Download The Fragility of Peace Processes: Reasons for Unsuccessful Negotiated Settlements and more Study notes Sociology in PDF only on Docsity! The Sociology of Peace Processes Lecture 3: why is peace a problem? Lecture summary The lecture explores the reasons why peace processes are so fragile and the negotiated settlements mostly unsuccessful. Peace accords go through several versions before they’re agreed, sometimes with long time delays between each version. It was once estimated that of 110 armed conflicts between 1989-99, only 21 were ended by peace agreements and only a minority of these survived. The lecture identifies five reasons why peace is so fragile. • No civil society to provide space and resources for peacemaking and compromise • Some kinds of post violence society are insecure (those with territorial integrity, relational distance and cultural capital) • The destabilising effects of on-going violence • The psychological costs of peace • The narrow focus on governance reform First of all, the communal violence may have been so intense, so atrocious that all search for compromise has been eroded. It is not just that the enmity may be stronger where the communal violence has been most barbaric, the resources and skills needed for peacemaking may have been decimated in the slaughter. Where civil society has been destroyed, peace making will be harder. Some of the reasons for the fragility of peace processes have to do with the kind of post violence society it is. It’s the kind in which territorial integrity and relational distance are preserved and in which vanquished groups continue to possess cultural capital. Cultural differences of ‘race’, religion, ethnicity or national allegiance remain despite the peace accord and are open to manipulation by those who seek to retain their local power and patronage or challenge the consensus. Violence often never subsides or never subsides quick enough, or opponents of the peace settlement ratchet up their violence in order to bring the peace settlement to collapse. There is a naïve assumption that where violence is a consequence of problematic politics, once a permanent settlement is reached violence is thought to irrevocably and swiftly disappear. However, rarely is there a complete cessation of all forms of violence and the ending of violence in most post-violence societies is only relative. Peace processes have to manage the constant risk of renewed violence from either warlords for whom the continuance of conflict maintains their local control and patronage or ‘spoiler violence’ deliberately intended to undermine the peace agreement. Peace brings psychological and ontological costs. The ontological insecurity caused by violence and which gives the push to the peace process can be insufficiently severe as to discourage some people from fully embracing the need to compromise, and the compromises required by the peace process can cause the same severe ontological insecurity and fear as the violence itself. Peace provokes what we might call the docsity.com
