Good Governance, War Peace and Communal Violence - Sociology of Peace Processes - Lecture Notes, Study notes of Sociology

Download Good Governance, War Peace and Communal Violence - Sociology of Peace Processes - Lecture Notes and more Study notes Sociology in PDF only on Docsity! 1 The Sociology of Peace Processes Lecture 1 War, peace and communal violence Lecture summary Issues of war and peace are topical concerns. What work there is on peace processes tends to be from a ‘good governance’ and human rights perspective and is thus dominated by the disciplines of political science, international relations and law. This course addresses peace processes from a sociological perspective and seeks to correct the weaknesses in the current literature in the hope that sociology can disclose some of the ways to better manage the after effects of communal violence. This problematic involves analysis of the different types of post-violence society and the various ways in which peace can be achieved, with attention being focused exclusively on post- violence societies based around negotiated peace processes. There are all sorts of ways in which communal conflicts and wars come to an end; this course explores the sociological features of negotiated peace processes and the array of social issues they throw up; questions like civil society, gender, emotions, restorative justice, memory, truth recovery, victimhood and citizenship education. Countries that have had wars are up to four times more likely to see conflict break out again; the most likely outcome of a civil war is another civil war. It is thus a matter of significant public importance for social scientists to turn their focus on the array of factors that help stabilize peace processes. This course is a contribution to that debate by addressing the wealth of social policy issues that peace processes need to manage in addition to the reforms that introduce good governance. War and peace are implied by each other, for no war is irresolvable and no peace secure from renewed conflict. They are implied by each other in another sense for the conflict often shapes the potential for peacemaking and the nature of the peace agreement. There is a further sense in which war and peace are two sides of the same Janus face, for the globalization of war has impacted on the globalization of peace and produced new forms of peacemaking. So implicated are war and peace in each other that it is first necessary to provide context to our discussion of peace processes by briefly exploring the globalization of organized violence. It is common to distinguish ‘global militarization’ and ‘military globalization’. The former refers to the global military build up under the arms race, to the point where very localized wars can involve the use of very sophisticated weaponry; the latter to the military connectedness between the world’s major regions as localized wars impact on the geo-political order and reinforce the necessity for the geo-governance of war. War, communal violence and rapidly expanding military technologies have been amongst the most important processes that have reconstituted the world into a single strategic geo-space. This time-space compression in turn has increased the potential for war, as well as its destructive consequences and its capability to disrupt relations well beyond the site of conflict. docsity.com 2 These are not the only reasons why globalization is said to have resulted in new kinds of war. The reassertion of regional and local interstate rivalry has intensified with the ending of the Cold War and the cultural fragmentation that has accompanied globalization has witnessed the resurgence of nationalist, religious, ethnic and communal conflicts. The intensity with which ‘local traditions’ are upheld in moments of transition or as a reaction to globalization often results in old identities assuming significance, thus perpetuating old divisions and sometimes turning them violent. Bauman argues that the human consequences of globalization encourage us to feel secure only in collective identities and to project risk onto the stranger in our midst. Democracy itself is increasingly perceived to have a ‘darker side’ by permitting people to openly mobilize around cleavages that can become divisive and encourage people to feel that that their particular religious, ethnic or communal values be represented politically, sometimes at the cost of other people’s. Whilst this increases the potential for conflict in global society, changing technologies of warfare permit the prosecution of war without the total mobilization of societies. This tends to make war several steps removed from many people’s direct experience, at least in the global First World, assisting in public acquiescence in war and governmental management of the political and material damage of war. These separate processes make for both more war and changed forms of war. But lying within the globalization of war are increased opportunities for peacemaking and new forms of peace work. The development of regional security blocs contributes both to fragmentation and centripetal processes at the same time, for these networks can encourage co-operation over defence and security arrangements as much as rivalry. Their interconnectedness makes us all vulnerable to conflicts in distant parts of the globe and can facilitate our mutual interest in peaceful intervention. The rising density of economic connections between states and regional security blocs means that nations no longer see threats to national security just in military terms, so that intervention is more readily contemplated. The development of extensive diaspora networks gives nations a cultural connectedness with distant others that may also motivate peacekeeping. Military globalization inevitably involves new forms of geo- governance that monitor the means and conduct of organized violence. The development of cosmopolitan humanitarian law to regulate conflict limit use of instruments of war and to hold people to account for war crimes constitutes a moral justification for peacekeeping and legal support for the interventions of the United Nations. The human rights discourse that affects so much of geo-politics is in essence a language of peace by constituting a powerful deterrent to the violation of human rights. It has furnished a monitoring regime of numerous International Non- Governmental Organizations that operate transnationally, bypassing governments to establish a global network of peace activists. This network allows INGOs to play a global role as peace campaigners, which gives peace a global voice. The impact of this global network is enhanced by the co-operation between human rights INGOs and a plethora of global networks mobilizing around gender, violence against women, the environment, anti-capitalism, opposition to landmines and other instruments of war, charitable giving, AIDS and other health issues and the like. There are flows of information between these networks and co-campaigning. This resonates with peace in two ways. These specific issues are often aligned with peace inasmuch as organized violence is seen to cause or make them worse; and these global networks can easily be mobilized around peace as vocation. docsity.com