented through the use of cameras. Again, I did not specify what should be photographed, but requested that each photo be dated and given a brief explanation of what it depicted and where. In many cases the fieldworkers used such photographs to corroborate their written accounts and thus strengthened the quality of the incident and event data.

Over and above the monthly reports the fieldworkers also provided hand-drawn maps of their village, and on occasion filled in supplementary questionnaires related to the research, for example on HIV and conflict and on livelihoods. Each fieldworker also provided a history of the origins of his particular protected village. When the security situation allowed I would also visit their villages with Komakech. This allowed a degree of mentoring, corroboration of the findings they had already presented, and the development of relationships of trust with the fieldworkers, whom, in addition to their role as data gatherers, I also considered as among my key informants.

Table 2.1 Number of Reports by Subject Matter over the Six Months July–December 1999, from 10 Protected Villages in Gulu District

It is difficult to overstate the importance of developing such trust; I still remember the tension of the initial meetings, and how over the months this tension was replaced by what felt like a high degree of mutual confidence and trust. My sense was that the key elements in this evolution were regularity of contact, regularity of payment, confidence over time that their reports were not being shared with the authorities, and the visible influence of their opinions on both the content and methodology of the research. As this happened, so the nature of what they were prepared to document changed; reports became more critical and the material more sensitive. With a more rigid approach I would have expected the findings of the fieldworkers to become more homogeneous; with this very flexible approach each individual's reports became more rather than less distinctive as each individual felt more able to bring his subjective concerns to bear.

The diversity of the fieldworkers was also a major advantage in dealing with the political ambiguities of northern Uganda. Although it is impossible to verify, it is probable that by having this range of people involved, those parties with an interest in knowing exactly what was being done were in fact informed and updated by our own research staff. From a methodological point of view I was more interested in capturing a wide range of perspectives than in the consistency of data across villages, and again this was well met by the diversity of the team. In presenting data drawn from the fieldworkers’ accounts, the village of the fieldworker and the date of the incident referred to are given in the endnotes.

In-Depth Key-Informant Interviews

In parallel to the ongoing monthly reports I also carried out numerous key informant interviews, generally together with Komakech, who would also translate when necessary. We began with interviews on the issue of refugees, the diaspora and remittances. These early interviews were the least successful, perhaps because they touched on too many sensitive questions, or because we were not familiar enough to ask them correctly, or because our identification of key informants was poor.⁴ Later interviews, which in some cases involved interviewing the same person several times over, focused more on issues such as the peace process led by the then Minister for the North, Mrs Betty Bigombe, from 1993 to 1994, the creation of ‘protected villages’ from 1996 onwards, and the teaching and role of traditional dance.

The most in-depth key informant interview, which bears some discussion as I draw on it extensively in Chapter 4, was one conducted by myself over a ten days period with a returned LRA soldier. This was unplanned and resulted from our both attending a meeting in Kitgum in late March 2002. By this point, notwithstanding the problems of researching the LRA and the fact that documentation on LRA abductions and other atrocities already existed, I had realised that, given the central position accorded to the LRA in mainstream accounts, I would have to make my own assessment of its relative importance in the overall situation, and that this would require some insight into the LRA's internal dynamics and motivations. I therefore asked him if he would be prepared to tell me his story. Although he agreed to do so he then avoided me throughout the rest of the meeting and I assumed he did not really wish to. However, when I was subsequently in Kampala he telephoned to say he was coming to tell me the story there. In the event his story, from the day he was abducted in 1996 aged 19, to the day he returned to Uganda under the Amnesty in late 2001, took eight days to tell and a further two days to check through. Rather than taping it I typed it straight onto my laptop with him looking over my shoulder, and we ended up with a transcript of forty-four pages.

