The Causes and Prevention of Violent Conflict:
There is no topic more important for modern societies than understanding the sources of violent conflict and identifying ways in which such violence might be prevented, managed, resolved or transformed. If we, as global citizens, do not face up to and develop some creative answers to this question it will be extremely difficult if not impossible to establish and maintain civilised communities in the 21st century within which citizens can live, move and develop their full human potential in a relatively care free environment.
The prevention of violence is also a pre-requisite for the development of what Martin Luther King used to call “The Peaceable Kingdom”. These processes—violence prevention and community building – are complex and difficult. They both require a radical commitment to more co-operative, collaborative processes, the intentional development of respect for the rule of law within a culture of peace. This is not a task for sissies and cowards it requires deep personal and social courage in the face of adversity and a willingness to generate and exhaust non violent options before contemplating the use of violence.
If there is no such commitment to non violent solutions, however, then I would argue that democracy, order and the rule of law are placed in jeopardy. As that well known non violent civil rights activist A.J. Muste put it way back in the 1950s “ The survival of democracy depends on the renunciation of violence and the development of non violent means to combat evil and advance the good”
How we constitute non violent communities and advance the good within them, however, are not simple questions, nor are they ever finally settled. Individuals and groups are constantly negotiating and constructing social and community realities for themselves. The determination of who become privileged citizens, for example, and who is included or excluded from collective benefits is one of those dividers within contemporary western communities.
The character and quality of the normative and institutional frameworks that we develop for ourselves, therefore, is critical to whether or not we will develop sustainable peace and harmonious relationships within and between states. What sorts of positive and negative incentive structures can we develop to ensure a commitment to non violent problem solving?
The questions that need to be asked are relatively timeless. To whom are we or should we be responsible and accountable and why? Are we our brother’s and sister’s keepers and who do we want to include in these categories? What does this mean in terms of ethics and behaviour? How do we ensure that our core political, economic, and social institutions generate real security for citizens rather than security for some and insecurity for many? In other words how are we connected to each other and how can we ensure that we work in ways which satisfy rather than frustrate basic human needs and which utilises diversity for the benefit of all?
My old friend and colleague Adam Curle argues that peacemaking is the art of seeing that things which appear apart are really connected. How do we make sense of the whole, therefore, and of the distinctive role that each part makes in the construction of that whole? Curle , along with other Buddhist writers, argues that in addition to arguments about congenital or learned aggression, at the root of most violence are what he calls three poisons .
The first poison is that of ignorance.[1] By this he does not mean ignorance of facts or ideas but rather ignorance of our nature . In particular the foolish belief that we are all separate and self existent beings when in fact we are all radically interconnected and subject to common dynamics and influences which affect us all individually and collectively. In our ignorance we cut ourselves off from others and in doing so feel off balance and lost. We will only overcome this existential ignorance if we focus on the ways in which we are truly interdependent. Only with this recognition will we acquire an active sensitivity to others and start developing right relationships with them.
The second poison is that of yearning, longing, wanting , lusting and greed which is generated by our ignorance and the consequent sense of insufficiency and loss.[2] We compensate for our loneliness and feeling of a lack of power over our lives by acquisition, status, wealth and position. Out of these things we build up an identity, or an image of self of which we can be proud. This is the first line of defence against insecurity, despair and futility but it is very fragile and in the end often quite insatiable and a source of deeper frustration and aggression.
The third poison follows from the failures and disappointments of the second. It is the jealousy and hatred of those who have more of what we desire or who we think are obstructing us in the pursuit of our own objectives.[3] We develop negative feelings because of our ignorance and the pursuit of happiness through competition and acquisitiveness.
“The Three Poisons provide the basis of selfishness, alienation from others, acquisitive greed, competitiveness and dislike from which most violence grows”.[4]
To these must also be added the experience of pain and suffering itself. This suffering can be specific experiences of rejection, (particularly in childhood and within the family) and experiences of violence, displacement, or destitution. One of the interesting features of most violent conflict is the way in which those who have been victims of it or have experienced deep trauma and suffering carry that pain throughout life and somewhat perversely often inflict it on others, thus perpetuating the cycle.
If this analysis is right, therefore, we have to ensure that our education and our analyses of conflict focuses on ways of revealing our interdependence, while working individually and collectively on ways of dealing with yearning, longing and greed and the feelings and behaviour motivated by jealousy and hatred. We must also direct attention to dealing with the after effects of trauma as well.
These are not easy tasks as there are powerful structural dynamics working in the opposite direction focussing attention on the virtues of possessive individualism and a radical assertion of self interest. Thus, we need to understand the complex relationships between attitudes, emotions, behaviour and context and how these, taken together, generate a disposition towards violence. In particular, in our analysis, we need to pay particular attention to the impact and significance of specific contexts since text without context is pretext! We must never underestimate the significance of place and location. If Australia does not become more sensitive to ways of doing business with Asia, for example, this will generate deep conflict within the future.
In any event analysing the ways in which violence emerges within families, neighbourhoods, communities, nations, regions or globally should always have the same the aim which is how do we develop individual and institutional arrangements that are resilient and capable of containing that complex mix of individual and collective emotion, and behaviour which is the human condition? How do we ensure that vicious cycles are turned into virtuous ones and that conflict generates positive rather than negative outcomes?
