Post-Conflict Studies

An Interdisciplinary Approach

Chip Gagnon, Keith Brown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415742351
• eBook ISBN: 9781317801733
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book examines how the violence of conflict is transformed in the post-conflict period.

Post-conflict studies seek to illuminate, theorise, and narrate the processes by which societies transition from periods of overt and violent conflict to periods of relative stability and peace. Most of the research carried out on post-conflict societies has taken place within disciplinary bounds. In contrast, this volume breaches those boundaries; though each author is grounded in a particular discipline, the chapters have been written in a spirit of interdisciplinarity.

The focus of the volume is how the violence of conflict is transformed in the post-conflict period into processes that the editors have categorised as criminalisation, medicalisation and missionisation. Comprised of essays written by a diverse group of scholars and activists from anthropology, political science, international relations, law, education, religion, and military history, each section of the book looks at the concept of post-conflict in a way that problematises its common usage and highlights the importance of strongly interdisciplinary research into post-conflict societies.

This book will be of interest to students of war and conflict studies, peace studies, security studies and IR in general.

1 Introduction

Chip Gagnon, Stefan Senders, and Keith Brown

Our interest in this volume is to explore ways societies make sense of transitions from war to peace, and how they manage experiences of violence and trauma. We begin by noting that the “end” of war is often no end at all; rather, conflict takes new forms, new objects, and is often enacted by newly identified participants. Thus we take as a preliminary perspective that the “end” of war – whether glossed for example as “peace,” “truce,” “defeat,” or “victory” – might best be viewed as a primarily symbolic operation, rather than as a material state of affairs. The objects of post-conflict studies, then, are the effects of such symbolic action: What is it that is “over”? And for whom? How is the “end” manifest in social practice and organization, as well as subjectivity? Who benefits from the “end,” and what forms of government and regulation are supported by its various forms?

In concrete cases we ask, what happens to the violence of war once the conflict is over? Our focus is on the ways in which the terms “post-conflict” and “peace-building,” which have become widespread since the early 1990s, have transformed experiences, constructions, and understandings of the nominal transition from war to peace, as well as both of those states. What, if anything, is common to situations which powerful outsiders label “post-conflict,” but which insiders may describe and navigate by reference to specific phenomena, including for example the return of ghosts, the rule of street gangs, or the enduring aspiration toward long-deferred justice? Our argument is that this diversity of experience and idiom poses a challenge and an opportunity for a critical, interdisciplinary social science to engage more directly with the now-established community of practitioners who “do” post-conflict.

We recognize that our impulse is hardly new. For more than a century, scholars in the social sciences have attended to the causes of war, the dynamics of armed conflict itself, and the making of peace. Some studies appear to accept a naive, or perhaps simply pragmatic, understanding of the end of war, viewing it as temporal distance from the time-point authoritatively labeled “peace.” From our perspective, such an approach is insufficient. More recently, scholars have come to scrutinize the ways societies change in periods following war, producing a number of critical studies of contested transitions to democracy, the rule of law and economic reconstruction (Paris 2004; Jarstad and Sisk 2008; Kier and Krebs 2010; Call 2007, 2012). In parallel, a substantial literature has emerged which seeks to identify and codify lessons learned and best practices, focusing in particular on the future of peacebuilding (see for example Call 2007; Keating and Knight 2004; del Castillo 2008; Chetail 2009).

While the term “peacebuilding” has thus been extensively parsed, and its limitations and dilemmas contested, the concept of “post-conflict” has received less attention. There does not yet exist a field that integrates findings from disparate disciplines into a coherent, integral theoretical understanding of post-conflict periods. And while there are many studies on post-conflict societies, there is little questioning of the term or concept itself. In his introduction to Post-Conflict Peacebuilding: A Lexicon, for example, Vincent Chetail offers four glosses on the term “post-conflict” within three pages: “emerging from conflict,” “in the aftermath of conflict,” “at risk of lapsing or relapsing into conflict,” and “…stuck in a grey area of ‘neither war nor peace’ ” (Chetail 2009, 5–7). More robustly and minimally, Charles T. Call offers the “de facto” definition of “societies that have experienced conflict and a cease-fire, either through a victory or a negotiated settlement” (Call 2012, 25).

