The Sociological Challenges of Peace Processes: Beyond Good Governance, Study notes of Sociology

Download The Sociological Challenges of Peace Processes: Beyond Good Governance and more Study notes Sociology in PDF only on Docsity! 1 The Sociology of Peace Processes Lecture 4: The sociological dynamics of peace processes I ended the lecture last time by arguing that one of the reasons why peace processes and negotiated settlements are so fragile is because the transition process is reduced to one of introducing good governance – democratic institutions and human rights law. These are good things but peace processes require much more than institutional reform if they are to be successful, and the focus on introducing good governance tends to leave untouched a whole array of sociological issues that are equally critical to the success of the transition process. So widespread is the governance approach to peace processes – and so critical is the subsequent neglect of the sociological problems that it forces upon us – that I want to devote an entire lecture to this topic. I will be arguing three things today. That: • good governance is an important part of the transition process to peace • the emphasis on good governance arises from the liberal hegemony that dominates our understanding of democratic transitions • and that its focus on institutional reform is too narrow to cope with the array of problems which communal violence leaves as a legacy for peace processes Now, it is necessary to understand what is being said this morning. No one can deny the importance of democratic forms of governance and the need for institutional reform to ensure proper forms of political representation and to end legal abuses by the introduction of human rights law. Good governance assists in both eliminating the sources of conflict, especially when the conflict was about the undemocratic nature of docsity.com 2 the former regime and the failure of one or more groups to feel they were adequately politically represented and who were subject to human rights abuses, or if not eliminate the conflict, at least channel it in institutional ways that substitute talk for violence, discussion for damage. Good governance becomes limiting and problematic only if this is the only post- conflict adjustment proposed and good governance is proffered as the only way to peace. The stability of peace accords does depend in very large part on two things associated with good governance: a) people’s experience of governance and law after the violence has stopped b) the way resistance to the accord is managed within the new governance and human rights parameters Good governance has to work and be seen to work. People’s experience of the new forms of governance – the new democratic institutions, the new forms of political representation, voting systems, human rights protections and the like – needs to leave people with favourable impressions. How they experience the reforms will in large part determine their commitment to them. Part of this also concerns people’s experience of how the new state, or government or institutions deal with opponents of peace; the on-going spoiler violence may be dealt with so harshly that the new regime’s commitment to democratic means and systems of human rights law may be called into question, affecting the way in which the peace process is experienced even amongst its supporters. docsity.com 5 There are many American-based and funded peace initiatives and peace centres that promote good governance as the solution to other countries’ civil wars and communal conflicts. They have the money to support peace initiatives in these places and the money to fund research programmes that celebrate good governance. For example, there’s the Washington Institute for Peace, the MacArthur Foundation, the Ford Foundation and the Woodrow Wilson Centre for International Scholars. They fund researchers, publish books, invite scholars to visit, all with the purpose of promoting good governance as the means to effective peace. Some of these are based in US universities, some privately-funded foundations, others government funded. They are all pro-US and advance US foreign policy objectives. Philanthropy and its impact on peace is worth emphasising here. There are two dimensions that are worth distinguishing here: the way philanthropy is being used to promote peace; and the equation of peaceful transition with good governance. Charity and aid are increasingly becoming mechanisms of democratization and thus the promotion of a Western hegemony. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace for example, describes itself as an international donor that has embraced civil society aid as a key tool for democracy promotion and supports thousands of NGOs around the world in the name of civil society development, investing precisely in those organizations that say they promote democratic participation and values and free market principles (see http://www.carnegieendowment.org). It funded a ‘democracy and rule of law’ research programme in Washington, the results of which were collated by two permanent researchers from Carnegie under the revealing title Funding Virtue: Civil docsity.com 6 Society Aid and Democracy Promotion, addressing South Africa, the Philippines, Peru, Egypt and Romania. Philanthropic organizations are of several types and those that operate on an international and global stage are not necessarily champions of good governance in such an obvious way as Carnegie. Diaspora organizations support particular religious and ethnic groups quite partisanly, while the international NGOs, such as OXFAM and Save the Children, do not promote liberal market capitalism and democratic governance. But traditional charities need to be distinguished from what might be called modern philanthropy. New large-scale philanthropic organisations have developed, like Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford and MacArthur, which focus on finding long-term solutions to the major public problems of the day. This does not just involve the alleviation of harm and illness but challenges the root causes of the problem; aid is directed to facilitate social and political change. This is done in several ways. Some endowed foundations award grants for specified purposes, some develop their own projects and programmes consistent with their aims and remit, while others are linked to multi-national companies and businesses. They function within the developed market economies and established democracies of the West but direct attention to the social problems in the Global South or on transitional societies that have geo-strategic value to the West. Foundations in the United States are more active internationally than European ones, and the amount of their aid is enormous; the top fifteen US foundations gave over $US19 billion in 2001. Much of this philanthropy specifically targets peace initiatives. Amongst the top fifteen charitable foundations in the United States for example, the Ford Foundation (which awarded grants of $US6 billion in 2001) ‘seeks to strengthen democratic values…and promote international co-operation’, the MacArthur Foundation ($US94 million in grants in 2001) ‘seeks to promote international peace docsity.com 7 and security…and human rights’, the Hewlett Foundation ($US66 million in 2001), ‘supports conflict resolution and US-Latin American relations’, the Starr Foundation ($US53 million in 2001), ‘supports international relations’, the Carnegie Foundation ($US44 millions in 2001), ‘supports international peace and security’, the Mott Foundation ($US31 millions in 2001), ‘supports the strengthening of civil society globally’, and the Open Society Institute ($US24 millions in 2001) ‘promotes and opens societies through support for civil society…and human rights’. This is not just a feature of US foundations, although the US foundations do dominate modern philanthropy. The Barrow Cadbury Trust in the United Kingdom has a justice and peace programme that has seen monies go to the promotion of civil society in Northern Ireland and the Middle East, and the Hallows Foundation in Australia and the Nippon Foundation in Japan also give generously to ‘overseas co-operative assistance’; 353 public benefit corporations in Japan list ‘international relations’ as the field of their charitable activity. In their analysis of five trends in global giving, Anheier and Simmons refer to two that bear upon our point: the tendency for aid to the directed to post-conflict societies and to compensate for ‘deficiencies in government or market failures’. These private foundations work alongside, but sometimes in conjunction with, governments, the UN, European Union and INGOs as part of a global network of organizations involved in post-conflict scenarios. The US-based Atlantic Philanthropies, for example, has been a significant funder of peace and reconciliation initiatives in Northern Ireland and has complemented the huge amount of resources devoted to the problem by the British and Irish governments and the European Union, the latter’s Special Peace and Reconciliation Programme in Northern Ireland being in excess of £1.5 billion by 2001. This aid comes not only in the form of humanitarian docsity.com 10 disclose partial truths. Analysts know that ‘truth’ tends to be relative, truth-from-a- perspective and is subjective, but common sense renders the idea of truth as objective, unaffected by partisan standpoints. Not unnaturally therefore, lay people often wish to know what happened and who was responsible and tend to believe that there is but one objective course of events and decisions in the past that represent this ‘true’ account. They want to know whose hands are dirty and bloodstained and believe such identification is unproblematic and non-partisan. Thus, while ‘truth’ is therapeutic and part of the healing process, it can re-open wounds and hinder or slow the process of reconciliation because the ‘truth’ may be used from one standpoint to damn a particular group. People’s perception of the peace process may be negatively affected by the ‘truth’ behind the former violent acts of negotiators, peace activists or politicians, or by feelings of anger, shock or rage at finally ‘proving’ the identity of the culpable. In short, ‘truth’ can be incompatible with ‘reconciliation’. ‘Comprise’ post violence societies therefore need to manage two problems: finding the balance between the need to know what