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

Download 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 Issues of war and peace are topical concerns. Bombs, body bags and Bush form a tragic alliteration in contemporary times, but if new kinds of war help to define global society, as so many social scientists claim, late modernity is also marked by new kinds of peacemaking. It is ironic therefore, that most of the attention in social science has been on the changing character of organized violence rather than on peace. 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 book 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, such as partition (and repartition), cultural absorption or annihilation, third- party intervention, United Nations’ peacekeeping and negotiated peace settlements in which parties give up their preferred options for a second-best compromise. It is the latter that forms the focus here. The course explores the sociological features of negotiated peace processes and the array of social issues they throw up; questions like docsity.com 2 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 not combatants who die either; nine out of ten people who die from direct and indirect consequences of war, terrorism and civil unrest are civilians. When one considers that there were 116-armed conflicts between 1989-2002 in 79 locations, 31 in 2002 alone, this tells us much about the proclivity to conflict in modern times, the scale of innocent deaths and the huge potential for renewed violence and killing if peace processes fail to bed down. It has been argued that it may take a quarter of a century for peace processes to become properly embedded and unless specific measures are taken to institutionalise peace, conflict is more likely to recur than recede. 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. I want to begin today by looking at war not peace. This may seem odd, but 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. If war is no longer a matter just for the protagonists, docsity.com 5 remains high). Two different sorts of explanation can be proffered for this. One is technical, for the figures exclude ethnic and other conflicts where neither of the warring party was a state and what the Human Security Centre calls ‘one-sided violence’, where one party is defenseless or quickly annihilated, such as in genocide. The figures therefore seriously under-represent the scale of communal violence as a result of the counting procedures used. The other explanation is that there has been a real reduction, in that the globalization of war predicates a new form of peacemaking and that this has been realized primarily in the post-Cold War era beginning in the early 1990s. 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 docsity.com 6 Nations (UN). The UN Charter provides for the body to intervene to restore peace and it has increasingly done so after its security function became real with the ending of the Cold War. 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 (INGOs) 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. There are weaknesses in the enforcement of human rights and in the geo-governance regulation of warfare, but peace has become a universal principle mediated by global networks; noted at present for its breaching as much as its practice but an international principle nonetheless. 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, to the point where we are observing the emergence of what Kaldor calls global civil society with shared values and aims. 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, as witnessed by the international populist campaign against the Iraq war in February 2003. docsity.com 7 Peace processes are a response to conflict and we should spend a few more moments at the end thinking about violence. Violence is of many kinds and types. Sociology has long been interested in particular kinds of violence – domestic violence, riots, crowd behaviour, wars, criminal damage, murder, terrorism and so on – and major figures from the sociological tradition in the past have discussed violence. Some of these types are interpersonal violence, others collective violence, and some we might call communal violence. Where collective violence involves the intent to destroy a whole nation, ethnic, racial or religious group it is referred to as genocide. Collective violence is the term in widest currency. The distinction between it and communal violence is thus worth reiterating. Communal violence involves groups of people, with the violence directed toward another group, either as a whole or toward individual members of the group because of their group membership. (Where there is intent to destroy the whole group, communal violence merges into genocide.) Of course, violence is against the person in that an individual Jew or Catholic or Hutu is the object of the violence but it is their identity as a member of the group that explains their victimhood. It is the group that is being punished or attacked; and the individual only as a proxy for the group. Some forms of interpersonal or collective violence may also involve groups, such as gang rape or some forms of riot, but the victim is not selected as a representative of the group, nor punished or attacked as a proxy for others. Or at least, if they are, it veers into being an example of communal violence. It is not the number of participants that makes violence a collective activity. Charles Tilly argued that collective violence only requires three people; two colluding docsity.com 10 examples of communal violence are incidents like genocide, race riots, race-hate crimes, ethnic cleansing, and some forms of terrorism, but not all. Embedding communal violence in the social structure in which it takes place in this way, enables us to focus on the influence of particular kinds of social structure on the sorts of violence that occurs rather than on the effect of different kinds of political regime on violence (such as the impact of, say, dictatorship or democratic governance on collective violence). It draws attention to the effect of social processes like ‘race’, structural inequality, colonialism, ethnicity and religion. The social structural dynamics behind communal violence also forces our attention to the impact of globalization and the way in which resistance to it reinforces violent conflicts over such cleavages as ‘race’, ethnicity and religious fundamentalism. Let me give some examples of what I mean to illustrate the connection between communal violence and different kinds of social structure. In flexible social structures with a diversity and plurality of social cleavages, conflicts are multiple and crosscut each other, preventing conflict emerging solely around one axis of differentiation. The multiple group affiliations of people make them participate in various group conflicts, so that their whole identity is not enshrined in any one. For example, people may be ‘Black’ or ‘Catholic’ but also ‘female’, ‘environmental campaigners’, ‘working class’, or whatever, supplying different cross-cutting issues in which they engage, ensuring that their identity is not wholly wrapped up in one over-arching conflict which subsumes everything they consider themselves to be as a person. However, in rigid social structures, patterns of cleavage coalesce around one axis, simultaneously narrowing and focusing social conflict, so that people participate in fewer groups but docsity.com 11 this group membership assumes and envelopes more of the individual’s total identity. To be Hutu, Tamil, Palestinian, Protestant or White, for example, may define one’s total identity so not only does this group interest define the position taken on all other issues, every issue get reduced to the simple matter of whether or not group interests are served by it. When the social cleavage is binary or can be presented as binary – Protestant versus Catholic, ‘Irish’ or ‘British’, ‘Black’ versus ‘White’, Jew versus Arab – the tendency is increased for the conflict to become zero sum. Zero sum conflicts are those that permit no sense of mutual interest and common good. Every gain one group makes, is a victory over the other; every loss one group suffers means the other group has stolen a march at their expense. In zero sum cases, conflict is simultaneously narrowed and broadened at the same time. It is narrowed because everything becomes reduced to the simple issue of ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘their’ interests and ‘yours’, but also broadened because everything is rendered in terms of this simple divide. Having established I hope the sociological roots to communal violence, I want in the rest of the course to look at some of the sociological features of the peace processes by which it is brought to an end. Any questions? docsity.com