To contextualise the problems a bit… I will talk about some of the major violent conflicts afflicting the world in 2004. This week alone, for example, there has been another suicide bombing in Israel; Israeli retaliation in Palestine; 194 refugees killed in Northern Uganda by the Lords Resistance Army; the re-emergence of a vicious civil war in Haiti; accelerated military action on the North West frontier of Pakistan; and continuing chaos in Iraq and the Congo.
These events do not take into account those who are killed by preventable diseases as well . These could be construed as the victims of wider structural violence. Leaving aside those who face daily existential terror because of pandemics like AIDS, malnutrition, displacement there were also many instances of direct violence as well.
A total of 226 armed conflicts were recorded by the Department of Peace and Conflict Research at Uppsala University for the years 1946-2002.
“ Of these, 116 were active in the period 1989-2002, including 31 in 2002. There were five wars in 2002. numbers were the lowest for this period. Seven interstate –armed conflicts were recorded 1989-2002, of which one was still active in 2002. In 2002 , a larger proportion of complex major armed conflicts were resolved, compared with new and minor armed conflicts . Although the data on armed conflict presented here suggests that there is a decline in the use of armed force, there is an increased feeling of fear and insecurity in many parts of the world because of terrorism incidents”.[5]
These data do not cover the wars and conflicts that have erupted or escalated in 2003 or this year. In particular they exclude the rapid deterioration of the situation in Palestine/Israel and the continuing War in Iraq . The general trend, downwards, is confirmed by other data sources as well. The total numbers of inter-state and civil wars is declining. Those that persist , however, are proving remarkably resistant to resolution. The unresolved and intractable internal conflicts which have persisted last on average for 7 years.[6]
Conflict regions
The main regions of current and prospective intrastate conflicts are Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) , the former Soviet Union (FSU), the Balkans and parts of Asia. In the Middle East, the Arab-Israeli conflict continues as do the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Serious intrastate violence occurs in North Africa, especially Algeria. There is a clear African Crisis Zone and a Central Asian Crisis Zone. Elsewhere specific countries, such as Burma, Colombia , Nepal Sri Lanka, Indonesia, the Philippines plus a number of micro states in the South West Pacific are also in conflict. There is a tendency for conflicts to spill over borders and become regional especially in Central Africa where a variety of armed groups are involved in a number of inter-related though separate conflicts. There is growing internal unrest and cross-border violence in Central Asia. Three strategic countries in the region, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, are plagued by a host of internal political and security problems, aggravated by poor and deteriorating economic and social conditions.
Major conflict in Western Europe is highly unlikely although low-intensity secessionist violence in Northern Ireland and the Basque Country continues. The rise of extreme-right terrorism in parts of Europe is likely to continue,this will probably be largely directed at minority communities, but is unlikely to be very great. Enlargement of the EU could lead to destabilising effects in neighbouring regions, such as south-eastern Europe, the FSU, Turkey and North Africa but more positively enlargement processes can also be used to prevent conflict as candidate states change their economic, political and legal systems in compliance with EU norms.
The Changing Nature of Conflict
The nature of violent conflict has changed in subtle ways since the end of the cold war. The proxy conflicts of that time have by and large been resolved. But the conflicts that remain are proving more resistant to solution and persistent. They are taking place against a backdrop of a world system where coercive capacity rather than problem solving ability is temporarily in the ascendant.
Power in the modern world system is distributed in a complex three dimensional pattern.
(1) Military power is largely unipolar. The United States, for example, now wields unprecedented global military power. The United States Defence budget is $379 billion after a recent rise of 14%. This is the biggest rise in 20 years. The defence budget is larger than the combined total of the next nine biggest defence spenders in the whole world. In the past this military power has been used to deter aggression in recent years it has been used more pro-actively, pre-emptively to promote American political interests. Where these happen to coincide with global interests there is a commonality of purpose where they do not the curtrent US administration is willing to proceed unilaterally.
This is sending signals which enshrine 20th century perspectives that might is right, or as Thucydides put it many years ago “ The powerful will do as they will while the weak do as they must”.
The 14% increase in US defence expenditure of $49 billion is equivalent to what the whole world spends on Overseas Development Assistance (which in 2002 was $51 billion). One of the challenges facing the world community, therefore, is how to ensure that US hegemonic military power is utilised to stabilise rather than destabilise; and to advance the global good rather than the advancement of narrow national and allied interest.
(2)Economic power, on the other hand is tri-polar, with the United States, Europe and Japan representing two thirds of world product. China’s rapid economic growth will make this tri-polar concentration quadripolar within twelve years. This is important as the economically powerful are in a position to ensure the long term structural prevention of conflict. If they choose to utilise this power to advance their self interests on the backs of the rest of the world -instability and envy will be the result.
(3) “Soft power”, political persuasive power, remains largely a Western preserve. English is the global language for trade and commerce; Western values dominate most multilateral institutions and western states exercise disproportionate influence within them. This is one reason why many non-Western actors feel alienated and excluded. This power manifests itself in a certain altruism ( led by Western Europe) in terms of overseas development assistance and other kinds of humanitarian intervention. These transactions generate gratitude and anger. Who benefits from these transactions and who does not? Who is viewed as marginal and who central? Who is listening to the voices coming out of the world’s peripheries? If Martin Luther King is right and “Revolutions are the cries of the unheard”. It could be argued that terrorism is also a cry of the excluded and unheard as well.