happened in the past and moving forward, and encouraging people to see the truth from someone else’s standpoint. This allows people to know about the past in such a way as not to keep them locked there. The tension between ‘peace’ and ‘justice’ All too often peace can be understood narrowly to mean the ending of violence and fails to address wider issues of justice. The wish for the killing to stop is natural enough. However, peace incorporates well-being and a sense of flourishing, and narrow notions of peace can misunderstand the range of issues that ‘compromise’ post violence societies need to address around the question of social justice, such as social redistribution, the introduction or restoration of equality and fairness in the allocation docsity.com 11 of scarce resources, and the opening up of life chance opportunities that were once closed to some groups, thereby undercutting the economic imperatives to continued violence. The peace accords in Northern Ireland and Sri Lanka (both suspended) are dogged by the incompatibility of the dominant groups’ emphasis on peace (the ending of violence) and the minority groups’ demand for justice (social redistribution and equality of opportunity), which has ended up making a whole raft of peace issues (such as disarmament) equally contentious. Post violence societies of this kind therefore need to address both peace and justice equally, with measures to maintain non-violence and achieve social redistribution. Experiences of victimhood Communal violence brings victims; sometimes the victims are from within one group or class but mostly from all sections. Victimhood produces grieving relatives, dominated by their hurt and loss, and survivors, maimed physically or psychologically by their involvement, who take their victimhood into the future as a burden of grief and pain. These experiences can be foundational to the progress of peace accords in ‘compromise’ post violence societies. Peace processes offer the prospect of ontological security in the long term but in the short term they may create ontological insecurity because they require the overthrow of familiar ideas and behaviours. Recall what I said about the ‘identity dilemma’: people who have defined their identity for so long in terms of ‘the enemy’, suddenly find in peace processes that they have to reshape their sense of who they are. Their anxieties are reinforced by the habit of peace processes to become almost the sole public issue, encapsulating all public events. In the public domain all they hear is peace, while privately all they feel is grief. The victims and their families are asked to release the bitterness, forgive old docsity.com 12 enemies and witness them now in parliament, see perpetrators receive amnesty or prisoners released, and generally move forward from their hurt, loss, and pain. This is particularly divisive where all groups can claim themselves victims, for experiences of victimhood thus continue to divide people and victimhood can lend itself to easy mobilisation by opponents of the peace accord. Experiences of victimhood thus impact greatly on the success of peace accords and post violence societies of this kind need to find ways of dealing with these experiences in such a way as to permit victimhood to be recognised and the victims honoured while moving them and the rest of society beyond the memory. The problem of remembrance and commemoration ‘Compromise’ post violence societies have the problem of how to remember and commemorate the conflict in such a way as to permit people to move forward. Post violence adjustments are facilitated by the selective nature of memory as a process and by the fact that memory is part of social practice and therefore always open to change; culture can reinforce certain memories or encourage collective amnesia. Memory is socially reproduced in acts of public commemoration and in public memorials, in public images, texts and rituals, and memories can be invoked for social purposes, such as in helping to shape group identity formation or encouraging public sentiments, such as hope. Memory is therefore private and collective at the same time. There are two sociological issues around public memory in post violence societies based on compromise: what it is that is publicly remembered and forgotten; and what social practices need to be adopted to culturally reproduce these selective public memories. Amnesia has been part of the nation-building project in many post violence societies in the past where there has been relational closeness, such as post-Franco docsity.com 15 businesses like bars and taxi companies and subsequent involvement in Sinn Fein’s political campaigns; indeed, many of the militarists now out of jail are amongst the leaders of Sinn Fein’s peace strategy in the local community and are actively involved in community development projects and economic regeneration schemes. Social reintegration is thus foundational. However, whatever is done for ex-combatants needs simultaneously to avoid dishonouring victims if the social reintegration mechanisms are not themselves to reproduce the old conflict. The development of ‘citizenship education’ for the new society Violence can sometimes be all that young generations