It is the relatively recent appearance, current proliferation of the term “post-conflict” and its diversity of usage – all individually valid and defensible, but whose combination widens rather than tightens the definition – that prompted this volume. For we note a shift since UN Secretary Boutros Boutros Ghali used “postconflict peacebuilding” in An Agenda for Peace in 1992 (Boutros-Ghali 1992). Where “post-conflict” originally gave a context for international action, it is now routinely attached to societies acted upon.

Yet as scholars have long recognized, insofar as conflict is a function of politics, no society is without conflict in its present. Even if the term is used as a proxy for violence, social scientists’ arguments regarding the ubiquity of hidden or structural violence would lead to the same conclusion (Galtung 1969; see also Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois 2004). And if one adds “armed violent conflict,” the effect is only to shift the discussion into the domain of temporality; few modern societies have made it through the past century without involvement in civil or international war, usually terminated (as Call’s formulation reminds us) in victory or settlement. To the extent that the term “post-conflict” refers to the absence of conflict, the term is a misnomer.

As Aida Hozić explains in her chapter, wars have come to be called conflicts in the post-cold war era. The shift in naming reflects a shift in the perceived source of threat to the stability of the international order – towards small states and internal wars – which in turn changes the ways in which the international community thinks about sovereignty and intervention. That thinking has correlates with the ways in which scholars and policy-makers distinguished the “new states” created by decolonization following World War II from their longer-established counterparts as inherently more fragile (see for example Geertz 1973). In similar ways, when applied to polities or societies, the term “post-conflict” appears to have a temporal referent. It does more than simply identify a social or political condition; rather it serves a communicative and instrumental function which gestures toward prospective futures.

What most studies of post-conflict societies ignore, whether violence was the result of internal or external (or a combination of both) factors, are the continuities between periods. Indeed, from our field experiences it was clear that the “end” of war is often no end at all; rather, the conflict takes new forms, new categorical relations, new objects, and is often enacted by newly empowered participants. Post-conflict periods can be considered those in which the “residue” of war, lingering on past the symbolic boundary of war’s end, becomes the site of struggle, thereby also setting the stage for future conflicts. In this sense, the “post-conflict” period may be marked less by a rupture or a radically new and different period, where violence has ended and a new era has begun, than it is a continuation of processes underway during war-time and the pre-war period. While “war” violence may come to an end, the processes that set it in motion, and that continued in motion and even accelerated and intensified during the war, rarely come to a complete end upon the official cessation of hostilities. Rather, they take new forms, and take on new labels like “crime” or “trauma” or “transition.”

The “end” of armed conflict – whether glossed as “peace,” “truce,” “defeat,” or “victory” – thus might best be seen as a symbolic operation rather than as a material state of affairs. Wielded by international agencies, it signals commitment to an ideology of peace beyond context. By electively marking cease-fire, truce, or victory as establishing a new blank slate, the term authorizes the instantiation of new policies, new interventions, new trade and political relations, new distributions of wealth and access, and new formations of symbolic order. That aspiration may resonate with some within the society in question. And such indigenous support, clearly, is a key component in averting any reversion to violent means of conflict.

In certain cases, however, it is those who had the opportunity to set the terms, or choose the moment for the cessation of active hostilities, who are most likely to support what can be seen as a “reset” which locks in gains they secured through violence. Critics of the Dayton peace agreement in Bosnia-Herzegovina, for example, argue that militant Bosnian Serbs, generally considered the aggressors or perpetrators during the 1992–1995 period, “won” the peace which granted them a larger proportion of the country’s territory than they had occupied at the start of hostilities. And while high-ranking, prominent leaders were in some cases brought to trial on crimes of war charges, lower-profile war profiteers and conflict entrepreneurs on all sides of this conflict were largely able to retain rather than return the material gains they had reaped at the expense of others, and use it as start-up capital with which to prosper further.

