Challenges of Interviewing Political Elites: A View from the Top in Post-War Burundi

Abstract

Burundi and its history of conflict have garnered little academic attention relative to the other countries of Africa’s Great Lakes Region. Yet it is an important example of a country emerging from civil war that had just undergone a political transition in 2007, the time when I began my research. The country has a history of power struggles along ethnic and regional fault lines that culminated several times in massive violence. The killing of the first elected Hutu president in 1993 triggered a full-fledged civil war between a Tutsi-dominated army and Hutu rebel movements. Many analysts assume that civil wars harden the main cleavage, but during negotiations and the ensuing transition between 2001 and 2005, political conflicts1 in Burundi no longer appeared to fall predominantly along ethnic lines. Experts also noted that the landscape of the political transition was much more fragmented and multi-polar than in the pre-war period (Lemarchand, 2009, p. 162; Reyntjens, 2005, p. 120). These observations led to my research question: how and why have the underlying lines of political conflict in Burundi changed from the start of the civil war to the end of the post-war transition?