Conflict Intervention and Transformation

Theory and Practice

Ho-Won Jeong

• Editorial: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781786610270
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Politics & International Relations
• Categoría: National Security

This book is aimed at both professionals and students who desire to deepen their understanding of the processes involved in conflict intervention and resolution effectively. Reflecting on multi-disciplinary traditions, it throws new light on discursive processes that facilitate or hamper a dialogue, essential for conflict transformation. The book covers a broad range of topics and themes for those studying introductory and advanced level courses on conflict resolution, including the principles of intervention, prevention of violence, local practice of peacemaking, identify politics and conditions for conflict resolution as well as peace negotiation. While comprehensive in scope, this edited volume’s main theme is a transformation of inter-group dynamics as well as the process for conflict resolution. It gives a systematic coverage of ways people try to overcome the limitations of the existing approaches to conflict management and peacemaking.

Chapter 1

Intervention for Conflict Transformation

Ho-Won Jeong

The transformation of deadly conflict dynamics entails alternative patterns of interactions, between antagonistic parties, that may derive from either changes within each major adversary or a new external environment inducing the end of hostilities. It is critical to examine institutional, organizational, and political changes within each party to understand changes in interparty relations. The dim prospect for winning a conflict may result in a reduced commitment to more resources. A costly deadlock in a conflict may have an immediate impact on each side’s willingness to take initiatives to bring about conciliation. Such an external intervention as reduction in economic or military aid as well as diplomatic pressure from allies could also bring about motivational changes in a continued fight. Conversely, however, an external actor can also play a critical role in sustaining or even escalating a factional struggle—for instance, in a civil war. As seen in the ongoing Yemini war, external actors have been fuelling fighting between the two main opposing factions supported either by Iran or a Saudi-led coalition.

This introductory chapter maps the processes and dynamics involving challenges to transforming intractable conflict. What can the intervention do to reverse escalatory dynamics if one or both parties believe(s) that they have a unilateral advantage in their struggle, with an unfaltering commitment to continued fighting? What types of external intervention might lead to a change in each party’s calculus? How could external actors assist in ending adversarial relationships, inducing a favorable environment for conflict transformation? These are the main questions that this introduction covers, as they provide background knowledge for topics covered by chapters included in this edited volume.

Conflict Process and Intervention

Being inherently a fluid phenomenon, conflict is continuously evolving. A series of events converge and diverge, reshaping the courses of a conflict.¹ The emergence of new conflict situations induces adversaries to choose different strategies. Some events are more likely to facilitate conflict mitigation and de-escalation. In fact, disastrous situations such as an economic collapse or loss of key allies produce a weakened motivation for continued fighting, with pessimistic views about the future prospect of the current struggle. When a further escalation to overwhelm an enemy appears to be futile, its realization would lead to difficulties in legitimizing a continuing sacrifice for the unachievable objective.

Thus the prospects for a prolonged conflict may induce parties to rethink their contentious strategies.² For instance, a military stalemate in a protracted war from 1954 to 1962 eventually led to French withdrawal from Algeria and the latter’s independence. The explosive and gruesome violence, including guerrilla warfare and torture, significantly weakened the French willingness to continue to fight. What needs to be transformed is the very dynamics of a widening conflict, inflexibility and rigidity of adversarial positions, as well as the acceptance of violence as a main means to determine an outcome.

Diverse types of intervention are needed at the different stages of a conflict process. Intervention produces a set of conditions that can have an impact on both short- and long-term behavior of conflict actors. The control of escalatory force is essential to preventing further violence. Beyond controlling unregulated violence through military intervention, adversarial relationships have to be transformed to create conditions for sustainable conflict resolution. Intervention in the context of conflict settlement and resolution may start with activities related to stopping violence or ceasing hostilities. It can be either military or nonmilitary, as exemplified by peace enforcement or an intermediary role to bring parties to a negotiation table. By communicating the readiness of the other party to seek a peaceful resolution, effective intermediaries should be able to persuade a reluctant party to move to de-escalation.

If one of the adversaries feels that the negative effects of a conflict are minimally disruptive, they have fewer incentives to wind down their efforts to seek a unilateral solution regardless of the ultimate costs. In the event that conflict has a disproportionately negative impact only on one party’s welfare, how could an entrenched party be convinced to reduce their hostilities? Forceful means of intervention can be designed for the cessation of military hostilities that produce indiscriminate civilian victims. In the mid- and late 1990s, NATO served as a power balancer in bringing peace to Bosnian civil war and other Balkan conflicts. International peacekeeping forces moved into Kosovo in 1999, permitting autonomous rule under European Union supervision. This was followed by a NATO bombing of bridges and other key military and civilian infrastructure in Serbia, aimed at overwhelming the resistance from then Serbian President Slobodan Milošević.

Intervention can also be needed for preventing conflict escalation by reducing tensions in troubled areas, keeping opposing forces apart.³ In the case of Macedonia, a civil war was averted after the dispatch of NATO peacekeeping forces in response to the beginning of Albanian armed resistance against government discriminatory policies. The dispatch of peacekeepers to Macedonia was followed by mediation efforts that eventually defused the tension by producing a settlement.

