The study
The 26 years of war between the Sri Lankan armed forces and the
Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a proscribed terrorist
organization, resulted in over 750,000 IDPs at the end of the war in May
2009. The majority of these IDPs were resettled by mid-2014 (Ministry of
Resettlement 2014) under an expedited resettlement process conducted by
the government of Sri Lanka (GOSL). Despite this resettlement process,
the post-war zones in Sri Lanka still face three main challenges: the
wellbeing of resettled IDPs, rebuilding the shattered economy and
preventing future wars. Facing these challenges is complicated by the
lack of access during and after to war zones due to lack of
de-militarization, which has resulted in a lack of research and data.
Although the war has ceased, conducting fieldwork in post-war
environments presents formidable issues in terms of the scale of the
risks involved compared to fieldwork in non-war areas. For example,
researchers must overcome challenges such as gaining access, hostility,
distrust, intimidation at the personal level as well as communal
humiliation, human rights abuses, enforced disappearances at a broader
level, and assuring the safety of all involved in an increasingly
volatile environment. This paper discusses the practical issues faced by
the researcher when conducting fieldwork in a complicated context such
as this and proposes some suggestions to mitigate risks to researchers
when implementing fieldwork in post-war zones.
The researcher grew up in the poorest part of a poor country surrounded
by poverty and has seen and experienced poverty personally and lived-in
experience showed how the cycle of poverty curtailed opportunities. The
researcher also experienced the ethnic war first-hand, which tore apart
the country with death and destruction. Through personal contacts, the
researcher came to know the scale of poverty in resettled communities at
a time when official statistics were unavailable. For example, 2012/
2013 statistics were issued in August 2015, which was the first
available official statistics since the early 1980s (DoCS, 2015). The
researcher himself is an entrepreneur who knows the power of it to open
doors, opportunities and its ability to transform lives. As a result,
the researcher wanted to know the role of entrepreneurship in escaping
poverty in contexts of PWZs and embarked on this research project.
The focus of the research was to explore the potential of
entrepreneurship in eradicating poverty in post-war zones and the
district of Mullaitivu in Sri Lanka was selected to conduct fieldwork.
This District was selected mainly because it is the poorest district in
the country, having seen the most destructive in terms of infrastructure
and lives, as well as being the area where the final battles took place,
displacing the largest number of people in a single event during the 26
years of the war. The fieldwork was carried out for approximately 4
months in 2015, in which 129 screening questionnaires were collected and
61 semi-structured face-to-face interviews conducted. The interviewees
included government officials, office bearers of community-based
organisations (CBOs), officials of third sector organisations,
entrepreneurs and aspiring entrepreneurs. Fieldwork was carried out
after receiving written permission by respective Divisional Secretaries
in three divisional secretariats in the Mullaitivu District namely,
Maritimepattu (MTP), Puthukuditiruppu (PTK) and Oddusudan (ODD). Data
and information were collected at respondent’s homes and their
legitimate business/ workplaces.