CCTS
Review 30

Discussion

The interface between Pacification and Peacebuilding

There was broad agreement that the interface between pacification and peacebuilding was a crucial area where peace practitioners had to engage and work, however difficult that might be. It would be a kind of luxury to refuse to engage. One speaker said that neither the pacification nor the peacebuilding paradigm offered all the solutions, and those working within one paradigm were tending to introduce some of the techniques and strategies of the other. The MOD, for example in some of the operational aspects of their deployment, were thinking of so-called ‘softer’ strategies. The risk for practitioners was co-option, but if you did not take that risk, and the opportunity to do the dialogue-related work which the government were putting out to tender, the armed forces would undertake it within their own paradigm.

It was pointed out that people engaged in humanitarian work faced similar dilemmas. They could see the advantages of receiving assistance from the military, but felt uneasy about it. For instance, in Aceh, after the Tsumani, there were debates about the Indonesian military delivering humanitarian aid. The military had logistical capabilities which were important, but their involvement gave the aid effort a certain Khaki coloration.

One speaker expressed concern that we might have created a divide in which governments did pacification, and ordinary people did peacebuilding. The US/UK approach now seemed to be that they would go in and do the pacification, and then think about peacebuilding. In the workshop we were posing the question in terms of where these two approaches met, whereas they were seeing pacification and peacebuilding as sequential, as if you had to do one before you did the other. Some contributors, however, thought that this might in fact be the case in some situations, where it was necessary to put an end to the indiscriminate killing before peacebuilding could begin.

Should carrots be used rather than sticks, where a state was abusing its citizens or otherwise grossly offending accepted norms of behaviour? If the stick implied military intervention, that, in the view of some participants, was ethically questionable because of the loss of life, including civilian life, it entailed. But carrots were morally ambiguous, too, in that they could be seen as a reward for violent behaviour. In the case Saddam Hussein, for years Western governments had expressed their disapproval of him – while at the same time arming him. Still, if there were big international incentives for states to behave democratically, that seemed at least as likely to succeed as going round attacking people. That was not a democratic way of doing things and it was hard to believe it could succeed in the long run.

It was pointed out that carrots could also be a form of pacification. NGOs in Kosovo had learnt to speak the approved international language of values and human rights, and were rewarded with all sorts of carrots. Kosovo was an extreme example of international imposition, as it was a small territory which had received more money and more trainers per head of population than anywhere else. The most solidly grounded groups in Kosovo were those that were largely self-reliant and were setting their own agenda.

The community peacebuilding work with ‘peace monitors’ that Michael Hammer had described had striking similarities with the campaign in Kosovo between 13 and 15 years ago to reconcile blood feuds. At the time about 15,000 people were confined to their homes to avoid being killed in the blood feud system, and a group of students decided to address the issue. They turned to various people for help and, in the end, with the help of a Catholic priest and a folklorist who had a deep knowledge of the culture, began going round the villages – always in a group, as in Michael’s example. Initially, the young people would go in to investigate the situation, and then bring in the elders when more serious persuading was needed. The young people would go to the kitchens and talk with the women and hear their side of the story, whilst the elderly men would spend time with the family decision-makers. The process would conclude with a public ceremony. All this took place in face of harassment by the Serbian police and without any external funding, and it resulted in the reconciling of 2,000 blood feuds in a two year campaign. Unfortunately, the blood feud had now returned to Kosovo and Albania, though in a different form. It was not ritualised any more; you could just pay a gangster to do the killing.

Various problems related to scale and effectiveness were considered. One aspect of the problem that Celia had raised in her talk was that peacebuilding efforts were often on too restricted a scale to have a major political impact. In contrast, the pacification approach was normally backed by the resources of one or more governments. The potential of alternative peacebuilding methods, including non-violent civilian intervention, could not be properly tested if they did not have the resources to be sustained over a reasonable period of time, and on a sufficiently large scale.

However, another speaker raised a different issue relating to scale. If, in order to engage with those who had the power or the money, you had to institutionalise and become more like them, that could be self-defeating. In Sierra Leone, if the peace monitors approach became institutionalised, it might lose its capacity to build peace at the community level. People asked whether the aim with community peacebuilding was to make it a nation-wide system. That question was still unresolved. If the work was institutionalised, it would probably lose much of its power.

