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Introduction: The Transcripts of Peace: Public, Hidden or Non-obvious?
Roger Mac Ginty
This piece introduces the special issue on everyday peace indicators. It considers the limitations of orthodox approaches to capturing and evaluating peace. Many of these approaches are top-down and reflect state-centric approaches. Alternatively they are focused on specific peacebuilding programmes and have little to say about the wider context in which peace is being built or obstructed. The lived-experience of conflict and war-to-peace transitions is often written out of accounts of peace and conflict. While recognizing that measuring peace is an inherently complex task, this introductory essay notes that there is little appetite among international organizations to reassess how they record and evaluate peace. In part, this is explained by the lucrative political economy of monitoring and evaluation. This special issue seeks to contribute to thinking about new agendas for evaluating peace.
Introduction
Go to any conference or workshop on peacebuilding and you are likely to hear clichĂ©s such as âone size doesnât fit allâ and âthere are no templatesâ. Despite their clichĂ©d nature, these phrases point to the commonly held view that peacebuilding contexts require tailor-made approaches that are sensitive to the needs and aspirations of the locality. The thinking behind this approach is that tailored peace-support and reconstruction interventions will have a greater chance of success and so will be cost-effective and sustainable. Yet, despite the attention paid to localism in pronouncements from international organizations, bilateral donors, international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), there is strong evidence that template-style interventions persist. This is especially the case in relation to the monitoring and evaluation of peacebuilding interventions where there is a trend towards the use of standardized techniques. This trend has been reinforced by the generic training offered by INGOs, or initiatives to design commonly-agreed evaluation techniques (McDevitt 2010, Kawano-Chiu 2011).
Standardization brings many advantages, especially if it means the internalization of best practice across a sector that is rapidly growing and may suffer from a âTower of Babel complexâ whereby multiple perspectives and operating procedures may lead to conflict and duplication. Yet, standardization also brings risks. Perhaps the greatest of these is the standardization of the ways in which conflicts and peacebuilding situations are âseenâ by interventionist organizations such as bilateral donors, international financial institutions and INGOs. This applies not only to the monitoring and evaluation of peacebuilding interventions, but also to the conflict analysis tools used to interpret a conflict. The danger is that the repertoire of description is narrowed through standardization, and alternative ways of describing a conflict are overlooked. The repertoire of prescription may also be standardized whereby peace-intervention actors often prescribe the same types of intervention regardless of context (Mac Ginty 2010).
This issue of the narrowing and standardization of our analyses of conflict is well-illustrated by the identification of state âweaknessâ and âfailureâ as the cause of many conflicts by conflict analysts in bilateral donor states or international organizations. For those inculcated in contexts where states are largely present and effective, state failure or absence seems an obvious explanation for the onset and persistence of conflict. Equally obvious to such eyes, is the prescription: statebuilding. According to this line of thinking, conflict can be staunched if effective states can be built to manage conflict and competing claims over resources, power and identity. The âpeacebuilding through statebuildingâ trope has been one of the most prominent elements of contemporary peace-support interventions. Yet, for many of those who experience conflict in places like the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) or Somalia the state is an irrelevance (Kabamba 2010). The state may variously be entirely absent, geographically remote, sporadically relevant or limited to particular functions or areas of life. Given the irrelevance or limited relevance of the state to everyday life, those experiencing the conflict may not consider the presence or strength of the state as a salient factor in the causation and persistence of conflict. Conflict analysts from the global north, on the other hand, may regard statelessness as the prominent factor in explaining the conflict. As statelessness is likely to be seen as deviant, the obvious âsolutionâ is statebuilding.
What this example illustrates is that some explanations of peace and conflict have greater traction than others. In many cases, analysts from the global north have significant labelling power and are able to promulgate their narrative of a conflict more successfully than others (Moncrieffe 2007). Those experiencing, or engaged in, a conflict may find that their conflict is labelled âethnicâ or âresource-basedâ and intervention is based on these labels. Stephen Chan (2011, p. 101) sums up the unequal power relationships held by those witnessing conflict from afar, and those experiencing the conflict: âThe sense and privileging of our horror and compassion render the persons we call âvictimsâ as without agency or capacity beyond victimhoodâ.
