Leverhulme Research Programme
Compromise after Conflict
4th Annual Report 2012-2013
Preamble
The Programme began in September 2009 and runs for five years. This is the fourth Annual Report, covering the academic year 2012-2013. This Report will be posted on the Programme’s website along with the response from the International Advisory Board. The purpose of the Report is to record the Programme’s achievements over the year and to subject the Programme’s progress to external review by the International Advisory Board. The Board’s assessment will be copied to The Leverhulme Trust, Queen’s University and the University of Aberdeen, along with this Report. (The Board’s assessment is reproduced at the end of this Report.)
Overview of achievements 2012-2013
If the first year was one of fruitful birth, the second of sustained growth, the third of emerging achievement, the fourth has been one of fulfilment. Data collection is now more or less complete, with the final survey data sent from Sri Lanka at Christmas. Analysis is now well underway. One of the linked projects was completed in the year (truth recovery) and thus we said goodbye to the Research Fellow (Corinne Caumartin). Threestudents have been awarded their PhD, and the fourth is submitting at the end of March. One of the PhD students folded into the programme but funded from other sources was also awarded their degree in the year. Several public presentations and conference papers have been completed, and some publications directly linked to the Programme have appeared in international peer reviewed journals. The book series based on the Programme, entitled Palgrave Studies in Compromise after Conflict, with John Brewer as Series Editor, saw its first book appear in January 2013, written by John Brewer, David Mitchell and Gerard Leavey and is on the role of religion in transitional justice. Our website is proving very popular and our Twitter account is very successful in drawing attention to our research, with over 8500 followers, including governments and international agencies. Two internal Programme workshops were held during the year, one each in Aberdeen and Belfast, thelatter attended by a new member of the International Advisory Board (Professor Roddie Cowie, who is Queen’s University’s representative). In addition, in May 2013, the Aberdeen- based team provided an overview of their work to Professor Gordon Marshall, Director of the Leverhulme Trust, when he visited the University of Aberdeen.
It is also important to record that the Principal Investigator and one of the Co-Investigators moved to Queen’s University Belfast during the year, so the Programme is represented at both the University of Aberdeen and Queen’s University. Brewer, Teeney and Dudgeon moved to Queen’s, and Hayes and Mueller-Hirth remained at Aberdeen. The PhDs remained at Aberdeen but continued to be supervised by Brewer. The financial administration of the Programme moved to Queen’s, whose server hosts our social media, but the Programme is a joint enterprise. Document Manager runs from Aberdeen University. AT Queen’s University, the Programme is now located in the Institute for the Study of Conflict Transformation and Social Justice.
John Brewer was awarded his DSocSci (honoriscausa) from Brunel University in 2012 for services to social science, including in part for the study of peace processes.The University Orator made reference to the Leverhulme Programme in his address.
Some of these matters will be accounted for separately, and expanded, in what follows.
Internal management of the Programme
This is a very large Programme, with one Principal Investigator, two Co-Investigators, three Post-Doctoral Fellows, and seven PhD students. It involves co-ordination of fieldwork in three countries (Northern Ireland, South Africa and Sri Lanka). Our internal communication systems are considerably enhanced by the use of Skype. Video conference calling by means of Skype is used on almost a daily basis between the research teams in Aberdeen, Belfast and Sri Lanka, creating a smooth and easy method of keeping in touch with distance being eliminated as a barrier to good working practice and delivery. We also hold twice annual workshops, where the Belfast and Aberdeen teams meet jointly to discuss progress and report across the sites. Two were held in the year, October 2012 in Aberdeen, the second in Belfast in June 2012, at which Professor Jeffrey Alexander spoke on the theme of cultural trauma following conflict. Contact is maintained with the Sri Lankan fieldworkers through occasional visits. The team also has a dedicated part of Aberdeen University’s server, called Document Manager, which is accessed by a unique password known only to members of the Leverhulme Programme. Using this facility, we upload all data files from the three case countries, minutes of meetings and internal Programme workshops, other web links and notable documents, so that they can be accessed by everyone at any time. This facility is managed by Francis Teeney.
Individual projects
Northern Ireland
The Northern Irish project has been in progress the longest, beginning September 2009 and is the template for the South African and Sri Lankan cases. The Northern Ireland project was originally designed to be in three sequential stages: a) qualitative interviews with a sample of 70-80 victims; b) a random sample survey of 500 victims in victim support groups; and c) general population random sample survey of 1,500 people. Problems in stage 2 meant we had to proceed out of sequence. Stages one and three are now completed. The second stage was stymied by the failure to generate a reliable sampling frame because of the unreliability of the records of victim support groups (the discovery of which took up much of the first year of the project), and, with the permission of the Leverhulme Trust, was replaced with follow-up qualitative interviews with respondents from the national population survey. This has also been completed. Thus all stages have been completed successfully and data analysis is underway.