One of the frustrations felt by many people working at the community level in Sierra Leone was that there didn’t seem to be anything in between their own powerlessness to deal with things that were detrimental to their community life – crime, an emerging conflict – and a retributive way of dealing with it, namely calling in the police and taking the matter to what, in Sierra Leone, is still called a Native Court, working on the basis of 1920’s legislation. This involved lots of fees, and in the end everybody was poorer and nobody was wiser. Community peacebuilding work occupied a certain ground and opened up the possibility of resolving problems without applying the stick. The challenge for the state authorities was to accept that this process was pushing the retributive instruments a little further back and required them be patient for a while. If we for our part could be more articulate in expounding the benefits of the community peacebuilding approach, the state authorities might feel more comfortable about accepting it.

Was the implication of that, one participant wondered, that you needed to have two separate levels; the community level at which CR’s partners worked in an informal way, and a more official level which involved the police, the judicial system, maybe also the army? The crucial question was how far institutionalised force was necessary for the informal peacebuilding to get under way and to be sustained.

Coercion and the role of the state

A recurrent theme in the discussion was coercion and the role of the state. One speaker said he appreciated the distinction that had been made between peacebuilding, as something people had to do for themselves, and pacification, which always involved an interventionist or external element. However, this contrast, though useful, was not absolute. He had recently returned from Eastern Congo, which was flooded with troops; but if there were no troops there, people would still be killing each other on a large scale. For him the second World War was another example of where the use of military force had been necessary to build peace.

Another speaker responded that in theory military force was the instrument of last resort between nations, but that increasingly it was being used much earlier, and powerful states were not making any serious attempt at resolving or transforming conflict through nonviolent means. The Iraq war was the most obvious example of this. This proposition was contested by the previous speaker, who felt it did not stand up when examined from a broader historical perspective. In Sierra Leone, military intervention occurred only after a long delay and after many people had been killed. That was true in other instances, too. Even in the case of Iraq there was a long delay before military intervention took place. There may have been all sort of reasons for the delay, including calculations of expediency, and fears that it might lead to civil war and the break-up of the Iraqi state, but it was a fact.

The key question for another participant was on whose authority a military intervention took place. There was a clear articulation of the principle of collective security in 1944-45, at the time of the foundation of the UN. However, starting with the Kosovo intervention, we had seen the wholesale erosion of that notion of collective security inherent in the decision-making procedures of the UN and the Security Council. There were two key questions to be asked about any military intervention. First, had the proper procedures been followed? This was important because it impinged on the issue of collective ownership and collective security. Second, was there consent from within the state? However, if the state had fallen apart, and all you had were warring factions, consent became problematic. Who was welcoming the intervention and who was opposing it?

The following speaker agreed that there was a particular problem in dealing with countries where the state had collapsed. It meant that there was no process to confer legitimacy on the actions taken, and no process to establish accountability. Legitimacy and accountability were the corner stones of democracy – the rest was process around these, which could be socially or culturally dependent. If it came to making policy recommendations, we needed to make a clear distinction between situations where a state existed but did not satisfy the basic norms of how the state should behave, and situations where instead of a state there were multiple power groups competing against each other.

The view that military intervention was justified in some circumstances was not unanimous. One speaker asked those who took it to agonize a bit more about the moral dilemmas it entailed. Like everyone else, she was aware of the dilemma when ghastly things were taking place. But, as conflict transformation practitioners, we would not be called upon to go in and do the fighting alongside the armed forces, so supporting military intervention was a bit like being an armchair freedom fighter. She did not take for granted the justification of World War II. Forty million dead was not self-evidently a brilliant outcome. Even the imposition of no-fly zones in North and South Iraq had entailed a lot of deaths.

For her, the state issue and the coercion issue were closely related. The state was where the big resources lay and there was a huge gap, certainly in the case of the UK, between the levels of expenditure on peacebuilding and on military preparations. Some of the work of the military might be directed towards peacekeeping, but the bulk of the expenditure went on preparation for massive hegemonic wars. Even in situations where intervention to stop something happening seemed to be required, the military did not always have an answer. The issue was about states and scale. You had a pre-existing system in which the military was dominant, and it was a huge challenge to think out how you could ever have the opportunity and resources to test out other options. It would be instructive to investigate what enabled military peacemaking and peacekeeping operations to be successful. Iraq was certainly not any kind of a model here.

For another speaker the state/non-state dichotomy in relation to peacebuilding was being exaggerated. A lot of civilian crisis management could be regarded as peacebuilding – institution building, setting up a judiciary and a civilian administration. Institution building was part of peacebuilding and complementary to the community-based work. He referred also to the European-wide training programme for civilians to go on EU, OSCE or UN missions where an element of peacebuilding was creeping in. In Britain the state’s link with non-state actors on peacebuilding was most evident, since the training work sponsored by the state was being undertaken by Peaceworkers UK. Elsewhere the implementing bodies were almost all state training institutes or governmental bodies.

