Conflict Resolution after the Pandemic

Building Peace, Pursuing Justice

Richard E. Rubenstein, Solon Simmons, Richard E. Rubenstein, Solon Simmons

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367721992
• eBook ISBN: 9781000388732
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In this edited volume, experts on conflict resolution examine the impact of the crises triggered by the coronavirus and official responses to it.

The pandemic has clearly exacerbated existing social and political conflicts, but, as the book argues, its longer-term effects open the door to both further conflict escalation and dramatic new opportunities for building peace. In a series of short essays combining social analysis with informed speculation, the contributors examine the impact of the coronavirus crisis on a wide variety of issues, including nationality, social class, race, gender, ethnicity, and religion. They conclude that the period of the pandemic may well constitute a historic turning point, since the overall impact of the crisis is to destabilize existing social and political systems. Not only does this systemic shakeup produce the possibility of more intense and violent conflicts, but also presents new opportunities for advancing the related causes of social justice and civic peace.

This book will be of great interest to students of peace studies, conflict resolution, public policy and International Relations.

Part I

Conflict resolution in a period of social crisis

1 Big peace

An agenda for peace and conflict studies after the coronavirus catastrophe

Solon Simmons

Exposing deep structural problems in the global institutional order, the disruptions of the coronavirus plague demand that we rethink the concept of peace and subject key institutions to question. Much like the recent turn to “the local,” “the everyday,” and the celebration of little p peace by sociologically inspired peace theorists, the concept of a Big Peace raises questions of radical inclusion that were once unthinkable, and challenges identity in ways that could push us closer to justice or toward the abyss. In the wake of the current series of crises, a revival of interest in the concepts of big peace is predictable.

It seems clear that this moment of global crisis will touch on every aspect of peace and conflict studies, from the boundaries and duties of the nation and state to the scope of human rights and the reach of rule of law, and from systems of business and economic distribution to definitions of personhood and the dynamics of identity formation. To match the matter of the moment will require us to think big, beyond the no longer adequate technocratic approaches to peace and conflict resolution that have become typical of the field for more than a generation.

In this essay, I introduce an agenda for peace and conflict studies that I call “big peace,” a concept that is, at once, more historical and more ambitious than has been typical of the field as it has developed in the wake of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union. This big peace agenda is not meant to displace or limit the good work already going on in the field, and its major features should already be really quite familiar, but it has long been clear that the concept of peace has been narrowing and specializing, thereby losing the weight of the older questions of a big peace agenda of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although this narrowing of the concept of peace is nothing new, the global pandemic has accelerated the processes that call for its expansion.

To get a sense of what is missing from our current peace agenda and why I think it is so important to expand it in this moment of global crisis, consider two exhibits from the history of international affairs. The first is excerpted from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s public prayer of June 6, 1944, on the D-Day invasion:¹

With Thy blessing, we shall prevail over the unholy forces of our enemy. Help us to conquer the apostles of greed and racial arrogancies. Lead us to the saving of our country, and with our sister Nations into a world unity that will spell a sure peace a peace invulnerable to the schemings of unworthy men. And a peace that will let all of men live in freedom, reaping the just rewards of their honest toil.

When Roosevelt delivered that prayer, the United States had not yet been formally part of an international organization designed to secure the peace of the world. After famously inventing the idea of the League of Nations, the United States refused to join it, only being drawn into a similar enterprise in consultation with the British as a second world war was imminent in 1941, coining the phrase United Nations as part of a “fight for freedom” around the world.

Let’s pause for a moment to note that the United Nations itself is, in a very concrete sense, a result of the peace movement, a peace movement with big plans for world peace that grew out of collective attempts to limit the uses of war in pursuit of conquest and, as Alfred Nobel put it in his will, to promote “fraternity among nations.” These were the ambitions of the field of peace and conflict studies, such as it was, in the early middle of the twentieth century. What is hard to remember after the development of the powerful peace organizations that we now enjoy is that they once had to be invented at all, and that their inventors were the peace scholars, both theorists and practitioners, of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The second excerpt is also associated with the United Nations, but this time from the Sustainable Development Goals of the organization that were set in 2015. Way down at the bottom of the list of 17 goals is SDG 16,² which is the box into which the representative organization for the world places today’s peace and conflict work. Here is the text describing the goal of that work: “Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels.”

