Conflict, Peace, Security and Development

Theories and Methodologies

Helen Hintjens, Dubravka Zarkov, Helen Hintjens, Dubravka Zarkov

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135012489
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: Economics

Whilst classical approaches linked development with peace, security has become central to understandings of both war and peacetime. This book uniquely reflects on how to deal with the convergence of war and peace in the context of global economic and geo-political development. It addresses methodological challenges in contemporary approaches to conflict, violence, security peace and development.

Two dominant contemporary approaches are selected for debate on methodologies and ethical choices: rational choice and identity-based theorizing. The chapters are arranged as dialogues around contending approaches, to better understand how the inter-locking fields of violent conflict, peace, development and security can be researched and understood. The book considers how theoretical and methodological approaches relate to different ethical and political choices, including around engagement and intervention in the four interwoven fields. Theoretical, methodological and ethical issues emerge from the critical reviews of academic discourses and case-study based chapters from across the world, including Sri Lanka, Ghana, Colombia and Rwanda.

This book is an invaluable resource for postgraduate students and researchers in Development Studies, Conflict Studies, Peace Studies and Security Studies.

PART I

The state of the fields

2

PEACE, CONFLICT, AND VIOLENCE¹

Johan Galtung

Introduction

Violence and war start in relationships that have gone wrong among parties, and so it is in better relationships that peace has to be built. The basic axiom is that unresolved conflicts underpin on-going violence; relations with incompatible goals are fraught with the danger of violence, and also with the opportunity to transcend such conflict. Conflict resolution can be seen as making goals compatible by creating some new reality and removing frustration and aggression in this way. The tool of conflict resolution is mediation with all parties, to know what happens, what went wrong, and what is the worst they believe could happen (dreams-realism-nostalgia-nightmares). Mediation is thus about one-on-one questioning for dialogue and a mutual search rather than debate for verbal victory. The process includes mapping of the conflict, testing the legitimacy of the goals, and bridging legitimate goals toward a new reality. The mediator needs empathy, nonviolence and creativity. As I will show, the TRANSCEND approach has already proved fruitful in a high number of cases.

When I gave the talk on which this chapter is based, at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS), part of Erasmus University Rotterdam, it was a great honor to be able to talk under the guiding name of Erasmus, a person whose philosophy I greatly admire. Erasmus lived with ambiguity. He was at one and the same time a Christian and a predecessor of the Enlightenment. He was a wandering scholar, yet focused on The Netherlands. Erasmus Rotterdamus was both a point of origin and a precursor of things to come. To me, he retained the spirituality of Christianity without being dogmatic, and it is spirituality that I still consider crucial for peace. The conference at ISS, where my talk was presented, kindly focused on my work, and the influence of my perspectives in Conflict and Peace studies. So I start from my own experiences.

In September and October 1951, I was struggling, wrestling, with the problem of whether to become a conscientious objector. Having been a student politician, my colleague on the Swedish side was a personal friend, Olaf Palme. I received a scholarship to go to Helsinki, and brought with me not books on mathematics, which I was supposed to be reading, but books related to my decision around conscientious objection.

It soon proved not difficult to come to the conclusion there was something very wrong about war. A problem arose for me: what was the alternative? What about peace? Having the time, I went to the university library and asked for all the books they had on peace studies or peace research. The librarian searched a database using Finnish words rauhan tutkimus (peace research, in Finnish). She looked up and said she was sorry, but they did not have any books on peace studies at all. She said she could call Uppsala University in Sweden, which we still considered the old colonial power. Uppsala University also said, no, they did not have any nonsense of that kind! However, they did mention that they had a lot of war studies books which they could recommend.

So I made the decision that this was to be the mission of my life. That is precisely how it happened: thanks to my military conscription in Norway. If there had not been compulsory conscription, I would never have made this decision about the need for peace studies. The only words of love I have for the military in my country are those I have just expressed here.

As a young 20-year-old man, I had a vision guided by my presence at countless dinner table conversations between my father and mother. My mother was a nurse, and her father had been the Director of the Health of Norway. My father’s father was a physician, and my father was also a physician. When I was born, my parents received a cable from my uncle reading: “a physician has been born.” So the load, genetically speaking, was heavy on my shoulders. One struggles against such prophecies, to make them self-denying. Yet the words: “diagnosis, prognosis, and therapy” have stayed with me throughout my lifetime. The conference theme where this talk was originally presented was well chosen: the past, present, and future of conflict and peace studies. To me the past, present and future are three “territories” of peace that I would now like to talk about, with some examples of my engagements for peace.

Three examples of successful engagement for peace

Since that initial decision, I have lived my life on two tracks: peace research and peace practice. The peace practice involves peace-building for the future, mediation for the present, and conciliation for the past. One day in February 2006, I was mediating with Tariq Ramadan, between three representatives of the Danish government and three Muslim clerics. We were not mediating about the Mohammed cartoons; they had already being treated fully by the journalists and the rest of the media. We were mediating about the Danish Prime Minister’s refusal to have dialogue with any of the other actors involved in the conflict. In the mediation meeting, I suggested: since today is Friday, how about if on Monday morning your government were to issue invitations for dialogue with Muslim leaders? Youth could then speak with other youth, politicians with politicians, and theologians with theologians. They could also dialogue across each of these categories. And I added the suggestion to hold an international conference on the grey zone between freedom of expression and freedom from humiliation. In the end, the Danish government accepted our proposal to invite Muslims for dialogue, and on Monday morning the invitations were issued. By Monday afternoon there were no longer any burning embassies, and no burning Danish flags. The protests had been centrally organized and what is centrally organized can be centrally stopped. Our initiative, and the invitation, passed another test: there was not a word about it in the press. The press is invariably only interested in bad news. We had many failures, just as physicians have failures. But the entrance ticket is solution orientation; the entrance ticket to success is a good, well thought-through proposal, theoretically sound and firmly empirically based.

