Challenges in Collecting and Assessing Oral Materials
Over the course of my research sojourns in Somaliland, I conducted some 158 interviews, and, moreover, engaged in uncounted informal personal conversations with informants in Somaliland, Nairobi, London, Paris, and Geneva. While those informal conversations were undertaken with individuals from a great diversity of professional backgrounds and social status, I conducted the formal interviews largely with key informants of Somaliland’s political, administrative, business and media elite. This approach was justified by the fact that key informant interviews allow the researcher to focus directly on the research question (Yin 2003:86). Furthermore, the urban elite have higher educational levels, better knowledge of the English language, and generally wider expertise in Somali and Somaliland politics than, for example, most informants in the rural areas, making the former an obvious target group for the research I aimed to undertake. Hence, and due to the fact that Somaliland’s political, economic and intellectual elite are concentrated in the capital, the majority of interviews took place in Hargeysa.
The secondary reason for why I focused my interviews on the urban elite in Hargeysa lay in the logistical and financial challenges of conducting research outside of the capital. Due to a fragile security situation, the carrying through of primary research beyond the confines of the capital comes with significant monetary costs, not least because the Somaliland government requires all foreigners to hire a minimum of two 4×4 vehicles and an armed escort consisting of members of the Special Protection Unit (SPU) when leaving Hargeysa for other destinations within the de facto country. Despite these constraints, I conducted a sizable number of interviews in Borama, Berbera, Burao, and Erigavo. I had been keen to undertake research outside the capital, partly because primary observation on the progress of state-making throughout the Somaliland territory was to inform my research. Moreover, I wanted to guard myself against a ‘capital bias’ in my assessment of Somaliland’s state-making trajectory.
For most of the time, the interviews were ‘semi-structured’ in nature, as this formula not only facilitates a “consistent line of inquiry” (Yin 2003:89) but also allows for a free-flowing stream of questions and information. Consequently, this approach enhanced my chances of acquiring information from the informants’ perspective, rather than my own. Partly in order to ensure a triangulation of information across different interviews, I generally used interview guides that featured central questions pertaining to my key research interests. The further I progressed with my research and the more I immersed myself in the knowledge I had gathered, I adapted the catalog of questions for the semi-structured interviews in order to cover additional ground and explore new narratives. While these interview guides evolved particularly in between my different research sojourns – i.e. during those phases of my research when I took stock of my empirical knowledge, analyzed the material collected to date, and readjusted and fine-tuned my research focus – these guides also evolved over the course of each research trip.
Whereas I recorded and subsequently transcribed the interviews at first, I soon came to realize that this practice restricted not only the number of my possible informants, but also significantly confined the range of information I would be able to gather. As numerous informants were not comfortable having our conversations recorded on tape due to the frequently politically sensitive nature of these discussions, I changed my method to taking notes during the course of the interview and producing protocols from memory thereafter. Although not all of the individuals I interviewed requested anonymity, and while I was reluctant to make all of my interview material anonymous at first, I ultimately opted to keep all interviews confidential, given that the implications of research and its publication are never foreseeable and could possibly impact on the informants’ careers and their lives more generally. Yet, by providing specific information about the profession and/or position of my interviewees in the ‘List of Interviews’ on pages 327-333, and by linking the information obtained in particular interviews with this list through a numerical system throughout this thesis, I hope to have restored some of the validity and transparency the oral materials have forfeited through the process of anonymization.
Although the research presented in this thesis relies on a variety of sources, primary oral materials constitute a central source. This is largely because it is only in interviews that I was able to uncover information and narratives that did not yet constitute part of the established knowledge and received wisdom on Somaliland’s state-making project. Since the interview material provides the principle source of information for this thesis, I have had to confront a number of methodological challenges. Amongst them are the representatively of the interview sample, the reliability of informants’ information, the comparability of different interviews, and the degree of manipulation in the presentation and interpretation of the oral materials.
As regards the selection of informants, I aimed at selecting interviewees from different political and clan groupings within the different sectors I wanted to research, so as to guard against bias and allow for the triangulation of information. Thereby, I undertook special efforts to interview representatives of different ‘sides’ of a particular conflict or event wherever possible, in order to not only validate particular pieces of information but also to gain a greater spectrum of narratives as well as achieve a greater level of objectivity. In practical terms, I started identifying my interviewees through my initial contacts at the Academy for Peace and Development (APD) during the course of my first research sojourn in Somaliland. Given that the APD is probably the most respected local think tank in Somaliland – which has, moreover, been deeply involved in diverse political processes – and due to the circumstance that its researchers come from a wide range of political and kinship backgrounds, selection bias in favor of one or another group was limited. Once I had explored and engaged with the informants suggested to me by APD staff, I started applying a ‘snowball system’ to reach beyond the immediate contacts I had initially been provided with.
