Ethical considerations and positionality

[Don’t] you see her hair? Don’t worry, she’s our sister.15

I found that the foremost factor that granted me access to and ‘kudos’ among ex- combatants and other ‘vulnerable youth’ was my choice of hairstyle – the dreadlocks I had started to grow in 2009. When I had announced my intention to begin ‘growing dreads’ to my parents a few years earlier, my father opined that only crazy people and drug addicts wore dreads, and my mother simply begged, ‘please don’t.’ For conservative Sierra Leoneans it was the ultimate posture of rebellion and, while in more liberal Liberia I observed with surprise quite a few women sporting the hairstyle in 2006, in both countries it remained somewhat risqué, associated with a spirit of rebellion, individualism and, fortuitously, the style of choice among the ‘cooler’ ex- combatants, laden as it was with the connotations of the iconic Bob Marley. Sitting in ‘cane juice’ (local Liberian brew) drinking circles, ‘attaya’ tea shops and gold mining camps, I was frequently greeted with ‘one love’, ‘my African sister’, and a fist pump.

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While I have used this term as loosely interchangeable with combatant, here I use the term ‘militia’ deliberately to separate these from groups of former fighters who (on the whole) would have been recognised as ex-combatants and would have had the chance to go through a DDR process as part of a peace agreement. Conversely, the mostly pro-Gbagbo Ivoirian militias for the most part were not considered eligible for the Ivoirian DDR programme, which was ongoing during most of my research, as not belonging to recognised fighting factions, which was another source of tension.

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A common refrain among ex-combatants, referencing my dreadlocks as an indicator of my solidarity with them, in reaction to whether they could trust my presence in their space.

When joints were about to be lit, or little packets of some illicit drug or the other were being (not too surreptitiously) bought and sold, someone would invariably look enquiringly in my direction, before someone else would respond with something along the lines of the quote above.

My ability to interact with these groups was further enhanced by the fact that I was from the sub-region, although somewhat removed: with Liberians, I was simply from a sister country, where they knew that we speak the ‘English from England’ (as opposed to the American-influenced English of Liberia), and that we shared the experience of being ‘youth’16 from desperately poor countries devastated by conflict. I spoke to, and interviewed Sierra Leoneans in Krio, the lingua franca, who were quite excited that their ‘sister’ had come looking for them and that they weren’t forgotten in Liberia. My grandmother was half Liberian, with most of her family remaining there most of their lives, so by extension I also had the benefit of being Liberian as well as Sierra Leonean, something it turned out I had in common with a good number of my respondents, as shown in the next Chapter. Also by serendipity, my key informant/research assistant in Montserrado County was a half Liberian, half Sierra Leonean ex-combatant, who spoke fluent Krio. Quite apart from the fact that this meant he had extensive contacts with the Sierra Leonean ex-combatant community, once he realised that, despite seeming appearance to the contrary, I was ‘actually’ Sierra Leonean and spoke Krio he warmed to me considerably and went out of his way to help. An aspiring student himself, he was also keen to see my research progress, and even took it upon himself to undertake a situation analysis of ex-combatants in Liberia for me. Similarly, my research assistant in Grand Gedeh, a Liberian, had spent time as a refugee in Côte d’Ivoire, at one time returning to Liberia to try and become a child combatant before being chased down by his mother and returned to Côte d’Ivoire. (Incidentally, both cited avenging atrocities against family members as their reason for wanting to fight.)

This apparent acceptance notwithstanding, my access to these circles was at all times mediated by these and similar gatekeepers. I found that when I tried to track people down directly, they would agree to meet and then adamantly deny that they had been

combatants, even if others had reliably confirmed that they were. It appeared that I was never considered quite trustworthy enough to divulge information to, even in informal circles, so I quite quickly realised it made more sense to formalise my interactions, which provided them with a measure of control over the situation, especially as this invariably included a ‘sitting fee’ of US$5, negotiated in advance with the gatekeeper. More formalised settings also meant that I could obtain informed consent from all the people with whom in-depth interviews were conducted, including to record (some) interviews. The ethics of ‘paying for information’ was ameliorated, as far as I was concerned, by the desperate situation many of my interviewees found themselves in; I felt it was the least I could do in return for them taking the time and effort to talk to me, and we framed it as providing for ‘scratch cards’ (mobile phone top-ups), which they could use to help me identify others to interview (during FGDs I also provided refreshments to the extent that this was possible).