These are noble objectives, but they are not nearly as lyrical as the words of Alfred Nobel’s will.³ To get a sense of what this more limited sense of peace and conflict work might mean, we can look to the specific targets and indicators of SDG 16, which range from reducing homicide, human trafficking, and illicit financial transactions to promoting participatory decision-making and public access to information. Again, all worthy goals, but when we define peace in this very limited way and compare it to what it meant to those who formulated the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact in 1928, when the great powers conspired to outlaw the very notion of war,⁴ or in 1945 when it provided the inspirational framework for an organization designed to prevent global catastrophe by inventing the United Nations, or again in 1948, when this new world peace organization set out to define a universal definition of human rights that would apply around the world, we see how much the peace agenda has narrowed during the past century.

To plan what will come after the liberal peace will require that those of us in the field of peace and conflict resolution begin again to think in terms as broad and ambitious as previous generations once did. We need to think broadly about what peace is, how it is related to the major institutional forms of violence and their likely presentations, and how these forms of violence can be constrained in a world in which the West will no longer be able to impose its whims on the rest of the world. In short, we need a big peace agenda in some ways like the one that engendered the Nobel Peace Prize, the League of Nations and the UN, the very notion of international cooperation, and universal human rights, but this time touching on domestic issues as well in a way that includes the nearly eight billion of us.

A science of leftovers?

One of the distinctive features of the field of peace and conflict studies, especially in those forms that have fallen under the label peacebuilding, is that they can be thought of as a kind of science of leftovers.⁵ No doubt, Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s acclaimed Agenda for Peace was a visionary document for its time,⁶ and the subject matter of peacebuilding is in no way unimportant. Still, rather than providing a broad structure within which to situate the range of rival domestic political projects of contending nations, peace in this formulation has tended to develop as a kind of narrow specialization within the broader fields of comparative political science and international relations, albeit one that borrows heavily from sociology and anthropology. Peace as peacebuilding is important work, but it tends to leave the big questions like global stability, the mode of production, forms of government, and rule of law unanswered, borrowing frameworks from presumably more rigorous fields. Peacebuilding therefore tends to become an ideologically narrow frame of reference, while the concept of peace, itself, like justice, is as broad as we should ever want it to be.

In contrast, the big peace agenda demands that we place those major institutional dynamics at the heart of our study, just as in the period prior to the so-called first great debate in international relations peace which was imagined so broadly.⁷ Although they didn’t use contemporary terms like structural and cultural violence to describe their interests, economists like Norman Angell, journalists like Alfred Fried, lawyers like William Randall Cremer, novelists like Bertha von Suttner, theologians like Nathan Söderblom, social workers like Jane Addams, and diplomats like Elihu Root considered the full range of human institutions in their concepts of peace. These were big peace theorists who imagined a new domain of global human experience that could be characterized either as peaceful or not. It was a project for imagining the future of a truly global and inclusive civilization. They demanded that new institutions be created that addressed the various forms of violence that placed the world at risk of deadly conflict. Their efforts spanned the entire range of sustainable development goals, and the peacemakers of yesterday would have found the tight specialization of our conception of the field to be disastrously narrow, missing the main fault lines of what we now call radical disagreement and deep-rooted conflict.⁸

After all, what should demand more of our scholarly attention and technical expertise than the broad goal of world peace? Should the pursuit of such a thing be consigned to those things that the economists, the humanitarians, the doctors, the political scientists, the other established professionals cannot do or find uninteresting? Should the scholarship of peace remain a science of leftovers when the consensus of the world, such as it ever was, may be falling apart?

Assuming the answers to these questions are no, what sort of imagination would we require to build this bigger peace agenda? At a minimum, we need a way of speaking about peace in relation to the various forms of violence, and with this a clear sense of how the concept of peace is related to the concept of injustice and to the various forms of politics. After all, who among us doesn’t believe our own era’s popular slogan, “No justice, no peace”? It is far too easy to caricature peace theorists as appeasers and accommodationists, but peace work is often highly conflictual. Justice and peace are highly complementary concepts.⁹ The tough talk of those who celebrate self-interest and selfishness actually lets those thinkers off the hook; they ra...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Author bios
• Foreword
• Introduction: the crises of 2020 and the field of conflict studies
• Part I Conflict resolution in a period of social crisis
• Part II Global political conflicts after the pandemic
• Part III Intergroup conflicts after the pandemic
• Part IV Conflict resolution initiatives after the pandemic
• Index