Social Movements in Violently Divided Societies

Constructing Conflict and Peacebuilding

John Nagle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317507994
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Violently divided societies present major challenges to institutions seeking to establish peace in places characterised by ethnic conflict and high levels of social segregation. Yet such societies also contain groups that refuse to be confined within separate forms of ethnic community and instead develop alternative modes of action that generate shared identities, build trust and foster consensual, peaceful politics.

Advancing a unique social movement approach to the study of violently divided societies, this book highlights how various social movements function within a context of violent ethnic politics and provide new ways of imagining citizenship that complements peacebuilding. By analysing the impact of social movements on divided societies, this book contributes to debates about the complexity of belonging and identity, and constructs a nuanced understanding of political mobilisation in regions defined by ethnic violence. In turn, the book provides important insights into the dynamics of social movement mobilisation.

Based on the author's extensive research in Lebanon and Northern Ireland, and drawing on numerous examples from other divided societies, this book examines a range of social movements, including nationalists, victims, sexual minorities, labour movements, feminists, environmentalists, secularists, and peace movements. Bringing together social theory and case studies in order to consider how grassroots movements intersect with political institutions, this book will be of interest to students, scholars and policymakers working in sociology and politics.

1 ‘Unity in diversity’

Social movements in divided societies

DOI: 10.4324/9781315716770-2

In this book I examine nonsectarian social movements in divided societies. I address the complex dynamics through which power sharing intersects with and affects nonsectarian groups and the various practices generated by these groups to support peacebuilding. The purpose of the chapter is to outline these key themes.

Violently divided societies: disputed lands and ethnocracies

In December 2012, over fourteen years after the signing of a peace accord, protests involving thousands of unionists erupted in Belfast, the capital of Northern Ireland. The protests mainly focused on Belfast City Hall, the seat of the municipal government, but quickly spread across the region and continued for over forty days. During the protests, over one hundred police officers were injured, including one in an attempted murder; a number of politicians were handed death threats and their homes attacked; and an office of a local political party was razed to the ground. The immediate cause of the protests was a vote by Belfast city council’s policy committee to restrict the flying of the union flag from city hall from all year round to fifteen designated days a year, like the Queen’s birthday (Nagle, 2014).

Protests by such social movements are highly evocative of places riven by severe ethnic divisions and conflict. Social movements play a key role in advancing sectarian interests on behalf of the ethnic group, fomenting intercommunal antagonism, and even spawning forms of collective violence in the process. Some movements, like those noted earlier, take to the streets to defend their ‘cultural capital’, whereas others emerge to petition for various group-based rights or to call for an enlarged share of public goods to be distributed among co-ethnics. Whatever their specific goals, it is tempting to see movements in divided societies as unitary ethnic actors ‘and ethnic identities as given ex ante, automatically salient, fixed … and predictive of individual political behavior’ (Kalyvas, 2008: 1043).

What are violently divided societies? In violently divided societies, ethnicity – or ethnonationalism ¹ – is the main dividing line. Conflict is not merely caused by the existence of multiple ethnic groups; conflict is generated when these ethnic groups derive mutually exclusive notions of political legitimacy. Within so-called ‘stable’ societies political contestation is the very lifeblood of democracy, yet in divided societies there is an absence of ‘consensus on the framework for the making of decisions and an acceptance of the legitimacy of the outcomes of the political processes’ (Guelke, 2012: 12). Intergroup violence derives from a struggle of national self-determination over the wider state (Horowitz, 1985: 5). One or more groups desire the position of dominant ethnie in the state or demand independence, unification with a homeland state across the border or some subset of secession, including territorial autonomy.

There is a debate as to whether ethnic conflicts in divided societies are particularly ferocious forms of contestation. For Horowitz (1985: 31), when groups advance violence in divided societies, the objective is for ‘sovereign autonomy, the exclusion of parallel ethnic groups from a share of power and often reversion – by expulsion or extermination – to an idealized, ethnically homogenous status quo ante’. More realistically, ethnic conflict ‘remains on a continuum with other types of conflict, rather than being qualitatively distinct from them’ (Ruane and Todd, 2004: 229). The micro-level, local dynamics of violence in ethnic conflicts can also differ strikingly from the main conflict dimension of the on-going war (Kalyvas, 2008). At the extreme end of the scale, some divided societies experience intense bouts of civil war replete with major atrocities, ethnic cleansing and forced movements of populations. At the other end, some divided societies endure relatively low-scale insurgencies with limited violence and sporadic instances of forced population movement.

What is the cause of divided societies? It is important to note that the development of a divided society cannot be ascribed to one single structural factor. In a useful explanation, Lustick (1993) focuses on what he calls ‘disputed lands’ as the outcome of failed state-building projects. Lustick (1993) examines states that expand administrative and political control over their territories and diverse populations. These states – where they are colonial – often use settlers to try and ensure the irreversibility of expansionist policies, an act that is met with resistance by groups experiencing the process of incorporation. In a similar analysis, Yiftachel and Ghanem (2004: 649) frame divided societies as the consequence of ‘ethnocracies’: a ‘regime facilitating the expansion, ethnicization and control of contested territory and state by a dominant ethnic nation’. The structure of an ethnocracy is designed to expedite ethnic stratification and discrimination, with ethnicity rather than citizenship featuring as the main basis for resource and power. The dominant ethnonational group ‘appropriates the state apparatus and shapes the political system, public institutions, geography, economy and culture, so as to expand and deepen its control over state and territory’ (Yiftachel and Ghanem, 2004: p. 650).

