Politics of Conflict

A Survey

Vassilis Fouskas

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781136833564
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Four sections present a thorough overview of current issues in the politics of conflict in historical perspective. Essay chapters written by a variety of academic and other experts on topics including conflicts in Latin America, Africa, the Caucasus and Central Asia, South Asia and South-East Asia, the Arab-Israeli Conflict and Yugoslavia provide background analysis and information on some of the key aspects of conflicts in the world. It also includes an A – Z glossary of conflicts in the world, Maps of countries and regions and a select bibliography.

Essays

Introduction: A World in Conflict

VASSILIS K. FOUSKAS

One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, 1939.

CONFLICT STUDIES

‘Conflict studies’ in the higher education institutions of the West is a relatively recent phenomenon. The subject stormed out of our military academies, to see itself assume pride of place in the list of postgraduate taught courses, especially in the United Kingdom. What generated this interest, of course, and sensitized the most alert members of the academic community in the field of international relations, was the end of the Cold War coupled, some 10 years later, with the terrorist attacks on the USA on 9/11, 11 September 2001. The clash, now, people like to say, is no longer between opposing states and power blocs, but rather between ‘civilizations’, religions and nationalisms. Conflict is also attributed to ‘rogue’ or ‘failed’ states and regions and can thus be ‘asymmetric’ in cases where a great power intrudes, attempting to impose ‘order and justice’ upon disobedient societal actors.

True, American academics and practitioners had pioneered the field well before the collapse of ‘really existing socialism’, particularly with their work in Ivy League institutions and specialized think-tanks: peace and conflict studies, conflict management and resolution, peace-making and peace-building, mediation and conflict—the list is endless. In fact, ‘conflict’ seems to have become the buzzword in the relatively new discipline of international relations. It is understood as an independent and neutral category in social sciences, a category that is not reducible to the classic concepts of sociology and political science, those of class, status and security. Thus, conflict-resolution frameworks in the field of conflict studies resort to technical instruments drawn from legal codes and the practices of industrial disputes: informal negotiation and arbitration first; then good offices, judicial settlement, reconciliation and problem-solving workshops; and, if need be, healing practices.

Despite the merits of this approach and its immense contribution to the study of conflict, in this book we have chosen not to engage directly with and/or problematicize this analytical framework. The essays presented here have a much more modest aim, which is to describe, inform and dispose of issues relevant to the specificities of the regional conflicts that each contributor examines. We do not talk about conflict in general, nor have we thematicized the variety of conflicts, such as according to gender, environment, etc; also, we do not make reference to low intensity conflicts (such as drugs trafficking, small weapons trafficking, etc.). Instead, we offer an informed discussion about high intensity conflicts across the globe, actual or latent, conflicts that pertain to the classic analytical matrices of class, state and security, and thus of power. The Politics of Conflict: A Survey has to be understood, and judged, from this idiosyncratic perspective.

Obviously, not everything can be reduced to the concepts of class, state, security and power. Identity, perceptions, the environment and cultural and ideological issues are determined neither in the last nor in the first instance by class or security. Identities and ideologies would not disappear in a hypothetical classless and stateless global society, although they may very well be interacting with each other under capitalism. To paraphrase Max Weber, it is not the Church that created Christianity as an ideological and identity theme of Western publics, but rather the other way around. Thus, conflict, in one form or another, will always be present, not because capitalism might last a long time but because the future will last longer than capitalism.

However, all sorts of religions, cultures, psychologies and identities can be referential to class by virtue of links—and access—to education, economic standards, anxieties about lack of money and so on. They can also be referential to security, broadly understood; for instance religious-based militias or the need of individuals to find spiritual refuge and shelter in a direct communication with transcendent powers, thus addressing problems of individual insecurity, health concerns, etc. In other words, constructivists and post-structuralists have one or two things to say to enrich our understanding about the antagonisms of contemporary international relations. None the less, at the end of the day, one has to ask the crucial question: what is the driving force of antagonisms in this world? How can we untangle this skein of different strands, class, power, security, identities and so on? The answer is that all these are large themes constituting the actual ingredients of most conflict situations, although I should make clear, in order to avoid misunderstandings and as I implied earlier, that my methodological preference is to privilege class, state power and security in the shaping of the actual politics of conflict. This is in preference to ideological or cultural themes, or to themes related to Michel Foucault’s relational and relativized concepts of the microphysics of power and panoptism (Foucault, 1975; and Negri and Hardt, 2000—see Bibliography).

These methodological and epistemological preferences have not been imposed on any of the contributors to this book—quite the opposite. The interesting thing to note is that the empirical findings of all the essays uphold this combination of ‘neo-realist’ and ‘neo-Marxist’ methodological standpoints. Let us now focus on the contributions and the empirical case studies with which the authors in this book have engaged.

