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Handbook of Regional Conflict Resolution Initiatives in the Global South
Jeronimo Delgado-Caicedo, Jeronimo Delgado-Caicedo
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Handbook of Regional Conflict Resolution Initiatives in the Global South
Jeronimo Delgado-Caicedo, Jeronimo Delgado-Caicedo
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About This Book
During the first half of thetwentieth century, the international system was largely dominated by the USA and the colonial powers of western Europe. After the two world wars, the political and economic dominance of these states guaranteed them and their allies an almost complete control of world politics. However, as it is the norm in the international system, power structures are not immutable. After the end of the Cold War, rapid changes to the existing international hierarchies took place, as new countries from the so-called ''developing world'' began to emerge as crucial actors capable of questioning and altering the power dynamics of the world. It is therefore unthinkable to ignore emerging countries such as Russia, the People's Republic of China, India, Brazil or South Africa in the decision-making process in today's world order.
In addition, there is a group of smaller, yet increasingly important countries that, while acknowledging their inability radically to change the rules of the international system, are still eager to shift power relations and enhance their influence in the world. Argentina, Colombia, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, South Korea, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Vietnam are generally recognised as part of this grouping of emerging powers from the Global South.
While there is a consensus amongst academics that emerging powers from the Global South must have a stabilising role within their own regions, previous analyses have focused primarily on the impact that emerging powers have had in their own regions' conflict resolution initiatives. This volume, instead, aims to go beyond these analyses and provide new insights regarding the effect that this stabilising role has on the continental and global positioning of emerging powers. In other words, this book explores the relation between a country's involvement in conflict resolution initiatives and its positioning in the international system. The volume will contribute to this approach using the perspective of academics and practitioners from countries of the Global South, particularly from states that have strengthened - or sometimes weakened - their position in the international hierarchy of power through a leading role in regional conflict resolution initiatives.
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1
Introduction
Going South
DOI: 10.4324/9781003287018-1
As I write these words from the hills that mark the eastern end of a highland plateau on top of the Andes, the endless lights of BogotĂĄ can be seen down below. The city is the third highest capital in the world at 2,600 metres above sea level, or as the local government likes to refer to it, 2,600 metres closer to the stars. BogotĂĄ is a sprawling city of more than 8 million inhabitants. A place that is both amazing and chaotic, charming and problematic, loved and hated. Ultimately, BogotĂĄ embodies all the good and bad of cities in the Global South.
Writing these words from BogotĂĄ is no coincidence. And as I do so, the teachings of Sue Parnell, my PhD supervisor at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, come to mind. Sue has focused her studies on cities and therefore, ever since I met her, she has made sure I understand the importance of places. Places matter. Places shape our lives, our history, our stories and our ways of thinking. They also determine who we are and contribute greatly to our understanding of the world. Again, places matter.
This book started in my favourite coffee shop in Cape Town, South Africa at the end of 2018 and ended on the hills of BogotĂĄ, Colombia three years later. During this time, many other places were also included in this project. Chapters were written by authors in Rio de Janeiro, Nairobi, Beijing, Addis Ababa, Algiers, Dubai, Baku, Puebla, Buenos Aires, Abuja, Accra, Johannesburg and Istanbul. And though it may seem as if these places have nothing in common, they all share their âsouthernnessâ, that is, their belonging to the Global South.
But writing about the South from the South is no easy task. In recent history, the international system has been dominated by the Global North â roughly North America and Western Europe â and that has had a significant impact on knowledge production. Scholarship produced in the North has been widely available everywhere, while Southern authors usually struggle to get their message across. According to Boaventura de Sousa Santos, modern Western thinking has hierarchised the production of knowledge in todayâs world. In his own words,
Modern Western thinking is an abyssal thinking. It consists of a system of visible and invisible distinctions, the invisible ones being the foundation of the visible ones. The invisible distinctions are established through radical lines that divide social reality into two realms, the realm of âthis side of the lineâ and the realm of âthe other side the lineâ. The division is such that âthe other side of the lineâ vanishes as reality, becomes nonexistent and is indeed produced as nonexistent. Nonexistent means not existing in any relevant or comprehensible way of being. Whatever is produced as nonexistent is radically excluded because it lies beyond the realm of what the accepted conception of inclusion considers to be its other. What most fundamentally characterizes abyssal thinking is thus the impossibility of the copresence of the two sides of the line. To the extent that it prevails, this side of the line only prevails by exhausting the field of relevant reality. Beyond it, there is only nonexistence, invisibility, nondialectical absence.
