Gatekeepers in Conflict Research Settings: Ethics, Access & Safety

Patrick James Christian, PhD Student Nova Southeastern University Graduate School of Humanities & Social Sciences Department of Conflict Analysis & Resolution Fall 2011

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 of the 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 depoliticalization 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

Gatekeepers in Conflict Research Settings 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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Gatekeepers in Conflict Research Settings 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 relative deprivation 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 Hades Cerberus 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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Gatekeepers in Conflict Research Settings 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 gatekeepercum-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 these servant 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
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(The Journey to the East, 1956)

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Gatekeepers in Conflict Research Settings 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 in Conflict Research Settings 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 purposes be 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 interplay a form of communication rather 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 disclosure ethics 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 its possibilities 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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Gatekeepers in Conflict Research Settings 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 between Zaghawa 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 confessed fear 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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Gatekeepers in Conflict Research Settings 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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Gatekeepers in Conflict Research Settings 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 by gatekeepers 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 point of 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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Gatekeepers in Conflict Research Settings 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 reality provides 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, and observational 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, the village, 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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Gatekeepers in Conflict Research Settings 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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Gatekeepers in Conflict Research Settings 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 Leo as 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 the gatekeeper 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 or military 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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Gatekeepers in Conflict Research Settings 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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Gatekeepers in Conflict Research Settings

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