Elicitive Conflict Transformation and the Transrational Shift in Peace Politics

W. Dietrich

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781349442133, 9781137035059
• eBook ISBN: 9781137035066
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book considers elicitive conflict transformation and its interrelation with humanistic psychology. It discusses the transrational turn in the fields of diplomacy, military, development cooperation and political economy, presenting a new model of conflict analysis with practical implications for peace work.

1

Introduction

1.1 Author’s perspective

United Nations (UN) Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s 1992 Agenda for Peace¹ was an attempt to respond to entirely new opportunities and challenges in the world system. Addressing the precedents and the consequences of violent conflicts as integral parts of the dispute itself, the agenda went well beyond the UN’s previous understanding of conflict work. Although no binding terminology exists for measures taken regarding a conflict of supranational dimensions, I will for the purposes of this book adopt the terms most widely used for designating the individual steps of international peace work, and which reflect the intensity of a conflict in progress: preventive diplomacy, peacekeeping, peace enforcement, and post-conflict peacebuilding.

With the Agenda for Peace, the customary spectrum of preventative diplomatic measures, including the time-proven ‘good offices,’ was extended to include a comprehensive early-warning system capable of quickly generating monitoring and fact-finding missions. Such missions gathered expert information and also provided access to a system developed to intervene in humanitarian, diplomatic, and economic ways, if not militarily. The purpose of this system was to buffer the most serious manifestations of a dispute before they could spread and become large-scale, extreme forms of violence. The politics of development – victim to its own claims in past decades – were rediscovered and redefined as a measure of peacekeeping. Social progress, facilitated by development aid and an adequate economic framework, was meant to reduce the propensity for violence attributed to the peripheral societies in the world system.

Observing human rights in conflict situations, monitoring elections, providing logistical support for institution building and for humanitarian aid across state borders became the concerns of the day. The spectrum of civilian and military measures typically applied in problematic cases was extended to include new measures not explicitly provided for in the UN Charter. Under the peculiar and informal designation ‘Chapter VI ½,’ peacekeeping came to be known as operations which include all measures of both the military and civilian spheres, and the armed and unarmed operations adopted by the UN in order to initiate, promote, or maintain peace processes. This included establishing demilitarized zones between conflict parties in connection with fact-finding or monitoring missions, and the establishment and enforcement of Chapter VI measures against specific regimes, so that such measures could become the subject of creative international accords.²

It was Chapter VII, however, that underwent the most extensive interpretation of peacemaking in the context of the UN’s work. The previously required consent of the conflict parties was no longer deemed necessary for armed interventions authorized by the Security Council. Peace enforcement, an armed measure under UN Chapter VII, became applicable without the consent of the conflicting parties provided that other requirements were in place. Post-conflict peacebuilding was intended to support the victims of an armed conflict in restoring civilian life once physical violence had subsided. Peacebuilding included humanitarian aid, civilian institution building, or the implementation of governmental services such as policing. Ultimately, it comprised disaster relief and development aid, at which point the circle closes and meets peacekeeping. When post-conflict peacebuilding does not have the desired effect, then the process begins again.

With the Agenda for Peace, the United Nations took a remarkable step toward realizing the idealistic purpose of its founding a half century earlier. At the same time, the rapid sequence of events that followed clarified the need for a renewed concept as the existing forms of peacekeeping rarely met practical requirements. It was time to learn the lessons that were impossible to address during the cold war. That is, it was suddenly necessary to develop practical ways to confront new types of organized violence, the so-called new wars³ – the term war being the only thing these conflicts have in common with international wars of modernity. These new wars, pre-modern in many ways, could not be assessed through the established criteria of international law, nor pacified with its instruments. Indeed, these tools failed, given that from a legal point of view the new wars resembled intra-state, not international, disputes; and the agents, their interests, and the instigators of these disputes were often difficult to identify. This brought the principles of sovereignty and nonintervention – longstanding pillars of international law – into a paradigmatic conflict with the more recent, but equally fundamental, achievements of human rights and humanitarian law.