THE BOOK

The first essay, by Andrew Wheatcroft, makes out a reflective argument on ‘evil’. He tries to understand how a world that before 1945 and the Nuremberg trials came out of the mouths of priests and theologians has since become a term used by politicians, military analysts and political scientists—even more so after 9/11. ‘Evil’ and the ‘war on terror’ have indeed become the ideological organizing principles around which the USA has been thematicizing its global hegemonic politics since 9/11. If the enemy is evil, then the enemy is criminal, and should be treated as such. Using works by David Frankfurter and Roy F. Baumeister, Wheatcroft goes on to argue that evil is a theme that has great mobilization potential, as the history of conspiracies and pogroms for more than 1,000 years has shown. The theme of evil, therefore, is a very powerful tool and the USA is using it in order to achieve concrete material outcomes. Wheatcroft then connects this analysis with the theme of Christendom, as this concept of evil has originated not in the Islamic East but in the Christian West. In this context, ‘evil’ may be seen as consubstantial to wars led by the war departments of the US ‘Empire’. That Empire—defined as an articulate organizer of imperialism (global projections of power, strategies of domination and economic exploitation, etc.)— converts the theme of evil from ideology into the practical terrain of material violence¹. In this sense, ‘evil’ is the post-9/11 code of organized global violence. Furthermore, ‘evil’ is here to stay, Wheatcroft warns, not least because the war on terror, as President George W. Bush and the Pentagon have said explicitly, might last forever. Wheatcroft’s contribution is a splendid exposure and criticism of the way in which the USA has been using the theme of evil in order to achieve power-politics ends.

As noted earlier, a common sense view is that post-Cold War conflicts are mainly intra-state and dominated by nationalistic and religious wars. Jairo Lugo tells us that this is not exactly the case in Latin America, inasmuch as civil and other forms of conflict there are still dominated by class and ideological issues, together with the left–right divide. Lugo, moreover, exemplifies a point made by virtually all the contributors: that ‘imperial’ or external interventions, whether by means of an open invasion or by means of CIA machinations, for instance, have characterized and defined the region’s conflicts throughout its modern history. We are, therefore, already becoming aware of the fact that imperial undertakings are both constituting and instituting agents of conflicts, not neutral arbiters, impartial mediators or ‘good will’ negotiators.

In examining the nature of conflicts in independent Africa, Phia Steyn mentions the arbitrary drawing of borders between the colonial powers, seldom reflecting the political, economic, ethnic and geographical realities of African regions. This was also the case in the Middle East and to an extent in the Balkans and east-central Europe, but Africa has seen all sort of colonists coming and going, be they British, French, Portuguese, Belgian, Spanish, Dutch, German or Italian. This legacy left an indelible mark on Africa and exacerbated its ethnic, tribal and religious problems; Steyn does not fail to point out as well the colonial policies of ‘divide and rule’. Her sober analysis is driving her to conclude that, owing to the complexity of African conflicts, no ‘quick fix’ or easy solution can be found.

Emmanuel Karagiannis’s essay on the issue of ethnic conflicts in the Caucasus and Central Asia corroborates further the hypothesis that ethnic conflicts in the region are related to material or class and strategic interests (petroleum and gas pipeline routes, the control of resources and of strategic passages, etc.), as well as to greater schemes of security and power politics driven by neo-imperial and/or external interference (from Russia, Turkey or the USA, for example). In this respect—although the internal dynamics of ethnic conflicts as such should not be underestimated—ethnic and religious minorities can be used by external agents as vehicles to fulfil their state agendas and class objectives.

Rajat Ganguly examines two of the most important—from the standpoint of regional and international security—conflicts in South Asia: the Indian–Pakistani conflict over Kashmir; and the Tamil–Sinhalese conflict in Sri Lanka. None of these seemingly ethnic and religious conflicts is dissociated from imperial and/or external interference. With Kashmir, India and Pakistan are obviously involved, but so is the People’s Republic of China, by virtue of its border dispute with India. The United Kingdom, the former colonial power in the region—as in Sri Lanka— has withdrawn to the background, but still plays a role in both conflicts. India (which supports the Hindu Tamils of Sri Lanka) and even Pakistan and Israel (which support the Sinhalese-majority Government) are also involved in the island. Ganguly is outspoken about US training of mujahideen (freedom fighters) during Afghanistan’s occupation by the USSR, a point that corroborates our generic principles: first, that modern imperial interests are a fundamental constituting factor generating conflict situations; and, second, that domestic (ethnic and religious) types of conflict are used by imperial and external powers either for power-politics ends or to address their security concerns.