An analysis of conflict trends cannot be separated from wider analysis of technological , economic, political and social development. There is no simple causal explanation for stable peaceful relationships which is why the best analyses of the structural and proximate sources of conflict are holistic and systemic. What we can do is identify a number of critical economic, political and social factors which increase the probability of violence and war.
Economic Sources of Conflict
Although there is a big debate about the relationship between economic factors and peace it is clear that most modern wars are concentrated in the poorest countries. 56% of those countries classified as having low development by the UN Human Development report experienced Civil war in 1997-2001. Only 2% of those countries classified as having high development experienced civil war in the same period. [7]
The World Bank in its recent report Breaking the Conflict Trap-Civil War and Development Policy [8]argued that war causes poverty but poverty also increases the likelihood of civil war. Countries with low, stagnant, unequally distributed per capita incomes and heavily dependent on primary commodities face “dangerously high risks of prolonged conflict”. This is further exacerbated by what the Bank calls “ The conflict Trap” . This trap reflects the fact that once countries have experienced a conflict they double their chances of having another conflict within a 5 – 10 year period. If they have experienced two conflicts their chances of another are quadrupled. In the last five years much attention has been devoted to the role of greed as a source of conflict. As always in relation to these arcane debates it is neither one factor rather than another that is most important. Rather there is an agreement that greed coupled with grievance is a prime propellant of violent conflict. This combination becomes especially lethal when connected to failed and failing political systems or what Mansoob Murshed at the Institute of Social Studies in the Hague calls a “ disintegrating social contract” between ruler and ruled.
This means that all of us have got to become better at thinking about ways of addressing economic discontent and satisfying basic human needs. It is also important to focus on some of the historic legacies of violent conflict. Both sources of conflict need to be addressed simultaneously if citizens of countries in conflict are not to be paralysed by their past and /or doomed to repeat old patterns of violence.
Political Systems and Conflict
Violent conflicts also tend to occur more within autocratic and non democratic political systems or within systems that are in transition. In terms of established democracies for example, only 12% were involved in civil war whereas 45% of one party dictatorships were involved in civil war and 30% of states with transitional or uncertain democracies were involved in civil war.[9] Because of these associations it is important whether or not state systems are moving in a more or less democratic direction. Monty Marshall and his team at Maryland University have been analysing movements towards democratisation. They identify a post cold war “wave of democratisation” which has slowed down over the past three years.
“There were 83 countries classified as democracies in early 2002, nearly double the number of democracies counted in early 1985 (42). The 80 autocracies in 1985 fell by nearly two thirds to 28 in 2002. At the same time, the nearly three fold jump in the number of states that fall in our middling category of regimes, the transitional polities or “anocracies” ( from 16 in 1985 to 47 in 2002 appears to have levelled off”. [10]
They argue that the sharp rise in the number of “anocracies” is cause for serious concern. Such regimes are highly unstable and over 50% experience major regime change within five years and over 70% within 10 years. They are about six times more likely than democracies and two and half times as likely as autocracies to experienced armed societal conflict. They are also three times as likely to experience major reversions to autocracy than democracies.[11] These trends suggest that governmental and non governmental organisations working to prevent violent conflict need to direct more attention to the promotion of stable democratic regimes and the enhancement of effective and capable government with high levels of popular participation. In particular it is important to promote the rule of law, oppose any drift towards a culture of impunity and to advance and promote those multilateral institutions like the International Criminal Court which are aimed at generating some international sanctions on the gross violations of human rights in war. None of this is simple and there are some very complex variables at work.
There is, for example, a very clear, nearly linear relationship between wealth and effective democratic governance –stable democracies are associated with high per capita incomes. But it is not clear how much or in what ways democracy fosters peace, economic growth and structural stability . Thus in terms of Curle’s three poisons while individual greed may be dysfunctional a collective commitment to generating public wealth is essential.
“…it is only the fully and deeply institutionalised forms of democracy that are truly stable, resilient and peaceful. These “perfect” democracies are clearly superior over the other forms of governance on nearly all measures of effectiveness and performance. Yet open forms of governance in general have shown themselves to be extremely fragile political systems that are highly vulnerable to internal challenges. They are particularly ill equipped to manage or repress violent challenges, whether revolutionary, separatist or predatory, and they are ill suited to withstand the twin pressures of grievance and contention in war torn societies.”[12]
These arguments suggest that we need to pay more attention to the precise relationship between development, governance and stable peaceful relationships. What is known as the development and security or development and peacebuilding nexus, therefore , is a key part of developing adequate conflict prevention mechanisms. The development of effective and capable democratic systems is critical to maintaining the rule of law and avoiding the culture of impunity which often occurs when the rule of law is subverted as it has been in Georgia, Zimbabwe and in many other areas of conflict.