Both Lutstick (1993) and Yiftachel and Ghanem (2004) see divided societies as the product of the modernizing and ultimately failed projects of nation-state building in places that are ethnically diverse (Wimmer, 2002). State and nation building fostered an ethnic identity that reflected the dominant group. Because legal and political inclusion within the state is dependent on nationality, defined in exclusivist ethnic terms, ethnonational minorities become structurally problematic and subject to either harsh assimilatory policies or denied their full right to equality. In this environment, the ethnic group that gained mastery of the state tried to make the nation ethnically homogeneous, especially by seeking to purify the territory from the presence of perceived polluting and undesirable rival ethnic groups (Mann, 2005).

Conflict in divided societies should not be seen as the result of ancient, primordial identities and enmities; it is instead a consequence of profoundly modern state-building processes. Wimmer et al (2009: 316) argue that ‘certain ethnopolitical configurations of power are more likely to experience violent conflict’. The prospect of armed ethnic rebellion increases in types of state structures that ‘[exclude] large sections of the population from central state power on the basis of their ethnic background’ (Wimmer et al, 2009: 317). Cederman et al (2013) also argue that ‘political and economic inequalities following group lines generate grievances that in turn can motivate civil war’. When an ethnic group is marginalized from the state’s institutions, this causes grievances that are often translated into radical rebellion. Inequalities over access to the state, argues Tilly (2003: 10), is central to collective violence, ‘both because it makes control over governments worth fighting for or defending and because it always includes differences in access to violent means’.

We’ve looked at the causes, but what are the characteristics of violently divided societies? Lustick (1979: 325), in a classic definition, claimed that these places are defined by an ‘antagonistic segmentation of society, based on terminal identities with high political salience, sustained over a substantial period’. In other words, ethnic identities for individuals are pretty much fixed from birth and cannot easily be escaped. These identities are defined in opposition to rival groups, and they provide the basis for social organization and political mobilization.

To illustrate further, let me briefly introduce an example from my research in Lebanon. Lebanon, as we shall explore in detail, is a quintessentially violently divided society. The main line of communal division in Lebanon is ethnoreligious, or ‘sects’, as the Lebanese term it (Salamey, 2014). At various times the main groups in Lebanon entered into violent conflict, and in order to try and peacefully manage these cleavages, the group identities are recognized and accommodated throughout Lebanon’s political and public institutions. Such is the magnitude of this process of official categorization, that ethnicity appears, in Lustick’s (1979) terms, highly ‘ascriptive’ and fundamentally ‘unchangeable’ for individuals. During my research I interviewed a political representative of one of the parties representing an ethnic group. Reflecting, somewhat sadly, on what it means to be a member of an ethnoreligious sect in Lebanon, he stated: The epithet ‘imprisoned’ may seem rather exaggerated, but it must be recognized that in divided societies the capacity of individuals to escape from ethnic identities is severely limited. There is almost an absence of human agency regarding how ethnic affiliation is understood and conceptualized by many inhabitants of divided societies. It is as if these ethnic identities are predetermined even before birth, and path-dependent processes limit the scope for ethnic change during the life course of individuals. I want to specify common features of violently divided societies which will be used throughout this book.

Many of us are born into certain sects, we cannot choose that. We go to sect-based schools and then sect-based universities. Then we marry someone from the sect according to the sect rituals and then when our kids are born they are also encouraged to marry someone from the same sect. And when we die we are buried according to sect rituals as well. It is like you are imprisoned within your sect your whole life.

(interview, July 2014)

Politics

In divided societies, there is a strong correlation between ethnicity and political preference. The society is divided by ethnic-based political parties that mobilize to represent and advance the interests of the ethnie. Instead of developing ‘catch-all’ policies designed to court votes from a wide spectrum across society, the parties focus on ‘catch within’ strategies that aim to maximize votes inside the ethnic group. Political competition, therefore, rarely occurs between cleavages, but within ethnic blocs. This intragroup competition creates a dynamic that rewards those parties encouraging hardline policies proclaiming to protect the group from the rival ethnic bloc(s). Rabushka and Shepsle (1972) coined the phrase ‘ethnic outbidding’ to describe a situation in which parties are incentivized to demonstrate ever-increasing displays of ethnic radicalism. A vicious and reinforcing spiral is set in motion as the ethnic strongmen of the respective blocs use evidence of increasing ethnic radicalization in the opposing bloc as justification for their own aggressive policies. Not unsurprisingly, elections in divided societies are symbolically highly charged, dramatic events that encourage the hardening of identities as well as the use of inter- and intracommunal violence. The result of this process is that there are very few moderate, nonsectarian parties in divided societies and even fewer that succeed in elections. Moderates are damned by the radicals as ‘sell-outs’ and ‘traitors’. Elections, consequently, resemble more closely sectarian ‘head counts’ and ethnic censuses.

Social life

As in politics, deep divisions structure social life in divided societies. The ethnic groups, notes Horowitz (1985), live alongside each other in parallel subsocieties. The most visible sign of division is residential segregation in which the groups reside in separate districts. Separation is not merely that of groups living in rather homogenous but distinct regions in the same state; in divided societies, the main groups live cheek by jowl, side by side, in the same cities and areas, but are separated by the odd street here or there. Despite such proximity, close relationships between neighbours across the ethnic cleavage is rare and at times impossible given that these borders between the groups are flashpoints for violent conflict. Social differences are reinforced by a range of further mechanisms, principal among these is marital homogamy, or to put it another way, ma...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Other Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction ‘You stink’
• 1 ‘Unity in diversity’: social movements in divided societies
• 2 Before the war: nonsectarian social movements and divided societies
• 3 Power sharing, agency, conflict and peacebuilding
• 4 Victims' movements, memory and the state
• 5 The right to the divided city
• 6 Promoting diversity and tolerance: sexual minorities
• 7 Fighting exclusion: feminist movements
• Conclusion: from violence to peace
• Index