This special issue intersects with two themes found in James C. Scottâs work on the representation of development and conflict: the notion of a âhidden transcriptâ and how states âsee like a stateâ. Scottâs work on resistance in development contexts noted how many individuals and communities adopted public and hidden transcripts (Scott 1992). The public transcript was on show for the bosses and those with the authority to punish or withhold resources. But alongside this public transcript was a hidden transcript, or a series of ways in which individuals and communities reflected their experiences privately. In part, this hidden transcript was a form of resistance, a form of communication inaccessible to those in power. In some peacebuilding contexts the most accurate and locally relevant transcript is indeed hidden. Communities may purposively shape their publically-accessible transcripts in order to maximize the rewards from outsiders. For example, we can see this in the adoption by local respondents of Western-style peacebuilding language in grant applications and annual reports. But more than deliberate deception, it is contended in this short introductory essay that the accurate transcripts of many societies experiencing conflict and war-to-peace transitions are not obvious to outsiders. This is despite the fact that outsiders are often charged with pivotal tasks in peacebuilding and statebuilding programmes. Rather than being public or hidden, transcripts are often confusing, contradictory, and thick with local meaning; they are ânon-obviousâ to outsiders who are often woefully lacking in the skills of observation and interpretation. The everyday world of those experiencing war-to-peace transitions may be outside of the ambit of external observers who are physically limited to the NGO headquarters, the armoured convoy or the diplomatic compound. Indeed the tools that outsiders are often equipped with, whether through Western social science or the monitoring and evaluation toolkits favoured by international organizations, seem designed only to read local contexts in particular ways.
Scottâs (1999) Seeing Like a State notes how states have developed systems (diplomatic, statistical bureaux etc.) that render information in particular ways. States often have a closed loop of communication that is limited in terms of its ability to access information beyond the diplomatic capital. Formal information-gathering networks can garner masses of information, but it is not always clear that this information is accurate and prevails beyond the capital city (Heathershaw 2008). It is not clear that the electronic revolution has made states any less reliant on traditional methods of information-gathering. Evidence of this comes in the form of how the United States was blindsided by the Arab Spring. The problem with state-centric lenses is that the experience of many individuals and communities in societies undergoing war-to-peace transitions is only lightly impacted by the state. The state may be irrelevant in many spheres of life and so states and institutions that âsee like a stateâ risk seeing only a partial picture.
The Limits of Orthodox Measures of Peace
This special issue is interested in the epistemology and political economy that surrounds the naming, description and measuring of peace and conflict. It takes, as its starting point, the observation that many of the measurement tools used by international organizations and others are limited. Before outlining those limitations it is worth stressing that those attempting to measure or capture peace and conflict face many difficulties. The methodological and ethical difficulties range from physical danger for the researcher and the researched to more conceptual issues such as what constitutes peace and conflict.
Three limitations on the measurement of peace and conflict are worth mentioning here. The first of these revolves around what is to be measured. Peace and conflict are illusive both as concepts and as practical phenomenon, and depend heavily upon definition and context. They are archly political terms, and local, national and international actors may have interests in advancing or stopping particular definitions and approaches to measurement. Those charged attempting to measure peace or capture peace are faced with a range of options. Do they take positive or negative peace as their baseline? Do they regard the reaching of a peace accord as a sufficient indicator of peace? Are they interested in peacefulness among individuals, or at a community or institutional level? Given the difficulty in pinning down what is meant by peace or conflict, those interested in measuring either term often resort to using proxy measurements. Levels of gross domestic product (GDP) are often used as a proxy for peace. The pitfalls of this approach are well-illustrated by the figure in Sarah Holtâs article in this special issue. It shows Sri Lankaâs ever-growing GDP despite the devastation wrought by inter- and intra-ethnic conflict, and the 2004 tsunami. The most likely explanation for Sri Lankaâs growth during war and natural disaster is that the government cooked the books. Richard Bowd and Alpaslan Ăzerdemâs article focuses on a phenomenon as intangible as peace itself: social reintegration. How can we measure something that often operates in the affective realm?