Human Rights and Conflict
Violent conflict ( war) is also strongly and positively correlated with minor or major violations of human rights—especially civil and political rights. Political regimes which violate a wide variety of civil and political rights are much more likely to experience political violence than those which do not violate such rights. 72% of states involved in civil wars also reported extra judicial executions, torture, police and prison violence, as well as the mistreatment of refugees and immigrants.[13]
This information suggests a need for much closer liaison between individuals, groups and organisations working on conflict prevention and those monitoring and promoting Human Rights. There is something of a paradox here , however, in that effective peace work in a zone of violent conflict is problematic if the antagonists feel that the external intervenors are from the human rights rather than the conflict prevention community. What is absolutely certain though is that state repression of political dissent or the denial of political rights to any section of the population is a major trigger to armed conflict.
Many of the world’s current violent conflicts , however, flow from what can be called “vicious identity politics” and deep horizontal inequality ( i.e marginalisation and exclusion of groups from economic, social and political benefits on a basis of class, identity, ethnicity). This systematic marginalisation of whole groups generate high levels of systemic instability and can only be maintained with high levels of state repression.
What is much more problematic, however, is how to address this exclusion non-violently and politically. What incentives, for example, might be applied to persuade the minority Tutsi population in Burundi to share their economic, political and military power with the majority Hutu population? In the absence of systematic efforts to address these gross inequalities, the prospects for stable peace seem very bleak indeed.
Ethnicity and Conflict
It is now becoming common wisdom in the field that ethnicity itself is not a source of conflict. Rather it is the particular demographic mix of different ethnic groups which is likely to have an impact on whether or not violence is more or less probable. There are more violent conflicts in those countries which have ethnic, racial or national minorities of more than 30% with a very rapid rise in those with more than 50%. The demographics of Burundi , for example, and the concentration of economic and political power in the hands of the Tutsi generate a strong disposition towards violence either (a) to protect power and privilege or (b) to challenge such power and privilege.
Another source of conflict related to and flowing out of identity politics are violent movements for self determination. The number of such movements has been diminishing in recent years but once these movements embark on a strategy of violent rebellion this tends to become normal if the ends are not realised. Rebel movements that have employed violence in the past have a 77% greater likelihood of using that strategy in the future than those movements which have expressed their interests and concerns through peaceful non-violent protest. [14] Once again the challenge facing the conflict prevention/ transformation community is how to break cycles of violence and revenge and replace them with more virtuous ones. Or more optimally, how might those interested in conflict prevention reinforce and consolidate the expression of self determination claims through non-violent means. When and where there is an initial commitment to non-violence , there is a tendency for this form of protest to reinforce itself.
Assymetric Conflict
Those who lack political, military and economic resources have always resorted to what is now known as “asymmetric conflict”. (This is where small and dedicated groups of people , social and political movements challenging larger dedicated powerful nations and peoples). The tactics that these groups employ to secure recognition of their social and political needs always rely on surprise, cunning, and probing for vulnerability in the powerful.
The 9/11 01 attacks on the Twin Towers in New York was a particularly graphic, tragic illustration of modern asymmetric warfare. These attacks have changed all sorts of taken for granted assumptions about security, insecurity and the supposed omnipotence of state systems in relation to the protection of citizens.
Assymetric conflict, therefore is likely to have very profound implications for all sorts of state (top down) and non state (bottom up) sponsored violence into the 21st century. The politics of terror (whether it is US/ UK “ Shock and Awe tactics”) or the deliberate use of violence by small groups claiming to represent massive constituencies and seeking to provoke “enemy over reactions” has become a sad reality of the first few years of the 21st century. The terrorist acts against the United States and the military responses to it in Afghanistan and Iraq ( and lower level responses in other parts of the world) have given a new legitimacy to the application of force to destabilise or defend existing regimes. This is already generating imitative responses as state systems start reviewing their defensive and offensive military capacity and as a wide variety of new political movements contemplate the use of violence as a political tactic in their respective struggles.
Unfortunately, therefore, top down or bottom up 'Political Violence' has become more pervasive in the first 4 years of the 21st century than in the last. The motivation behind acts of political violence as witnessed on September 11th 2001 and the Bali bombing etc are wide and diverse. They can be seen among other things as one response to a lived experience of US/Western economic/cultural and military domination and not just a reaction to generalised feelings of discontent of subjective perceptions. The reluctance to engage with actors defined by one side as 'terrorists', or to address issues that motivate political violence threatens to increase intra state and global conflict.
September 11 2001 not only reminded the most powerful nation in the world of its vulnerabilities; the subsequent “war against terror”; the forceful overthrow of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan , the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the occupation of Iraq, the unresolved conflict in Israel/Palestine, have resulted in some fairly fundamental challenges to traditional conceptions of peace, security, and liberty and placed some question marks over taken for granted concepts of open, pluralistic and democratic societies.
When 67% of United States citizens suggest that they are willing to sacrifice First Amendment Rights for strong national security or when political movements use suicide tactics in pursuit of their cause it is clear that political philosophy is being changed by political and military practice which is going to have very profound implications for our understanding of freedom, politics and violent forms of communication.
Somewhat paradoxically the heightened stress on national and state security is arousing some of the threats it is intended to allay. These are turbulent times. New divisions are occurring within and between different states and regions and too many actors are choosing violence as a means of securing recognition and promoting their personal and political interests.
Conflict actors.