Against the backdrop of numerous accounts given by returned abducted children, this account is important because, at nineteen years of age, Jacob was already an adult when abducted, and he spent his six years mainly within the LRA's headquarters. His story confirms many of the elements of the feedback given by younger abductees, but adds a whole layer of information about the day-to-day running of the LRA and the gradual changes in political climate and their influence on the LRA – at least as he was able to perceive them. I have included the entire transcript as Annex A so that readers can assess the account for themselves.

For several reasons I did not prioritise key informant interviews with NGO or IGO staff. As an NGO staff member myself, I felt I would have numerous opportunities to engage in participant observation of NGO activities, such as weekly NGO security meetings. Most of the international and many local NGOs operating in Gulu district participated in the September 1999 conference,⁵ and several international NGOs participated in meetings with the Government following the eviction of ACORD from Kitgum district. More importantly, I wanted to capture their role as institutions as perceived by their ‘beneficiaries’, rather than the opinions of individuals within them. As such I decided to rely to a large extent on the observations of their work as seen throughout the fieldwork, together with their own documentation and statements to the media. However, in the course of my eighteen months fieldwork and subsequent visits I had opportunity to have conversations with many aid workers and to get a sense of how they saw the problem and how they justified their approaches. I have tried to give an overview of those conversations, notably in Chapter 8.

Audio-Visual Data

Another major item, which informed my view of the LRA (and Government), was a video recording of the 1994 peace talks, which my research assistants transcribed and translated (see Annex B).

I felt that our findings would be stronger and more accessible if supported with visual documentation. In addition to photographs, a digital video camera was used to document a whole range of activities; food distributions, political occasions (e.g. NRM day), ceremonies (e.g. the installation of Archbishop John Baptist Odama, the anointment of a local chief), celebrations (e.g. World Women's Day, World AIDS day). These were dubbed onto standard VHS tapes and then edited. Again, while basic guidance was provided on how to use the digital camera, the decision about what to film in a given place or situation was generally left to whoever had the camera. Where it was not possible to use video recording, audio recordings of public functions and cultural activities were made. The team also taped radio broadcasts – covering occasions such as the District Council meetings and including the LRA's own ‘Radio Voice of Free Uganda’ for the few weeks that it succeeded in broadcasting to northern Uganda (see Chapter 4).

Media Monitoring

In the event I made relatively little use of the transcriptions of these recordings, and drew instead on newspaper clippings to give a sense of the kind of information circulating inside the ‘war’ zone. Newspapers were a constant feature of daily life in Gulu town. The two dailies, the New Vision and The Monitor, arrived with the first bus in the morning and by mid-morning were sold out. They were eagerly scanned and their contents fed into numerous discussions. On the one hand they were the only regular source of news, and provided some record of events as they occurred. On the other hand, they could not be consumed unquestioningly, the New Vision because it was Government controlled, The Monitor because it was subject to constant harassment by the Government. They also seemed inconsistent in the tone adopted, at times expressing a critical voice, at times simply reflecting official positions. The ambiguous space thus created contributed substantially to my own sense of being in a surreal environment in which nothing was quite as it seemed. To try and get an insight into this phenomenon I employed two part-time documentation assistants to go through these daily papers (including local language papers), clipping and filing those items of concern to the project (e.g. Sudan, LRA, Gulu and Kitgum districts, Diaspora, International NGOs, Human Rights, Gender, West Nile Bank Front, ADF).

Some of these (e.g. Sudan) were a useful source of information on ‘linkages’, others were more useful as a control of the quality of reporting as a whole (e.g. we could compare our own accounts of events in Gulu district with those given in the media). Analysing the discrepancies found through this juxtaposition of public information and our own primary data allowed some conclusions to be drawn regarding the manipulation of public information and thereby of public opinion (see Chapter 4).

Throughout the thesis I have quoted from these news clippings. In some instances I have used them as references for particular events, in others to demonstrate the biases in the opinions expressed in them, and in others to give readers a sense of the extent to which the media contributed to peoples’ sense of disorientation and could thus be integral to the dynamics of situation.