The Agenda for Peace, its consequent documents and resulting projects, have been both extensively praised and criticized in the scientific and political fields. While recognizing the lessons learned, I would nevertheless be inclined toward criticism, as I have doubts regarding the idealistic view of humanity that underlies the Agenda for Peace. It seems to me that its assumptions concerning humanity would not stand an empirical test. Human beings do not necessarily act with violence when they are starving; nor do they necessarily avoid violence when their basic needs are met. Rather, people whose needs are well addressed regularly commit the most consequential and extreme forms of violence. As an institution that emerged from a mix of idealist and realist approaches, the UN is likely to take this view. After all, wherever idealistic peacekeeping fails, peace enforcement offers a realistic alternative, an actuality unchanged since 1945 – only the likelihood of applying enforcement as a last resort has increased.

I will address this question concerning paradigms more fully toward the end of this book but will otherwise work from current circumstances, by now in place for twenty years, and examine what they mean for the current generation of so-called peace workers, for there can be no doubt that the nature, function, and elements of peace work have changed fundamentally as a result of recent developments. Today, peace work is multilateral, multinational, multidimensional, and multicultural. Civilian tasks are taken on by both governmental and nongovernmental institutions (formally authorized or not), with the latter ranging from internationally recognized institutions with UN observer status to quasi-governmental organizations and myriad more or less respectable private initiatives, all following their own rules and protocols. Individuals with an interest in civilian peace work – and this book primarily addresses them – will find a place in this wide field.

International civilian peace work may no longer function independently of, let alone in opposition to, military measures. Conversely, strict military peace enforcement is no longer a timely concept. Every international military action is embedded in a tightly knit network of diplomatic, humanitarian, and economic support measures. In the context of peacekeeping and peacebuilding, the significance of the civilian element has multiplied. Within the United Nations alone, the number of civilian personnel rose, between 1988 and 2010, from 1,500 to nearly 22,000, not including police forces. Although the first police officer participating in a UN mission was sent to the Congo as early 1960,⁴ up until 1988 police were rarely deployed. At that time, only 35 police officers were on duty in international missions. By 2010, there were nearly 13,000 police officers on duty, from more than 100 countries.⁵ In total, the number of civilian personnel in peacekeeping and peacebuilding rose from 1,550 in 1988 to 35,000 in 2010, along with a marked tendency toward continuing increases requiring more and more highly qualified civilian personnel – not in lieu of military personnel, but in addition to military units with a peace–political orientation and corresponding training. In short, civilian field personnel are in greater demand today than ever before. However, given that the challenges they face have also multiplied, thorough training is essential. As I wish to show in the following chapters, such training begins with the development of personal consciousness.

In doing so, I follow what, after the turn in international politics, has come to be known as multi-track diplomacy.⁶ The features of traditional diplomacy have changed fundamentally, while new and various forms of para-governmental diplomacy have emerged; thus multi-track diplomacy has become both a social fact and an accepted technical term.⁷ In line with the social basis of the term, a wide variety of civilian expert workers is required by international organizations, the goals of which can no longer be accomplished with the tools provided by traditional diplomacy and bureaucracy. Moreover, the number of nongovernmental institutions involved in missions is increasing, and their role is increasingly important. Civilian operational personnel have expanded drastically within this multi-dimensional framework. Today, operations comprise the activities that fall under the scope of (established) political and diplomatic work. Secondly, within the realm of security, operations meet with the military domain and its related areas, particularly police work and civilian monitoring of elections. Thirdly, operations include the mushrooming realm of humanitarian support. And, fourthly, of course, operations include all fiscal and administrative duties. Multi-dimensional operations unite the scientific, technical, cultural, psychological, and legal aspects of peace work, and they do so on all levels from political leadership to village communities, neighborhoods, and families.