It is important to link some of the macro dynamics underlying conflict to specific actors. These actors have been changing over the past twenty years as different individuals and groups resort to violence in pursuit of their interests. Internal conflicts are generally fuelled by urban elites, allied with the local political/religious power structure and the military. Rebel movements, for example are often led by disaffected or excluded urban based leaders who take their grievance to rural areas. These groups are often closely linked with organised criminal groups that launder money, sell illicit arms and dispose of looted minerals. Disaffected and unemployed youth, and children, often provide the muscle to these rebel movements. The Coalition to Stop Child Soldiers estimates that there are that there are some 300,000 child soldiers worldwide.
Multi-national corporations are conflict-actors in their own right. For example, in Colombia, Indonesia and Sudan, a number of different oil companies have directly or indirectly financed government security forces deployed against rebel groups.
The principal victims of violent conflict, however, continue to be unarmed civilians killed or injured either directly by warfare or as a result of the breakdown of government health and other social programmes. In the Eastern Congo for example, the ICRC has estimated that 2.5 million deaths have occurred since the second Congo war began in August 1998 of which 350,000 can be attributed directly to violent conflict. The rest were due to conflict-related disease and malnutrition.
These conflicts will inevitably lead to an outflow of refugees and increased numbers of internally displaced. Such movements of people in turn disrupt normal patterns of production, leading to food and other shortages and increased poverty and deprivation. Neighbouring countries can become destabilised as guerrilla movements are often formed from refugees groups and conflict slips across borders.
The Dynamics of future conflict
As has been noted already above conflict dynamics will continue to be driven by autocracy, anocracy, state repression, poverty, vicious identity politics as well as religious and ethnic grievances. There will always be struggles for control of mineral and other resources as well. These diverse sources of conflict are always inter-related . While they can be separated for heuristic purposes in fact they do need to be held together. This means that more attention needs to be paid to holistic analyses and the development of more integrated responses.
If the experience of the past three years is anything to go by we can expect that these economic, political , ethnic and others conflicts will be exacerbated to a large extent by an increase in world population from 6.1 billion now to 7.2 billion by 2015.
95% of this increase will be in developing countries, mostly in rapidly expanding urban areas. Given that a good number of these countries have fragile political systems, the combination of population growth, inadequate economic capacity and urbanisation will encourage instability.
Many states for example, now have a disproportionate number of children. About 30% of Afghans, for example are under the age of 20. The increasing number of unemployed or under-employed youth will provide a ready pool of people who see themselves as having nothing to lose by joining political (or pseudo-political) movements willing to use violence to realise their aims.
When these demographics are added to location it becomes a very poisonous mix indeed. Most of the new “hot” conflicts that have occurred in the past three years have done so in regions already afflicted by warfare. In general new incidents of violence with between 25 -1,000 war deaths have occurred in regions or “bad neighbourhoods” with on going serious armed conflict occurring somewhere in the vicinity. We need more sophisticated regional analyses of conflict and better integrated regional responses to such conflict.
Focus on the Prevention of Deadly Conflicts[15]
So how do we ensure that these negative dynamics are transformed into more benign and virtuous ones and how do we ensure that the early warning early response gap is reduced so that national, regional and global actors can respond proactively and immediately to signs of incipient violence? How do we take advantage of this rather bleak moment in history to rethink the role of the non-violent, unarmed peacebuilder and peace maker? How do we start living relatively “carefree” lives free of fear, pessimism and despair? What do we need to do to start thinking of a different kind of politics which places the service of the weakest and most vulnerable at its heart rather than the promotion of the richest and most powerful? How do we deal with terrorist threat and challenge non violently rather than violently? And how do we ensure that there is an open ended pursuit of human security and a desire for deeper relationships between people’s in order to guarantee stable peaceful relationships?
There are some obvious answers which have to do with domestic US politics and the upcoming presidential election campaign –but I will leave these to the wisdom of US citizens! There are some other answers, however, which have to do with what I call the development/peacebuilding nexus or what some others think of as the development/security nexus. For too long these areas of national and international policy have been thought of as relatively independent spheres of activity. The national security apparatus-police, intelligence, military and all other co-ercive agencies of the state have tended to receive the lions share of public recognition and funding . These agencies are, after all, the iron fist that lies beneath the velvet glove of State legitimacy. They confer the monopoly of power which lies at the heart of national sovereignty. Development, anti-poverty, emergency relief, preventive diplomacy and conflict prevention programmes of most wealthy states ( with some notable European exceptions) on the other hand receive little public or political recognition and have been relatively deprived of funds.
From 2002 to 2004, for example, US defence budgets increased by US$90 billion or 27% more than the 2001 level. USAID’s total budget (grants and loans) in 2001, however, was only US$10.7 billion which means that the increase in defence expenditure is over 8 times larger than the total USAID budget. Although these amounts are not that large in terms of total GDP (below 1%) or the Federal budget (below 5%) they are being financed largely through deficit financing . This has cushioned the negative impact on social sectors. In the long term , however, this rate of military expenditure will result in reduced government and private expenditure on other things. [16]
In addition to a rather unequal allocation of resources between the development and the security sectors, there has also been some conceptual confusion about the ways in which the policy agendas of these two sectors intersect, complement or contradict each other. It is assumed that the “hard” side of State activity is primarily responsible for law, order and social harmony while the “soft” development side provides safety nets for the impoverished and disadvantaged, slightly higher levels of general welfare and some general incentives to economic growth nationally and globally.