Another example was the conflict between Peru and Ecuador over 500 square kilometers in the high Andes. For more than 55 years this tiny bit of land was disputed, with thousands killed. Imagine you want to solve this dispute, and are called in as mediator. In 1995, the then President of Ecuador asked for my contribution. “Where do we draw the border Professor Galtung?” And I said: “Would it be possible, do you think, to imagine not drawing any border at all? You could administer this as a bi-national zone with a natural park. Zona Binacional, Parque Natural. He replied: “Very creative Professor Galtung, but too creative. It will take us 30 years to get used to this concept, and then another 30 years to realize it. That is 60 years, and we don’t have the time. Don’t you have anything else to suggest?” It turned out that the young people in the Presidency took to the idea, and in 1999 a peace treaty was signed between Ecuador and Peru, leading to the establishment of the bi-national nature and conservation park in the border area.²

To jump to something contemporary, I was recently seated with a Pentagon General, trying to find ways out of the whole mess with wars that the United States is in. My main concern was with changing the discourse. In a militaristic, capitalist country, the discourse is all about cost-benefit analysis. Those who favor raising military expenditure find that benefits of the word “victory” far outweigh the costs of war. Those who are against higher military spending list the costs of war and find the benefits elusive. This is a debate we are all familiar with. The General looked at me and said: “I cannot imagine any alternative discourse.” And I replied: “That is exactly the problem. There is one, however.” The war movement argues that the benefits of war outweigh the costs. The peace movement argues that the costs outweigh the benefits. They are both trapped in the same discourse, the same logic of cost and benefits. The alternative discourse is about identifying underlying conflicts, and then solving them.

To illustrate what I mean, we can think about something that happened not that long ago, similar to 9/11: the events of 11 March 2004 in Spain. At the railway station of Atocha, Madrid, 200 people were killed, in a brutal attack. Very soon it became clear that a Moroccan Islamist group was behind the attack (and not Euskadi Ta Askatasuna [ETA, Basque Homeland and Liberty group], as originally claimed). What did Spain’s President Zapatero do? First, he withdrew Spanish troops from Iraq to avoid more killings there, both by and of Spanish soldiers. He thus decided not to kill, as a precondition for thinking about not being killed. Second, Zapatero travelled to Rabat to visit King Mohammed VI. He did not break diplomatic ties, he did not expel the Moroccan Ambassador or haul him over the carpet in Moncada, the Prime Minister’s residence. Instead, the President of Spain travelled to Morocco and had a discussion. One of the topics discussed must have been the tiny Spanish ex-claves of Ceuta and Mellila, on the Moroccan coast. Here, in my view, there are serious conflicts that result from migrants trying to leave Morocco and reach Spain, conflicts that need to be resolved.

Having discussed the whole situation, Zapatero decided to recognize and legalize the situation of almost half a million – 490,000 – Moroccan workers who were living without papers in Spain. Then he initiated an “alliance of civilizations,” along with the Turkish Prime Minister, under the auspices of the United Nations (UN), to promote dialogue and combat intolerance among religions and communities. Zapatero did not succumb to the Islamophobia now so ingrained in countries like The Netherlands, Denmark, and my own country, Norway. Instead, he took a fourth step on 28 October 2005, when he organized a conference to which he invited Hezbollah and Hamas representatives, the government of Syria, the government of Iran, and people from Iraqi resistance movements.

At this event, where I was one of the participants, I remember asking publicly if there was an Israel they could all recognize as legitimate. All participants agreed that there was, but that it was not the present, Zionist Israel, which acknowledged no limits to its territorial expansion. What they would accept was something resembling the Israel of June 1967, with some minor modifications. All those parties and countries were quite prepared to recognize Israel, if only Israel were more modest about its territorial claims.

This is not what the Western press reported. The press falsified a speech given by Iran’s President Ahmedinejad. After he gave his speech, Ahmedinejad signed the Riyadh Declaration on behalf of Iran, and thus recognized Israel, provided it accepted the agreed 1967 borders. The press conference held at Zapatero’s invitation was so successful that it also passed the old, well-known media test: not a single word was reported about it in the press. Media have this psychopathological attachment to failure, and to things going wrong. As the saying goes, good news is no news. The journalists were sitting there waiting for harsh words, and hearing only dialogue. This preference for bad news is a sort of pathology in the media, and something we try to work against in peace journalism.³

But sometimes you fail

Having said all this, let me give some examples of where we did not succeed. I went 34 times to Sri Lanka. After hundreds of dialogues, mapping the conflict, watching whether the goals were legitimate or not, and then transcending the gap between legitimate goals, we simply failed. The Sinhalese wanted a united country, and the Tamils wanted independence. We suggested a federation, an asymmetrical federation, with a high degree of autonomy for Tamils, but this suggestion was not accepted. Perhaps we did something wrong. We also found out that diplomats are not there to resolve conflicts. They are paid to promote the national interest of their home country. They are also in love with the idea that each conflict has just two parties (and they are not the only ones, scholars can tend to view the conflict in this way too – see Chapter 12 in this volume by Shyamika Jayasundara-Smits). In reality there are always more sides to a conflict situation than that: in Sri Lanka’s case there are Tamils, Sinhalese, Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, and outsiders like USA, UK, India, and even Israel. There are also conflicts that revolve around caste, class, and gender; the age of young children forcefully recruited to fight the war.

What did we run up against? This time the alternative approach to ending conflict was simply called winning. “We’ll make those Tamils creep down...