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
