Paper short abstract:

This paper uses the Juba Peace Talks between the Government of Uganda and the Lord’s Resistance Army to highlight methodological and analytical challenges encountered during researching the complex developing and changing dynamics between 2006 and 2008.

Paper long abstract:

Investigations of peace processes tend to look for "spoilers"—readily identifiable actors pursuing a counterproductive interest. Yet, the Juba Talks between the Government of Uganda and the Lord's Resistance Army showed that instead of single spoilers, such processes are complicated by a vast and ever-changing range of individual and group actors and interests. Peace talks are a multi-layered part of a conflict trajectory in which individual experiences might play a bigger part in conflict resolution than the technical matters being discussed at the table.

Adequately capturing that rich human tapestry requires thorough and time-consuming investigation of a nonlinear coalescence of ever-changing events, experiences and context through detailed multi-disciplinary observation. This would ideally need to include a researcher's engagement with all actors at all times, in order to emerge as an omniscient narrator able to produce a sequential analysis of unsystematic human experiences while appreciating that success and failure need new measurements if the whole process and all the dynamics it sets into motion is taken into account.

Yet such a holistic scholarly approach that provides reliable and unskewed information on years of multifaceted and ever-changing motivations in a developing conflict and then draws constructive conclusions that help make the peace talks a success is outside the remit of individual researchers. Scholarship has yet to learn how to qualitatively investigate complex processes with incomplete and manipulated information and draw nuanced, yet operationally informative conclusions. Yet what to do with this realisation that throws open more questions than it answers?