Introduction

This chapter explores the physical, psychological and emotional challenges of qualitative research into the underlying drivers of violent communal conflict and covert inhibitors of successful resolution. Such research settings are usually found in the under-governed spaces of failed or failing states, and involve what Hobbs (2006, p 57) calls ‘dangerous fieldwork’. The qualitative nature of these drivers of conflict and inhibitors to resolution requires the field researcher's immediate presence within the conflict zone, as the phenomenological inquiries and specific contexts of trauma and loss cannot be subcontracted to incidentally present observers, or victim-perpetrator participants to the conflict. The ongoing intra-state conflicts in Syria-Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Sudan, Somalia, Mali-Niger and Nigeria, for instance, illustrate the need for increasing levels of qualitative investigative research into these conflict drivers and resolution inhibitors. Over the past 15 years I have worked in most of these conflict zones as a uniformed military officer and researcher tasked with analysing and ultimately resolving intractable communal violence.

My first field experience researching genocidal communal violence was at the destroyed village of Ambarou in West Darfur, Sudan, in the summer of 2004. The village had reportedly come under attack, and my African Union ceasefire mediation team was tasked with assessing the report and mediating with the conflict parties. From our base in the abandoned town of Tine, in the South Libyan desert, we drove across open terrain for a day, only to find the village in smouldering ruins (see Special Warfare, 2006). As I walked among the burned-out houses and partial human remains, I felt an indescribable chill on my face and neck, and realised I was no longer perspiring from the heat. I felt as if I had become unconnected to everything and everyone around me. When I looked at my African Union colleagues, their faces were blank, eyes staring at the carnage surrounding us.

At one point, I came across a small figure charred in ashes with his or her hands still manacled to a wooden post. The dull stainless steel of the old-fashioned handcuffs still glittered in the bright sun, and whispered to us of the unspeakable things that our fellow humans had only recently been doing in the secrecy of the desert.