War’s “ends,” then, are subject to political contestation in the post-conflict society. Victims of violence, in particular, may emphasize continuities that run through the pre-conflict period, during the war itself, and afterwards, and resist or resent the calls to reconcile and move on – to a greater degree than perpetrators. Yet this readily intelligible reaction may generate counter-intuitive alignments and attitudes in the post-conflict setting. For the end of war provides openings for external actors to insert themselves into ongoing processes – indeed, they often seek to define or redefine processes in ways that sometimes, intentionally or not, shape outcomes in crucial ways. Outsiders often deem such intervention as necessary for the society in question as well as for the well-being of the international community. But while outsiders may have specific intentions, they rarely fully understand the contexts, historical and contemporary, into which they are intervening; their attempts to shape post-conflict societies thus often have unanticipated consequences for ongoing contestations and processes.

Post-conflict and “transition” periods are effectively protean, and they offer a wide range of opportunities – for the rise of social categories, hierarchies, and practices that appear new only to newcomers. They may see post-conflict periods as historical moments in which the prewar foundations of society, politics, the economy, as well as the framing of issues, have been interrupted and even overturned. And this is accurate, insofar as the post-conflict period is defined by ideological and institutional contestation, by actors both local and distal. At stake is the shape and form of the emergent “peace.” What will be the new constraints on power? Who will have access to politics? What forms will agency and accountability – agency of people within a post-conflict society, and accountability of external actors – take? How will categories of person – traitors, heroes, deserters, profiteers, rescuers, loyalists, victims, perpetrators, veterans – be determined? How will they be regarded or treated? How will the costs – and benefits – of war be distributed? Who will be seen and marked as “normal,” who as “pathological”?

But the struggle for control of this “peace” is seldom dominated by those who lost most in the conflict that preceded it. And further, it may be more violent than the war itself. As Ellen Moodie shows in her chapter, violence in El Salvador increased after the nominal end of the war in 1992. In the context of the post-conflict regime that followed, the violence of war was replaced with the violence of “crime.” To take another example, in the former Yugoslavia, war-violence was framed in terms of competing “ethnic” identities that had not been particularly salient before the war. Ethnic conflict, in this case, was more a product of war than its cause, and attempts to shift discursive frames to an exclusively ethnic focus – including through implicit and explicit violence – continued during the post-conflict period, as part of a strategy to misrepresent different “groups” thus imagined as equally culpable. These attempts were greatly aided by outside interventions into the conflict – every international attempt at peace-making involved privileging ethnic categories over all others.

While seeking to problematize the notion of “post-conflict,” we also recognize that it has become an important category for both analysis and intervention, a category that deserves more attention than scholars have given it. Indeed, as a category in security studies, the post-conflict or postwar period is perhaps more important now than in other times in history. From a material and environmental perspective, changes in weapons technology have led to increasingly enduring after-effects from military action. Land mines, for example, remain lethal for years after their initial deployment, and no “cessation of conflict” is capable of rendering them harmless. New forms of ordinance, like the million-plus cluster bomblets fired by the IDF into Lebanon in the closing days of the 2006 conflict, create enormous costs for civilian populations and agencies, and thus “constitute a severe impediment to post-conflict recovery.” (Steiner 2007, 7). Similarly, toxic materials used in military action, whether deployed as weapons or as facilitators for other processes, routinely endure well beyond the nominal end of hostilities. Agent Orange, the herbicide and defoliant used by the United States during the Vietnam War, impacts the health of American and Vietnamese veterans and their communities to this day, while the long-term environmental and public health effects of more recent and widespread use of depleted uranium shells by US forces in Kosovo and in Iraq are objects of research (Busby et al. 2010; Zuchetti 2009).

