Reasons for Unsuccessful Compromise in Fragile Post-Violence Peace Settlements, Study notes of Sociology

Download Reasons for Unsuccessful Compromise in Fragile Post-Violence Peace Settlements and more Study notes Sociology in PDF only on Docsity! The Sociology of Peace Processes Lecture 3: why is peace a problem? Over the last few weeks we’ve been clearing some of the ground work before we look at some of the sociological aspects of peace processes: the first week we explored what we meant by communal violence since this kind of violence is often the most difficult to deal with; and last time we looked at the different kinds of ways in which peace can be introduced, looking at post violence societies based on conquest, cartography and compromise. Only the latter (compromise) is based on a negotiated peace process, although clearly partition – cartography – can be the outcome of a negotiated peace settlement, although partition isn’t very stable and often leads to renewed conflict that requires further peace work. It is with compromise post violence societies that we’re concerned here – those based on a second-best negotiated peace settlement in which people have given up their preferred choice in a compromise deal. Today I want to explore the reasons why this kind of peace is fragile and the negotiated settlements mostly unsuccessful or bump along from one crisis to another. I have placed on the reading list for this week the web site of INCORE, based at the University of Ulster, which has a record of all peace agreements and their iterations. You will see that peace accords go through several versions before they’re agreed, sometimes with long time delays between each version. The Guatemalan peace accord went through nine versions before it was agreed. Peace agreements in Northern Ireland and Sri Lanka are suspended because of disagreements. And many previous docsity.com Israel-Palestine agreements have been ripped up and discarded as the parties return to violence after continued disagreements. Peace processes are universally fragile affairs, rarely prospering over the long term without active public support. 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. Today’s lecture therefore asks the simple question: why is peace so fragile? Unfortunately, the answer is more complex. There are five reasons I think: • 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 Let me focus on each in turn. First of all, the communal violence may have been so intense, so atrocious that all search for compromise has been eroded. Most forms of genocide come close to this. One thinks of the Balkan regions in former Yugoslavia, although Rwanda, another example of genocide, is not an example since reconciliation there has been made easier because civil society was not destroyed. 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. As we shall emphasise in a future lecture, civil society is a key agent docsity.com patronage or in the form of what John Darby calls ‘spoiler violence’ deliberately intended to undermine the peace agreement. The warlords have developed an economy of war, profit from the war, even perhaps from the aid sent in by the United Nations as they pilfer and corrupt the aid process. Warlords have power – often having private armies – to enforce that power; they have status in a society where otherwise they might have none. And they want to keep themselves in power and so use crime, racketeering, corruption and brute force to keep their army sweet, to keep their patronage by having people below them tied to the economic benefits they can give because of the war. There is in other words an economic incentive to keep the war going. It’s not the settlement they object to but the very ending of the violence at all. It could be said that some Loyalist paramilitary groups fit into this category for the conflict allows them to disguise their criminal behaviour under the pretence of politics; some sections of Loyalist paramilitaries have conveniently used ‘the troubles’ to engage in the drug trade, organised crime, customs offences and the like and peace threatens this. It threatens it in two ways. First, the police are now no longer focused on political crime so the full resources of the police now get focused on ordinary criminal activity. Secondly, peace prevents them from enforcing their control in working class Loyalist areas with the same murderous and brutal methods that they have done so in the past. Without a culture of violence in which murders are a daily occurrence, the attempts by some Loyalists to enforce their control by brutal force can no longer be disguised as part of the political struggle. docsity.com This form of warlord violence is over and above the ‘spoiler violence’ done by groups who just don’t like the kind of agreement that’s being negotiated; it’s not a settlement in principle they object to, just this particular one. Violence from the anti-Agreement Republican movement in Northern Ireland, groups like the Real and Continuity IRA come to mind. Likewise the pan-African groups in South Africa or the Afrikaner right wing groups like the AWB, who wanted to kill their way to a different kind of constitution for South Africa. Where warlord or spoiler violence is kept going, whether for economic or political motives, peacemaking has to operate in a situation where the old enmities continue, where mistrust has not been assuaged and where violence can destabilise elite and grassroots initiatives by closing the space for compromise. The emotions made raw by the past violence are not healed because the violence continues, albeit in transformed ways and albeit mostly on a much reduced scale. This leads me naturally on to a third reason why peace is a problem: peace brings psychological and ontological costs. This is again counter intuitive and needs further explanation to make sense. These arguments suggest what is perhaps a surprising truth: peace comes at too high a price for some people. 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. Of course, peace offer the prospect of an end to violence and the reconciliation of conflict, and thus the prospect of longer-term ontological security, but in the short term they may threaten docsity.com ontological security because they require change, the overthrow of familiar ideas, routines and behaviours, all of which can be psychologically difficult. As we shall emphasise in another future lecture, peace provokes what we might call the ‘identity dilemma’. People who have defined their identity for so long in terms of the enemy, suddenly in peace processes find they have to reshape their sense of who they are. There is another dimension to this problem. People have not have known anything but the violence, they have learned to live with and cope with it, especially if it’s low scale violence, therefore ‘peace’ itself is unfamiliar and ontologically strange. These feelings are enhanced for victims and their relatives. The public issues surrounding the search for peace and the reconciliation of ancient conflicts cause psychological grief for the victims and their families. This is reinforced by the habit of peace processes to become almost the sole public issue, enveloping and encapsulating all public events. In the public domain all they hear is peace, while privately all they feel is grief. The empty chair at the dinner table once filled by someone still much loved, the constant constraint of the wheelchair, the emotional pain that gets repeated every anniversary, and the persistent physical and emotional scars are daily reminders of what the violence has cost them. Their hurt and bitterness can become defining features of their identity, and peace comes at a cost. The victims and their families are asked to release the bitterness, forgive old enemies and witness them now in parliament, see perpetrators receive amnesty or prisoners released, and generally move forward from their hurt, loss, and pain. The continuance of ontological insecurity and anxiety during peace processes is only one kind of cost to peace. In my research on grassroots peacemaking in Northern docsity.com