Enduring Conflict

Challenging the Signature of Peace and Democracy

Adrian Little

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781780937687
• eBook ISBN:
  9781780936505
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Relations internationales

This unique text challenges the notion that absence of conflict is the foundation and norm of a stable political environment. Combining complexity theory and the notion of signature with case studies, it argues that political processes need to be understood within their social and cultural contexts. It thus develops the idea of enduring conflict, referring to both the enduring nature of political conflict and the endurance of people in conflict-ridden societies, looking at countries involved in conflict transformation, such as Northern Ireland, Cambodia, Indonesia, and South Africa. Examining debates around trauma, memory, and reconciliation, the work shows how conflicts are so socially and culturally ingrained and protracted that political agreements alone cannot bring substantive change. In addition, key texts, such as peace agreements, along with interviews of politicians, participants, and NGOs help identify the conditions under which notions like peace, democracy, and conflict resolution can even be conceived - let alone implemented.
This innovative text is a significant contribution to the literature as it highlights the limitations of conflict resolution strategies and identifies the issues that pertain to conflicts throughout global politics. Written in an accessible manner, it will be highly attractive to students in conflict processes, peace studies, and international relations theory.

1

Endurance and the signature of peace

This opening chapter outlines the key arguments of the book by explaining the dual meaning of the term ‘enduring conflict’, namely, on the one hand, that conflict endures in ‘post-conflict’ societies and, on the other, that the quality of endurance is something that is demanded of the people who live within post-conflict societies. However, rather than attempting to portray this as some kind of pathological feature of post-conflict societies that differentiates them from their ‘normal’ counterparts, I want to suggest that such continuing conflict is actually a resilient feature of most complex, contemporary societies. While it is more overtly expressed and obvious as a structuring factor in deeply divided or post-conflict societies, this does not necessarily make less obviously conflictual societies more cohesive or harmonious. It may merely reflect the existence of a contingent range of historical, cultural and social mechanisms that have enabled more successful management of conflictual tendencies. In these circumstances this does not mean that conflict has been overcome; the contingent nature of the fragile bonds that facilitate the management of conflict are always potentially undermined by the shifting dynamics of social complexity which will be explained in more detail in the next chapter.

Before proceeding to the complexity of conflict dynamics, let us first concentrate on the methodological underpinnings of the enduring conflict thesis and the reasons why post-conflict societies usually exhibit variants of the very conflicts that their political processes have been designed to overcome. In so doing, it will become clear how the endurance of conflict (in both its manifestations) relates to the everyday operation of democracy rather than democracy being seen as some sort of antidote to the existence of conflict. Moreover, it will demonstrate how this understanding of their relationship differs from dominant versions of the democracy-conflict nexus. The methodological approach is, therefore, central to the book and, more precisely, how the argument relates to a politically engaged form of post-structuralist theory derived from the work of Foucault and Agamben in particular (Agamben 2009, Agamben et al. 2010). This approach casts new light on our approach to questions of social and political conflict and, in particular, the nature of the ‘signature’ and the ways in which certain conceptual norms around peace and democracy can impede our understanding of the complex issue of managing conflict in both more or less divided societies.

Often when political scientists come to address issues of conflict, its ramifications and ways of managing or transcending it, they do so on the basis that the thing which they are addressing is an agreed and settled entity. That is, that a particular society exhibits conflictual tendencies because there is a definitive problem or a set of problems that have hitherto appeared irresolvable. Quite often these interpretations are rather reductive of the complexities of political problems but they provide a way of framing issues such that political actors can be seen to be trying to do something about them. So, for example, these explanations may reduce the situation of Gorkhaland in Northern India to a problem or residue of British colonialism, or Northern Ireland to either a religious or ethno-national conflict, or South Africa to the deliberately forged inequalities of the Apartheid era, or Cambodia to the horrors inflicted by the Khmer Rouge, and so on. The role of political scientists on this view is to provide an explanatory framework for how this situation has arisen and potential pathways through which specific conflictual problems can be addressed and, hopefully, resolved. In theory, this then provides political actors with a road map to help them to engage with the many contingencies, ambiguities and compromises that are inevitably part of conflict transformations.