During my second and third research sojourns in Somaliland, I commenced identifying my informants in a similar manner, however, from different institutional bases, amongst them the Observatory for Conflict and Violence Prevention (OCVP). Again, I first approached the OCVP staff, subsequently turning towards their own private and professional primary contacts, incrementally making ever more distant connections accessible by applying the ‘snowball system’. Moreover, the longer I stayed in Hargeysa and the more often I returned to the Republic of Somaliland, I increasingly got to know a more random variety of individuals, ranging from hotel staff to parliamentarians, through whom I sought to gain further access to additional informants. The more I learned about Somaliland’s state trajectory and the central actors behind it, the easier I found it to identify and target informants that I deemed particularly relevant or interesting.
Apart from ensuring a balanced interview sample, another central challenge that arises when relying on key informant interviews as the primary source of research lies in the fact that particularly initial interviews run the risk of bias, both on behalf of the interviewee and the interviewer (Yin 2003:86). The fact that my own assessment of Somaliland’s statemaking progress changed during the course of my research helped me to keep my own bias in check. Also, some of the prepossession I encountered on the part of some of my informants seemed to diminish over time – either because I had gained sufficient knowledge so as not to readily ‘buy-in’ to certain narratives offered by particular interviewees, or because I had managed to establish a level of trust with the respective informant. While I had frequently been provided with what appeared to fall into the ‘standard narrative’ of Somaliland’s state-making trajectory during initial interviews – thus, rendering some of the early interviews not useful beyond acting as formal introductions – later interviews seemingly brought to the fore more sophisticated answers from my informants. Thus, where possible, I attempted to repeat interviews, or at least return to the same research question(s) in later sessions with the same informant.
Nevertheless, during the course of my research I was presented with a cacophony of divergent narratives on the question of how Somaliland’s state-making process had evolved. Consequently, I faced the challenge of assessing the validity of my informants’ information and making judgments as to whom and what to believe. According to Thompson (2000:272-274), there are a number of principles that must be followed in order to ensure a certain level of validity of oral histories collected. First, each interview must be reviewed for internal consistency and with a view to discerning the general thrust of the narrative being presented. Second, the researcher must cross-check and triangulate the information provided with a variety of sources. And third, the interview must be reviewed in the context of the researcher’s own understanding of the wider context in which particular events took place. While I tried to adhere to all these requirements, my main strategy in ensuring the reliability of my informants’ information lay, as mentioned before, in cross-referencing and triangulating information with other sources of information from different types of kinship groups, gender, and professional background wherever possible.
While interview informants recalled particular events with reasonable consistency in terms of what happened, explanations for why these events unfolded and who was responsible for setting them in motion, for example, tended to differ significantly. Three factors played into these inconsistencies. First, the interviewees themselves entertained a subjective perspective on certain events and had an interest in according themselves a particular role. Second, it seemed to be apparent that particular political or kinship groups had derived a shared understanding of a particular historical event. Third, there seemed to be an ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ account of past processes and developments – with the ‘official’ one frequently being offered during the early phase of my research in Somaliland, and the ‘unofficial’ one generally being provided once I had established myself as a researcher. Similarly, I found that issues discussed with interviewees and the kind of explanations and responses given by them in the morning seemed to sometimes differ from what I was told in more informal settings in the afternoon.
Because of this and the fact that I was presented with different narratives on Somaliland’s state-making trajectory, I was confronted with the question of whom and what to ultimately believe. This question was particularly pertinent in cases in which the triangulation of information manifested rather than diminished the cacophony of narratives. In certain cases, the question of whom and what to believe presented itself as being relatively straightforward, however. This was, for example, the case when an informant presented a highly political, contested and ambiguous issue in a simplistic manner, glossing over important factors I knew had influenced the aspect under discussion. Similarly, I became suspicious of informants’ accounts, if their narratives fell too neatly in line with their clan’s history – which is why I always tried to gather a good deal of background information on the individual I planned to interview. Consequently, I tended to lend my ear more to those informants, who confronted me with accounts that gave proof of higher levels of reflection, scrutiny, and complexity.
Apart from conducting interviews in a formal manner during the morning hours, and applying a generally slightly less formal setting in the afternoon hours, I also collected parts of my research during very informal khat chewing sessions. During the afternoon hours, men tend to sit with their colleagues and friends in a room of a public or private building, in order to socialize and engulf in the consumption of the light stimulant khat leaves. However, while some researchers have found it valuable to attend these chewing sessions in order to obtain information, I myself did not find them as valuable, after all. This had largely to do with the fact that these afternoon meetings were always held in Somali, leaving me either excluded from the conversation or with an uncomfortable feeling of intrusion, when trying to switch the discussion to English. Moreover, I found my attendance at these sessions to constitute an ineffective use of my time, as it frequently took hours to extract some sparse information or clues. Having said that, some of the khat sessions proved to provide a useful context for gaining additional information or leads, not least because people tended to be more talkative, but also because they often provided an opportunity to immediately triangulate information.
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