gatekeepers in conflict research settings - ethics, access & safety.docx

7/29/2019 Gatekeepers in Conflict Research Settings - Ethics, Access & Safety.docx

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Gatekeepers in Conflict Research Settings:Ethics, Access & Safety

Patrick James Christian, PhD Student Fall 2011

Nova Southeastern University

Graduate School of Humanities & Social Sciences

Department of Conflict Analysis & Resolution

Abstract:

Keywords:

Introduction

The role of the gatekeeper in qualitative research set in places of violent conflict is

sufficiently different in its complexities to warrant study and review by conflict interventionists.

In traditional research, a gatekeeper is simply an individual with whom the researcher must

negotiate access to participant subjects. Such a role implies a related condition such as

ownership, stewardship or other executive authority in line with the existing cultural norms ofthe research setting (Sanders, 2006). Depending on the place, nature and participant body of

research subjects, the role of gatekeeper can be one of simple formality to one of extraordinary

complexity where sought after access is deeply embedded into the research project such as when

gate-keepers are also participants and subjects. This paper focuses on research settings involving

the latter and discusses the various ethical considerations that need to be taken into account when

working with gatekeepers during qualitative research in zones of emerging culture conflict. The

purpose for focusing on this particular area of emerging research is because of an increase in the

number and type of research projects by state and international-multinational governments as

well as profit/non-profit private sector NGOs. This change is a direct reflection of growing de-

politicalization of intra-state conflicts by the most influential members of the international

community. In emerging culture conflict research, the normative participant group consists of

participants to violent conflict that involves extended loss of life and property. Their

participation can be as victim, perpetrator, witness or all three simultaneously. The settings these

participants are found in are usually ungoverned or under-governed spaces and involve what

Hobbs (2006) calls dangerous fieldwork (p. 57). The field of dangerous research in emerging


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Gatekeepers in Conflict Research Settings

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culture conflict requires fieldworkers to place themselves in the midst of ongoing conflict

between armed parties operating with sovereign or semi-sovereign authority. Their ability to

access the subjects of their research is markedly more complex when those subjects are engaged

in violent activities or are suffering from significant deprivation and loss. Gatekeepers in such

research settings occupy positions of government bureaucrat, NGO care-giver or the many

formal and informal roles of gatekeeper-participant from the rebel leader carrying a rifle to the

father carrying their childs coffin. All must be navigated with caution requiring insight into the

conditions in which they exist and the expected effects of conflict and loss on cultures struggling

to adapt to a changing world around them.

The participants of emerging culture conflict constitute complex structures of sociological

community that are often in a state of flux with respect to their physical and psychological

boundaries of being. The flux of physical being is created due to the loss of habitat, economic

capacity, declining membership, famine, disease, injury and death associated with both the

surface aspects of the violence and the underlying causes and conditions that drive the conflict.The flux of psychological boundaries of being is created as both a byproduct of the physical

changes combined with factors such as deteriorating elements of group identity, assaults to

cognitive imprinting based on geography, geology and climatology and the effects of prolonged

individual and group trauma, separation and alienation. The instability of the physical,

psychological and emotional landscape in emerging culture conflict research settings serves to

delineate between the establishment of permissive and non-permissive research environments.

Permissive and non-permissive research environments are divided both between time and space

as the nature of intrastate conflict is one where battle space and living space are intimately

intertwined. At times, they become one and the same. What this means is that at times, a

permissive research space of a village may well become non-permissive with little or no notice

to the otherwise unaware fieldworker. In such situations, safety from harm is inextricably linked

to the researchers continuously evolving plan of gatekeeper access at multiple levels and on

multiple sides of a research space that is often contested physically, psychologically and

spiritually.

Gatekeepers and access to the landscape of qualitative field research

Research settings that place fieldworkers in sociological structures of communal life that are

caught up in emerging culture conflict present distinct differences from both domestic research

and the conduct of traditional anthropology. Field research in ongoing zones of conflict is

neither active nor passive. It is not active in the sense that the researcher is a combatant, but it is

not passive because that same researcher remains in constant danger of harm and must be

defended. Such research cannot wait until the conflict is terminated as doing so may result in the

foregoing of intervention and the acceptance of the destruction of the research body of


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participants. Similarly, the research cannot be conducted before the conflict occurs as the conflict

itself is the research subject. Infusing researchers directly into ongoing zones of violent conflict

creates tremendous challenges for them, including at times, their own loss of life. Human Terrain

Team research scientist Paula Lloyd was only 36 years old when she was doused with gasoline

by a disputant to the conflict in Afghanistan and set afire. Suffering severe burns to the majority

of her body, Paula was one of a growing number of researchers wounded or killed while

conducting fieldwork in conflict zones. It is only recently that conflict researchers have begun to

introduce forms of research directly into the intervention as it is occurring. No longer do such

researchers and the interventionist personnel they support have the luxury of waiting until the

stronger powers reduce the levels of violence and bring a semblance of order to a potential

research setting before fieldworkers attempt to gather and analyze data.

