Communal Violence, Types of Post Violence - Sociology of Peace Processes - Lecture Notes, Study notes of Sociology

Download Communal Violence, Types of Post Violence - Sociology of Peace Processes - Lecture Notes and more Study notes Sociology in PDF only on Docsity! Sociology of peace processes lecture 2 Types of post-violence There are many examples where communal violence has been reduced or eliminated as the result of peace accords, as in much of Latin America, Rwanda, South Africa, Sri Lanka and Northern Ireland, to name but a few contemporary examples. There are many historical examples: in the twentieth-century one thinks of Spain after Franco, West Germany after the fall of Hitler, Cuba or Mexico after their revolutions, Poland and other Eastern European countries after the fall of Communism, and so on. Peace is not an issue to which the sociological imagination has been applied much in the past. Political science, international relations and human rights law are normally the subjects that dominate the field. However, there are some sociologists who have looked at some aspects of peace and peace processes but the literature is small and limited in different ways. The category ‘post violence society’ is applicable to those social formations that have undergone transition from communal violence to relative non-violence. There are obvious differences between the societies that might be described under the category of ‘post violence society’. The category includes countries that differ in their history of violence, both the scale of conflict and its nature. In some cases it is full-scale war that is being transformed, such as Rwanda, in others sporadic, intermittent acts of communal violence. They also differ in who the victims were. Sometimes the violence was directed at the state, leaving much of the population unscathed, once supporters of the old regime are discounted. In these situations the old regime or toppled dictator can be used to assign away blame. But in other cases the communal violence was focused on members of other ethnic groups, as in Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Northern Ireland and the Philippines, spreading the scale and intensity of victimhood, limiting the capacity to assign responsibility to the past and leaving the policy problem of maintaining non-violence. The category also includes countries that differ in the lines of social cleavage that structured the communal violence. Some of these cleavages are less easily reconcilable than others, in that they are perceived as absolute categories rather than contingent social constructions that lend themselves to zero-sum conflicts; some can be more readily accommodated by constitutional and institutional rearrangements, while others leave a permanent strain on the accord, increasing the danger of renewed violence. We can identify three types of post violence society, distinguished by the basis on which peace was primarily achieved. For the sake of alliteration they can be called ‘conquest’, ‘cartography’ and ‘compromise’. They cohere around three axes, which I call: • Relational distance-closeness • Spatial separation-territorial integrity • Cultural capital-cultural annihilation Relational distance-closeness refers to the extent to which former belligerents share common values and norms; spatial separation-territorial integrity describes the degree to which former belligerents continue to share common land and nationhood; and cultural capital-annihilation addresses the level of cultural and other resources docsity.com possessed by former belligerents. These axes will become clearer as we develop the taxonomy. Conquest is normally associated with conventional wars between nations, but there are historical instances where internal communal violence has been successfully terminated by conquest, such as colonial and civil wars. Post-violence adjustments after conquest tend to be easier where there is relational closeness between belligerents, such as the American and Spanish civil wars, since there are few differences other than the allegiance around which the conflict was based, although this should not be disparaged. Post-violence adjustments after conquest are more problematic where relational distance is greater (as with the ethno-cultural and religious differences between settlers and the indigenous population). In these instances, conquest usually succeeds at the cost of the cultural annihilation of the vanquished or their effective subjugation. Where the vanquished retain cultural capital, as a result of their numerical size, labour power and role in the economy, diaspora networks or access to social capital through education and other key resources, cultural annihilation is never complete and this type of post violence society becomes susceptible to renewed communal violence in the long term around decolonisation or the competing claims of communal groups. There are examples of colonial conquest where the cultural annihilation has been complete, such as North and South American indigenous groups and Aboriginal peoples in Australia. Nonetheless, conquest is rarely the organising principle of post violence societies in the modern world because it contravenes human rights principles in an international order where human rights constitute the dominant discourse. Another type of post violence society is peaceful now only because cartographers have redrawn national borders and new states or devolved regions have developed as a way of dealing with the social cleavages that formerly provoked communal violence. This suggests that post-violence adjustments are sometimes perceived to be easier where former adversaries are separated spatially. Accordingly, both partition and federal devolution are popular post-violence strategies for separating warring factions. The new Balkan states are good examples, with new territorial borders attempting to keep apart various ethnic blocs, and partition is proffered as the basis on which the Palestine and Israel conflict can be solved with the ‘two states’ road map. Of course, many communal conflicts around the world do not involve belligerents with relational closeness, or people who lack cultural capital or who can be separated spatially. Conquest or cartography can’t work here. This is why compromise exists alongside conquest and cartography as motifs to define a type of post violence society. This type is one that keeps its territorial integrity and has to find ways of managing internally the social cleavages that formerly caused communal violence through peace accords in which second-best solutions are negotiated as part of a compromise deal. Maintaining territorial integrity is itself problematic when it is preserved in the face of continued relational distance and where 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. The transition process in this kind of post violence society thus involves implementing peace settlements that eliminate the communal violence while allowing the reproduction of the cultural differences and relational distance that docsity.com