Colombia presents with one of the largest armed conflicts in the world. Children exposed directly or indirectly to armed conflicts live the emotional footprints left by war. This paper aims to identify mental health problems among children survivors of Colombia’s armed conflict and associated factors.,A cross-sectional study with (n = 80) children aged 7 to 11 years (M = 9.8 years; SD = 1.4) was conducted using the Child Behavior Checklist, Family APGAR and MOS social support survey adaptation to children. Linear regression analyses were also performed with emotional and behavioral problems as the outcomes and related factors as the predictors.,Clinical levels of emotional and behavioral problems were found in 56.3% of children. Internalizing problems (63.7%) were more common than externalizing problems (51.2%). Older children had greater emotional problems at the trend level, and those with higher functioning families had lower emotional problems. Children with higher perceived social support had lower behavior problems at the trend level.,This study includes a sample facing multiple risks and uses a holistic approach to consider family and social resources that may support children who are survivors of the armed conflict in Colombia. These results provide a foundation for future promotion and prevention programs related to children’s mental health problems to support peacebuilding within the framework of the Colombian post-conflict process.,To the best of authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to collect empirical data on the mental health of children survivors of Colombia’s armed conflict focused in the Atlantic Department.

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Mental health problems, family functioning and social support among children survivors of Colombia’s armed conflict

Researching protests and activism can contain various challenges, even more so when then the researcher embeds themselves in the protest context. Based on an ethnographic study of an environmental campaign in Sweden we will in this chapter discuss the challenges and risks the first author faced when collecting longitudinal interview and observational data. More specifically, we discuss challenges and risks related to gaining access to a protest setting, gaining access to people, gaining access to stories, maintaining access and trust, and becoming vulnerable and at risk in the field. In particular we discuss advantages, and risks, of the researcher taking sides and positioning themselves on one side of the conflict. We argue that, in the study of the Swedish environmental campaign, taking sides made us better positioned to give a more accurate account of the campaign and campaign participants through understanding the context and phenomena. We will also suggest that taking sides and becoming part of the group – sharing identity – can in some studies increase the researcher’s safety while in the field. We highlight the need for continuous negotiations and consideration while in the field to ensure both the participants’ and researcher’s safety and privacy.

Taking sides with Swedish protesters : gaining and maintaining trust in the field

Motivation Fragility and closing civic space present significant challenges for research, making research processes more onerous and difficult, particularly on social and political issues. And yet these contexts may be those that may most need to be researched to understand the trend in democratic backsliding being witnessed in many parts of the world. Purpose How can researchers navigate difficult contexts characterized by fragility and closing space to conduct rigorous yet safe research? We contribute to a growing literature on this question by exploring researcher strategies in contexts characterized by both fragility and closing civic spaces, as well as the obstacles and challenges they face. Methods and approach We draw on the reflections and experiences of researchers directly engaged in managing and undertaking research on social and political action in four contexts affected by varying levels of conflict and violence over a five-year period. Their insights were gathered through observations, informal interviews and discussions over that time, and a focus group discussion. Findings Based on the experiences of these researchers we argue that fragile citizen–state relations make the research process and its associated relationships themselves more fragile, indeterminate, and tentative. We note challenges of access, both formal and informal, low trust, and ethical dilemmas. We then highlight four strategies that stand out as common in navigating these challenges and undertaking research successfully. Policy implications We argue that research in fragile contexts with closing civic spaces needs long-term collaboration with local partners that includes building the capacity of emerging researchers and maintaining close accompaniment to create relationships of equality and a community of practice. This requires such research to be more rather than less involved and engaged with participants and research partners located in these contexts, in contrast to suggestions elsewhere that more remote or virtual engagement is the answer. But this research needs to take account upfront of the inherent challenges and uncertainty of research process, and where findings can be safely shared. 

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Researching governance in difficult times and places: Reflections from Mozambique, Myanmar, Nigeria and Pakistan

Racial majority and minority groups in the United States often differ in the extent to which they believe that racial bias—including stereotyping, expressions of prejudice, and discrimination— has and continues to influence the opportunities and outcomes of individuals and communities across a wide variety of domains. Communication and dialogue between members of different racial groups is often considered an effective method to combat bias. Through dialogue, members of groups in conflict can learn about relevant issues, seek to understand each other’s perspectives and work together toward productive solutions. However, for a variety of reasons, people from different racial groups are often reluctant to initiate interracial dialogue to discuss racial bias, and often these discussions end with each “side” feeling unheard, misunderstood, rejected, and unlikely to make future attempts to engage. This conflict is present within a variety of organizations that seek to understand and address the challenges and opportunities associated with a diverse workplace. In this chapter, four scholars—a Black woman, a White woman, a Black man, and a White man—team up to discuss insights from their experiences in communicating research about the existence and nature of racial bias to various audiences in the United States. We conclude that various aspects of our own identities (race, gender, professional status) and motivational states (expectations, enthusiasm, uncertainty, threat) intersect with the identities and motivational states of our audiences to influence what we communicate and how we do so. We recommend that researchers and practitioners consider these intersections in their efforts to develop more effective confrontation strategies.

Confronting Conflicting Attitudes About Racial Bias in the United States: How Communicator Identities Shape Audience Reception

In December 2018, Sudanese people took to the streets in increasing numbers to topple the Omar Al-Bashir regime. The protests were met with brutal force. People’s collective action was very costly as they risked being arrested or killed, and yet, they still stood their ground. Based on WhatsApp conversations with revolutionaries and discussions among the authors (two of which are revolutionaries), this chapter explores the Sudanese revolution. The chapter has two key aims. First, we want to highlight collective action in high-risk contexts. In settings such as Sudan, extensive, lengthy, and organized collective action was required to overthrow the regime, and this was carried out under repressive conditions. The motivations and the drivers of such collective action are potentially quite different from the ones driving collective action with few or mild ramifications for participants. Exploring real-life resistance with real-life consequences in extreme contexts is a valuable and necessary addition to the collective action literature in psychology, as different theoretical frameworks may be needed to understand such processes. Second, this chapter highlights ownership of knowledge production. This chapter attempts to learn more directly from revolutionaries, with stakeholders positioning themselves as direct knowledge producers. Through this method, the “insider-outsider” dynamics are shifted, providing new insights.

“Chanting at 1 pm Revolution Time”: Collective Action as Communal Coping in the Sudan Revolution

Conducting research in violent environments poses particular challenges for researchers and participants. The current chapter explores factors that influence field research in Colombia prior to and immediately following the peace accord in 2016, which formally ended the country’s 50-year conflict between the government and the country’s largest guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (after its Spanish abbreviation FARC). The authors include Colombian and international researchers, practitioners, and academics and offer three proposals. First, working in violent contexts demands that the research is flexible and responds to the participants’ voices and needs. This type of research may be particularly coherent with Participatory Action Research (PAR), which explicitly recognizes the power and agency of local actors who navigate conflict issues on a daily basis. Second, we demonstrate how ongoing violence poses obstacles, offers opportunities, and shapes each phase of investigation, such as research design and data collection. For example, we discuss how to select regions to study that are safe for the team and for participants to engage in research. Relatedly, a strong, local network is essential to research on sensitive social issues relating to on-going conflict dynamics. Third, the inclusion of emerging researchers, particularly from the conflict setting, in the team may increase local capacity as well as the longevity of the project. We reflect on the challenges and opportunities to including emerging researchers and conclude the chapter by suggesting how these issues may apply to other conflict and post-agreement settings.

Paola Forero

Papers

Conducting field research amid violence : experiences from Colombia