Celia Russell from the UK Data Service at Jisc presented on how the UN peacekeeping mission in Darfur gather information from local communities about their experiences of conflict. Peacekeeping missions gather narratives of security incidents and human rights abuses from local populations in order to monitor the security environment and help their decision-making. a historical record of the security situation and often constitute one of the few continuous information resources on the conflict.
However, relatively little is known about the belarus rcs data practices by which this information is gathered.
What are the effects of personal networks, tensions with national security services and trust in the credibility of the mission? How do these factors influence the reliability and the accuracy of the data produced? Celia presented on the findings of a key informant study undertaken as part of her work on the University of Manchester’s Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute’s Making Peacekeeping Data Work project in which five former UN field officers and 53 Darfurian refugees were interviewed about the experience of data collection on the ground in Darfur and how the realities of information gathering in conflict regions impacts the quality and potential research value of the data.