The rich and powerful, for example, value development and aid agencies, much less than they do foreign ministries, intelligence agencies , departments of defence and other coercive agencies. The result of all this is, that for the past fifty years the development and security spheres have been viewed as relatively autonomous—security is viewed by policy makers as essential to development but development , for most, has not been seen as central to security.
The central concern of national security specialists has been and still is “what dangers might threaten the survival of the state”? How might these dangers manifest themselves in the short and medium term and what are the appropriate responses to them? The central concerns of development specialists, nation building specialists has to do with what constitute the right sets of institutional and other arrangements that will deliver true human welfare and real human security. For these soft power specialists, force should only be used when all non violent methods have been exhausted. Wars of necessity are legitimate in self defence –wars of choice such as Iraq are rarely if ever legitimate and certainly not for the purpose of regime change by an external power.
While national security specialists have been happy to promote a certain amount of multilateralism to generate more order in the international system they have not and do not focus much, if any, attention on the achievement of order through the cultivation of trustworthy relationships, justice or the systematic pursuit of human security ( or care-free-ness) for the weakest and most vulnerable. This has been left to the UNDP and the Canadian and Japanese governments. All of these actors have recently developed the concept of ‘human security’ to encompass not just the achievement of minimal levels of material satisfaction but also the absence of severe threats of an economic or political kind.
The traditional realist security equation stands in stark contrast with this. It was and is dominated by the fear of war and the security of states rather than the security of individuals and groups. It has relied heavily on the concept of “Peace through strength” and shibboleths about waging peace by preparing for war. It does not worry too much about whether or not regimes are treating their individual citizens and minorities with justice and fairness. On the contrary it is preoccupied with whether or not states are good allies and friends or more optimally willing to be vassals under a benign imperium! Traditional Realists are worried about coalitions of the strong and powerful, who is on “our” side and who is not.
With the ending of the cold war, however, the “traditional” roles of the national security state have been challenged by an assertion of individual and collective rights, all around the world . These assertions of civil, political and economic rights and self determination claims were advanced more or less simultaneously with the neo-classical promotion of the centrality of the free market, possessive individualism and an opposition to big government . This has resulted in a systematic assault on state control and regulation of economic activity. In response to this pressure ( led principally by Bretton Woods institutions) political systems, started shrinking but national security agencies did not shrink as fast as the educational, health and welfare institutions. In the recent evolution of political systems market and state security institutions have remained privileged but social, community, and civil society spheres have tended to be both relatively and absolutely neglected.Unless we start thinking in terms of conflict sensitive development strategies and developmentally sensitive security strategies the world is going to get more and more insecure and the quest for true human security will become more elusive than ever.
The Biblical Psalmists, 2,000 years ago looked forward to the time when “ Love and faithfulness met together and justice and peace kissed each other”. (Psalm 85). Despite this ancient aspiration, Justice, Development ,Peace, and Reconciliation remain elusive irrespective of globalisation processes and a hugely enhanced global productive capacity. How do we explain to the world’s poorest, for example, that the richest fifth of the world’s people consumes 86% of all goods and services while the poorest fifth consumes just 1.3% of this amount. How do we justify the fact that the three richest people in the world have assets that exceed the combined gross domestic product of the 48 least developed countries or that the world’s 225 richest individuals (of whom 60 are American with total assets of $311 billion) have a combined wealth of over $1 trillion which is equal to the annual income of the poorest 47% of the entire world’s population? How do we explain to Africans that the average African Household today consumes 20% less than it did 25 years ago while Americans spend 8 billion a year on cosmetics or $2 billion more than the estimated annual total needed to provide basic education for everyone in the world.
These sorts of figures reflect a deep and expanding division between rich and poor, a global inequality that is unjust, unacceptable and untenable over the medium to long term. This central divider is the global backdrop, however, against which any discussion of development and peacebuilding must take place and where long term conflict prevention must start.
There is evidence, for example, of widening differentials between Moslems and Westerners. The 1975-1999 annual growth in per capita incomes in Arab States was 0.3% while that of high income OECD countries was 2.2% . Similarly there is a widening gap in the per capita incomes between Israelis and Palestinians as well. Israeli per capita incomes have been growing at 5% per annum ( 1990-1999) while GDP in Palestine has been declining at a rate of 7.5%. Unemployment in the areas under Palestinian authority is 40% compared to 9% in Israel. [17]
Clearly there is no direct causal relationship between these divisions and global terrorism nor is their a direct relationship between global economic inequality and the 37 persistent internal conflicts that exist in 2004 . These inequalities, however, do feed negative perceptions of concentrated wealth, power and military might.
The cost of achieving and maintaining universal access to basic education, basic health care for all, reproductive health care for women, adequate food for all and clear water and sewers for all is roughly $40 billion a year or less than 4% of the combined wealth of the 225 richest people in the world. Another way of putting this is to remind ourselves that this figure is very close to the 14% extra defence expenditure of $48 billion which President Bush asked for and received from Congress last year. This $48 billion is equivalent to what the whole world spends on official development assistance each year, namely $51 billion.