However, the military component of peace work is not, therefore, redundant. On the contrary, its tasks in peace enforcement – as well as in peacekeeping and peacebuilding in a narrower sense – have become more clearly defined. Military personnel now focus on their core task. They are integrated into military–civilian networks in which they are primarily responsible for security and logistics, whereas civilian personnel perform civilian tasks. This may seem obvious, but in actual practice it is an enormous challenge for everyone involved.⁸ It requires collaboration and communication across social environments that are often as foreign to the participants as the ideologies, religions, languages, and experiences present in their missions. In view of such challenges, it is unacceptable when peace-inspired idealists, often without proper training, take up fieldwork on their own, fail to communicate with military organizations, and reduce soldiers to combat machines, but nonetheless rely on military intervention when their lives are in danger. Moreover, such attitudes are also conceptually inconsistent. That is, taking an opposing position, even against soldiers, violence, and war, is a kind of belligerent thinking. Peace workers are people who understand the causes of violence and act peacefully. This is something soldiers can do just as much as civilians.

With regard to the military, these developments require a humanitarian professionalism as well as communication comprehensible to civilians. With respect to civilian peace workers, they need to acquire a basic understanding of the tasks and functions of the military. Ultimately, both must be prepared for collaboration. Soldiers and civilians will encounter each other in missions in hot conflict areas whether they like it or not. From the point of view of civilian peace work, understanding, interpreting, communicating, and collaborating with the military is not a matter of ideals or ideology, but of survival and effectiveness.

When John Paul Lederach introduced the concept of elicitive conflict transformation into peace research,⁹ he did not simply propose a new name for old techniques and objectives. The term refers to a greatly expanded approach to understanding peace and conflict, an approach that requires a new attitude from peace workers toward themselves and toward their work as ‘explorers, forerunners, reassurers, conveners, initiators, advocates, decouplers, disengagers, unifiers, aggregators, consolidators, enskillers, empowerers, envisioners, fact finders, guarantors, facilitators, moderators, legitimizers, endorsers, enhancers, developers, monitors, verifiers, enforcers, implementers and reconcilers.’¹⁰ Lederach suggested a form of training he called strategic capacity and relationship building as a preparation for peace work, a combination of cognitive knowledge acquisition and personal growth as grounded in humanistic psychology. At the University of Innsbruck’s UNESCO Chair for Peace Studies, we developed an academic program dedicated to this teaching, practice, art, and science and, following on from Lederach, we called it elicitive conflict transformation.

Following my attempt to establish a new episteme in the first volume of this trilogy under the heading of transrational peace, I dedicate this second volume to elicitive conflict transformation. Elicitive conflict transformation is understood here as an art and a science. Based on the theoretical considerations of the Innsbruck approach to peace studies, this new attitude toward conflict work is both a subject to be addressed in the classroom and one to be applied in practice.

1.2 Research interest

How can the conclusions reached in the first volume of this trilogy be translated into ways of behaving, communicating, and acting that are peaceful and conducive to peaces? One way of finding an answer to this guiding epistemic question would be to search for observable, applied, and recommended methods for each of the five families of interpretations introduced in the first volume. There are several reasons why I have chosen not to do so. First, it would be difficult to avoid writing another descriptive volume, similar to the first one, and thus repeating the previous conclusions. This is not what I am interested in. In the first volume I elaborated upon one of these five families – that is, the transrational peaces – therefore, I will limit myself to the corresponding methods. The purpose of this second volume is not to elaborate on the philosophical subjects of the first volume. Rather, it is to identify useful information for teaching and practice in a discipline wherein key methodological terms – conflict management, conflict settlement, and conflict resolution – have undergone a drastic change of meaning since the end of the cold war, resulting in a great need for clarification.¹¹

What is the exact me...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction
• 2  Humanistic Psychology, the Foundation of Elicitive Conflict Transformation
• 4  Voice-oriented Approaches to Elicitive Conflict Transformation
• 5  Movement-oriented Approaches to Elicitive Conflict Transformation
• 6  On the Transrational Turn in International Peace Work
• 7  On the Transrational Turn in Peace Research: Themes, Levels, and Layers of Elicitive Conflict Transformation
• Conclusions of the Second Volume
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index