This book adopts a different approach: rather than seeing such ambiguity and contingency as part of a practical set of issues around political processes of conflict transformation in a relatively settled context, the argument here suggests that these ambiguities are a product of the dynamic nature of conflict itself as a defining feature of most societies. In other words, the idea that there can be a stable rendition of what a conflict is really about and therefore a firm foundation on which to establish a way of navigating through contingent dynamics is to misread the nature of how political conflicts are reproduced. In most conflict scenarios we can delineate clear narratives of the foundations of disputes and key political and historical events that gave rise to them. However, the nature and meaning of these events are never uncontested from the motivations of key actors through to differing interpretations of the truth of what actually happened. In effect, these narratives are amalgamations of a wide range of partial memories and partial forgettings, rewritings of events, fabrications and the construction of meanings (all of which will contain elements of truth) to enable us to make sense of phenomena that have taken place and the ways that political actors have behaved. Disparate details and events tend to get brought together into a single narrative to provide a unified story that pushes contradictions and complexities to one side lest they interrupt the flow of the narrative. But, the reality, as the enduring conflict thesis contends, is that singular narratives of complex conflicts are never universally consensual and lead us to towards an unnecessarily limited range of potential political strategies for managing conflict situations.

It is this phenomenon that underpins too many interpretations of the way in which we try to understand conflict in contemporary politics as suggested by the examples above in a range of different conflictual circumstances. And the pre-eminence of what is regarded as ‘the problem’ in a given situation can come to subsume discussion of other forms of social structuration and the divisions and inequities which they might engender. Thus, for example, we can identify narrowing processes whereby discussion of many of the divisions in South African society that were exacerbated by the Apartheid regime tend to be filtered through the paradigm of race (Marais 2011) or, in Northern Ireland, how the ethno-national conflict and discourses explaining ‘the Troubles’ have inhibited proper discussion of other structural divisions around, for example, gender, race and class (Little 2002a; McVeigh and Rolston 2007; Zalewski 2006; Coulter 1999). In other words, the definitive conflict – however that is interpreted in different contexts – comes to subsume all others.

In Foucauldian terms, the identified source of conflict is constructed to be a problem in itself – ‘the problem’ – and like most problematizations it establishes a paradigm of potential solutions (Vaughan-Williams 2006). Understanding conflicts in particular ways is not devoid of political influence or ramifications. For example, the understanding of a conflict as a particular kind of problem that is an antithesis to normal conditions of peace and democracy has fundamental political implications. Not least, it engenders political strategies and policies designed to normalize conditions of peace and democracy in such a way as to position conflict as abnormal and always to be overcome, if possible. Not only does this agenda neglect the potentially positive contribution that conflict can make to social and political development, but it also potentially underplays the significance of conflict and its importance to the environment and conditions in the societies it affects overtly as well as the amount of conflict simmering just beneath the surface of less obviously contentious societies. The result of this process is to make us avert our eyes from the continuation of conflict in many contemporary societies – to rewrite our stories to imagine that where conflict may have been a part of what makes us what we are, it is something that we have overcome. Or, where it emerges again – as in the riots in the United Kingdom in 2011 (Bassel 2012), that it is a pathological phenomenon to be overcome through means such as punishing the ‘mindless’ perpetrators.

On the contrary, the argument in this book suggests that conflict is an ontological condition of contemporary complex societies. That is, that rather than viewing conflict as anomalous in the sense of an unusual condition which blights the regular course of politics, the contention here is that conflict in one form or another is a standard element of the political. It is usually a feature of the contexts in which we must act politically but quite often we fail to take this into account properly as our systems are not established to grapple with the complexity of conflict. In so doing, however, we oversimplify and underestimate the ineradicable nature of social conflict. In effect, we simplify so we can act politically but in so doing, we can misread and misrepresent political conflicts, their origins, their continuity and their reproduction. Of course, there are conflicts and there are conflicts and in no way should this book be construed as reducing all conflicts to the same common denominator. Nevertheless it does suggest that just because the conflicts in some societies are better managed or less violent does not mean that those societies are immune to some of the same dynamics that manifest differently in less restrained conflictual circumstances.

