Human nature has a propensity for conflict as well as a need for peace. As Immanuel Kant suggested, we are characterized by an âunsociable sociabilityâ (1998)1 that urges us to compete aggressively as we fight to become taller and stronger and to cooperate and conciliate in order to guarantee our development in a prosperous environment. Both faculties (necessity/passion and reason/morality) determine our physical and mental survival whether we think of ourselves as individuals or as a community.
Here, we should take into account that âconflictâ does not necessarily mean aggression nor war, but that it represents, in general, inner and outer tensions or confrontations that can be dealt with in multiple ways â open and direct aggression or even war being only the most extreme and violent forms of conflictual response. Curiously, conflict transformation through negotiation and non-violent means, in fact, much more common in human relationships than war,2 but as we are so focused on violence, peace is often either invisible or taken for granted. If we look closer, we realize that conflict transformation can be observed in all cultures and societies, and in small or big, simple or complex communities alike, although it might obtain in very different ways.
Peace as Conflict Transformation
In order to explain these connections, it is important to emphasize from the beginning that we do not understand peace outside the conflict paradigm that characterizes human existence, but rather as the competence to find ways to attenuate the intensity or the expression of conflict and to engage in permanent negotiation and imagination toward reconciliation. Peace conceived as the end of all conflict would, indeed, be more similar to a cemetery, as ironically suggested by Kant in his seminal essay âPerpetual Peace.â3 By trying to find a solution for war, the German philosopher âinventedâ in 1795 a system of internal and external cooperation (the foedus pacificum, a man-made device founded on the constitution and the laws of modern Republics), that broke the millenary tradition of a God-given and therefore apolitical conceptions of peace and introduced an idea of peace as a man-made device and collective political task. In both classical and medieval understanding, peace had generally been defined in a negative way as the absence of war (or a period between wars) or at its best as a state of âiustitia, securitas, tranquilitas, caritas,â4 but in either cases as a momentum of order and harmony without any perception of conflict or difference. The âpax romanaâ is a good example for such an understanding of peace as order â but also of submission to an imperial power from above. In his groundbreaking work Paix e Guerre entre les Nations (1962), Raymond Aron distinguishes this model of peace (the peace achieved by the imposition of an empire) from the attempts to reach peace through law (either by balance of power or cooperation) and it is precisely in this sense that Immanuel Kant can be regarded as an inventor of a modern and political concept of peace (Howard, 2002).
Fully aware of the âcrooked timberâ5 of mankind, of human passions and evil, Kant introduced a notion of peace as a continuous political process, that derived from reason and morality and depended on the capacity of humans to introduce transparent laws and rules, to keep them and to debate and negotiate, to cooperate and to reach for consensus through conflict and, eventually, to trust and carry on, again and again.
Accordingly, we must ground our debate on the path toward peaceful communities on an understanding of peace that is adjusted to our human nature (characterized as we have seen by passion and by reason and morality alike, as well as by conflict and the capacity to create political devices to overcome it), in other words, on a âworldlyâ and possible peace and not on an ideal of absolute peace, a heavenly peace for angels alone â or a vain illusion for dreamers and fools.6
In his referential book Politics and Peace (1986), the political scientist Dolf Sternberger calls our attention to the fundamental distinction between these two concepts of peace. For him, the idea of a status without any conflict (or a full elimination of our potential for violence) would suggest a radical change of human nature. And this brings up an ontological problem: When âthe wolf shall dwell with the lamb,â as announced in the vision of Jesaiaâs Book (Isaiah 11:6), then, we could argue, wolves wouldnât be wolves anymore. This means that the heavenly vision of peace cannot be conceived as a paradigm for peace on earth, because the idea of a unitarian and timeless âcommunity peaceâ does not correspond to our human (and social, political and cultural) quest for peace, as elaborated by Sternberger:
Humanity, whether biologically of one species and morally compelled to solidarity, does not exist as unity on a political level, but as multiplicity, not in a unique conviction and is not unitarian [âŚ] but lives in plurality, in competition, in contrasts and conflicts, as well as in confrontations. [âŚ] No, the point of departure for all efforts toward an earthly peace is the pluralty of the âpoliticalâ humanity. (Sternberger, 1995, pp. 100â101)7
In order to elucidate this idea of peace as âconflict managementâ in plurality, the understanding of Lewis Cosner (1957) regarding âconflictâ seems to be very helpful. For Cosner, conflict is natural (and even healthy) for communities, because it permits gradual change âwithin the systemâ when approached in a peaceful manner (through debate and reform) â instead of a revolutionary (and violent) clash that would lead to the change âof the system.â Going back to George Sorel, he stresses that âconflict [âŚ] prevents ossification of the social system by exerting pressure for innovation and creativityâ (Cosner, 1957, p. 197). In a broader sense, conflict competence is suggested as an important tool for permanent adjustment (or conciliation) not only regarding plurality within, but also threats and challenges that derive from outside of a community.
