Paper long abstract:

Burkina Faso has become a new epicenter of political turbulence in the Sahel. Islamist groups fuel violence and intercommunal conflict in order to destabilize the country. In 2019, death numbers in Burkina Faso reached a new peak. National security institutions and international interventions are unable to contain the spiral of violence or provide human security. In the midst of these developments, the nation-wide self-defense groups called the Koglweogos, who govern crime by their own means, have firmly installed in the country. While the international community accuses them to violate human rights, empirical findings stress that they enjoy trust in the population and have contributed to a significant drop in crime rates.

Vigilante governance in Africa always raised political and moral controversies. Actors like the Koglweogos navigate in legal and moral grey zones, reproduce violence to establish security, and thereby create tensions but also prejudices on various intertwined levels. Our research aims to achieve a decolonized perspective on the issue. This requires a deep anthropological immersion into the Koglweogos' governance and lifeworlds; an endeavor that is promising and at the same time highly challenging. Obstacles are multiple and appear on various levels. On the (inter)national level, where the Koglweogos are framed as an ethnic local militia and oftentimes scapegoated, research with the groups means to constantly swim against the tide of Eurocentric reports and media coverage. On the academic level, the goal to participate in the Koglweogos' everyday and during their extra-legal hearings raises severe ethical and methodological concerns. Not for nothing have anthropologists rarely conducted close observations with vigilantes. Last but not least, it is exactly these close observations on the ground, together with the Koglweogos and in the face of physical punishments, prisons, and shackled persons, that confront us with personal and professional limits. In addition, the security situation in Burkina Faso is fragile, which shrinks spaces of maneuvers during fieldwork and demands a lot of precautions.

This paper tackles the ethical, methodological and epistemological challenges we face before, during and after research with the Koglweogos. It reflects new directions for fieldwork in 'red areas' and puts an emphasis on the - surprisingly - hardest predicament we find: to counter simplified representations and norms that determine the way the world delineates political non-state actors in Africa.

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Paper long abstract:

The contribution analyses the role of research brokers in social sciences' research in Africa. With an increasing number of places which are not accessible for Western researchers because of the security concerns, the role of brokers in research is becoming essential. Moreover, their voice in the research is usually the one which is heard the most strongly. However, there is a growing ethical dilemma about their input to the research. Among the questions which arise with this type of research may be brokers' and interlocutors' security, confidentiality, and reliability; their position as co authors even though they did not write a single world; or their possible dependence on researchers' sources which may establish another patron-client relationship and bias for the research as a whole. Thus, there is a huge question of objectivity of the data collected by them and, in general, of their contribution as co authors. The contribution wants to put this issue into a normative and ethical light. It is based on personal experience from extensive field research taking place in (Red area) Northwest and Southwest regions of Cameroon (NoSo) and also on findings of ongoing research of team from Uppsala University led by Mats Utas, which is called "Exploring the Research Backstage - Methodological, Theoretical and Ethical Issues Surrounding the Role of Local Research Brokers in Insecure Zones." The author is aware that his empirical findings will not analyse the situation in the Great Lake region and that they will mainly come from different areas. However, he is convinced that these ethical dilemmas are also present in the research of other African regions.

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Paper long abstract:

Since the withdrawal of Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) from Northern Uganda in 2006, the Acholi region is no longer labeled as a 'no-go-zone' or red area for visitors and researchers. However, decades of war and conflict in this region, the records of which can even be traced back at least to early colonial times, have left their psychological and physical marks on the Acholi people who strive to regain socioeconomic "normality" in a post-conflict setting.

Additionally, ongoing conflicts in bordering South Sudan and Eastern Congo recently led to an influx of refugees to Northern Uganda, which poses new challenges to its residents, e.g. resulting in land grabbing by the widely unpopular government and its reallocation to refugees. On the other hand, several sources - ranging from 19th century European travelogues to 21st century ethnographies including self-descriptions of Acholi thinkers and academics - laud an extraordinary hospitality of these people. A linguistic analysis of discourses of hospitality and hostility among the Acholi seems a promising approach to grasp the perception and conception of 'Others' from an emic perspective so that a better understanding of Acholi perspectives on this issue can be gained.

However, conducting such research in a region where (past) conflicts were caused on the basis of ascriptions of 'Otherness' that led to stereotypical images of a militarized, war-prone and ferocious Acholi people that still inform contemporary discourses in Uganda, raises several theoretical and ethical questions that invite a discussion in this presentation: How can such a study be conducted without reproducing stereotypes and without making resurface existing resentments towards Others in this war-torn region? Who is invited to talk and who desires to talk about these issues? Which data is expected to be generated in a discourse linguistic study in the discipline of African Linguistics? How can a (transdisciplinary) collaboration with a local university enhance the understanding of specific concepts (hospitality vs. hostility etc.)? In how far can such an approach challenge and decolonize dominant epistemes of cosmopolitanism by adding a 'Southern' perspective?

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Paper long abstract:

Development studies has been engaging for decades in discussions on participatory research, and more recently on decolonizing development studies. However, these discussions have largely bypassed research in so-called ‘dangerous areas’ or ‘red zones’. In these areas it is often assumed that 1) participatory methods cannot be done in conflict-ridden areas and 2) that local knowledge actors are lacking or lack in capacities to be full partners. This presentation details of different experiences and outlines how participatory research can be successful. At the same time, it yields some lessons that may be relevant to research elsewhere.