have known, and marked social cleavages can leave most people without the citizenship skills for living with their former ‘enemies’ in the new post violence setting. Even post violence societies in Latin America with longer established peace accords have more or less failed to develop citizenship education that brings the groups together at the bottom. This is also the case in South Africa, except perhaps for wealthy South Africans in the affluent areas where the market has brought people together with different coloured skins but who in most other respects are exceedingly alike. Citizenship education is about acquiring the knowledge and learning the skills for tolerance, that is, for recognising, dialoguing with and understanding ‘the other’ sufficiently to conduct orderly social relations. It does not involve idealistic and romantic notions of coming to love one’s former enemies, applying theological notions of forgiveness or of giving up on one’s own identity in order to merge with ‘the other’ into a hybrid identity. Citizenship education involves the more prosaic process of tolerance (peace activists in Northern Ireland refer to this quaintly as the public practice of manners). Tolerance is both a personal and public quality. It is something that is practised in people’s docsity.com 16 private lives in their perceptions of ‘the other’, in their ways of communicating with and about ‘the other’ and in the relationships they conduct with them. It is a public virtue that can be reinforced by civil society and the state, and in this respect ‘compromise’ post violence societies need to develop policies that create tolerant social relations. For example, the school curriculum has been amended in Northern Ireland and the Philippines to impact the teaching of history but also to encourage children to meet together. Non-governmental agencies and para-church organisations in Northern Ireland have developed voluntary citizenship education courses for assisting people with issues like identity, memory, forgiveness and moving beyond sectarianism. It is important that opportunities be provided for people from all sides to come together to tell their personal narratives in a non-threatening setting by means of local networks whereby groups from across the former divide meet to create a dialogue and seek understanding of each other. Bridge building is an essential part of the peaceful transition to post violence, but this needs to be more than elites coming together to agree new forms of governance; the bridges must be purposely erected at the local level to allow former enemies to traverse the divide in their understanding and perception of each other, to facilitate tolerance toward ‘the other’ and to work out dialogue for communicating and relating with each other. Extenuating the mundane over the sense of crisis Perhaps with the exception of genocide, situations of communal violence involve people trying to maintain the daily routines of life as a way of managing and routinising the violence. Conventional war might not evince it, but communal violence is contradictory: violence occurs in the midst of the reproduction of social routine. This is assisted in some cases by the geographic containment of the violence docsity.com 17 to specific milieux (such as the African townships in South Africa or the Northern part of the island in Sri Lanka), allowing people elsewhere to successfully distance themselves from it. Sometimes it reflects the nature of the violence itself, in that it is sporadic or targeted in very limited ways. The need for ontological security means that even during the worst times of widespread civil unrest in areas of high violence, ordinary people try to maintain a semblance of routine to enable them to continue with their ordinary lives. People tried to get to work and children to school. Barricades were removed to permit workers to earn wages and then put back again at night; shopping had to be done and businesses tried to remain open. Hospitals, schools, unemployment offices continued to function. This is but one example of how people in areas of high violence, like those living elsewhere, try to normalise the violence (although Northern Ireland shows that alcoholism, depression and mental illness, as the usual signs of social stress, were higher in areas of intense violence irrespective). Ironically this extenuation of the mundane, which helped in the normalisation of the violence as a way of managing its ontological effects, can be disrupted in the peace process as disputes over the negotiation process or over the actual settlement come to dominate the public agenda, increasing people’s senses of ontological insecurity. Victimhood can attach a special price to peace, but more generally the public obsession with the inevitable lurching ebbs and flows and vicissitudes of the negotiations can unsettle the mundane and cause crises to be manufactured out of dramas. ‘Compromise’ post violence societies therefore need to find ways of maintaining perspective; of dealing in the public domain with war and its amelioration, while extenuating in the private sphere the same mundanities and daily routines that allowed most ordinary people to cope while the violence raged. docsity.com