This new type of research is set primarily within intrastate conflicts in under or ungoverned

regions in Southwest Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America. The issues being

researched range from disintegrating large group identity to draconian issues of relativedeprivation sparked by desertification, deforestation, population growth and competition over

cultural expression, placement and survival. These issues become intractable without the

introduction of qualitative research methods that both involve and engage the participant

communities in conflict. Without real-time field research, the international community has been

unable to implement normal methods of peacekeeping, stability operations, or nation-building.

The results of disintegrating states and international peacekeeping failures have provided a new

type of state: the failed state or failing state. Political scientists continue to debate the fine points

of when states such as Somalia, Sudan, Liberia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Libya, Iraq,

Afghanistan, or Colombia lapse into and out of failed, failing or recovering state status. This is

where most of this new type of research is set; in and amongst failed and failing states, in both

permissive and non-permissive sociological structures. Advances in conflict zone research

employment and methods will eventually provide researchers and the interventionists they

support and ability to reduce and resolve violent conflict where traditional yet expensive

diplomatic efforts have continuously failed.

Gatekeepers, Wardens and Guides:Hermann Hesses Leo versus HadesCerberus

The role of the gatekeeper is far greater than as a permissive agent of access. The physical

access sought after by the researcher is merely an initial geographical step for qualitative

research. The underlying psychological, emotional and spiritual levels that create the lived

experience of the participants are the real goal of the researcher seeking to understand the

subjects of their inquiry. It is this access to access that separates gatekeepers from wardens; or

the servant leader guide from the Cerberus guardian of access to Hades like places that form

conflict zone research settings. The distinction that I am illustrating may seem a bit exaggerated,


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but not by much. Hermann Hesses literary work1

of a leader who disguises himself in the cloak

of a servant in order to help guide a group of explorers searching for truth and knowledge lays

the foundation for discerning the reality that such hidden leaders of human societies do in fact

exist. When their sacrifice and humility is compared to their formal counterparts who cloak

themselves in the role of authoritarian gatekeeper, the striking differences between servant leader

and Cerberus warden seems clearer. Any conflict zone fieldworker who has ever had to negotiate

physical access to exploited and damaged populations will intuitively recognize the role of the

government or militia gatekeeper as a type of Cerberus warden living off of the lucrative profits

of a captive people and the international community trying to assist them. These gatekeeper-

cum-wardens possess a nuanced skill in ensuring that those inside do not escape the spreading

conflict while limiting access to those who might cast doubt on their diagnosis, prognosis or need

to continue their endless paid vigilance to the crossing of their own private Styx.

Gatekeepers who possess the ability to access the psychological sociological structures that

are involved in the ongoing conflict by their very nature have the capacity to serve as theseservant leader gatekeeper guides. The nature of their capacity arises from their love of and

intimate connection to those to whom they would guide the researcher to. Without this

psychological and emotional connection to the research community, they would be unable to

know where to look or whom to lead the researcher to. Gatekeepers who are servant leaders

possess the ability to access the private spaces of a target communitys identity. They can access

those members of the community whose condition or injuries represent the phenomenological

objects of their terror, shame, and the delicate emanations of psychological and emotional group

identity that both hold together their basis of existence and threaten their ability to transmit

memory and purpose. In short, they have access because they are part of what the researcher

would seek to understand and they love those with whom the researcher would engage with.

They are both gatekeeper and research participant whose involvement spans the entire research

project and beyond. The gatekeepers that I have met who were of this type were both formal and

informal leaders with varying levels of education and organizational abilities. My work with one

such gatekeeper, Heriberto S., illustrates both the possibilities of conflict resolution and the

ethical dangers of sociocentric imprinting and aspirational deprivation. Heriberto was the elected

leader of displaced peoples from an important village abandoned when fighting between

government and insurgent troops forced the inhabitants to flee. Initial access to Heriberto was

via a series of meetings with the Catholic Bishop of the province, yet another gatekeeper to the

subject of my research: refugees displaced by violence and war.