Research Integrated with Programming – The Use of Focus Groups

To engage existing programme staff in the research process I was keen to establish joint research exercises with my colleagues in ACORD's Gulu office. These had to emerge during the course of the work rather than being cast in stone before I had even arrived. The opportunity to make a connection emerged around ACORD's involvement in a Belgian-funded project concerning traditional leadership, as it was agreed that some assessment of how this leadership was generally viewed should be carried out. From January 1999 we therefore embarked on research into the roles and responsibilities of traditional and modern leaders, as seen by the members of ten community-based organisations with whom ACORD had longstanding relationships. These included youth, subsistence farmers, women victims of conflict, and people living with HIV/AIDS (see Chapter 6). In each discussion we first drew up a timeline for the period 1986–1999 and asked people to remember one or two incidents which had happened in each year as a result of the war at national, district, community levels, and, finally, to them or their immediate family. It was a very simple but extraordinarily powerful method, which left the respondents to determine what to mention or to keep silent about. In each group, regardless of its composition, a litany of unceasing abuse and violation emerged. In addition to the better documented LRA abuses, this stage of the research revealed heavy levels of sexual abuse by the military, as well as rampant destruction of peoples’ livelihoods by different forces at different points in the history of the conflict (see Chapter 3 for findings from one women's group). Had the exercise just been conducted with one group it might have appeared exceptional; when it became clear that such experience of violation was consistent across groups with very different profiles and in very different parts of the district, it was shockingly unanswerable.

These findings led us into a second phase of research with the ACORD programme on HIV and AIDS.⁶ The main objective was to explore the perspectives of the military on issues of HIV and of sexual relations with civilians, again using focus group methods with groups of ordinary soldiers, officers, and military wives, both in Gulu barracks and in a number of rural detaches. Again, ACORD's existing relationships greatly facilitated this otherwise potentially problematic exercise. In most military sites where we carried out the research we were the first NGO to have visited. A third stage involved gathering data on livelihoods (see Chapter 5). Fieldworkers completed a questionnaire designed to supplement studies carried out previously by programme staff as part of their earlier work in this area (for discussion of findings see COPE Working Paper 32).

The work on traditional leaders involved all of us participating in and documenting numerous meetings in local communities, as well as the higher levels of local and central government policy-making. The latter also allowed close observation of some of the NGO/donor politics behind the stated aims of interventions related to the traditional leadership issue.

A further important source of data, which helped to shape the thinking of Chapter 7, was an in-house planning workshop conducted with all ACORD's staff from northern Uganda, including the COPE fieldworkers and documentation assistants. The proceedings of that workshop, conducted in early 2000, both corroborated and significantly added to my understanding of various forms of discrimination and humiliation. Indeed, it was an object lesson in how certain types of information (in this case the question of negative and derogatory racial and ethnic stereotyping) only emerge if the right questions are asked.

Dealing with Findings

Quite apart from the political challenges of conducting research in a politically charged environment and on potentially sensitive topics, there was also the problem of how to present the findings. The original proposal to DFID suggested that this be done in a small dissemination workshop at the end of the field-work period. There were a number of problems with putting this into operation; London was not an ideal venue since many people who could contribute to and draw from the discussions would have been excluded, and it risked accusations of ‘extractive research’ or worse; Kampala, given Uganda's north-south divide, presented similar problems, although access would have been easier.

At the suggestion of the ACORD Gulu co-ordinator, therefore, the workshop was held in Gulu, to allow much fuller participation by all those who had been involved in the research, and by people most directly affected by the situation. This demanded a certain level of commitment from the external participants who were willing to travel to and stay within what was still considered a high-risk area, but also gave them an opportunity to form their own impressions over and above what they heard in presentations and papers.

