CCTS
Review 29

I am particularly interested in the place where pacification and peacebuilding meet. Many peace processes provide examples of this. At one end of the spectrum you have the negotiations that led to the Dayton Agreement, where coercive military action forced the parties to a negotiating table dominated by power-backed mediation. At the other end of the spectrum, you have peace processes characterized by internal dialogue and negotiations, or local civilian-led talks. Most frequently these different approaches and activities overlap towards the middle of the spectrum.

What makes many peacebuilding practitioners uncomfortable is that we are small players, and that the dominant paradigm of pacification appears overwhelming. It is hard to find space in which to operate without real concern at being co-opted or instrumentalised, as part of a process with very different goals.
This leads me to pose three questions:

1. To what extent does peacebuilding rely on or need the hard instruments from the pacification toolbox in order to be viable?

The tools of pacification range from financial and legal sanctions through to the deployment of peacekeeping forces to full scale military operations. Many people argue that these measures are sometimes necessary to create the conditions to end overt violence – they can restrain the violence, remove the financial or logistical ability of actors to commit atrocities, or act as leverage to bring parties to the negotiating table.

But such coercive methods can be deeply problematic, especially as they are mostly deployed by a state-centric international system which tends to privilege the dominant state party in a conflict, rather than any non-state party or opposition. They are also inconsistently applied.

Over the previous year in Conciliation Resources’ Accord programme, we have been looking at the engagement of armed groups in peace processes, and particularly at how some state-centric measures affect their ability to engage in negotiations. In particular, the use of proscription against armed groups is essentially about trying to punish bad behaviour in the hope that this will change the dynamics of the violence. Paradoxically, what has occurred in a number of contexts is that, far from providing an incentive to the groups to engage in a political process, it has created legal and practical obstacles to it. The proscription of the Tamil Tigers (LTTE) in Sri Lanka is a case in point.

The dilemma facing Conciliation Resources, and similar bodies trying to influence these situations, is whether to focus its efforts on trying to improve tools of coercion in the pacification toolbox, so that they do not have such a negative impact on the peace process, or to work to develop alternative options from within a peacebuilding paradigm.

2. Where do international conventions – human rights and international humanitarian law – fit in on the pacification to peacebuilding spectrum?

Many of the conventions signed over the last 40 years support a principled approach to peacebuilding – like the Covenant on Civil and Political rights that provided the framework for political participation in decision-making, and UN resolution 1325 on women’s participation in peacebuilding. Unfortunately, however, they are often ignored, or inconsistently applied. Some, indeed, have been deliberately undermined in the conduct of peace processes. Recent developments, such as the first indictments of the International Criminal Court, are also playing out in perhaps unintended ways. The indictments issued against the leadership of the Lord’s Resistance Army in northern Uganda are to be welcomed for their intent to hold the perpetrators of atrocities to account. However, it is arguable that they act simultaneously to dissuade the LRA leadership from engaging in peace talks and coming out of the bush. So far, it appears that the indictments have not acted to restrain the LRA leadership from committing atrocities; and undermined their already fragile interest in the prospect of a negotiated solution. For the people of northern Uganda, the war continues.
In light of these challenges, it seems that there is far greater scope and need for joint analysis by peacebuilding and human rights agencies, in order to work through some of the challenges of complementarity in particular and in general, and identify approaches which can uphold the twin principles of ending war and promoting human rights.

3 The problem of scale: does the comparatively tiny scale of non-state peacebuilding activities condemn us to work forever in the shadow of pacification?

The government-led Utstein review of peacebuilding conducted a couple of years ago identified a “strategic deficit” in the connections between what are often micro level peacebuilding activities and the big macro political picture. Many of us aspire to connect the micro and macro levels, but given the lack of resources and the level of vulnerability of this work, how realistic is that aspiration? And, in moving from a micro to a macro level, do institutionalized ideas, or mass movements, take on attributes associated with a pacification paradigm?

I hope the brief articulation of these three questions indicates some of the strategic challenges and dilemmas facing our field. One factor that I find it important to keep in mind is the human dimension of all these issues. Lederach in his recent work explored how personal shifts can affect the potential for macro change. Pacification and peacebuilding approaches are ultimately driven by people, whatever their institutional setting. The possibility for human connections that shift attitudes and policies remains important, particularly when it takes place at the centre of Diana’s fan diagram, at the meeting point of different tendencies.

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