As gatekeepers, the Catholic Church is quite competent, with twenty centuries of protecting

vulnerable populations. The ethical considerations for a researcher attempting access to Roman

Catholic parishioners can extend even to personal relationships of faith, especially if the

1(The Journey to the East, 1956)


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researcher, as in my case, is Catholic themselves. This was actually the first question posed by

the Bishop when he granted me an interview in response to my query of assistance. Nave

assumptions of blind support for the obvious rightness of my mission were quickly dashed when

I had to respond to a series of questions beginning with: am I a Catholic and am I a good

Catholic? In matters of gatekeeper trust, sometimes matters of faith and spirituality go hand in

hand. I understood the Bishops questions were designed to establish context for understanding

intent, motivation, and reliability. The ethics of conversing with him were complicated by our

sharing of a larger context of belonging to the Roman Church. While the ethics should have been

straight forward as support for a damaged population, how that support translated into physical

inducements and guarantees created the balancing act between what that gatekeeper determined

to be appropriate levels of support and what the Colombian civil and military governance was

able or prepared to provide. The potential dilemma of my situation as both a Catholic and a

government researcher did not escape the Bishop as his initial smile indicated upon learning my

religious origin. But the requirement for openness and honesty about the possibilities of success

or harm in the participatory action research of village resettlement eclipsed any dilemma or

misunderstanding. Resettling a village while the conflict is still ongoing is always fraught with

danger. Both the gatekeeper and those they protect have the right to understand their situation in

contexts of present loss and future gains. Gatekeepers have that overriding obligation to inform

their constituents so they can make informed decisions as participants to narrative construction.

In the end, the Bishop gained an appreciation of the lengths to which government forces could or

would go to support and defend the research process and the risks to which the participant

population would be exposed to. Against this information, the participants and their gatekeepers

weighed their present condition and their future potential for a restoration of their lives outside of

that of refugee.

Once the Bishop decided to permit me access to the participant body of refugees, I was

introduced to their informally elected leader, Heriberto S. Where Heriberto was a gatekeeper to

the access of the villagers as research subjects and participants in action research, he was also a

ferocious advocate of their rights and a restoration of post-conflict, post-resettlement justice. As I

was to learn, the language of gatekeepers frames not only the debate, but the ensuing positions at

the bargaining table. As an example, an element of post-conflict, post resettlement justice came

to be defined as land title reorganization and redistribution, an issue the Bishop and Heriberto

deftly introduced as central to our ability to garner the participation of the displaced families.

Land title reorganization and redistribution is a tricky business however. Too little support to

those who actually farm the land can create incentives for joining the rebellion. Too little support

to the sanctity of contracts and land titles can inhibit the creation and sustainment of social

ownership over the economic process; an important factor in job creation and a healthy economic

environment. Beyond subsistence levels of effort, people will not work for what they can never

own.


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Gatekeepers who are organic to the research population are nearly always involved or

intensely interested in the well-being of those they serve and protect; often by virtue of ties of

blood, marriage, ethnicity and identity. Their willingness to grant and provide access to their

flock comes with an unspoken acknowledgement of their willingness/intent to subvert or at least

influence the research process for socio-economic-political purposesbe they gainful or

defensive in nature. There are ethical pathways to dealing with this issue, and the researcher is

never hostage to those whom he/she would study (except in those rare cases when desperate

participant subjects do seize researchers as hostages). These pathways are dependent upon the

researchers understanding that research cannot be held hostage to political agendas, even those

of victimized populations. The active manipulation by gatekeepers of access and cooperation in

order to fulfill unmet social needs must necessarily be understood by the researcher as part of the

naturally occurring process of sociological interplaya form of communicationrather than

mal-intentions against the research. So long as the researcher remains uncommitted to any one

course of action or research result, they will have the necessary flexibility to keep from

becoming part of the political-sociological discourse over data collection and analysis. In a

sense, nearly all conflict zone research tends to have elements of participation and action as

integral components. Attempts by the researcher to maintain confidentiality of their goals and

processes may result in greater mistrust and acrimony than the failure to disclose that

information warranted. This is because in most conflict zones, the population participants have

subject to manipulation and distortion by government and private concerns, creating an

atmosphere of paranoia when they perceive any withholding of information by the researcher.