Rather than simply disseminating our own findings a wide range of organisations and individuals were invited to make presentations of their own experiences and research. By collaborating with the Acholi Religious Leaders Peace Initiative (a high-profile local initiative by the Muslim, Protestant and Catholic religious leaders working for peace in Acholi) and with last minute support from central government, we ended up, in September 1999, with an international conference with some 290 participants rather than the modest dissemination workshop originally planned.

Key issues from our own and other pieces of research were tabled and discussed for the first time, by actors ranging from village leaders right up to the Prime Minister of Uganda, and with inputs from a large number of international participants. These findings were juxtaposed with discussion of existing NGO activities and identification of gaps. Public discussion of the issues was thus dramatically broadened and this in turn contributed to the creation of a wider political space than had hitherto existed. Perhaps most importantly for the protection of researchers and respondents, the joint organisation contributed considerably to greater ownership of results, and demonstrated that the issues raised came not just from ACORD but from a wide range of research activities by a number of concerned individuals and organisations. As such it helped to put ACORD's research activities into a wider perspective, and contributed to raising awareness of a number of issues which had hitherto received little attention (such as investment in secondary and higher education, addressing gender inequalities, promoting enterprise and employment, and investing in basic communications infrastructure). As the title of the conference suggests (‘Peace Research and the Reconciliation Agenda’), it was an early attempt to go beyond a narrow focus on particular victim groups and to think through the broad range of issues which would need to be addressed if northern Uganda were ever to successfully recover from two decades of violation and violence.

The importance of individual profiles in this should not be discounted; it was in large part due to the intervention of two well-respected academics who had at one time taught President Museveni at the University of Dar-es-Salaam, that it was possible to broach the taboo topic of relations with Sudan. It became possible for everybody to ‘hide’ behind somebody else, and get that person to safely make a contribution which they themselves would have been unable to make for reasons of their own sense of security. Equally it served to de-mystify research, as it became clear that everybody, from unemployed youth through to teachers and administrators, can contribute to a research process. The diversity and range of participants’ profiles thus broke with traditional social and political stratifications and demonstrated the need and value of doing so. The combination of Ugandan and non-Ugandan participation gave the meeting considerable power, as outsiders could ask questions which to an insider had either ceased to be points of discussion or had become ‘taboo’ topics. Outsiders also brought comparative examples from other places to bear on the discussion. Bringing together Ugandans from very diverse backgrounds was also useful: when a fundamentalist preacher can challenge a minister, and an army commander can question the Prime Minister, progress has been made towards critical analysis which challenges existing frameworks rather than perpetuating them. Horizontal stratifications were simultaneously recognised and cut across. As one participant subsequently noted, ‘perhaps it is only across levels that the real questions which contextualise the experience of war may be asked, the questions normally voiced privately’.⁷

Other than a number of presentations of findings given mainly in London, my next attempt to put the findings into the public domain was through the publication of an article under the title ‘Which Children Count?’. In this I focused on the politics of humanitarianism as demonstrated through the question of abducted children (ACCORD, 2002). I was in northern Uganda at the time the publication was launched, and this coincided with a slightly shortened version being published in The Monitor as part of Charles Onyango-Obbo's regular opinion column. He subsequently reported that, rather than provoking his readers into writing in with their comments, it appeared to have shocked them into silence.

Within ACORD the research process informed and gave focus to the organisation's subsequent non-research activities, including a restructuring of activities throughout northern Uganda. Our experiences fed into an ACORD-wide workshop on oral testimony and the development of guidelines for this, and it also influenced the agency's wider thinking about the role of research in programming. Perhaps the strangest, and ultimately most disappointing feedback process, was with our own funders. By the time we were asked to report back on this three years project, those who had originally commissioned the project were no longer around, and we were invited to present our findings during a DfID lunch-break, with ten minutes each for the three presenters.