(De Sousa Santos, 2007, pp. 45â46)
De Sousa Santos bring us back to our initial statement: places matter. But, in this case, they matter depending on where they are placed on either side of the line. The abyssal thinking theory is ultimately about how power determines the level of importance of a place. Similarly, the Igbo people of Nigeria have the word nkali which roughly translates âto be greater than anotherâ. The principle of nkali can be used to explain the current power structures in the world. Being greater than another means being able to increase oneâs power through knowledge production while, at the same time, marginalising the knowledge of those who are perceived as being smaller.
This book aims at overcoming the abyssal thinking and the principle of nkali. It abandons the perception of countries of the Global South as second-class and considers them as key actors not only in their own regions, but globally. By bringing authors from Latin America, Asia, Africa and Eastern Europe together, our objective is to produce a book on the Global South, written from the Global South by authors from the Global South. It is our way to abandon âthe other side of the lineâ to make sure our places matter as well. In the words of the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe, we want to guarantee a balance of stories, one in which Southern knowledge has a place alongside existing scholarship from the North. One that widens our understanding of the world by including countries of the Global South that, according to the distribution of power in the current international system, can no longer be disregarded.
* * *
The first half of the twentieth century brought about an international system largely dominated by the United States and the colonial powers of Western Europe. Their political and economic dominance after the two world wars guaranteed them and their allies an almost complete control of world politics. However, power structures are not immutable. The end of the Cold War prompted rapid change in the existing international hierarchies as new countries from the so-called âdeveloping worldâ began to appear as crucial actors capable of questioning and altering the power dynamics of the world. It is, therefore, unthinkable to ignore emerging countries like Russia, China, India, or Brazil in decision-making processes in todayâs world order.
On this topic, international relations literature talks about the BRICS â Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa â as the first tier of countries that would fall under this category. Nonetheless, there is a group of smaller, yet increasingly important countries that acknowledge their inability to radically change the rules of the international system, but are still eager to shift power relations and enhance their influence in the world. Countries such as Indonesia, Turkey, Nigeria, Mexico, Egypt, Vietnam, Iran, Colombia, Argentina, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, or Pakistan are generally recognised as part of this grouping of emerging powers from the Global South.
But recent history has not only seen a shift in power structures. The strategies and tools used by countries to improve their influence in the international system have also changed. In turn, while the global North mostly used its economic and military power to exert control in other areas of the world, countries emerging today have included the use of soft power and diplomatic means to ascend in the global hierarchy of power and enhance their leadership capabilities regionally and, in some cases, globally.
The idea of the âSouthâ was proposed by Italian political scientist Antonio Gramsci in his essay âThe Southern Questionâ, in which he stated that the Southern part of Italy was colonised by the North. These terms of âNorthâ and âSouthâ were later included in the international political lexicon when âdeveloping countries (mainly former colonies), began to articulate the idea of a Global South whose interests conflicted with those of the industrialized powers, both capitalist and communist â cutting across Cold War divisionsâ (Dados & Connell, 2012, p. 12). The result was the creation of three different worlds in the international system: The First World (i.e. capitalist world); the Second World (communist world); and the Third World, which was essentially âthe restâ: all those countries and territories that did not belong to either of the first two worlds.
The end of the Cold War came with radical changes for the âThird Worldâ. In fact, the existence of the concept itself began to be questioned as there was a new need to transfer these countriesâ identity into a more horizontal and cooperationist approach that enabled a new SouthâSouth dialogue (RodrĂguez de la Vega, Delgado Caicedo & Luna BeltrĂĄn, 2021). Other concepts such as âunderdeveloped countriesâ or âdeveloping countriesâ were used to refer to the former Third World, but they still had a negative connotation of subordinance to the traditional Northern powers. Consequently, the idea of the South was created to symbolise a heterogenic term moulded by developing countries themselves, scholars and activists, who started using this concept to enhance the knowledge and discoveries from nations that were historically excluded from the international narrative (Clarke, 2018; Antonini & Hirst, 2009). In economic terms, for example, this change can be clearly seen in the transition from the G7 to the G20, in which countries from the Global South such as Argentina, Brazil, Indonesia, India, China, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey were included as full members in the worldâs most important economic decision-making forum (El Aynaoui & Woertz, 2016). This debate will be further addressed in Chapter 2 of this book.