Keeping the organic gatekeepers fully informed of all aspects of the possible outcomes of the

research, the limits of action possible and the full measure of participation will go far in assuring

the researchers relationship with the participant body stays amicable and ethical.

Full disclosureethics of communications flow to and from gatekeepers

Given that gatekeepers or their participant populations have little ability to act on the full and

continuing disclosure of agenda and purpose of the research effort, there is most often little harm

that can result by full disclosure. What this disclosure does do however, is fulfill an underlying

human need within the subject community of participation in the development of their narrative.

Full and continuing disclosure of the research agenda and purpose also creates an exciting and

enabling condition for the researcher with the reciprocity of interchange. Even as the gatekeepers

and their supporters are enabled to delve into the research purpose and agendas to relate itspossibilities to their own circumstances, their eventual questioning opens doors for the researcher

to create many intimate moments of shared question and answer sessions that do as much for the

researcher as for the subject. The willingness to accept questions and offer indepth answers not

limited to policy restatements creates mutual trust and confidence in a deepening relationship

where the subjects and their gatekeepers are an equal partner in not only what data is collected,

but how it is understood and pieced together. This produces euphoria of a second human need


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being fulfilled; that of telling their story in their way from their point of view by their own

agency.

One example of this interactive process that I participated in involved a survey of tribes

along the Chad and Sudan border to determine the relative boundaries between Arab and African

tribal lands. Our research mission at that point was to support the mediation of conflict betweenZaghawa and Rizeigat villages which were continuing to attack each others livestock and crops

as they struggled over diminishing well water resources and arable land for grazing and

agriculture. The gatekeepers we approached were usually a combination of village leaders and

informal militia commanders charged with the physical protection of their families and clans.

Where the government members of the research team objected to full disclosure to the African

village gatekeepers, the rebel organization members of the research team objected to full

disclosure to the Arab village gatekeepers. Their objections went beyond the understandable

desire not to disclose intelligence to one militia organization about the other, but about

interpersonal interaction between the research group and the feared other. Both sides confessedfear that the gatekeepers would distort or block full information if they knew our research agenda

and purpose. Full disclosure policy prevailed when we convinced the two sides that in fact, we

needed to start with the full knowledge from their point of view in order for us to understand the

conflict in its entirety. Our ability to develop a trusting relationship between both sides to the

conflict as we researched the underlying causes and conditions established a platform to future

mediation efforts at the village-to-village level.

The nature of gatekeeper access:physical, psychological and emotional

Physical Access of the Field Research Team: Just as access is a continuous event that

punctuates the entire research process, it also occurs at multiple levels and involves multiple

types of gatekeepers. Access is a multi-dimensional process undertaken as part of the

development of the relationships that the researchers engage in with those whom they are

researching. The multiple dimensions of gatekeeper and protected population access are

physical, psychological and emotional. Physical access often involves the simple allowance of

the researcher to physically present themselves to the subjects of their research and is a much

more complex issue in conflict zone research than other types of ethnography. Village Stability

Operations (VSO) and Human Terrain (HTT) teams for instance, must be prepared for extended

negotiations with village gatekeepers just to gain access to the village. Any use of their weapons,

technology, or international interventionist authority to summarily enter the village uninvited

defeats their research mission even before they dismount. Research into these communities must

be an invited affair, not one that is coerced out of fear or intimidation.

The longest I have spent negotiating access to a village in a conflict zone was three days. My

team and I parked our vehicles 2 kilometers from the village, where we could barely make out

the tops of the houses. We had no doubt that the village was well aware of our presence as the


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young boys we passed on the way in took in every detail from people to equipment. We

negotiated access to the village through the gatekeepers 12 year old grandson who demonstrated

a precocious attempt at casual fearlessness. Only after our third night sleeping in our vehicles in

the cold did the village gatekeeper take pity on us and invite us to spend a night while he mulled

over our request for access rather than the authoritative demand they were accustomed to

receiving. The decision making process that the village gatekeeper was going through was a

complex exercise involving many factors. For instance, accepting our long term presence would

bring him and his village to the attention of the insurgents and they would become targets

because of their perceived collaboration. As well, our presence of 10 additional people further

taxed the water and food situation, not to mention concerns over the mixing and taxing of

opposing cultural systems of behavior. Daily, elements of my team met with and talked with the

village leader and the heads of the larger, more senior families. Our conversations over initial

access focused on reviewing our purpose, agenda, and how our presence would be value added

to his job of safeguarding their people. Key conversations with gatekeepers however also delved

into issues of morality, political rights, and a bit about our western lives in Europe or America.

