Engaging Ethnographic Peace Research by Gearoid Millar

Author:Gearoid Millar [Millar, Gearoid]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367730888
Google: kS_1zQEACAAJ
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2020-12-18T16:13:45+00:00

Key benefits of long-term fieldwork: time, chance, and change

The goal of this section is to evidence the added value that is gained from living within and witnessing the many challenges of a post-conflict setting. As will be illustrated, an understanding of everyday life in post-conflict contexts cannot be gleaned from interviews, focus groups, or observations alone (even when conducted among non-elite locals). Indeed, it is the broader context of people’s lives that shapes their ideas and opinions, their expectations and experiences.56 As such, only familiarity with that context allows the researcher to interpret how people understand and represent their world. In what follows, I describe three benefits of long-term fieldwork: time, chance, and change. I will illustrate why each is so important to an EPR approach with examples of the added value of such research from my past work in rural Sierra Leone.

56Mac Ginty, “Peacekeeping and Data”, 701.

This research spanned a total of 19 months in-country. This includes 2 months in 2007 and 10 months in 2008/2009 during which I conducted an evaluation of the local experiences of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in and around the city of Makeni in Northern Sierra Leone, as well as 6 months in 2012 and 1 month in 2013 during which I evaluated the impacts of a large Bio-energy project in 12 villages within the project’s 40,000 hectare land-lease area. Both of these studies involved long-term engagement with these communities, participant observation, and semi-structured interviews designed to assess understandings and experiences of the interventions. I have since published more than a dozen peer-reviewed articles presenting these data, as well as a couple of papers describing the benefits of such ethnographic assessments as a means to understand how and why interventions are experienced as they are in local settings. However, I have never before written specifically of the substantial added value of long-term fieldwork above and beyond what could be gathered by the same methods (interviews, observations, site visits), if they had been carried out over weeks instead of months. This will be my task here.

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