the heart of the Convention Against Torture definition. It suggests that the power of the concept of torture will be strengthened rather than weakened by broadening the lens from a primarily legal one to a more socio-economic, psychological and political one, particularly as such a lens suggests a correspondingly broader range of interventions to address human suffering in situations such as northern Uganda.
Notes
1. UN Security Council Resolution 688 of 5 April 1991.
2. In considering the political functions of silence it is useful to consider Kapucinski's observation that silence is ‘a signal of unhappiness and, often, of crime. It is the same sort of political instrument as the clatter of weapons or a speech at a rally. Silence is necessary to tyrants and occupiers, who take actions to have their actions accompanied by quiet…’ (Kapuscinski 1998: 189).
3. As Lan records, ‘During the last years of the war [in Rhodesia], the majority of the population had been forced into concentration camps, the so-called ‘protected villages’, in order to limit the amount of assistance they could give the guerrillas’ (Lan, 1985: 230).
4. In 2002, for example, Amnesty was concerned that twenty prisoners illegally removed to a military detention facility in northern Uganda were at increased risk of torture or ill-treatment whilst they remained in UPDF custody (Public AI Index: AFR 59/004/2002).
5. The Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, adopted and opened for signature, ratification and accession by General Assembly resolution 39/46 of 10 December 1984, entered into force on 26 June 1987.
6. The American Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.
7. Given what is known about the process of forcible displacement into the ‘protected villages’, this immediately makes a large proportion of the northern Uganda population, 90 per cent of which was displaced, increasingly susceptible to PTSD.
8. Then Minister for Northern Uganda Reconstruction, Hon. Owiny Dollo, Bedo Piny Pi Kuc, Gulu, 26 June 1998.
9. For an exploration of the difficulty/impossibility of erasing past experiences of war, see Bao Ninh, The Sorrow of War: ‘Losses can be made good, damage can be repaired and wounds will heal in time. But the psychological scars of the war will remain forever’ (Bao Ninh 1994: 180).
10. B.G. Melamed et al. in Suedfeld, 1990, p 16.
11. The term ‘internalise’, as used in psycho-analysis, ‘means the process whereby inter-subjective relations are transformed into intra-subjective ones (internalization of a conflict, of a prohibition, etc.)’(Zur 1998: 189). By extension I shall use ‘externalisation’ to describe a process whereby intra-subjective relations (in this case the thought processes used by an individual to justify their non-intervention) are transformed into inter-subjective ones and given form through discourses.
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