Even as we negotiated access to remain in the village to conduct participatory action research,

other members of the team provided short term assistance such as livestock vaccinations and

crop fertilizing-insecticide support. As the gatekeepers concerns about our mission and presence

were addressed in discussions, other gatekeepers within the village were offered evidence of our

intentions and support which reinforced positive perception of our continued stay.

Where the physical aspect of the gatekeepers access was initially difficult but ultimately

successful, remaining aspects of access were not so easy. The decision over physical access was

based on a cost-benefit comparison, with the potential security costs being weighed by the

obvious and tangible benefits that would accrue to the village by our presence. When the village

gatekeepers realized that we had curative and restorative capacity for humans, livestock and

crops, as well as capacity to build legitimate organic village security capabilities, the decision to

allow us to remain was finally made. Mere physical access however would not bring us within

reach of our goals for participatory action research. Our research effort involved identifying

dysfunctional elements of the villages sociological structure, to include their inability to adapt to

changes in environmental, growth, political and social structures at the provincial or national

levels of governance. Where one part of our participatory action research might identify a lack

of ability to preserve food across harvests (resolvable with education and basic materials), far

deeper goals of research remained unfulfilled. These deeper research goals involved

psychological and sociological structural changes based upon competing systems of social order

emanating from a national government or a broad based insurgent movement. Both government

and insurgent worked to secure gatekeeper and villager loyalty to affiliations of competing

religious, social and political systems. Both competing forces usually ignored the greater

problems facing gatekeepers and their constituents at the psychological sociological level of


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survival. Research that requires deeper access than mere entrance to the village, involves

unpacking and examining dysfunctional systems of inter/intra-village justice; initiating new

discourse on education, historical narrative, and family/village/tribal identity in a world that is

suffering changes in climate, geography, social mores, and political structure. The requirement

for such research to be participatory in nature with an action component often creates a barrier

that insurgent and government systems are unwilling or unable to cross.

Psychological Access of the Research Team: For each element of justice, family structure,

education, memory, historical narrative and the transmission of generational memory, the array

of gatekeepers will change and fluctuate as roles and responsibilities of village leaders are

crossed and grouped. Whether these village leaders are called gatekeepers or influence leaders,

they are carriers of knowledge and tradition that the remainder of the village and tribe looks to

for guidance on how to frame the possible contexts of village discourse. When the discourse

between researchers and villagers involves the psychological underpinnings of vulnerable

sociological tissue, the possibilities of researcher mistake and the potential loss of access bygatekeepers heightens the fragility of the research. For such research to work, complex family

and village developmental issues have to be discussed in participatory settings where

psychological and emotional comfort allow for the possibilities of reframing painful problems or

past historical incidents. Without participation structured along village lines authorized by

gatekeepers at the village and family levels of social organization, potential for change never

occurs. The initiation of research at this level is invitational only. If or when sensitive topics are

opened for discussion with the researchers by the village gatekeepers or their designated speaker,

the pace is at the slowest speed of the most recalcitrant discussant. Any attempts at control or

coercion of the process would create immediate resistance and rebellion to the research and

possibly even a catastrophic loss of rapport.

As the gatekeeper of a village or family supervises or monitors the research discussions

between research team and the village participants he/she is responsible for, the gatekeeper is

often not so much an active participant in the discussions as is a moderator who is sided with his

own people. He/she is already deeply informed of the issues and their concern is transmitted to

all participants by their opening of the issues to our research team. As you watch the gatekeeper

during participatory research discussions, you find a heightened awareness of the emotional and

psychological state of his members. Its as if the gatekeeper at times follows the research

discussion less from an intellectual content and more from an emotional and psychological pointof view, guarding against danger in words, ideas or pain that cannot be withdrawn or

subsequently healed. In these situations, gatekeepers feel a tremendous burden of responsibility

for the psychological and emotional wellbeing of those in their care. This heightened feeling of

responsibility is better understood when we remember that such villages and clans operate as

semi-sovereign domains of sociological structure where their entire support system is based

internally to the community with little or no possibilities of being saved from annihilation by


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outside sources. Therefore during nearly all such participatory research, gatekeepers stand on

the access switch like a nervous mother watching a stranger say hello to her baby. Using this

allegory, the level of fear or nervousness by the gatekeeper will be commensurate with past

experiences in their ability to safeguard their membership.