Conflict sensitive development planning and more synergy between the development and security or the development and peace building agendas is, therefore, absolutely critical to the achievement of stable peace and conflict prevention . Violence generates huge development costs. To tackle violence involves meeting these costs not with an enhanced and expanded military but with more targeted resources for smarter development. This involves a mainstreaming of conflict sensitivity across a range of different development sectors--- how can the educational, health, justice, welfare, and environmental sectors for example, be utilised to advance structural stability and peaceful relationships? What role should the private sector play in this? How much can state systems intervene to rectify gross inequalities without constraining market growth? These are the issues that confront those who wish to promote the development and peacebuilding agenda. It is a huge intellectual undertaking which requires considerable courage and political will.
In the first instance it is important to develop some vision of change that combines the development , security and democratisation agendas in an integrated and organic fashion. “Without a vision the people perish!” It is also important within this to highlight inclusive patterns of development, which are participatory, just and oriented towards the generation of stable and trusting relationships. This is critical to the achievement of lasting peace and security. In these processes it is vital to incorporate a wide range of civil society stakeholders in order to focus more systematic political attention on who is included and who excluded from the allocation of scarce national resources. All of this work has to be imbedded,however, in some theory of social and political change. What is our vision of a desirable future, what are the visions of parties to conflict, where do they intersect? How sensitive are we to visions that we have difficulty accepting but which might be very salient for others? How do we let go of our own visions so that we might enable the realisations of others and in that process discover some deeper meanings for our selves?
Secondly, it is vital to get the analysis right. There are some crucial economic, political and social sources of violence which need to be distinguished very carefully if conflict resolvers are to design adequate processes for dealing with them. If, there is a strong and consistent association of economic and political factors with violent conflict, it is imperative that these be assigned rather more primacy in the design and implementation of intervention strategies than has been the case until now. To ignore such dimensions and to focus intervention processes on coercive processes without addressing the underlying sources of structural or direct violence will generate very inadequate foundations for stable peace. These projects may enhance the “feel good factor” but will generate even deeper despair at the capacity of government and state systems to perform their social functions.
Thirdly, many good initiatives are subverted by the actions of corrupt governments, and the increasing criminalisation of politics. It is vital, therefore, to understand the linkages within and between different political complexes and the networked nature of relations between the state, civil society, the formal and non formal economic spheres, criminal and non criminal groups, paramilitary , police and military elements.
Fourth, most of these conflicts are occurring in environments with undemocratic political systems, where there are persistent patterns of gross violations of human rights ,widespread state repression of dissidents and large minority populations. There are huge dangers, however, in trying to generate regime change and “instant democracy” in countries that have been habituated to repressive authoritarian rule . The transition periods are the most dangerous. Conflict resolvers need to develop more integrated analyses of these problems and devise intervention strategies that enable more organic evolution of different systems. Despite what President Bush hopes for in Iraq, the US will be unable to impose democracy out of an authoritarian system. It will require much more than a month to devise a constitutional arrangement that satisfies the needs of Shia, Sunni and Kurds.
Fifth, The structural sources of organised violence generate challenges for peacebuilders which often seem far greater than their current capacity to respond to them. This means that peacebuilders need to maximise their resources wherever possible seeking higher levels of communication, cooperation and positive working relations with like minded actors in the governmental, inter-governmental, private and non-governmental sectors. We need clarity about different competencies and a more efficient division of labour between all actors. We need radical systemic perspectives to generate the right sorts of policies. The NGO conflict resolution (peacebuilding) sector, for example, is expanding, professionalising and acquiring more resources to engage in long term conflict transformation processes. It remains predominantly Northern, however, its resources are miniscule compared to those available to the world’s military and armed non state actors and it has limited capacity to challenge the political and economic dynamics of organised violence. It certainly has difficulty dealing with the criminalisation of politics, failed states, predatory states, institutionalised corruption, widespread subversion of the rule of law etc. The NGO sector cannot “mediate with muscle” nor can it enforce solutions to problems. Its strengths lie in other areas. It has flexibility, and an ability to respond to human suffering without being politically constrained. It needs to acknowledge the limits of its competence as does the state. Both need to join forces in the difficult task of achieving sustainable peace and development simultaneously. Both need to build on the unifiers rather than the dividers in society since strong and resilient communities are the fundamental pre-requisites for human existence and security.
Sixth, although reducing fear, building trust and restoring confidence are all necessary elements of any move towards a cessation of violence, they are not sufficient. This requires a much less adversarial much more problem solving orientation to politics. Perhaps this is the major contribution that the Conflict resolution community can make to transforming corrupt and deficient state and economic systems. It can begin modelling political processes which are collaborative rather than competitive, unconditionally constructive rather than adversarial and where the interests of all are placed at the heart of the political process. This may sound rather utopian but it is essentially where most of the major development donors are moving.[18] (This is also beginning to happen within the private sector as well). Conflict prevention is well and truly at the heart of the political and development agendas.