Qualitative interviews
Qualitative interviews were conducted amongst two types of respondents - victims of the conflict (conducted primarily by Dr Katrin Dudgeon), and policy-makers and public figures responsible to victim issues (conducted primarily by Dr Francis Teeney). All interviews are complete. A 52-page draft document has been produced by Dudgeon as a preliminary analysis of the qualitative data. Teeney is in the process of producing a similar document for the practitioners.
General population survey
The questionnaire, known as the Northern Ireland Social and Political Attitudes Survey, is based on a multi-stage stratified random sample and is a nationally representative survey of the adult population in Northern Ireland, with a response rate of 59 per cent. The target survey population – 1,500 individuals – was achieved in August 2011. Some provisional analysis has already been undertaken, and several papers have been published in high-impact peer review journals (see Publication Record below).
Follow-up interviews with the general population
In January 2012, we decided to replace the proposed random survey of 500 victims in victim support groups by a series of in-depth follow-up interviews with respondents from the general survey. The reason for this change was twofold: a) despite many and continuing efforts on our behalf, we remained unable to generate a reliable sampling frame because of the unreliability of records of victim support groups; b) because of the fallout from the PSNI’s request to Boston College for the transcripts of interviews previously undertaken by leading paramilitary figures in Northern Ireland, many individuals were refusing to participate in academic research. Thus, permission was given by the Leverhulme Trust to undertake this change. Katrin Dudgeon was responsible for conducting 50 follow-up interviews with selected respondents from the general population survey. These have now been completed and a separate draft document has been produced by Dudgeon giving a preliminary analysis.
South Africa
The South African project is led by Dr Natascha Mueller-Hirth, who returned from maternity leave in November 2012. It has qualitative and quantitative parts.
Qualitative interviews
The primary focus of the South African project is qualitative interviews amongst victims and amongst witnesses and organisers of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Two periods of field work were conducted in South Africa and all qualitative interviews have been completed. A substantial draft document has been written by Mueller-Hirth giving a preliminary analysis of this data using the same coding format as in the Northern Irish case.
Quantitative data
A second stage to the South African case is analysis of secondary survey data sets on victim issues conducted among the general population. Surveys that include questions that can be compared with the Northern Ireland Social and Political Attitudes Survey were selected. These include the South African Social Attitudes Survey (SASAS), Afrobarometer and the South African Reconciliation Barometer (SARB). One annual survey, the SARB, is particularly relevant for our purposes, and allows comparison over time on attitudes to victim support, perpetrators, tolerance, race relations, forgetting, memory, affirmative action, land reform, and variables. SARB Datasets from 2003 until 2011 were obtained from the Institute for Reconciliation and Justice (IJR) in Cape Town. We have catalogued replicable questions over the nine rounds of the survey and recoded the data sets. Preliminary analysis of these data sets has been undertaken with a view to publication of a journal article. This has examined attitudes to dealing with the legacies of the past (reparations; government supporting victims; government persecuting perpetrators; remembering the past) and compromise mediators (hope; trust; inter-group networks).The compilation of this survey data is still ongoing.
Sri Lanka
This project comes in two parts and both have been completed.
Qualitative interviews
The Sri Lankan project began in September 2010 and focused initially on undertaking qualitative interviews with victims (stage 1 of the Northern Ireland template). These are now complete. Eighty interviews were undertaken in local languages. The translation back into English was checked by fluent speakers in Tamil and Sinhala. Transcription and translation of the interviews is complete but analysis of the data has not yet begun.
Quantitative survey
With the abandonment of stage 2 in the Northern Ireland project, we replicated stage 3 in Sri Lanka instead, by researching the general population utilising culturally appropriate questions from the Northern Ireland questionnaire, translated into the two main Sri Lankan languages. This retains the ambition to make cross-national comparisons across all three sites. The Asian Institute of Missiology conducted the survey fieldwork on our behalf, utilising their experienced team of local interviewers. The deterioration in the country’s political situation caused delayed the completion of the survey in the heavily militarised Tamil areas of Sri Lanka, but we have reached our sample size of 500 people and the work was completed in December 2013. The surveys have been translated back into English and are now being coded by Katrin Dudgeon, who will work with Natascha Mueller-Hirth and Bernie Hayes in analysis by SPPS. This is only now beginning.
Widows and orphans project
Following on from John Brewer’s visit to Sri Lanka in February 2012, it was agreed with members of the Asian Institute of Missiology to engage in a small scale but active civil society peacebuilding project. The inaugural meeting took place in March 2012 of an initiative established to bring together Sinhalese and Tamilwidows and their children, who are victims of the conflict,as part of grassroots peace building and reconciliation work in Sri Lanka. The first two meetings have been fundedfrom withinSri Lanka. The second took place in December 2012.
Truth Commissions
This project got underway in March 2011 with the appointment of Dr Corinne Caumartin, and ran for two years. It was completed in March 2013 and Caumartin left the Programme. A document was prepared by Caumartin giving a preliminary analysis of the data.
