Social Science Research Council

This project was approved by the Program Committee on Global Security and Cooperation of the SSRC at its Belfast meeting in September 2001. It is part of the process of "Field Building" activities that seek to bring together the different kinds of knowledge with a view to developing the mechanisms for integrating, synthesizing, and transferring skills and expertise available in each of these different knowledges to a wider audience and to all actors.

The workshop, held on November 5th-7th in Kampala, Uganda, was designed to address the issue of peace and security in pastoral communities in Eastern Africa. These communities have been caught up in a cycle of conflict and violence emanating from a number of factors including an ecological crisis, the over-reliance on cattle as the main means of livelihood and the globalization of instruments of violence in the form of small arms proliferation which have added to the commercialization of the conflict and its intensification.

The workshop sought to bring the actors involved in this conflict together and discuss ways of bringing about this basic objective into reality. The exercise was to use this period as a "collecting phase" to scan the horizons of knowledge and establish the elements of creating a "field" for the understanding of the phenomenon and also by creating a basis for a new kind of research of the different kinds of activities in the field of "security studies" and help to redefine the field and the sources of knowledge. The strategy adopted here was to ensure the participation of different social, cultural and class forces, including gender and age balance.

The participants at the Workshop were involved in identifying, planning and implementation of study groups and training workshops that will lead to outreach work in the communities and research and practical fields. Even here, in the practical fields and communities the learning and information gathering activities will be participatory ensuring that the communities take part in assembling and benefit from this new pool of knowledge. The strategy also involves a wider geographical spread, which cuts across "national" boundaries. Such an approach is also innovative since most research and practical activity tend to be carried out within single "national" borders and practitioners do not learn from other experiences across regional borders. This "field building" project will try to overcome these "boundaries" between knowledge and establish a common understanding of issues which focus on the betterment of the human being across "national boundaries."

The second phase of the project is a mid-term one, which is to focus on how such knowledge could be integrated, synthesized, and disseminated to a wider range of audiences, including governments, international organizations, NGOs, CBOs, students, researchers, and the affected communities themselves. This phase will involve setting up a committee which will make reports about the available knowledge and publish and/or disseminate some of this knowledge in the form of reports, monographs, journals, newsletters and the creation of a website where some of this information will be exhibited and made available to the different kinds of audiences and actors. This will include translations of some of the texts into different kinds of languages, particularly into indigenous ones which would enable the communities to access such knowledge after it has been identified.

The long-term objective is to establish a number of study and training workshops which were to study particular topics and themes in more depth aimed at integration and creating synthetic methodologies for bringing about such integration of knowledge. It would also involve holding workshops, seminars, and conferences to consider the results of these studies and new registries as well as the emerging trends, methodologies, and paradigms in the context of the different disciplines. The training Workshops will involve actors who are in a position to widen the knowledge about this process such as the media, community activists, environmental workers and human rights activists, and the targeting of particular social groups such as women, youths, religious associations, and different kinds of activists, etc. for sensitization about the available new knowledges and approaches.

In practical effect, these different kinds of phases will be mixed as has already happened in the process started in the Kampala Workshop. Some activities (such as training) which would have come in the long term phase will be taken on already in the medium term. This intermixing shows that different kinds of activities can be handled side by side while others need time to be articulated and crystallized. In addition, it will be noted that research groups have will already have been set up to look into issues of philosophies, methodologies, and epistemologies if future research is to be coherent and integrative. The longer term research issues would require a process for them to emerge and take a concrete form since the "Field" we are building is an innovative approach to the whole issue of research and knowledge creation, assemblage and storage. Such a process may in fact be part of paradigm formation which cannot be foretold but has to emerge with the process of building the field. For this reason, some activities envisaged in long-term phase are already emerging in the second mid-term phase.

The most important and critical determinant in the evaluation of all these "field building" activities will be to what extent the communities from which this knowledge is assembled is regarded as being useful in helping them solve their problems, quite apart from the considerations of "objective scholarship" that underlies this activity. An evaluation of how the communities perceive the way the synthesized knowledge has been used will form part of the judgment as to the success of the "Field Building" activity.

The strategy here is to establish a "field" where none has existed before by bringing face to face different kinds of researched knowledge by different researchers, actors and practitioners in order to synthesize them into a holistic pool of knowledge. This pool will come from the knowledge, expertise and skills from institutions, individuals, practitioners and communities, which have not communicated before. Hopefully, it will result in the discovery of the fact that there exists complimentary knowledge, expertise and skills which could be useful to them as a pool rather than as separate compartments of knowledge. This will help to create wider and self-conscious perspectives for them that will energize them in new directions and enrich their work. This is an innovative approach which will be experimented upon by creating study circles and groups as well as setting up of training workshops to create new awareness about the value of this complimentary use of existing knowledge in an integrated way.