The erosion of civil liberties by the state in the name of security was also raised. One contributor commented that the rhetoric was all about protecting citizens and telling them they would have to forego certain things so that the state could protect them. So not only were states pacifying other people – increasingly they were also pacifying their own citizens, excluding them from decision making on the grounds that it was for the government to make decisions and for the citizens to turn out once every five years to vote. Another speaker said this observation reminded him of traditional characterisations of the state as embodying a social contract, and of having a monopoly on the use of violence. The description he liked most was that the state was the largest protection racket. You gave up certain things and, in return, the state protected you. That was linked to the monopoly of violence.

One speaker argued said that, even where there had been a strong case for a UN military operation, the intervention itself had always been accompanied by human rights abuses and a lack of accountability. In Kosovo, in the period immediately after the war, when the Kosovo Albanians were expelling the Serbs and the Roma, the international forces were largely ineffective. And when they did try to get active, they were kicking down the doors of innocent people. In their ignorance of how to police in that environment, they acted in a stupid and arrogant fashion, violating every principle of good procedure. Institution building that followed war took place in a power vacuum, and therefore the issue of accountability was crucial. In Kosovo the new institution that was agreed by all sides at Rambouillet was the office of Ombudsperson, yet this was the last institution of all to be set up by the UN. It had few resources and a low profile, but had done excellent work.

It was remarked that the sustainability of work at a non-governmental level depended very much on secure funding. However, there was a risk that the longevity of a project could give it a spurious legitimacy. Outside funding might keep it in being without its having much support at the local level. At the macro level the sustainability of, for instance, the left-wing governments in South America, would depend on whether their economies proved viable. But there was also the question of what the US or other governments might do to undermine them.

Community peacebuilding was stronger when it was supported by funding from local sources. But in a desperately poor country like Sierra Leone, how much could you ask local residents to give to the peace monitors to enable them to fix the tyres of their bicycles, or from time to time to buy a new bicycle, so that they could go out of that village? As long as these things depended on Conciliation Resources having to discuss with DFID in Glasgow whether to buy 79 bicycles or 81, and whether it was transgressing current budget limits, the process would be vulnerable.

Another speaker, however, noted that there was a big middle-class business interest in Africa, which had not been addressed by the NGOs or the donors. We didn’t appear to see them. We talked of the bad state or the good community but not about these people in between, who either fan the conflict or have an interest in stopping it. Their interests would determine which way a conflict went. If their interests lay in prolonging the conflict they would perhaps support an intervention. If their interests lay in a peaceful outcome, they would support grassroots work and get local people to set up peace groups. He did not believe in volunteerism – you needed to tap into people’s self interest. Why were the people doing the peace monitoring, not farming or doing other work? Was this the only work they could do? The reason the reconciliation process had worked in South Africa was that people were persuaded that it would be in their interest to support it, because anything else could have been chaotic.

Another speaker responded that there were various layers of motivation behind people’s actions. They did not always act out of material self interest as defined by the hierarchy. She agreed that we needed to broaden our view of who was a peacebuilder. It wasn’t just states, or just Civil Society with capital letters, nor was it simply grassroots activists. We needed to include people who were not obviously political but had an impact: financial actors and so on.

The principle of subsidiarity, it was suggested, should apply in the way a society was run. If one could positively say that something could be done without the state taking responsibility for doing it, like exercising social pressure at the local level, then it should be done that way. So the approach would be to take action at the lowest possible local level and work up, rather than assuming that the state had to come in always with the big stick or the coercive carrot.

One speaker said conservative governments ought to be open to the idea of subsidiarity because, ideologically, conservatism was about local autonomy, local power, and minimum government. It verged on anarchism. Military intervention was built on a model of external control more akin to communist thinking. The paradox was that it was conservative governments, or governments that were moving in a conservative direction, which were supporting military intervention.

Selling ourselves

A question that came up at several points during the day was why we were not better at convincing people of our successes. Was there some way in which organisations involved in CCTS could bring together cases sufficiently comparable to lend themselves to joint analysis and prove that investing in peace had proved worthwhile?

The difficulty lay in being able to demonstrate cause and effect. We could say a violent conflict had not occurred, but it was much harder to prove that this was the direct result of things we had done. You could see a correlation, but not necessarily cause and effect. But this was also true of wars, and one speaker wondered if it would be ethically acceptable for us steal some of the government’s clothes by making unequivocal claims about our successes. In the US, the Department of Homeland Security claimed to have foiled several attempted attacks on the US. This they ‘proved’ by the fact that they had not taken place. Similarly, the Metropolitan police claimed to have foiled numerous terrorist attacks on London and this too was ‘proved’ by the fact that they had not taken place. We were much more tentative in our claims, but bold, unequivocal claims were what convinced people.
It was pointed out by other speakers that governments could claim they had conclusive evidence from their intelligence services that an attack had been planned and thwarted, though for security reasons they could not say more than that. They might or might not be telling the truth, but the claim could not be convincingly challenged. If we made a claim we had to be able to provide the evidence for it.

