Theories of Violent Conflict

An Introduction

Jolle Demmers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317502753
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Paz y desarrollo global

This revised and updated second edition introduces students of violent conflict to a variety of prominent theoretical approaches, and examines the ontological stances and epistemological traditions underlying these approaches.

Theories of Violent Conflict takes the centrality of the 'group' as an actor in contemporary conflict as a point of departure, leaving us with three main questions:

• What makes a group?

• Why and how does a group resort to violence?

• Why and how do or don't they stop?

The book examines and compares the ways by which these questions are addressed from a number of perspectives: primordialism/constructivism, social identity theory, critical political economy, human needs theory, relative deprivation theory, collective action theory and rational choice theory. The final chapter aims to synthesize structure and agency-based theories by proposing a critical discourse analysis of violent conflict.

With new material on violence, religion, extremism and military urbanism, this book will be essential reading for students of war and conflict studies, peace studies, conflict analysis and conflict resolution, and ethnic conflict, as well as security studies and IR in general.

1
Identity, boundaries and violence

Since this book takes the prominence of the identity group in conflict as its point of departure, this first chapter aims to cover the discussion on identity, social identity and its relation to violence and conflict. It discusses approaches that focus on processes of group formation and group attachment as possible sources of violent conflict. First, we will look into ideas surrounding the definition of identity, and in particular social identity, and into critiques on the representation of identity groups as bounded and unitary. We then focus the discussion on the connection between identity groups and violent conflict by zooming in on ethnic groups, explaining and contrasting primordial and constructivist understandings of ethnic conflict. After highlighting the argumentation supporting the claim that ethnicity is socially constructed, this chapter then aims to specify how it is constructed, pointing at the role of violence as ‘group-maker’. Consequently, we look into theoretical traditions that emphasize the political functionality of ethnic war and theories that primarily understand it as the outcome of historically conditioned cultural meanings. The chapter concludes by answering the book’s leading questions and by looking at the assumptions underlying the various constructivist approaches to violent conflict.

Identity

Identity is one of the most popular buzzwords of our times. It is one of those container concepts that everyone refers to. People use it to categorize the self and the other; companies and organizations profile their ‘corporate identity’; and in marketing and advertising products, businesses and services are increasingly branded as containing identity. The term is considered so obvious that it needs no further explanation. Identity is used in a plethora of ways: to describe, label and categorize, but also as ‘doing things’, that is, as driving individual and group behaviour. Mostly, identity is used in a normative sense: it is good and desirable to ‘have identity’; without it one is considered lost and weak. In the field of social and political analysis, the term gained prominence in the 1960s and since then has increasingly replaced class-based explanatory models. It is inescapable in any work on gender, migration, mobilization, culture, religion, ethnicity and nationalism. Also within the field of Conflict Studies, ‘identity talk’ has proliferated. Mary Kaldor (1999) introduced identity, together with globalization, as key concepts for understanding the ‘new wars’ of the post-Cold War era. She contrasts the old ‘politics of ideas’ that had characterized conflict throughout most of the twentieth century with what she signals as the rise of a new ‘politics of identity’, emerging out of the erosion of the modern state. One year earlier, Arjun Appadurai (1998) emphasized the need to grapple with the link between globalization and ethnic violence. He argues that the growing multiplicity of the identities available to individuals in the contemporary world feeds into a growing sense of radical social uncertainty, which can – at times – lead to anxiety and violence.

In the following section I will try to bring some conceptual clarity into the discussion on identity and violent conflict by defining the social identity concept. I will certainly not present an overview of the scholarly debate on social identity, but will focus on those components that help us to theorize ethnicity as a specific kind of collective or social identity, to then look into the relation between ethnic identity and violent conflict.

Identity, broadly defined, is the answer to the question ‘Who or what are you?’. That seems rather straightforward. But the huge range of answers to this question calls for more precision. Are we free to define who we are? How do context and structure, roles and norms, discourses and symbolic orders impact our self-understanding? Why is it that some identities come to dominate others? Roughly, the vast field of identity studies stretches between traditions that locate the source of identity at the level of the individual and those who place it at the level of society. Erik H. Erikson, one of the first scholars to investigate the role of identity processes in social reality (and allegedly the father of the term ‘identity crisis’), illustrates the multiplicity of identity by locating it in both the core of the individual and the core of the group, or, in his words, communal culture. In an article from 1966, Erikson introduces the identity concept with quotations from the two ‘bearded and patriarchal founding fathers’ of the kind of psychology on which he himself based his thinking on identity: William James and Sigmund Freud. The first quotation is taken from a letter of James to his wife in which he describes a man’s ‘sense of identity’ as:

discernable in the mental or moral attitude in which, when it came upon him, he felt himself most deeply and intensely active and alive. At such moments there is a voice inside which speaks and says: ‘This is the real me!’.

