My University Journey - Professor Chris Dolan

In the latest of our University Journey series – where members of our GSD teaching faculty discuss what they picked for their undergraduate degree and why – we speak to Professor Chris Dolan, who convenes on our modules Violence, Peace, and Sustainable Development, Taboo Topics, and Conflict-Related Sexual Violence. He shares his experiences of his university days; from switching degrees in his second year of study to his research on internally displaced persons struggling to survive conflict in Northern Uganda.

Before university

I was born and raised in Teesside, Newcastle to an English father and Swiss mother. My father worked as a mechanical engineer, my mother as a teacher and as a German-language translator. It is probably her influence that led me to develop a talent for languages, as I always excelled in my French, German and Spanish classes during school.

Adolescence was complicated, with distracted and distant parents during my teenage years. After completing secondary school, I decided to take a couple years out of education and away from home, which I spent in London and Northampton (and hitchhiking around) doing odd jobs, some volunteer work with homeless people, as well as completing a music course where I polished up my piano and took up the bassoon!

My early university experience

At aged 20 I took up a place at Cambridge to study Modern Languages. For some reason, they only offered me German and Italian, even though what I really wanted was to study Spanish and to explore Spanish-speaking parts of the world.

To fuel this interest, I started to attend talks about US interventionism in Latin America. So much more interesting than the dreary German and Italian literature I was reading for my studies! Prior to this, I had no clue about what the social and political sciences were, and not only did these talks have a big impression on me, but they helped me realise how the rigidness and closed-off nature of my private school education had left me ignorant to issues happening around the globe.

At the end of my first year, my mind was made up to switch from Modern Languages to the Social and Political Sciences degree. However, a week before I was about to begin my second year at university, my mother passed away. At that time in the late eighties I had no idea if there was even an option to defer a year at university, so when the second year started a week later, I went back to Cambridge to continue my studies.

I do now regret this decision as not only did it prevent me from fully processing my grief, but the treatment I received from some of the teaching faculty at the time was brutal. I will never forget being called into one of my professor’s offices to explain my slipping grades. When I suggested this might be due to the recent passing of my mother, the professor just stared at me blankly before saying “well that’s your issue and you just have to find a way to deal with it.” Thankfully, Higher Education has come a long way since and universities are much better equipped for dealing with students going through grief or mental health struggles.

The university moment that changed me

The photo below shows me and one of my close friends in Managua, Nicaragua, which I visited in 1989 towards the end of my second year at university.I had planned the trip because - rather naively - I thought I would be able to do some fieldwork for my dissertation.

My visit happened to coincide with the 10th anniversary of the Sandinista revolution of 1979, so I was in Managua during the official celebrations. However, I quickly realised that the only people who seemed to be really celebrating and dancing with joy were the ‘internacionalístas’ (i.e., volunteers from abroad). This woke me up to how disconnected the international narratives we hear can be from their people’s true lived experiences, which is a message I continue to teach about today.

Determined to carry out my research, I duly arrived in Estelí on the doorstep of a contact one of my tutors had kindly recommended to me. As this was pre-internet and mobile phones, I was equipped with a handwritten introduction explaining who I was and what I wanted to research. The contact then arranged for me to travel to a small settlement based high in the mountains of northern Nicaragua.

What followed was possibly the longest two weeks of my life. At the time, the news and international narrative about Nicaragua had concealed the fact that there were many internally displaced camps housing war refugees. It was disconcerting to realise that I was in the middle of an active war zone in which the Contras (rebels) were fighting the FSLN (Government).

It was during that trip that I first heard the sound of my own heart beating with fear – and when I first met someone who had been tortured by his own government. When he wanted to prove that he was telling the truth by showing me the injuries that his torturers had done to his genitals, I took off in the opposite direction. Ever since then, I have wondered how desperate he must have been to raise these issues with a complete stranger on the street, particularly as I subsequently spent many years working with survivors of conflict-related sexual violence, many of whom found it very difficult to talk about what had happened to them.

Following a Masters in Development Studies and five years working in a former homeland area of South Africa during and after the transition from apartheid, I enrolled in 1998 for a PhD in development studies. My focus was on community level experiences of war, specifically the so-called war in northern Uganda involving the infamous Joseph Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army rebel group, but also the Uganda Peoples’ Defence Force, multiple international actors, and mass internal displacement of the Acholi population. I was a part-time student, working full-time in ACORD, an NGO that had presence in northern Uganda. Processing what I saw and heard during a year and a half spent in a war zone took much longer than the time allowed for a PhD nowadays!

What I aim to provide with my GSD modules

In both academia and industry, the issues surrounding violence and war are rarely considered, yet I don’t think you can understand political and social dynamics of sustainable development without seeing where violence fits.

Even when the war and conflict is over, there is always leftover trauma in the people affected and for the generations following, and this changes how people exist within their families and communities, as well as how they interact with other communities. Therefore, when you suddenly get an internationally funded development project trying make changes within these communities or the spaces that they are habituating, it is no surprise that they are often met with hostility.

I believe it is also important for students to be aware of the paradoxes that surround war and violence. Whilst we can agree that war is inherently “bad”, the reality is that there are many significant social, economic and technological advances that are catalysed by war and violence. It is essential that within GSD students have the opportunity to examine and confront such paradoxes.

The point of me sharing my university story is to show that what we learn at and around our time at university really matters, even if not in the ways we first think. My awareness of the disconnect between what I was learning in class and what I was seeing and hearing on the ground, and my curiosity about how and why that disconnect is sustained, largely drives what issues I have worked on, whether as practitioner, academic, activist, or academic.

I find GSD a great space in which to try and help students develop critical thinking, healthy and constructive scepticism, and an awareness of hidden complexities, all of which they can bring to bear in how they engage with the world and its challenges.