Another speaker drew attention to the Human Security Report by Andrew Mack published by the University of British Columbia at the end of last year which purported to prove that there had been an average diminution of violence worldwide over the last 40 or 50 years and that there was a the causal link between that phenomenon and the peacebuilding and peacemaking work of the UN. So perhaps there was evidence that over a longer period these things were having an effect.

One speaker said he was disturbed by the fact that on the government side there was no recognition of the possibility that they might be wrong. Did they always have to pretend that they were in possession of the answers? In this meeting, even though there was a divergence of opinions, we could exchange views with each other. Was it possible, in public or private dialogue with the government, for them to acknowledge that they did not necessarily know all the answers? It seemed that, in politics, once you adopted a position you felt obliged to defend it to the hilt, whatever the circumstances.

Others argued that there could be good reasons for the government not publicly to acknowledge any doubt or uncertainty, for instance because of not wanting to undermine the position of its military forces. There would be other reasons too. It was much more difficult for people in authority to express doubts. There were logics here that one needed to understand. Privately, government people could admit to all kinds of things, but publicly not.

Another contributor said there had been doubt and confusion in official circles in 1990, in Britain and the USA, over what to do about Bosnia, and the Balkans in general. And there was a lot of pressure from various critics who were talking about condemning Bosnians to a slow death. But when a government decided on military intervention, it had to do so wholeheartedly. It was true, however, that official bodies sometimes claimed success on the basis that violence had not occurred in a given period of time. That was what the United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) were doing in March 2004, until suddenly there was a lot of violence, which was a huge shock to their self-confidence. At moments like that, there would be people searching their souls, and probably even before that point. The Iraq war should not overshadow the genuine soul-searching there had been amongst policymakers. In the Netherlands, Srebenica had caused a lot of self-doubt.

Another speaker agreed that there were many factors that made it difficult for a government to recant or admit they were mistaken. But that should not affect private conversations, and we should be looking for some modification of public policy over time. She wondered about joint research as a possible endeavour in which there could be a structured engagement.
Several speakers expressed the view that there were opportunities to dialogue with government. One example given was that the Ministry of Defence had signed a contract with the Department of Peace Studies at Bradford University for them to do training in peacebuilding; this implied a degree of openness to ideas from our milieu. There were some open doors, but maybe we were not very effective in pooling information about the opportunities that arose.

One speaker suggested that at the level where the Great Game was being played out – in the Middle East, Iraq and Afghanistan – it was difficult to have much influence. But in other contexts, which had a more marginal importance in foreign policy, there probably were opportunities. There had been new policy initiatives across Whitehall related to conflict over the last several years, but only very rarely had conflict transformation practitioners managed to have an input into them. Currently, at Westminster, there was a Parliamentary Select Committee looking into the place of conflict in development policy.

One speaker expressed disappointment that gender issues had little profile in our discussions. UN Resolution 1325, on the role of women in peace processes, was being used as a rallying point in lots of contexts and it ought to be part of our discourse, for example when we talked about subsidiarity, and who that included. We needed to consider gender in relation to democracy and who democracy was for. There were still too few women in the UK parliament and if you looked at assembled politicians in any newspaper photograph, you would see maybe one or two women amongst all the males. It mattered and it changed things, and unfortunately it changed those few women because it was about co-option all the time. Structural change was required. Without it, the work was always going to be about who would rescue these or those poor unfortunates, or who would stand up for whom. We were poles away from doing the things we would like to see done.

Another speaker said we should be more prepared to spell out an agenda for social change. Sometimes people feared that if you did that others would be offended and not be willing to work with you. However, if you did not state what your social project was, people would find it very difficult to situate you or to work with you. And whether it was a gender issue, or a youth issue, or an issue of discrimination or marginalisation, one could defend a reasonable base line for the position one was promoting.

Concluding remarks

The chair of the final session concluded by saying that CCTS was not a group that could formulate a common policy on which to act or make recommendations to government. People in the committee could not commit their organisations in that way. We could usefully explore the issues but, if action was to be taken, it had to be by the organisations or individuals themselves. The seminar had raised a number of issues and it was now for each of us to go away and ask what they meant for our work, and what could be brought back to our organisations. There was not one kind of action that could come out of the day, but hopefully there would be many different actions, and perhaps some joint action.

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