Such experience includes ‘a mere mood or emotion to which I can give no form in words’, and which ‘authenticates itself to me as the deepest principle of all active and theoretic determination which I possess’ (James 1920: 199 in Erikson 1966: 147). James here poetically describes identity as a rare and unique sense of self. Identity thus is an utterly private and solitary experience. Subsequently, Erikson turns to Freud to highlight the other, communal dimension of identity. In an address to the Society of B’nai B’rith in Vienna in 1928 Freud said the following (Freud 1959: 273 in Erikson 1966: 148):

What bound me to Jewry was (I am ashamed to admit) neither faith nor national pride, for I have always been an unbeliever and was brought up without any religion though not without a respect for what are called the ‘ethical’ standards of human civilization.

Whenever I felt an inclination to national enthusiasm I strove to suppress it as being harmful and wrong, alarmed by the warning examples of the peoples among whom we Jews live. But plenty of other things remained over to make the attraction of Jewry and Jews irresistible – many obscure emotional forces (dunkle Gefuehlsmaechte), which were the more powerful the less they could be expressed in words, as well as a clear consciousness of inner identity, the safe privacy of a common mental construction (die Heimlichkeit der inneren Konstruktion). And beyond this there was a perception that it was to my Jewish nature alone that I owed two characteristics that had become indispensable to me in the difficult course of my life. Because I was a Jew I found myself free from many prejudices which restricted others in the use of their intellect; and as a Jew I was prepared to join the opposition and to do without agreement with the ‘compact majority’.

Identity, again difficult to ‘express in words’, here is experienced as sameness, as essentially sharing a ‘common mental construction’. By means of these two examples, Erikson shows us the two faces of the identity concept. The two statements (and the life-histories behind them) help us to understand why identity is so ‘tenacious and yet so hard to grasp’. For here we deal with ‘something which can be experienced as “identical” in the core of the individual and yet also identical in the core of a communal culture, and which is, in fact, the identity of those two identities’ (1966: 149). In the one case, it is the most individual sensation of a person’s unique sense of self, that is, being utterly unlike anyone or anything else. In the other case, the essence of personal self is held to be one’s membership of a social category or group, that is, being like a number of other people (Verkuyten 2005). Identity thus implies both sameness and uniqueness.¹ These two dimensions of identity, in less poetic terms, have become integrated in the way the term is defined in the social sciences. In social psychology, this is expressed in the distinction between the self-concept, or individual identity, and social identity. The self-concept is the total set of cognitions an individual has regarding who (s)he is. The self-concept thus subsumes the answers a person gives to the question ‘Who am I?’. In turn, social identity is described by means of Henri Tajfel’s canonical definition of the term as ‘that part of an individual’s self-concept which derives from his knowledge of his membership in a social group (or groups) together with the value and emotional significance attached to that membership’ (Tajfel 1981: 63). A social identity, then, is one kind of answer to the question ‘Who am I?’ that is based on group membership. Tajfel – whose work we will discuss in the following chapter – defines the social identity group cognitively, in terms of people’s self-conception as group members. He sees social identity as emerging from individual cognitive processes, and as we will see in chapter two, as underpinned by a drive for order and simplicity. In social psychology, scholars are mainly interested in the individual’s subjective experiences of identity, not in its social construction and political functions. For Verkuyten (2005: 62), using the term like this is misleading:

If social identity coincided with self-understanding this would imply that an identity can change only when one’s self-understanding changes. But of course it is not that simple. People can start to understand themselves differently, while from a social point of view they are still categorized and treated as if no change has occurred.

Someone born and raised in Amsterdam, for instance, who considers herself Dutch, may still be largely treated and categorized by her Moroccan heritage. Sociological approaches, therefore, place the origins of social identities in the social and the political, not the individual. Social identities are seen as socially constructed, as largely externally ascribed and as serving social and political functions. Evidently, these opposing views need not be mutually exclusive. Taking a middle ground position, Verkuyten argues that identity is not about individuals as such, nor about society as such, but the relation between the two. ‘It is about the intricacies, paradoxes, dilemmas, contradictions, imperatives, superficialities, and profundities of the way individuals relate to and are related to the world in which they live’ (Verkuyten 2005: 42).

Social identity

From the above we can learn that social identity is about the relationship between the individual and the social environment. It is about categories and relationships. The social identity concept tells us about the categorical characteristics – such as nationality, gender, religion, ethnicity – that locate people in social space. A person has a certain social identity if (s)he shares certain characteristics with others. Social identities are relational in the sense that they are limited: we are what we are not: Catholic not Protestant; female not male; Sunni not Shia. Hence, social identities are by definition divisive although not necessarily antagonistic or conflicting.