Yoke-Lian Lee and Roger Buckley comprehensively present a wide range of conflicts in South-East Asia, underlining issues of legitimacy and institutional weakness in the South-East Asian state. They point out the negative legacy of colonialism in the shaping and transformation of the regional conflicts and raise concerns about how the South-East Asian state can provide a conflict-resolution framework in a region dominated by the often competing agendas of far more powerful states, such as China, India, Japan, the United Kingdom and the USA— and, more recently, Australia.

The focus of the book then switches to four single case studies, on: the former Yugoslavia; Iraq; Northern Ireland; and the Arab–Israeli conflict. This has not been an arbitrary choice. Northern Ireland and Palestine have been defining regional—even international—security relations since the First World War, whereas Yugoslavia and Iraq have risen to prominence, from the point of view of conflict studies, in the wake of the collapse of ‘really existing socialism’. Furthermore, the comprehensive analysis provided by the authors exemplifies the realist linkages between exogenous and endogenous actors in the origination, shaping and transformation of conflict. The best summaries available on the issue of linkages are the essays by Stevan K. Pavlowitch and Peter Gowan, first published in late 1999 in the Journal of Southern Europe and the Balkans. Whereas Pavlowitch seems to suggest that the West bears minimal responsibilities for the dissolution of Yugoslavia, making the internal complexities of the country a key to understanding its case, for Gowan the articulation of domestic and external agents amounts to an explanation of the crisis. From this perspective, the next three cases need the least explanation of all; Iraq, Palestine-Israel and Northern Ireland have been and are the most mediated—thus, politicized and internationalized—conflicts ever. All three contributors, Rory Miller (Arab-Israeli conflict), John Doyle (Northern Ireland) and Vassilis K. Fouskas (Iraq), offer original and highly informative analyses of the conflicts with which they deal.

A REALIST WORLD IN CONFLICT?

This, therefore, seems to be a realist world in conflict, which persistently and tenaciously refuses to fit into preconceived technical frameworks of conflict prevention, management and resolution, which at times are operated, after all, by ‘impartial’ agencies of which we might have some suspicions. The failure of the UN, NATO, the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and other inter-governmental or ‘non-governmental’ organizations to achieve comprehensive peace in areas in which they have been engaged, either as aggressors or as mediators and peacemakers, is colossal. Successful diplomatic or military missions led by them are few, or the conflict in question is unresolved, temporarily fixed and/or still lurking (see, for example, the case of Cyprus and other cases in the A–Z Glossary). This might be because, as Georg Simmel mentioned a long time ago, ‘Conflict itself constitutes a resolution of the tension between the contraries’ (his 1904 essay can be found in a 1963 publication cited in the Bibliography). However, for a ‘duel’ to be held in international and social relations would be but an ideal; there are no gladiators in international politics. In reality, this sort of duel does not exist because conflict is always mediated by a variety of other agents, sites and structures. In this respect, this volume establishes and offers an answer for two major issues in the field of international relations and conflict:

First, there has never existed an ethnic, religious or whatever conflict in the first place, and an international (or third party) intervention that followed, in order to bring about ‘peace’, ‘war’, ‘a settlement’, ‘transformation’ or whatever to that (‘domestic’) conflict.

Second, ethnic, religious (let alone inter-state) and other non-individualistic forms of conflict are deeply political and international, which is to say, consubstantial with the issues of class and security.

Needless to say, both the themes established here are very much inter-linked. Let us shed some light on them.

To begin with, modernity is consubstantial with internationalization and, first and foremost, with the internationalization of both capital and labour as forms of antagonistic social relations². Every form of ethnic and religious conflict is profoundly international, because all examples that we possess from modern history indicate that imperial/external powers and domestic agents are both and simultaneously responsible for the conflict in question, or that conflict was caused and/or exacerbated/transformed by external/imperial intervention. Obviously, this thesis turns theory and the theoreticians of conflict resolutions and mediations on their head. What kind of impartial mediation could, for example, have been offered by a British negotiator in the Cyprus dispute, since it was primarily the United Kingdom itself that exacerbated the problem there? What kind of impartial service could conceivably be undertaken by Michael Levy in his position as the United Kingdom’s special envoy for Israel-Palestine, when he was a former Chairman of the Jewish Appeal Board and former board member of the Jewish Agency, has business and a house in Israel and has a son working for the Israeli justice ministry (Pilger, 2002)?

Secondly, we should remember that when great powers intervene, in whatever way, in the domestic affairs of a smaller state, they do so via their own state or state agents. What realist theoreticians call national interest is, in fact, an amalgam—albeit contradictory and, at times, even deficient (see Fouskas’s essay on Iraq)—of the class and security interests of the imperial power in question. If we look at the US ‘Emp...

Table of contents

• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• The Contributors
• Abbreviations
• Essays
• A–Z Glossary Conflicts in the World
• B
• C
• D
• E
• F
• G
• H
• I
• K
• L
• M
• N
• P
• R
• S
• T
• U
• X
• Y
• Maps
• Bibliography