A second obstacle facing those attempting to measure peace or conflict concerns the level of analysis. Many measures of peace and conflict are confined to one level of analysis, yet peace and conflict are often experienced at multiple levels of society, though with variance across these levels. As a result, many of the orthodox snapshot attempts to capture peace and conflict only see part of the picture. For example, international organizations are often wedded to national-level statistics (this applies to much of the output of the United Nations Development Programme and the World Bank), yet conflicts often occur within a particular area of a state and often have a transnational dimension. A further level of analysis problem is illustrated by the prevalence of project-level measures of peace. The monitoring and evaluation of individual peacebuilding projects is a prudent activity, with a sound bureaucratic rationale. Yet we must be careful not to exaggerate what project-level evaluations can tell us about the broader context of the society. It is possible for a peacebuilding project in a conflict zone to successfully meet all of its criteria yet for the wider security or communal context to be deteriorating.
A third limitation associated with many orthodox measures of peace and conflict is that they tend to be top-down. Many attempts to capture peace and conflict are conducted remotely, and those who actually experience the conflict or peace are uninvolved in the design and conduct of the measurement exercise, and the dissemination of the results. Individual and community-level experiences of the conflict or the emergence of peace can be overwritten or represented in ways that are alien to many of those in the conflict zone. This applies to both quantitative and qualitative descriptions of local contexts in which the language used is exclusive, often a professionalized argot that is only accessible by those with the requisite âexpertiseâ. Indeed, the top-down and exclusive nature of the data gathered to describe conflict or peacebuilding contexts often reinforces the importance of the professional peacebuilding clique. The specialist argot is required in order to access donor funds with the result that expatriates or overseas-educated personnel are hired to conduct in-country assessments.
Despite the limitations associated with orthodox approaches to measuring or representing peace and conflict, there is surprisingly little effort to think of alternative forms of measurement. The somnambulant persistence with forms of measurement that are not fit for purpose can be largely explained the convenience of the familiar, and the difficulties associated with alternatives. There are other reasons as well. Prominent here is the political economy of measuring peace, especially the monitoring and evaluation (M&E) industry that has developed with consultants and M&E âspecialistsâ pedalling standardized (and often palatable) reports. Many of the snouts in the trough would be anxious not to upset the farmer. Also important in explaining the persistence of orthodox approaches to the measurement of peace and conflict is the logic of technocracy. Peacebuilding as conducted by international organizations and many INGOs and NGOs can be said to have experienced a âtechnocratic turnâ in recent decades. This has involved the adoption of many of the values and operating procedures that are found in the business world. Technocracy and bureaucratic systems are defensible to the extent that they bring efficiency and neutrality to functional tasks. Yet the logic of technocracy has meant that, in many cases, technocratic and bureaucratic mores become pre-eminent to the detriment of the original aim of the third sector organization. Reconciliation and humanitarianism become subordinated to budget cycles, spread sheets, and monitoring and evaluation. Agendas are set by donors with the result that INGOs and NGOs lose autonomy.
New Agendas for Measuring Peace
Despite the obstacles facing those attempting to measure peace, and the strong incentives for inertia among international institutions and the monitoring and evaluation industry, there are signs of a new agenda in the measurement of peace. The Institute for Economics and Peace (2011a), for example, has constructed a Global Peace Index comprised of an amalgamation of 23 qualitative and quantitative indicators. It has also established a United States Peace Index based on measurements of homicides, violent crimes, jailed population, and police officers per 100,000, as well as a measure of the availability of firearms (Institute of Economics and Peace 2011b). While this initiative faces many methodological problems (such as the weighting to be awarded to each of its indicators), it is noteworthy in that it attempts to be a measure of peace rather than conflict. Other initiatives include one by the Alliance for Peacebuilding, an association of mainly US-based NGOs that has sought to provide a space for dialogue between the funders of evaluation and the implementers (Kawano-Chiu 2011). The World Bank, often caricatured as an unreflexive neoliberal machine, has shown signs of recognizing the limitations of its often national-level data-gathering techniques. Its World Development Report (World Bank 2011, p. 23) was replete with conflict-sensitive phraseology, as well as a recognition that standard measures s...
