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