The idea of peace as a process rather than a final state draws from a very similar understanding of conflict as source of permanent dialog that leads to a capacity to adjust through negotiation opening paths of understanding and compromise toward conciliation. Within this productive conflict model (of gradual processes of adjustment), peace is understood as intelligent âconflict managementâ that can be learned.
The problem is that in violent environments and in so called post-conflict situations the ability for dialog and peaceful conflict management is much more difficult to achieve and must be, in fact, learned (again). And this is a complex task. First of all, because there is no true or âidealâ post-conflict âstate,â no âStunde Nullâ8 for peace. As evidence in the field of Peace Studies has shown, there is no âpost-conflictâ state, but only a permanent process of conflict resolution through non-violent means, a manifold process that implies a continuous learning in negotiation and consensus building (mostly by trial and error), and hard work. Although we will use the âpost-conflictâ concept in order to characterize moments of truce after a period of war or conflict escalation involving violent confrontation or terror, this is rather a conceptual simplification trying to define a still unstable state because, in most cases, post-war societies continue as violent and dangerous as during the war, sometimes even more so. The major conflict potential after a war that has ended has to do with the violent remains of the clash, such as individual and collective shock and trauma, extreme poverty and destruction, displacement and dispossession, family separation, constant fear of retaliation and discrimination, sexual violence, torture and, in a larger sense, loss of any future perspectives (Jarstad & Sisk, 2008).
In this context, we must also consider the massive emergence of a new pattern of war since the 1990s, blurring the lines that distinguished interstate and intrastate wars, as well as civil and ethnic wars and unleashing unbounded violence. There are more and more wars without any âwar codeâ (whether as understood in a post-Westphalian tradition or as defined by Clausewitz) fought for many and interwoven reasons, involving a plurality of actors, waged at a âlow intensityâ but progressive level (van Creveld, 2009), with complex economic ties and targeting especially civilians. In fact, most of these ânew warsâ (Kaldor, 1999; MĂźnkler, 2005) are intrastate (and not between states) and more than 80% of the victims have been civilians so that the prospects for a just and enduring peace process become very difficult to sustain.9
An Agenda for Peace
It was precisely for this reason that former Secretary-General of the United Nations Organization Boutros Boutros-Ghali, presented in 1992 the groundbreaking report âAn Agenda for Peace.â10 Drawing attention of the Security Council to the âchanging contextâ of our world order, where the conventional peace efforts that characterized UN peace missions since the Second World War would not work anymore, he appealed to the urgency of âpost-conflict peace-buildingâ strategies in order to break the chain of ongoing causes and effects of violence during wars and to allow the development of peace building processes.
More than 25 years after Boutros-Ghaliâs appeal, does the Agenda for Peace still obtain? In our view, Boutros-Ghaliâs legacy is still stimulating new ways of conflict resolution. One of the reasons for its enduring strength is the innovative conception of âPost-conflict Peace Building,â a major development in the field of peace research with concrete effects on the ground. Firstly, because it made clear that traditional means of ending wars would not fit in todayâs conflict configuration. As witnessed in the old saying that âmore important than winning a war is winning peace,â the Agenda focuses not merely on the effort of keeping up a peace treaty, but even more on building fair and just conditions for peace to grow. Beyond this idea we can find a new paradigm of peace: peace as a comprehensive task that cannot be âmadeâ but must develop out of a fertile soil involving the entire society affected by conflict. Accordingly, the Agenda conceives an arrangement of peace work that does not only aim at a political truce, including security and reformation of political institutions, but specially on the reconstruction of infrastructures and the development of economic, social and cultural capacities and institutions that empower people, stimulate civil society, foster cooperation within the community and the whole region and eliminate the seeds of extreme poverty, fear, oppression, hate and resentment.
Secondly, An Agenda for Peace reminded both the Security Council and the members of the General Assembly that conventional UN Peace Missions, although gradually expanded in almost half a century of outstanding experiences, could not answer the new threats to peace anymore and had to adjust to contemporary forms and means of conflict. This implied a stronger engagement not only during a violent conflict, but particularly before the possible escalation of violence â and also after escalation, when basic relief and reconstruction must be integrated into a sustainable common roadmap to peace.
Two major guidelines could be traced here, one regarding the concept of peace itself, the other regarding the practice of peace missions, but both interwoven and concerned with peace as a possible goal that could be attained as a medium-term strategy.
On the one hand, peace is understood as compound or comprehensive value in Boutros-Ghaliâs statement: Relying on the foundational studies of critical peace research developed by experts such as Johan Galtung (1969) or Dieter Senghaas (1971), peace is not only conceived as the absence of direct violence or war, but moreover as the possibility of life without indirect violence (such as, for example, political and social repression) and with full participation in free and just institutions (including forms of education) that generate civ...
