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.