Timely humanitarian assistance and intervention is necessary to save many lives in conflict zones. Humanitarian intervention restored order in Somalia, permitting the delivery of food and other basic necessities to reach millions of people in the early 1990s. However, the dispatch of international forces to stop the 1994 Rwandan genocide did not materialize. The delayed military intervention of NATO forces in Bosnia-Herzegovina allowed the Srebrenica massacres of July 1995 (with the death of more than 8,000 Muslim Bosniak civilians). Since these incidents, there has been a growing recognition of a need for a stronger military force to prevent a future genocide, but any coherent policy or guideline has not been established at an international level.

Nonetheless, force has occasionally been exercised against a party who obstructs peace in such situations as the violation of a cease-fire. Most importantly, external forces have to be sufficiently armed to deal with an armed resistance from local militias.⁴ The British intervention in Sierra Leone was successful in ending the renewed fighting and removing the renegade rebel groups in 2000. However, while attempting to enforce peace among warring factions, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) peacekeepers, composed of soldiers from Nigeria and other neighboring countries, were embroiled in the Liberian civil war that went out of control in the early and mid-1990s. Occasional killings of peacekeepers by local militias in Eastern Congo show the vulnerability of peacekeeping operations and the necessity for UN troops to be more adequately armed to respond to aggression.

The eagerness of parties to pursue a negotiated settlement depends, in part, on relative power differentials. Intervention strategies differ, depending on whether the adversaries are (not) ready to scale down hostilities. If there is an asymmetry in vulnerability, a more powerful party may not readily agree to terminate hostilities. External intervention can change conflict dynamics from one-sided to mutual readiness by creating negative incentives for the resisting party. By bringing a motivational change to an intransient party, external pressure and/or incentives for ending hostilities can play an important role in transforming an intractable conflict.

Mediation is appropriate when the adversaries are willing to search for an end of a violent struggle and explore a solution.⁵ Managing a flow of communication between antagonistic parties is needed even in the midst of hostilities. Most importantly, continued contacts provide an opportunity to identify shared objectives through the recognition of common interests; issues can be reframed to help all concerns be met. Sufficient concessions by one side create interest of the other party in discussion about settlement terms. In support of a negotiated settlement, intermediaries encourage adversaries to be willing and ready to take a “risk” of making concessions and reaching settlement, while lowering the bar for the cessation of hostilities. A willingness in accommodating the other party’s legitimate demands depends on a conciliatory atmosphere created by improved communication, belief in the utility of cooperative relationships, and a new vision for peace.⁶

The opening of communication flows by mediation is aimed at perceptual changes in support of alterations in the adversarial relationship.⁷ A positive relationship change can help avoid or minimize the use of coercion without having a quest to seek an adversary’s surrender. In altering self-perpetuating dynamics of conflict, intermediaries can help adversaries overcome a difficulty in altering enemy images and stereotypes. As seen lately in the improved relations between the United States and North Korea, attitudinal changes can be attributed to reduced enemy images with a search for a collaborative relationship in conjunction with steps toward reduced military tensions.

Assistance in improved relations and future engagement after settlements is aimed at creating conditions for sustainable peace. Its importance is well recognized if we observe worthless peace treaties and continuing civil wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo and other parts of the African continent. An intergroup dialogue can be designed for healing and rebuilding wounded relationships through a reconciliation process.⁸ An international community often provides an expertise for the removal of institutional obstacles to participatory democracy and power sharing across ethnic lines beyond election monitoring and human rights advocacy.

System versus Issue Transformation

If we focus on specific issues related to conflict behavior itself, we may not be able to investigate societal or organizational roots of adversarial relationships. For instance, Kenya’s postelection violence goes through a periodic cycle, but political elites have been ignoring underlying conditions for a winner-take-all political system that only exacerbates long-term tribal rivalry, producing power disparity. The end of hostilities may simply result in the restoration of order and the mitigation of violence rather than changes in the political and economic systems that harbor a conflict. If the unsatisfied need of one group is regarded as an outcome of discriminatory policies, a new conflict of the same origin will not be avoided. Immediate and shorter-term issues can be settled without long-term, structural changes; yet if we look into the roots of problems beyond separate issues, specific incidents and related issues are often linked to each other.⁹

While meaningful changes can be produced by the cumulative effects of a successful management of immediate issues, recurrent struggles represent more than opposing views or contending interests that can be settled within the existing process or law. Solving disagreement, for example, on the divisions of residential areas or school redistricting may not be the end of animosities in a racial and ethnic conflict. Thus it is important to treat an endemic tension as more than an incidental phenomenon by utilizing it as an opportunity for institutional, system changes.

System transformation is needed for a conflict rooted in socioeconomic and political structures.¹⁰ Thus conflict transformation should be more than a response, not requiring a system change, to a separate incident of a conflict episode. Repeated tensions need to be reframed as more than isolated incidents that occasionally surface and submerge. Specific issues (e.g., water shortage) may need to be linked to the need for an institutional change (that can guarantee equal representation, for instance, on a decision-making board responsible for water allocation).

The life of ordinary people has become destabilized due to the structural patterns of underlying relationships.¹¹ Fundamental relationship changes can be induced by economic a...