It is important to notice that, in the current changing power dynamics of the International System, the emerging countries from the Global South are taking over significant spaces in the agendas traditionally reserved only to superpowers. In turn, the objective of this book is to analyse the global positioning of selected countries from the Global South and address how their involvement in conflict resolution and mediation has impacted their place in the international hierarchy of power. Furthermore, by taking a close look at soft power initiatives, the book argues that these tools have the ability to radically impact the international standing of countries of the Global South in such a way that they can enhance their recognition as emerging powers and become key and influential actors either regionally or, in some cases, globally.
In order to achieve the previous objective, this book includes the experiences of 18 countries from the Global South with significant experiences in using their participation in regional conflict resolution experiences as a tool to influence their international standing, namely: Saudi Arabia, Iran, India, Pakistan, China, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Algeria, Ghana, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico and Chile. And while most of these countries can undoubtedly be located in the Global South, others such as Belarus and Azerbaijan may create some doubts on the part of the reader. To clarify the inclusion of these countries, the book starts with the generally accepted geographic location of the Global South: Latin America, Asia, Africa, the Middle East and the South Pacific (excluding Australia and New Zealand). Furthermore, transcending both the geographic criterion and the Western understanding of the world, it considers Belarus and Azerbaijan as countries of the Global South. The reason for this inclusion is based on the fact that their usual interactions tend to gravitate around the post-Soviet space and not countries of the North. Also, their processes of international positioning unquestionably follow a similar path of those found in the Global South. In turn, we believe that including the experiences from Belarus and Azerbaijan can, without a doubt, enrich the debates proposed in this Handbook and contribute to a better understanding of the Global South.
* * *
As a Colombian, living in South Africa for a few years allowed me to reflect on two important topics for what I like to call âmy two countriesâ. First, both countries have faced dark decades in terms of political turmoil. Of course, the road is still long and both peace processes have had their ups and downs, but there is no doubt that the Colombia and South Africa that we see today are radically different from their previous versions. Second is the international positioning of Colombia and South Africa. Both countries went from being pariahs in the world to becoming emerging powers from the Global South, albeit in different ways. Thinking about the recent history of Colombia and South Africa led me to reflect on the relationship between conflict resolution and international positioning, two key concepts examined in this book.
What differentiates this book from previous publications on similar topics is the fact that these analyses have only focused on studying either the Global South or conflict resolution. This book, however, aims at breaking the barrier between both topics and proposes instead an understanding of the relation between both the emerging powers from the Global South and conflict resolution. Above all, it gives the reader the possibility of understanding not only the analyses on soft power strategies, but also links them with elements of increasing power and influence in the international system. In other words, this book brings these two concepts together, in turn providing a more specific and detailed analysis in terms of the international positioning dynamics of countries from the Global South.
Foreign policy is also a key concept in this research. It is understood as an element of great importance in affecting the power relations in the current international system. This book traverses 18 cases from the Global South, thereby offering a detailed analysis of how the emergence of new co-operation instruments and soft power practices in foreign policy have significantly impacted the countriesâ standing in the international system.
Multilingualism is also at the core of this book. Alan Mabin (2014) stated that limiting any analysis about the Global South to Anglophone scholarship makes for inevitable partiality. Furthermore, according to Choplin:
the aim should not be to idealise anglophone scientific output to the point of creating a new hegemonic model of thought. It would be more stimulating to encourage dialogue between researchers from continental Europe, the United Kingdom and the United States, as well as â and, indeed, above all â from Southern countries.
(Choplin, 2012, p. 3)
In order to address this language partiality found in other studies in the field, this book included authors working on and in countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe and, therefore, a large range of languages was taken into consideration. Having access to the scholarship, as well as int...