A Response to Ilmari Käihkö’s “On Brokers, Commodification of Information and Liberian Former Combatants”

ABSTRACT

In a recent article in Civil Wars, Ilmari Käihkö criticizes my research approach of collaborating with ex-commanders to study their own ex-command structures. While I welcome a discussion concerning the pros and cons of employing this approach, it must be based on a correct representation of the methods that I have used. Käihkö does not do this in his article, and he makes a number of false statements about my research. My ambition with this paper is to set the record straight and pave the way for a more productive discussion about how to best study ex-command structures.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Maria Eriksson Baaz, Lotta Themnér, Mats Utas, and the editors at Civil Wars for their helpful comments. I am is also grateful for the support provided by the Centre for Gender and Africa Studies, University of the Free State, where I am a research fellow.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The terms ex-combatant networks, ex/informal military networks, and ex-command structures are employed interchangeably.

2. While I refer to the ex-commander as “David” in Themnér (2015), he is called “Joseph” and “Paul” in Themnér (2019) and Themnér and Karlén (2020). These are not his real names.

3. e.g. when Käihkö discusses the reliability of one of my key informants – who I call ‘David’ in Themnér (2015) – he does not change his name.

4. Aspinall (2009), Christensen (2013), Wiegink (2015), Daly et al. (2020), Mukhopadhyay (2009), and Persson (2020).

5. The project received ethical approval by Regionala Etikprövningsnämnden i Uppsala, reference no 2011/259.

6. Some ex-fighters lived close to the interview sites and would not have had any travelling costs. However, many of these ex-combatants were still away from their hustles for several hours. I usually conducted three to four interviews/day and many ex-fighters came early to the interview site. Oftentimes these ex-combatants ended up having to wait for their turn.

7. If researchers put too much emphasis on questions relating to their main interest early in an interview, there is a risk that interviewees – due to social desirability bias – skew their responses.

8. During the civil wars, there was an inflation of military ranks given to, or taken by, combatants. Hence, the ranking system cannot be directly compared to that of ‘Western’ armed forces.

9. The information on David’s military career is based on interviews with: the latter, 73 interviews with ex-fighters of David’s 2011 and 2017–2018 networks, interviews with nine “sleepers”, two NGO representatives and an ex-commander interviewed for another project in 2019. Based on this material, it was possible to develop a time-line for David’s military career. David joined National Patriotic Front of Liberia in 1990 and had become a captain by the end of the first war. When Charles Taylor won the 1997 presidential elections, David was integrated into Special Security Unit. After that he joined Anti-Terrorist Unit (ATU). In 2002, David became a “bush general” when he was ordered to leave ATU to form a militia unit under the banner of Navy Division.

10. See footnote nine for information on David’s military career.

11. This figure includes follow-up interviews that I conducted with the same ex-combatants.