Seventh, we need more political commitment and greater recognition of how conflict sensitive development strategies might be mainstreamed and most importantly implemented in macro policy and micro programme and project cycle frameworks. There are ongoing first, second and third track discussions about what constitutes the right programming needs and priority responses at all phases of violent conflicts and there are certainly many discussions about specific roles, responsibilities, burden sharing and basic operational coordination among development agencies. The fact that these discussions are taking place is in itself a positive sign and there is now general agreement that peace, stability and human security should be at the centre of bilateral, regional and multilateral development planning, funding, and implementation in violent conflict zones.
All of these elements are going to require new perspectives, new ways of thinking about old problems and new processes for designing truly empowering and emancipatory partnerships between donors and recipients in war torn societies. Only by addressing these issues, however, will we start dealing with the fundamental asymmetries. The fact that both the development and conflict resolution communities have realised this need is an optimistic sign. The major message which politicians need to hear, however, is that military and development policies based on fear, vulnerability, revenge or a desire for revenge are doomed to generate insecurity for all of us.
As Seamus Heaney in his poem The Cure at Troy puts it.
Human beings suffer,
They torture one another,
They get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.
The innocent in gaols
Beat on their bars together.
A hunger striker’s father
Stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
Faints at the funeral home.
History says, Don’t hope
On this side of the grave
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed for tidal wave
Of Justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme
So hope for a great sea change
On the far side of revenge
Believe that a further shore
Is reachable from here
Believe in miracles
And cures and healing wells
Extract from S Heaney, 1990 The Cure at Troy, Faber and Faber London, p 77.
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[1] Adam Curle 1995 Another Way:Positive Responses to Contemporary Violence, Oxford, Jon Carpenter Press p 16
[2] ibid p 18
[3] Ibid p 19
[4] ibid p 20
[5] Mikael Erikson, Peter Wallensteen and Margareta Sollenberg, “Armed Conflict 1989-2002” Journal of Peace Research Vol 40 , no 5 2003 p 593 The Uppsala team divide conflicts into three categories. “Minor armed conflict where the number of battle related deaths is at least 25 but below 1,000. In 2002 there were 10 such conflicts, the same number as in 2001. Intermediate armed conflict with more than 1,000 battle related deaths recorded during the course of the conflict, but fewer than 1,000 in any given year. In 2002 there were 16 such conflicts compared with 14 in 2001, and War, with more than 1,000 battle related deaths in any given year. In 2002, there were 5 such conflicts , down from 11 in 2001”. p 597
[6] Monty G Marshall and Ted Robert Gurr 2003, Peace and Conflict 2003, CIDCM, University of Maryland College Park, p.15
[7] See Dan Smith, 2003 The Atlas of War and Peace London Earthscan Publication p 10
[8] Paul Collier et al, 2003 Breaking the Conflict Trap:Civil War and Development Policy Oxford, OUP and World Bank
[9] Dan Smith op cit p 14
[10] See Monty Marshall and Ted Robert Gurr , op cit p.17
[11] ibid
[12] ibid p.25
[13] See Dan Smith op cit p 12
[14] Monty Marshall and Ted Robert Gurr op cit p.36
[15] The Carnegie Foundation made a major contribution to this debate with its report on the Prevention of Deadly Conflict. See Carnegie Commission on The Prevention of Deadly Conflict, 1998 Oxford University Press pp xviii-xlv. In this they argued for the prevention of deadly conflict through the development of capable states, rule of law, social safety nets , protection of Human Rights and the development of robust human societies; the prevention of ongoing conflicts spreading by creating appropriate economic, social, political and military barriers ; methods for preventing the re-emergence of violence in the aftermath of conflict through smarter use of security forces, police etc. They also placed a lot of stress on early reaction to signs of trouble particularly early responses to early warning and the development of comprehensive balanced approaches to alleviate pressures triggering violent conflict. There was also a strong commitment to extended and expanded effort to deal with underlying root causes of violence and many other suggestions in relation to the operational prevention of conflict, the development of more enlightened political and military leadership and reform of regional and global organisations. Throughout all of their recommendations, however, there was a strong stress on dealing with the underlying structural sources of conflict and violence by focussing on new concepts of security, abolishing Weapons of Mass destruction; promoting cooperative security arrangements, and more attention to security within states, adequate law justice and penal systems, long term development and justice, and more clarity about how to utilise state leaders, civil society leaders and professional NGOs in short and long term prevention processes.
[16] See Francis Stewart, 2004 “Development and security” Unpublished paper prepared for Fifth Annual Global Development Conference, New Delhi 25-26 January p. 20
[17] Francis Stewart , op cit p.22
[18] See Caigals and Leonhardt above, op cit for an elaboration of all the diverse ways in which different natioinal governments, multilateral agencies are addressing these issues. There are, however, many other more official reports which are signalling political dissatisfactions with the old relief/development model and a desire for new ways of addressing the sorts of complex issues outlined in part one. (e.g the 2000 OECD DAC Guidelines on Conflict Peace and Development Cooperation which also resulted in the development of the Conflict Prevention and Post Conflict Reconstruction Network (CPR) which brings together aid and development policy makers to work out how they can be more efficient in terms of conflict prevention and post conflict reconstruction. The EU’s recent policy papers on Conflict Prevention and different UNDPA and UNOCHA reports etc are all moves in this same direction).
I hope this helps....
Don