Discussion and Conclusions

Overall the methods adopted, often as a result of discussions with my co-researchers, addressed the concerns I had; they allowed us to conduct field-work over nearly two years without any security incidents; they embraced and reflected the subjectivity of researchers and respondents alike and in the process took their viewpoints seriously rather than attempting to suppress the reality of their influence; instead of pre-imposing questions and analytical frameworks, which risked channelling rather than opening up thinking, they resulted in findings in which linkages were both implicit and explicit, and which took me beyond documentation and into the analysis of dynamics over time – informed by those most affected by the conflict.

Evidently these methods diverged considerably from more standard NGO-driven research, much of which focuses on very specific questions in order to inform what are generally pre-determined intervention agendas, which in turn have been determined by existing institutional niches and interests. There is little scope in the NGO world for ‘blue-sky’ research which seeks to take a fresh look at situations. As such I was fortunate in the space and time afforded me by my colleagues and the project as a whole. The methods adopted relied on the project being in place over a long period of time, and having the capacity to return several times to any one person or place. With the added advantage of a number of follow-up visits I was ultimately able to accompany the conflict for eight of its twenty years rather than creating a snapshot of one year. As such I did not just talk about fluctuations in security, I lived them. I had my own experiences of what it feels like to have the promise of peace held out (and all the curiously mixed emotions which that brings with it) only to see it dashed again. I observed the gradual development of external interest in the situation and the form that interventions took. This gave me far more confidence to talk about the dynamics of social torture over time. In this regard I was fortunate to be able to make several follow-up visits in the course of which I was able to verify certain impressions or explore issues further. This was particularly true of the question of suicide, a theme which had not struck me particularly in 1999, but which jumped out at me when I looked at the data in its entirety.

The methods adopted were also made possible by being based within an NGO. The integration of the COPE research with the research needs of existing ACORD programme activities provided a degree of security in that it allowed us to work with very diverse groups of people with whom the organisation already had a long relationship, to whom it had demonstrated commitment, and through whom it had created a constituency. The active involvement of long-standing ACORD staff in these activities added legitimacy, and gave access which would not have been possible if we had been perceived as doing ‘research for research's sake’. Undoubtedly this way of working also influenced the methods adopted such that they diverged from a more purely academic model of research. In particular the need to identify and implement research activities in response to the agency's emerging programme meant that research instruments, rather than being pre-determined and piloted in advance, were developed on the spot.

On the other hand the experience highlighted some of the shortcomings of the agency when it came to dealing with a complex research process. While they provided support to the implementation of the research as outlined, they were less able to respond to the processes which the research triggered. In particular, the momentum and political support developed by the September 1999 conference was not capitalised on. More generally there was no institutional capacity to deal with key issues which such research can uncover; there was no specific budget for legal support, no staff to provide psycho-social support, and no capacity to provide the kind of national and international witness which both respondents and our findings demanded.

Evidently there were also certain limitations to the methods adopted. One of these has already been mentioned, namely the lack of women fieldworkers in the protected villages. The already considerable diversity within the types of information given by the male fieldworkers would undoubtedly have increased had women been represented as well. Certainly, were I to carry out another such project, I would insist on having a gender-balanced team. For while women's voices were heard in many of the reports, and women and men were were equally represented in all the focus group discussions, women's subjectivity was not brought to bear on field-work in the protected villages. Their involvement would have added an important further dimension to the findings.

A further limitation was that, while I developed an ear for quite a lot of Acholi, I did not learn to speak it properly and this meant that some of my discussions were mediated by the need for translation. Similarly, while all the fieldworkers wrote their reports in English, this was considerably more difficult for some than for others, and undoubtedly some details and nuances were lost. I felt, however, that because we were using several different methods of data collection, the short-comings in language in one area would be made up for in another. When it came to translating the transcript of the 1994 peace-talks video, for example, the final version was the result of several days’ discussion involving the translator, a number of colleagues and myself. As we compared the translated transcript with the video almost sentence by sentence I became very aware of some of the ambiguities of language used, and also of the particular force with which language was used in that meeting.