During the period I was working for UNMIL, I did not go out of my way to hide this fact, so although I was always explicit that my engagement with interviewees was only in relation to my academic research, invariably, however, I found that respondents were always keen to get a message across to UNMIL about the many shortcomings of reintegration programmes and the dire situation of youth. In any case this was useful for my work at UNMIL, because these were also issues I was consumed with professionally.

Ethical considerations were arguably more problematic in terms of my institutional research. In order to keep myself accountable, I have made a point not to use any data that I could not have reasonably obtained from public records, unless I explicitly requested permission from the author(s), it was provided to me in direct relation to my PhD research, or it was non-confidential material that I had produced myself. Needless to say, however, my analysis is also informed by the countless meetings I participated in, confidential documents that I both read and produced on the topic, and informal conversations about the regional combatant ‘problem’, which I cannot divorce myself from. In order to ensure accountability, I informed supervisors, co- workers and other colleagues about the nature of my PhD and its relation to my day- to-day work and reminded them at regular intervals that this was a part of my reason

for being in Liberia and that the day-to-day working of the UN formed a component of my study. Anybody I interviewed in relation was also explicitly informed of my study. My positionality in relation to my colleagues at UNMIL and to the institution itself also merits some consideration. In reading both Autesserre’s books referenced above, in which she takes to task the construction of knowledge among peacebuilders, as well as their problematic practices, habits and narratives, I felt that I did not recognise myself in her characterisation of the inhabitants of Peaceland. Instead, I imagined myself more closely aligned to those exceptional individuals who, she noted, had taken the time and effort to understand the context in which they were working, and engage more meaningfully with the peacekept. After all, at the beginning of my fieldwork I had lived with Liberian hosts who were relatives or friends of family friends, and introduced to more of the same. Other Liberians I came to know, and socialise with, through my fieldwork and then at work, like my combatant communities had cross- border ties, including with Sierra Leone, so we had that in common, while others hailed from the same County in Liberia or ethnic group as my grandmother’s family. Yet other Liberians, who I met through church and other social institutions were Americo-Liberians, again some with extensive ties with my Creole (Krio) community in Sierra Leone, so there was an instant familiarity, and more than once I was stopped in the street by someone enquiring whether I was so-and-so’s daughter from the Americo-Liberian/Congo community, so I suppose I also had that ‘look’ about me. All of this had me smugly dismissing Autesserre’s assertions about interveners’ everyday, which ‘created and maintained firm boundaries between them and their local counterparts’; ‘their perception of themselves as markedly different from host populations’; and their ‘valuing external expertise over local knowledge’ (Autesserre 2014: 12-13), as not applying to me, with the additional benefit of doing my PhD undoubtedly rendering me more self-aware and reflective than most. But this was juxtaposed with frequent assertions by Liberian and other African colleagues that other, invariably ‘Western’ colleagues especially ‘liked me’ and gave me opportunities because ‘I understood their language’, and knew how to write like ‘they’ wanted. They largely ascribed this to my growing up in the West (which was not true but my accent seemingly proved what I denied), or at least from the insider knowledge I had gained

from working and living abroad for a significant period. While I largely dismissed the former observations, I could not discount the latter, nor the fact that I seemed able to move (relatively) easily between the worlds of the ‘interveners’, ‘insider interveners’ and the ‘peacekept’, and that this ‘in’ with interveners, including at senior levels, enabled me to make insights and arrive at conclusions central to this thesis from a highly privileged position. I did challenge my ‘insider’ perspective constantly, however, to the extent that I was quite worried about some of my conclusions, particularly in chapters 8 and 9. Nonetheless, while they left me wondering nervously about whether I would be hired again within the UN, they also enabled me to confidently conclude that I had not sacrificed academic rigour at the altar of my rarefied UN perspective! Notwithstanding, given the inherent ethical and positionality dilemmas with both the ex-combatant and institutional aspects of my research, I was ever conscious of the need to be reflexive about my engagement, especially considering that in no way could I have been perceived as ‘neutral’ in either setting, given that in my work I was constantly called upon to inform decisions about the very things I was studying. To keep myself accountable, I maintained an audio diary, where I tried to think through my concerns and how best to address them. As mentioned above, I also largely limited myself to publicly accessible documents, and regularly informed and reminded supervisors and other colleagues of my research.