This is the first in a series
of posts on quantitative peace research. Relatively new and often
relegated to the 'huh?' panel stream at conferences, quant research in peace
and conflict studies has been gaining ground in the past decade for several
reasons. Besides imbuing the word peace with less fuzzy/idealistic
qualities thereby making it easier to build policies, raise money, frame
political action platforms, and fuel solutions to conflict (Although it is the
source of conflict with qualitative purists. I won't hide that I am pro
mixed methods... a topic for another post), the most promising reason quant
research is having an impact in the field is that studies are being conducted
by researchers with some surprising backgrounds beyond the usual
polisci/sociology/social science disciplines. These individuals bring
with them alien concepts from neuroscience and even field experience from
actual military combat that make for a truly multidimensional approach.
Whose Truth/Justice/Reconciliation? is a short version of an upcoming
talk at The 8th Human Welfare in Conflict
Conference.
While presenting a seminar on
the findings from my doctoral research (looking at narrative distortions
produced via mobile ICT applications by bilingual participants), someone made
an interesting comment about the applicability of my research, and methodology
in particular, to transitional justice contexts. This paper is an opportunity
to develop that idea further.
In very generalized
terms, post-conflict
peace processes known often as ‘truth and reconciliation’ programs have been
criticized for imposing a framework of justice that is culturally mismatched to
the participating population’s concepts of justice. (see, for example, Avruch,
2010) In this paper, I focused on
concepts of culpability and agency by providing a nuanced quantitative
measure to distinguish culturally rooted concepts of justice, responsibility,
and agency. (Boroditsky,
2010; Costa
et al., 2014) The novel methodology adapted from cognitive
linguistics combined quantitative measures of conceptual frames surrounding
doubt, agency, and event structure to describe the concept of
culpability. Results have the potential to enhance dimensionality for
articulating complex processes such as justice and reconciliation as well
as discussing the efficacy of such post-conflict programs.
I began by looking at the
influence of ICT in conflict contexts because it is inescapable. Due to
the increasing use of information and communication technology (ICT)
applications
in the fields of peacebuilding and conflict resolution for gathering human
rights abuse reports, election monitoring, polling, violence reporting, and
other conflict management data
collection activities that inform policy-making and participatory governance,
this research performed a bilingual experiment with methodology from cognitive
linguistics in order to describe the problematic nature of the ICT used in the
conflict management context. This study was the first to incorporate
cognitive-level communication variations and preferences as design
considerations in the context of conflict management. (a.k.a radical alien
interdisciplinary research)
I have written extensively in previous posts about what cognitive-level means, but a brief recap. Pulling in research from both cognitive psychology and linguistics that examines memory, thought patterns such as categorization, problem-solving, cause-effect relationships, concepts of time and space, and use of language, this methodology focused, in particular, on conceptualization. Conceptualization often requires complex relational understandings of objects, persons, time, space, and events. The type of concepts that interest me concern events such as those that might be reported during conflict such as violence at a polling station or other incidents recalled as narratives and collected with mobile ICT applications. (These narratives, once aggregated, become data for policy makers indicating hotspots of violence, political unrest, economic need, or even health crises.) In order to observe concepts (because I can't see thoughts), I observed 'conceptual frames.' A frame is something that computer scientists refer to, cartoonists refer to, cognitive psychologists refer to. It is a fragment like a subject or a predicate, a basic unit of cognitive capacity that describes a perception such as he vs. they or something falling vs. something rising.
Building from earlier work I
had done which examined the consequences of a language barrier for ICT in
crisis contexts (post-earthquake Haiti 2010, Libya and Egypt 2011, and Somalia
2011/12) which asserted that:
This flawed application prevented the original contributors from interacting with the information directly related to their own life-threatening situation, and the information it amassed formed an unsound basis for decision-making by international actors…. (Sutherlin, 2013, p.1)
my doctoral research (as well
as this new paper) pursued the idea that the conceptual structure underlying
language—the ‘organizational logic’ that occurs at the cognitive or
thought-level—remained problematic for participation with ICT tools and the
power they can leverage for policy-making for use by local actors. In
order to investigate conceptual structures, this research adapted experiments
from cognitive linguistics that provided a quantitative means to assess the
communication of concepts.
In the northern region of Uganda, Gulu district, Gulu
town, 29 bilingual Acholi-English participants completed a three-stage
experiment. (I know it doesn't sound like a lot but that's an average number of
participants for this type of bilingual study.) Participants viewed a
YouTube video depicting a chaotic street brawl, and were then asked to describe
what they had seen in three distinct narrative forms: oral Acholi, written
Acholi on a mobile device, and oral English. By comparing narrative
construction and identifying concepts unique to certain narratives, the
experiment looked at the level of thought before language, the cognitive level,
and thus followed in the footsteps of earlier research in the field of
cognitive linguistics that examined how concepts from one language can be
observed to transfer into another.