We have multiple identities: we form part of many different social categories. One can be an academic, mother, political activist, Muslim and French-Moroccan at the same time. However, these social identities mean different things in different contexts: they are contextual in the sense that depending on context, one identity can become prominent whereas others recede into the background. In the setting of a university classroom, persons are addressed by their social identity as students and professors, not as mothers, or believers. In turn, the university lecturer’s professional identity plays a less prominent role in her interaction with small children at home. Social identities are dynamic and changeable. We may strongly identify with a religious group, a subculture or a profession in a certain period of our life, but we can also change faith, step out of certain communities, transform ourselves. Some social identities are more enduring than others; whereas one’s membership of the category of university students is an often intensive, temporal phase of three or four years, one’s gender identity, national identity or ethnic identity tends to be much more permanent (the so-called primary identities). Building on the idea of the fluidity of identifications, scholars arguing from a ‘practice turn’ in the Social Sciences and Humanities propose to see identity not as something we ‘have’ but as something we ‘do’ (see Adler-Nissen 2013). Identity here is seen as performance, as something we ‘act out’. Particularly in the field of women’s studies, the idea of ‘doing gender’ has become something of a standard (since West and Zimmerman 1987). The idea of ‘identity as performance’ also influenced understandings of ethnicity. Brubaker, for instance, when discussing what makes a ‘diaspora’ (2005), suggests to use terms such as ‘category of practice’, or ‘event’ rather than crude labels such as group or entity. As we will discuss in more detail later in the book, there is scholarly debate about the extent to which actors have the freedom to construct or ‘act out’ their identity, whether their social identities are largely determined by societal rules, regulations and institutions, or whether in fact there is room for agency and initiative. The ‘light’ version of this discussion speaks of the difference between externally and internally ascribed social identities: some categorizations are forced upon us, that is to say, whereas others we can adopt ourselves. An ‘identity conflict’ arises when these two prove incompatible. For instance, in the case of homosexuality and Catholicism, someone can on a personal level ascribe to Roman Catholicism and be homosexual at the same time. However, from the outside this combination may be condemned and ‘forbidden’. Likewise, second-generation migrants may see themselves as normal citizens of the country in which they are born and raised, but may be treated and categorized as disloyal outsiders on the local job market.

This automatically leads us into the realm of power. Each society is characterized by explicit and implicit rules and narratives about right and wrong, normal and abnormal. Some of these rules are firmly established and institutionalized, others are more subtle and negotiable. Nevertheless, they are all formed in historical contexts of power: some groups in society have more ‘power to define’ than others. Social identities are shaped and transformed, constrained and facilitated by these social and political environments and their definitional powers. In this context, the modern state has been one of the most important agents of categorization, classification and identification. As pointed out by the work of, for instance, Foucault, Bourdieu and Wacquant, the state monopolizes, or seeks to monopolize, not only legitimate physical force but also legitimate symbolic force. Including the power to name, to identify, to categorize, to state what is what and who is who. The state aims to classify people in relation to citizenship, ethnicity, gender, literacy, criminality, property ownership or sanity, supported by symbolic and material resources ranging from schools to prisons and asylums (see Brubaker and Cooper 2000; Ferguson and Gupta 2002).

As will happen more often in this book, we run into definitional boundaries. If we indeed define social identity as the answer to the question of what someone is taken to be socially, this would also allow for answers such as my students like to give, including ‘human’, ‘lazy’ or ‘funny’. Clearly, not all categorizations (moods, tastes, preferences, roles or labels) and possible group memberships are recognized as social identities. Scholars agree that for the membership of a collective of some sort to form a social identity, individual members should view them as more or less unchangeable and socially consequential.

In line with the above discussion on the role of power, Fearon and Laitin (2000: 848) provide us with a more politically sensitive definition of social categories as:

sets of people given a label (or labels) and distinguished by two main features: 1. rules of membership that decide who is and is not a member of the category; and 2. content, that is, sets of characteristics (such as beliefs, desires, moral commitments, and physical attributes) thought to be typical of members of the category, or behaviours expected or obliged of members in certain situations (roles).

Together, ‘boundary rules’ and ‘content’ thus form the necessary, and highly interrelated, components of social identities.

Social identity and group conflict: the unitary trap

It is not hard to see the salience of social identity in violent conflict. Very often social identities such as ethnicity, religion, clan or nation are seen as the primary fault line between groups in conflict. People seem to be willing and able to kill and die in the name of the group. Indeed, the social identity concept is crucial to the understanding of violent conflict, but it should be handled with caution. It is easy to fall into what I call the ‘unitary trap’ for at least two reasons. First, by making use of the term ‘identity group conflict’ we seem to imply, often unintentionally, a causal link between ‘identity’ or ‘identity differences’ and violent conflict. As will be outlined below, a way to deal with this problem is to contrast primordial and constructivist approaches to social identity and to introduce the term ‘everyday primordialism’. Second, we need to rethink the ‘group’ in applying the social identity concept to violent conflicts. Contemporary wars are not binary conflicts between unitary and bounded groups or blocks A and B. The levels of ‘groupness’ of parties in conflict are not constan...