Since World War II, post-conflict periods have frequently been accompanied – and in some cases created – by a variety of international interventions; these interventions, as we discuss throughout the book, take many forms. Military intervention, as described by Ike Wilson in his chapter, is one of the more obvious generators of the post-conflict phase; U.S. military doctrine developed a terminology of “Phase IV operations” which reflects the increased significance of the concept in U.S. security concerns (Crane 2005). International organizations, such as the UN, are often called upon to manage refugee flows and returns; NGOs may engage in a wide range of interventions – Keith Brown’s chapter on democracy assistance in Macedonia, Chip Gagnon’s chapter on democracy promotion, Rose Metro’s chapter on educational work among Burmese refugees, and Chris Engel’s chapter on international legal involvement in post-conflict judicial forms all focus on such types of actions. As Elton Skendaj notes in his chapter, scholars and academics also intervene in their attempts to explain pre-conflict, conflict and post-conflict, and at times also to aid in the post-conflict interventions of others. Especially since the end of the Cold War, post-conflict periods have become the focus of what amounts to an industry of intervention.

Within this volume, we do not give priority to any one academic discipline; instead, we have gone out of our way to present multiple perspectives. We have brought together scholars from anthropology, sociology, political science, international relations, education, military history and legal studies. In addition, we have sought out activists, missionaries, and NGO-workers to help us illuminate the breadth of “post-conflict.” Much of the work presented here is based on ethnographic research. The voices heard here are those of scholars and activists, all of whom have worked in and on post-conflict societies. What we do not have are the direct voices of those “on the ground,” that is, members of post-conflict societies themselves. We do think that future work in post-conflict studies would benefit from more ethnographic work, and from the inclusion of a greater diversity of voices and experiences.

We are also convinced that to be successful, post-conflict studies will have to develop a high standard for interdisciplinary discourse, which is no simple task. In our own experience, disciplinary boundaries are sturdy, and practical and ideological pressure makes it difficult for young scholars, who are the most likely to develop a coherently interdisciplinary perspective, to conduct research that might be considered unorthodox or threatening to established boundaries and authority.

The chapters in this volume began as short thought pieces presented and discussed at two workshops held at the Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies at Cornell University, in 2008 and 2010. We asked participants to write about their own experiences and observations of post-conflict contexts. As a preliminary conceptual framework for the overall project, we suggested that participants focus on four processes, or modalities, that we saw operating both continuously within post-conflict periods, and simultaneously upon the very periodization of conflict and post-conflict as discontinuous. The four terms we proposed for participants to think with were medicalization, criminalization, memorialization and missionization.

Medicalization and criminalization are forms of social identification that channel the violence that had marked the period of war into “peacetime” processes of medical diagnoses and/or criminality and its policing. These processes thus separate violence from everyday life, mark it as “abnormal,” and incorporate it within what are often extensive and powerful bureaucratic structures. Specifically, we took Medicalization to refer to the integration of post-conflict experience into medical discourse; that is, the violence of the wartime period is transformed into a medicalized condition in the post-conflict period. For example, we were interested in the ways the categories of “trauma” and “PTSD” have become ubiquitous in post-conflict contexts. One of the consequences of this emergent medicalization has been the development of a community dedicated to active therapeutic intervention, as well as a discourse that focuses on violence as it is experienced at the individual level. Much of the reconciliation work being done by international NGOs adopts a psychological framework from couples and other kinds of counseling, projecting back to the past as the cause of violence some kind of psychological dysfunction of an entire society. Although a number of participants in the workshops found the concept useful, none of the authors in this volume center their analysis around this concept. Its influence is nonetheless apparent in several chapters: Hozić, for example points out that the very notion of “conflict” rather than “war” is rooted in a view of the causes of violence being rooted in pathologies or “character failings,” itself a medicalized discourse.

Criminalization we understood as the process of converting violence and violent agents from socially defined categories of “military” to “criminal.” Our view of criminalization is fairly broad; we were interested in discursive changes as well as material changes in legal infrastructure and practice. We asked, for...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge Studies in Peace and Conflict Resolution
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• Part I The post-conflict concept
• Part II Recasting mission
• Part III Criminalization
• Part IV Reflections on post-conflict as practice
• Index