Data collection
Desk research and phone interviews were carried out between February and July 2016. An expert meeting of academics, practitioners and policy makers who have undertaken similar studies or who have knowledge of the customary justice systems in Mali or western Africa was also convened in The Hague on 22 February 2016.
To carry out the field research in northern Mali, the Clingendael Institute partnered with the Bamako-based Groupe Observation des Dynamiques Sociales Spatiales & Expertise Endogéne (Groupe ODYSSEE). Under the supervision of Dr Brahima Fomba, Groupe ODYSSEE’s scientific coordinator, a team of Malian researchers, in some cases with the help of local fixers, interviewed 108 individuals between 13 August and 14 October 2016. This team consisted of the following researchers: Mamadou Togola (Mopti and Niafunké); Dr Bréma Ely Dicko (Douentza); Mahamadou Doumma (Ansongo); Adizatou Diallo (Gao); and Sane Chirfi Alpha (Tombouctou).
The principal field research method was qualitative semistructured interviews that had a slight variance per group, to take into account the different contexts from which they would be speaking. The sampling strategy was premised on including individuals that experienced customary justice systems from different perspectives. The researchers identified the relevant authority figures and community members in each of the locations they visited. The interviews were targeted at: 1) actors in the customary justice system; 2) persons who have brought a dispute to a customary justice system; 3) persons who have been called to answer a dispute in front of a customary justice system; and 4) a sampling of the general population of each area, including administrative authorities, actors of the state justice system, civil society groups, marginalised groups and religious minorities.
Before the researchers went into the field, a second expert meeting was held on 9 August 2016 at Groupe ODYSSEE’s headquarters in Bamako with representatives of the various international organisations carrying out similar studies in Mali, as well as other local stakeholders, including academics and customary justice leaders. A third expert meeting was held in Bamako on 12 August 2016 with seven members of Réseau des Communicateurs Traditionnels (RECOTRADE) to gain advice on the research questions and to hear firsthand accounts of the work of customary justice leaders.
Data analysis
For the data analysis, all interviews were imported and coded in Microsoft Excel, and every individual was allocated a unique number that identified their interview in the dataset. After scanning the content of the interviews, we identified a number of recurrent dominant themes: 1) age of customary justice actors, 2) age of users of customary justice systems, 3) alternative profession of customary justice actors, 4) number of disputes, 6) type of disputes, 7) inclusiveness of women, 8) satisfaction with the outcome of customary justice systems, 9) collaboration between customary and formal justice, 10) perceptions of customary justice systems by their users, 11) mechanisms of customary justice system, 12) resolution of crisis crimes through customary justice and 13) recommendations by customary justice actors. This initial coding allowed us to better understand sociodemographic characteristics of the respondents and to identify elements of interest for this report. Finally, all these themes were transformed in descriptive statistics and infographics. For this purpose, we used text mining techniques extracting meaningful numeric indices from the text of the interviews, and made the information contained in the text accessible to data mining processes. The themes of each section of this report were either areas of interest identified in advance by international stakeholders working in the justice sector in Mali or topics repeatedly discussed by the respondents.
| Circle |
Customary justice leaders |
Persons who have brought disputes before customary justice |
Persons who have been called to answer a dispute before customary justice |
Sampling of general population of each circle |
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ansongo |
|
|
3 |
|
|
| Douentza |
|
|
2 |
|
|
| Gao |
|
|
2 |
|
|
| Mopti |
|
|
2 |
|
|
| Niafunké |
|
|
3 |
|
|
| Tombouctou |
|
|
3 |
|
|