The purpose was to analyse the compromise dimensions of witness testimonies gathered during various truth-seeking exercises internationally, and to discuss some of the strengths and weaknesses of truth recovery as a process for dealing with post-conflict reconstruction and in meeting victims’ needs for justice and truth. For the purpose of this research, a typology of truth commissions was elaborated by identifying four major sets of distinctions in the truth gathering process: international versus nationally led processes; processes undertaken following major political transition versus regime continuation; state sanctioned and informal processes; and local/community versus national level processes.
A number of case studies representing the major truth seeking exercises identified in the typology were incorporated in the research – Sierra Leone, Liberia, Peru, Guatemala and USA (Greensborough).
PhD students
Laura Fowler Graham (start February 2010 – Completed)
The thesis, entitled An Evaluation of Leadership Roles and Social Capital in Northern Ireland’s Victim Support Groups: Theory, Policy and Practice, was awarded in 2013 and Laura graduated in July that year. Her external examiner was Professor Brandon Hamber from the University of Ulster. Laura subsequently obtained a teaching post at Tufts University in the USA.
Sandra Rios (start October 2010 – Completed)
Sandra’s thesis, Religion and the Social Reconstruction of Memory amid Conflict: The Case of the Massacre of Bojayá (Colombia)was awarded subject to very minor revisions in January 2014, with graduation in July 2014. Her external examiner was Professor Andrew Hoskins from Glasgow University.
Clare Magill (start October 2010 – Completed)
Clare Magill was awarded her thesis following a successful viva in February 2014. Her research was on the recovered memory project in contemporary Spain and its impact on the school curriculum. Her external examiner was Professor Tony Gallagher from Queen’s University Belfast. This is an even more remarkable achievement since Clare is seven and a half months pregnant.
Rachel Anderson (start October 2010)
Rachel’s progress was delayed by illness, forcing her to withdraw from her studies for a short while, but the thesis is due for submission in March 2014. The external examiner is Professor Roger MacGinty from Manchester University. Her research is on the social reintegration of child soldiers in Sierra Leone.
Other linked PhD students
In addition to the four Leverhulme Trust-funded PhD students, three other PhD students funded from other sources have been folded into the Programme team in order to add to the critical mass of students working in the area and to assist in integration and shared learning. They are:
Dave Magee (started October 2009 – Completed). The thesis was awarded in July 2013. His research was on the deconstruction of violent masculinities amongst members of the Loyalist paramilitary organisations. External examiner was Professor Jim McAuley from Huddersfield University.
Aimee Smith (stated October 2011) is funded by the ESRC and is working on Catholic youth identity in Northern Ireland post peace process, addressing elements of change and continuity as a measure of how the peace process is experienced by people. Aimee remains registered with the University of Aberdeen and is supervised by John Brewer (external supervisor) and Bernadette Hayes. She is now in her final year and is writing up.
Duncan Scott (started October 2012) is funded by the Commonwealth International Scholarship scheme, and is working on the role of religion in transitional justice in South Africa. He is registered with Queen’s University and is supervised by John Brewer and Cheryl Lawther. He has completed fieldwork and is now undertaking analysis.
IT and public dissemination
Responsibility for managing the presence of our research in social media and the Internet falls to Francis Teeney. In previous years we relied on Face Book and Twitter with huge success. Since last year we have introduced a highly successful blog. .
Our Twitter following @Compromisestudy has increased dramatically in the last 12 months and now stands at 8,439 followers. The individual Twitter accounts of John Brewer (1721 followers) and Francis Teeney (1256 followers) increases the reach of the Programme dramatically. Large numbers of our followers are global figures, international governments, religious leaders, mainstream media and a wide variety of high quality Twitter users. They range from the White House to the EU, Downing Street, the UN, Ghandi Foundation, the Mandela Foundation, the Vatican, NATO, BBC, and all manner of political parties and pressure groups. In order to use Twitter to its full potential and reach an even wider global audience we also use Audio-boo, which is a system of disseminating a vocal recording of an interview.
Face Book
Our Face Book page ( has 644 ‘likes’ and has a total reach of many thousands each week due to the high profile of our followers. Face Book allows us to use different mediums such as video, pictures, and allows for longer comment and in depth discussion. We link our Twitter and Face Book together in order to achieve full coverage across both mediums simultaneously.
Blog
Our blog (Compromise after Conflict at has been very successful in terms of message dissemination and public engagement. We started our blog last July 2012 with the theme of Hope for the Future. It was an instant success and many leading Northern Ireland politicians, victims groups and church figures have posted. We developed this theme to include the Haass-O’Sullivan talks, which have dominated the political situation in Northern Ireland for the last six months as they attempted to deal with flags, parades and the past. Our contributors consisted of the leadership of all the political parties, as well as the deputy First Minister, Martin McGuinness, church leaders and victims. The blog is constantly being picked up mainstream media, and has featured many times on the BBCNI. We have run simultaneous articles with local press and even had a two page spread in the Times Higher Education (see To date the blog has received in excess of 850,000 hits, and is considered a major contributor to the Northern Ireland post conflict debate; it attracts thousands of unique visits each month from across the globe.The blog has not only constrained itself to Northern Ireland as we have also posted articles on South Africa, the legacy of Nelson Mandela, issues of forgiveness and culture.