**A quick note about language/culture/cognition: because this was a bilingual experiment and the data was in the form of 'language' but the variables under investigation were cultural and cognitive variation, the two comparison languages used in the experiment should be considered exemplars of cultures with certain characteristics that have a high cognitive impact such as orality or how categories are used. The characteristics which differ form a really long list, but part of the reason these two languages are compared/contrasted is their linguistic and cultural distance to one another which brings the issues under investigation into relief. (Linguistic distance was proposed by Greenberg in 1956 and extended by Lieberson in 1964 and even has a Wikipedia entry so it has got to be pretty well established. It quantifies how different dialects and languages such as German and Dutch vary from one another. Cultural distance is adapted from this idea. So English represents the culture that produced the ICT application and Acholi represents the culture using the application for data collection/aggregation/policymaking in conflict contexts.) To summarize, it's not an experiment about English vs. every other single language or any specific language at all; it's about variations in underlying thinking (preceding or accompanying language). Because we can 'see' thinking, the experiment observes language production and makes inferences about cognition and the culture that influenced it.
During the analysis, I looked for evidence of English
to transfer into Acholi due to the presence of ICT. For example, in the
ICT recall stage, although participants were reading in Acholi and writing in
Acholi, the logic of the ICT application which had been designed (as nearly all
software has been) with the logic of English in its core would trigger English
concepts in participants bilingual brains. Concepts from English would
transfer into their Acholi narratives that would not normally appear in an
Acholi narrative. My hypothesis was that, in essence, the ICT format
would prescribe the participants' narratives in a way that was not natural to
Acholi; there would be distortions or dissonance. In 3/4 of the cases
this was true. There was a narrative shift and not simply one
attributable to speaking vs. writing because I was looking at specific schemata
and narrative structure. (From speaking to writing you might change how you
describe something, but you don't change the story.)
Before conducting the
experiment, I spent three months in the field. I did intensive language
immersion. I had discussions with local university professors, hunted for
literature to review (anthropology, literature, poetry, linguistics, narrative
studies, psychology). All so I could identify specific cultural schema
and narrative patterns. Schemata (sing. schema) are cognitive shortcuts that
our brains use to make sense of the immense amount of sensory information we
take in. They are made up of conceptual frames. For example, you
can recognize a dog in a fraction of a second out of the corner of your eye
because it fits the model/shortcut/set of conceptual frames for that
animal. We rely on schemata in order to be more efficient with our mental
energy as well as to make sense of unusual or new situations by slotting what
we see/hear/etc., onto the scaffolding of existing a schema and proceeding with
a 'best fit' guess. By focusing on schemata, this connected the
experimental results to culturally formed concepts and the level of thought
rather than a discourse analysis on language. Schemata are culturally
informed in this way-- you are probably familiar with the adage, 'When you hear
hoof beats think horses, not zebras.' Does everyone everywhere think
horses? It may depend on place/culture. The video prompt for the
experiment was chaotic and shared some familiar characteristics (because it was
a street scene in Nigeria and the market stalls and taxi stand looked similar
to Uganda as well as YouTube having made Nigerian videos popular viewing across
the continent); however, the unfamiliar language in the video and, again, the
chaotic scene, made it likely that it would trigger in participants the
reliance on their culturally learned schemata. That was the idea anyway.
Among the key findings, the concepts of culpability
(who was guilty) and agency (who was involved) emerged as unique between what
was described via ICT and orally in Acholi. Crucially, several
participants claimed that one specific individual was to blame for the incident
in their ICT recall while they had only described a group having possibly been
involved in something during their initial Acholi oral recall. In
addition, several participants changed the very nature of the event between
these two recalls. If we imagine these reports as part of a police
investigation, the initial set of oral reports seems to indicate no action is
needed while the ICT reports point the finger at one man. Troubling to
say the least.
In conclusion, if cultural constructs such as justice, culpability, and agency are both consciously and unconsciously programmed into technology, then the ICT application is putting limitations on the narrative, perhaps even prescribing conceptual elements of narrative for something as vital and nuanced as justice. If we imagine a field poll being taken about what form transitional justice should take, if technology is involved, even in the aggregation of narratives later, this could radically alter the results by altering authorship/intentionality/voice/participation. In addition to this practical impact, the methodology I used (with or without the mediating factor of technology) could offer a deeper understanding of the core conceptualization of justice within a society by being able to break the concept down at a cognitive level. Subsequent posts will continue to look at each of these concepts in more depth (culpability and agency) as well as build on comments/reactions to the paper.
