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