Where there has been no trauma, no loss, no conflict, access and trust will be easier to garner.The types of problem situations that participatory action research teams are fielded to research do

not lend themselves to finding high trust environments. Rather, such research teams tend to be

fielded for research in fractured sociological structures whose underlying psychological

cognition is laden with dissonance, loss and trauma that prevents healing and the restoration of

psycho-social order and justice. The gatekeepers of such societies are informed or have taken

positions that range from leader-shepherd to angry participant to detached warlord transforming

his village-clan into an active part of the ongoing violence. By far, conflict research teams find

themselves in the former, once in a while in the middle, and hardly ever in the latter, that being a

principal domain of kinetic force rather than non-kinetic conflict resolution. This realityprovides the conflict zone research team with the requirement to establish a baseline of lived

experience for both positive, daily-life expectations and an appreciation of the depths of harm,

loss and privation experienced during the ongoing conflict. The gatekeepers of village and

family will already intuitively know this baseline, having been both participant sufferers and

leaders responsible for the amelioration of that suffering.

I have found that during such research missions, a key gatekeeper ethic has been to determine

how well I and my research team understood and appreciated that baseline of lived experience

and traumatic suffering within those whom we would research. As such, I found that many

gatekeepers operate at 3 levels of interaction with a research team: denial, instructional, andobservational monitoring. The first, denial, passes quickly as soon as the gatekeeper finds that

the research team is a serious group that is equipped, informed and prepared to learn deeper into

the phenomenological issues affecting the village or community. The second, instructional, is

used by the gatekeeper to ensure that the research team understands the context of the villagers;

what they were before the trauma-conflict, what trauma-conflict happened to them, and some

emerging ideas or theories formed by the gatekeeper of the meaning of what they had

experienced. Gatekeepers as participant leaders see their role as being one that is involved in

guiding the meaning-making process of the village. This means explaining what happened, why

it happened, and interweaving this explanation into the historical narrative of the families, thevillage, the clan and ultimately the larger society. In normal trauma and conflict, such meaning

making accounts for the inclusion of chosen traumas and chosen glories into that narrative.

When this meaning making and construction of historical narrative do not relieve the conditions

of physical, psychological or spiritual suffering however, the gatekeeper can be open to outside

intervention provided that such does not replace or remove him as gatekeeper-leader-participant.


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Emotional Access of the Research Team: Abdul Salam was a Muslim man, native to the

Kandahar province of Afghanistan. On November 4, 2008, he was approached by a female field

researcher and interviewed about the rising prices of gasoline. He was probably selected because

he was carrying a container of benzene (gasoline). While the exchange between the female

researcher and the Muslim man is unknown, the subsequent events are quite well known. Abdul

Salam tossed the contents of his jug of benzene onto the female researcher and set her on fire. In

the events that quickly played out, the female researcher, Paula Lloyd, was thrown into a water

source to extinguish the flames that covered her body and rushed through escalating levels of

medical treatment that ended two months later when she finally died from her injuries. Abdul

Salam was immediately captured by Afghan authorities, but an enraged colleague of Lloyds

summarily shot him in the head in a sensationalized and politicized incident that is set to be tried

in a US criminal court. I recount this story to center the discussion on emotional access as

something that occurs between individuals rather than just to an individual. The types of

societies in conflict that field research teams work within are often very different from those

which the researchers were raised in, schooled in, and socialized in.

The gatekeeper of a sovereign village or tribe in a conflict zone possesses authority and

responsibility for his constituents to a degree deeper than counterparts in developed societies.

The nature of ungoverned or under-governed regions of emerging states prevents the types of

social and security systems we are accustomed to from developing, enhancing the

responsibilities of gatekeepers at all levels of the social stratum. Most such sociological

structures are characterized by sociocentric group identity with an external locus of individual

control in shame based systems of psychological interplay. In these complex communities, the

role of gatekeeper at the family, village, clan and tribal level becomes uniquely difficult and

complex. The emotional dialogue supersedes that of the intellectual in terms of volume and

velocity in the intra-family relationships. While gatekeepers at all levels interactively provide

much of the intellectual discourse, their ability to focus and balance intellectual discussion is

based on that volume and velocity of emotional dialogue that permeates the interior of each

family. Sociocentrism enhances this by the process of sharing an ethos laden identity and an

emotionally rich inner communal life. Where the emotion is positive and the identity definition

clear for both present generation and future transmission, the psychological and emotional aura

can be deeply fulfilling. Where the opposite occurs, communication falters, rage, shame and

alienation mount and susceptibility to the lure of participation in ongoing violent outplays

increases.