From a personal point of view the research process had a high psychological impact; although at the time of collecting the data I felt well able to process it, I subsequently found, for more than a year after finishing the main period of field-work, that it was difficult if not impossible for me to work on the data. Even now, some years later, some of the data still has the power to disturb me. I was somewhat reassured to find that I was not alone in this, even though I had been given no warning it might happen. With the benefit of hindsight I feel that the standard model of PhD research, in which a year of field-work is followed immediately by a year of write-up, does not allow sufficient time for the individual to process the experiences and information that conflict zones provide.

Subjectivity and Objectivity

The question of subjectivity and objectivity is a vexed one. It could, for example, be argued that, because the nature of the information collected changed over the course of the field-work, it does not allow an objective analysis as the data collected at the end was not directly comparable to that collected at the beginning. There are several responses to this. First, certain questions were repeated throughout the fieldwork in the monthly questionnaire filled out by the fieldworkers. As such, some basic forms of data were collected in a consistent fashion throughout the research. Secondly, what would an objective account entail? It is clear when conducting field-work that nobody, whether ‘insider’ or ‘outsider’, has the only description, the whole picture or the only answer to a situation. The extent to which each of us saw the situation through very different eyes was perhaps most evident in the fieldworkers’ photographs; the majority of photographs of one fieldworker, for example, were of group activities and official events, with most pictures featuring dozens of people against a wide backdrop. Those of another fieldworker were far more intimate in character, placing one or two individuals or objects right in the centre of the frame. This very diversity of viewpoints was proof – if proof were needed – of the dangers of assuming any homogeneity of perspective on many issues. The contradictions between different positions (insider, outsider, local, national, regional, international, diaspora, refugee, youth, women etc.) become a basis for dialogue within the team and with those beyond it. It is necessary on the one hand to be able to pin down some of ‘what happened when’, while still keeping multiple interpretations of these events in consideration.

A further question is whether quantity of data on a narrow question is better than quality of data on a diversity of issues. My own view is that, leaving co-researchers to determine the level of risk they were prepared to take was methodologically powerful in that it lead to findings on issues which could not have been pre-determined, such as suicide.

As fundamentally, the changing nature of the qualitative data over time was to me an indicator of the success rather than the failure of the methods, for I believed that recognition of the subjective and its influence was essential to an objective understanding. When, as time went by, the fieldworkers allowed their subjective voices to become more visible, it was for me a case of objectivity through subjectivity.⁸

In particular it alerted me to the complex interplay between trust, time, memory and disclosure; fundamentally research on sensitive issues requires relationships of trust between respondent and researcher over time. The fact that issues could emerge which would never have done so using a more rigid data collection strategy, must raise a considerable question-mark over the objectivity of any data collected without taking the time to build relations of trust and without the engagement of the researchers.

Notes

1. The Monitor, 16 May 1998, ‘Let's Vote on Kony War’.

2. Justice & Peace News, August 2002, Vol. 2 – No. 5: p4.

3. IRIN, 28 January 2004, The 18-Year Old War that Refuses To Go Away.

4. Our starting point was for research staff to contact people known to them to have some family members living abroad.

5. ACORD, ACF, Amnesty International, AVSI, CRS, Christian Aid, Conciliation Resources, CPAR, DENIVA, IRC, Interpares, Life and Peace Institute, Mennonite Central Committee, NRC, Oxfam, Redd Barnet, SNV, Stromme Foundation, TPSO, ARLPI, ISIS, JYAK, Legal Aid Project, EPRC, Northern Uganda Media Forum, Peoples Voices for Peace, Gulu Development Association, Gulu Youth Peace Forum, GUSCO, Hunger Alert, Justice and Peace Commission, Kacokke Madit, KICWA, Dyere Tek.

6. See Chapter 6.

7. I am indebted for these observations to Judith Large.

8. I am indebted to Dr Thi Minh Ngo for this formulation.