The thesis here contends that conflict is not an inherently problematic part of contemporary social relations and that it exists in all political contexts. As such, it would enable us to make better sense of conflict and its implications if we were to take this inevitability seriously. This approach has ramifications both for how we conceive ‘peace’ as a process emanating from a paradigmatic shift away from conflict and for how we might understand conflict as a normal part of social and political relations. From this perspective, the requisite political shift is not from paradigms of conflict towards paradigms of ‘peace’ or ‘democracy’. Rather, it is better to understand conflict as part of the ontology of contemporary politics and something that ebbs and flows in everyday life. This is not to say that paradigm shifts away from violent conflict are not to be pursued but to suggest instead, in a more nuanced fashion, that such changes should not be envisaged as a move from a ‘bad paradigm’ of conflict to a binary opposite of a ‘good paradigm’ of peace. Moreover, we need to get away from the conflation of conflict and violence – while the two often intersect in overt ways, at other times they may not and conflict is not always violent. What matters is the nature of conflict and how its ramifications are socially experienced and politically managed rather than our imaginary being focused on the potential eradication of conflict in some reconfiguration of political institutions and social relations towards a more ‘normal’ (i.e. non-conflictual) state of affairs.

The rest of this chapter proceeds with an analysis of the methodological underpinning of the argument focused on the idea of the signature in contemporary political philosophy and its implications for how we go about the process of thinking about the politics of conflict. In the following section, two ways in which we need to understand the enduring nature of conflict are delineated: the first focused on the structurally ingrained reproduction of conflict and the second directed towards the implications of this for social actors and the need for the endurance of conflict. The subsequent section of the chapter examines what these twin conceptions of enduring conflict mean for the theoretical notion of paradigm shifts in the context of social and political complexity, while the final section moves on to look at the implications of complexity for how we need to rethink paradigms of conflict and how they might shift. The conclusion draws together these themes to argue that the failure to understand the enduring nature of conflict leads us to think of peaceful or democratic paradigms in problematic ways that do not actually help us to engage seriously with the question of what the management and transformation of conflict might actually look like in practice.

The methodological implications of the signature

The underpinning methodological approach in the following argument lies in the theoretical notion of the signature (Agamben 2009). As such, it is grounded in a post-structuralist concern for the use of language and analysis of particular discourses and the ways in which relations of power are established and reproduced in often less than explicit fashion. This points to the importance that certain terms and concepts in the social sciences play in the construction of epistemological orders and the differences that exist between the ways in which we talk about conceptual issues and their implementation in practice. This understanding of the practical import of the post-structuralist deconstruction of language is pivotal to the book as too much of the post-structuralist literature consciously steers clear of moving towards issues of practical political concern in the belief that this will involve the construction of a mere alternative, discursive ordering of knowledge that will be equally susceptible to obfuscation and misrepresentation of prevailing power structures.

Although these concerns about political ordering may be genuine, they are nonetheless unavoidable in the conduct of politics. The application of post-structuralist theory to political debates must surely involve some concessions to the need to engage with alternative normative arguments for a reordering of politics. Disregard of the need for political engagement makes post-structuralism unnecessarily impotent, rendering it incapable of making a serious contribution to the construction of alternative hegemonic discourses to prevailing orders. This is surely a fundamental part of a post-structuralist politics (Little and Lloyd 2009). Whether this lack of political engagement is conscious or not, this book contends that it is a strategy that promises impotence in the face of prevailing orthodoxies; rather, I suggest it is incumbent on post-structuralist theorists with a concern for political analysis to get their hands dirty in the construction of potentially alternative readings of the organization of the political order in full knowledge that whatever is formulated through this process will be open to exactly the same processes of analysis and deconstruction which will open up new critiques that unveil orderings of power. This is an inevitable feature of political engagement and it implies that post-structuralist political theorists need to recognize that this is the nature of the beast they are grappling with if they want to be politically relevant beyond the realm of deconstructive critique.