Against this description, the conflict zone researcher seeks entrance, acceptance and

inclusion to the physical, psychological and emotional interplay of a village in conflict. As can

be seen however, physical access is only a small part of accessing the research subjects and such

access may not permit the conflict zone researcher to remain aloof, unaffected by the turbulence

around him/her. The risk for the researcher is twofold; personal and professional. If they are


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allowed in by the gatekeeper, they are assumed to be capable of personally dealing with their

exposure to stories of trauma, anguish, loss and privation without undue loss of intellectual

fidelity which they are expected to employ on behalf of the communal unit. The risk

professionally is to refrain from increasing the harm already inflicted on the community

members by working with formal and informal gatekeepers to determine research pathways that

do not lead to an unbalancing of the family or village psychologically or emotionally. The

researchers fidelity of perceiving the emotional state of the family and community must be

measured against constant feedback from formal and informal gatekeepers. The informal

gatekeepers are those members of the family or community that the researcher recruits to help

them perceive, understand and gage the emotional state of the inner community, especially if

they find themselves over-connecting or under-connecting to the emotional current that animates

both trauma and ethos in the household. These informal gatekeeper recruits are members of the

community that possess high degrees of emotional intelligence and articulation. As they can

understand deeply, they can articulate clearly. As they love unconditionally, they protect

completely. They become in essence, a version of Leoas servant leader; serving the research

needs of their family and village as a means of exerting leadership. Insofar as the interventionist

conflict zone researcher respects and maintains the boundaries between their egocentric basis of

origination and the sociocentric requirements for the psychological and emotional health of the

gatekeeper and family members, such a relationship can produce rich knowledge and

understanding on the part of the research team.

Conclusion:Ethical considerations of working with gatekeepers in conflict zone research

As perhaps the foregoing has made clear, conflict zone research settings are not always safe

and are laden with considerations of harm to both community and researcher. The role of thegatekeeper in conflict zones is central to research that does not exacerbate the ongoing harm,

potentially leads to a reduction or mitigation of the conflict and retains scientific basis for

accurate data collection, analysis and action implementation if one exists. Ultimately, the

conflict zone researchers ability to navigate through gatekeepers at many levels and of varying

connectivity to the research subject community is essential to any fieldwork success.

Gatekeepers must not be seen or understood as a monolithic participant group, nor should they

be seen as a discrete profession. Gatekeeping is a role undertaken for different reasons at

different levels of access. The more focused the gatekeeper tends to be on physical access, the

more likely that their role is political and controlling in nature, often within a governing civil ormilitary force. The more intimate the gatekeeper to access of psychological and emotional

intercourse with the subject community, the more likely that the role is undertaken with as a

participant gatekeeper whose own survival or annihilation is contingent upon that of the

community that he/she helps protect.


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As the conflict zone researcher develops their research plan, nearly all of their plan

components must include an analysis of how the gatekeeper will see the plan and its components

in light of their past, present and anticipated future. Considerations of how the gatekeeper and his

community see themselves against neighboring communities involve analysis of relative

deprivation or unfulfilled aspirations, either of which can lead to unanticipated consequences.

Other analysis involves the relationship of the gatekeeper and his community to their

environment; to the existing political structure (if any) attempting to exert governance and any

competing socio-political-ideological structures competing for that governance over the

community. Finally, an analysis of the gatekeepers expectations of sociological structural

normative conditions is an important concern for review prior to initial contact if possible. By

this I mean that the research team must analyze whether gatekeeper expectations of their society

are in harmony with the larger society or are inherently conflictual with the mores of the

surrounding communities. Polygamy, the role of women in social life for Arab Muslim versus

African Muslim communities; ancient hierarchical strata of community power based on blood,

ethnicity or race and the accompanying effects of adversary symbiosis between tribes are some

of the issues that research teams must analyze prior to deploying in order to prepare for

interfacing with gatekeepers of communities in conflict.


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