The notion of the signature outlined by Giorgio Agamben (2009) is pivotal in this process. In discussing the work of Foucault (1973) and Thomas Kuhn (1996), Agamben explains the analogical emergence of paradigms whereby specific instances give rise to particular modes of making sense of social and political events. Kuhn’s contribution to this is his recognition that

a paradigm is simply an example, a single case that by its repeatability acquires the capacity to model tacitly the behaviour and research practice of scientists. The empire of the rule, understood as the canon of scientificity, is thus replaced by that of the paradigm; the universal logic of law is replaced by the specific and singular logic of the example. (Agamben 2009: 11–12)

The singular event then helps to provide a paradigmatic framing structure through which we are able to filter and interpret other extraneous events. This not only reinforces the paradigm but also makes it easier for us to make sense of sometimes highly complex social and political phenomena. This understanding of paradigms focuses on their propensity for epistemological ordering, their establishment of interpretive boundaries and the ways in which they emerge and prevail. Or, to put it in Agamben’s terms, ‘paradigms establish a broader problematic context that they both constitute and make intelligible’ (Agamben 2009: 17).

This differs from more orthodox understandings of paradigms whereby a range of events take place with similar dynamics which are then acted upon by political actors in such a way that we are able to judge ex post that a new paradigm has emerged. This understanding of paradigms sees them as emerging from sometimes unrelated convergences among political actors around particular courses of action which then come together in our retrospective analyses to be understood in terms of a particular paradigm. In this approach paradigms are almost evolutionary involving quasi-spontaneous, isolated developments which become structurally ingrained as a paradigm and are then brought together to make sense of the dominant modes of thinking and acting in politics in a given period.

Agamben’s approach differs from this insofar as he sees the formation of the paradigm as a means by which we bring together very different phenomena (albeit with some shared characteristics) to facilitate a sense of order to sometimes disparate social and political developments. As such, particular events which might have some shared features (but are substantively different) are brought together under the rubric of a specific interpretive light and become fundamental to the construction of a paradigm. The paradigm becomes a funnel mechanism through which a range of events are channelled. This funnel contains an interpretive filter which has the primary function of ordering the event to make sense within paradigmatic boundaries. Everything that falls outside of the funnel or gets trapped in the filter is mere ‘noise’ because, due to the extraneous nature of the interpretations they engender, they cannot fall within the boundaries of understandable or acceptable political discourse. This is what Rancière calls the ‘distribution of the sensible’ (Rancière 2010: 36–7).

The idea of the signature is important in the sustenance of paradigms because it is through the identification of a particular phenomenon as part of a specific paradigm that it is able to be interpreted within existing epistemologies. In this sense the paradigmatic appellation accords phenomena meaning that might otherwise render them as mere isolated, random or ambiguous events. The signature is a means through which paradigmatic status can be granted or assumed. By taking on or being granted a particular discursive nomenclature as part of a specific paradigm, phenomena can begin to make sense especially as their existence relates to other elements of a political or social order. Thus, for example, to label something – ‘democratic’, ‘neo-liberal’, ‘terrorist’ and ‘egalitarian’ – is not only to ascribe some fundamental characteristics to it but also to position it vis-à-vis other potential appellations that could be ascribed. Positioning something within one paradigm of meaning is, therefore, significant because such an action positions it in relational terms to other paradigmatic framings as well. In politics, of course, the substance of these labels, the meanings of paradigms and where things should be located or not are matters of deep contention. However, the role of the signature in Agamben’s work is important for those with a particular interest in trying to close off some...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-title
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Endurance and the signature of peace
• 2 Democracy, complexity and conflict
• 3 Reconciliation and conflict resolution
• 4 Agonism and the politics of disagreement
• 5 Rhetorics of peace and transition
• 6 Narratives of conflict and the politics of memory
• 7 Conflict and the politics of contingency
• Conclusion: Enduring conflict
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright