CCTS
Review 38

Discussion of Oliver’s presentation

Statebuilding, peacebuilding and conflict transformation

The relationship between statebuilding, peacebuilding and conflict transformation was a recurrent topic in the discussions that followed Oliver’s presentation. One point of view expressed was that the state was the primary unit of militarism. Statebuilding in the guise of peacebuilding often followed massive violence and frequently involved the very people who had perpetrated the violence. So war and the so-called peace were part of the same project – a coercive route to this wonderful liberal outcome. Kosovo was a well-explored example of this. Conflict transformation, by contrast, was primarily carried out by people who live in the area in question, sometimes with solidarity and support from outside. The question for those of us on the outside was how to provide that support without distorting the local efforts.

However, several speakers maintained that some kind of state structure is essential to establishing a grounded peace based on the rule of law. Without it, the notion of engaging local people and constructing the social contract was not even a starter. Security for individuals and groups was a prerequisite for a peaceful society. 

One speaker found the analysis of the highjacking of peacebuilding in pursuit of a liberal or neo-liberal agenda disturbing, given that many of us work in areas funded by, or potentially funded by, governments that may be pursuing a divide and rule policy, and/or pacifying populations rather than responding to their needs. The speaker suggested it would be useful to discuss examples of grassroots community actions that have been successful, like those of Gandhi in India. 

Oliver said we needed to reclaim conflict resolution, which was much more focused on human needs than institutions, sovereign territorial states or political systems. Starting with the human gives us a very different perception of the kind of action one might take when engaging with someone else’s conflict. But that requires a sophisticated knowledge of the culture and society in question. The conflict prevention argument, too, was quite a good one because it was about not waiting until there was a crisis and having to respond hastily. Conflict prevention means taking into account social indicators like the distribution of resources, and inequalities in the class systems. But to do this is also problematic because it means that a deviation from agreed standards would be taken to mean that a future problem would arise. It could again legitimate regime change without anything really having gone wrong at that point.

Alternatives to the liberal peace

Some time was spent discussing alternatives to the liberal peacebuilding-statebuilding project. Several speakers commented on the alternative approach Oliver had sketched, namely working with genuinely local people and movements, as opposed to imposing a peace from outside or engaging only with local elites. But how, someone asked, would one recognize a ‘local local’? One participant said she found the notion of ‘the people’ in Oliver’s presentation, glib and romantic. And if the former Yugoslavia was so wonderful, why did it collapse? Another speaker said that local elites frequently owe their position to the popular support they enjoy, and to the extent that this is the case they do represent the authentically local. (Oliver interjected the caveat that popular opinion could also be manipulated.) Sometimes the leaders of popular opposition movements during the period of foreign occupation, dictatorship or repression play a leading role in the post-conflict state-building and institution-building, process. One example here was José Ramos-Horta in East Timor.  

The question was raised as to whether the internationals – organisations like the UN, EU, OSCE and INGOs – were capable of a sufficiently intimate knowledge of the societies in which they intervened to be able to identify and work with ordinary people and grassroots organisations. The example of Kosovo was again cited. In the 1980s and 1990s, one speaker said, there were many people doing good work. But when the UN arrived, following NATO’s military intervention, they got pushed aside and an educated and well-off elite were embraced as they were considered safe to work with. Many of the activists, like Adam Kurti and Adam Damaci, who had fought non-violently for years, and endured beatings and imprisonment, were now seen as dangerous. The speaker said she could not imagine people from organisations like the UN coming in from outside to a culture which was not their own and finding a way to work with people at the grassroots. 

Oliver thought the root of the problem lay in some of the universalist claims liberals make. The people projecting the value of liberalism come in with superior technological knowledge, romanticise the local in negative ways and can pick and choose whom they engage with, and marginalize others using various excuses – they might be terrorists, or too far off the political agenda to work with. However, he did not think it was beyond the bounds of possibility for the governments and internationals to have the detailed local knowledge that engaging with local people required. The speaker who made the point responded that for that to happen the outsiders would have to take a back seat. At present, when internationals like the UN come in, their people want to run things – yet they were the last people who should be doing so. 

One paradox, another speaker said, was that when money from official sources began to be directed to peacebuilding, in part as a result of pressure from the peace movement, the operation became professionalised and you got people who made a career out of going on successive peace missions. They went from East Timor to Kosovo, to Rwanda, to Sierra Leone and to Afghanistan, and therefore had very little knowledge of the local context. Oliver said he agreed about the dynamics described by the speaker, but felt the experience of the 1990s had resulted in some improvement in the area of providing humanitarian assistance and upholding human rights. A permanent critique of peacebuilding efforts was required. The peace process was not one that came to a cut and dried conclusion. In a sense the term peace was a misnomer, because the situation was always going to be fluid, transient and changing. 

Another speaker emphasised the crucial role of process. The starting point should be an inclusive process that might or might not produce the outcome of a liberal state. If people were not included in the conversation, the chances were that they would oppose whatever came out at the other end. They would not own that decision or be party to it. There were a lot of people around who wanted from the outset to dictate the end result – sometimes parties to the conflict, foreign governments, or international bodies. This produced a response from another participant that some people involved in process know exactly where they want to go and push the outcome in that direction. The classic study of this was Jo Freeman’s pamphlet of 1970 entitled The Tyranny of Structurelessness. Another speaker said the idea of an inclusive process was itself a liberal one. An illiberal process would be one in which the only people who could participate were male patriarchs, mullahs or elected MPs. Oliver responded that he did not think this was an accurate depiction of liberalism, because liberalism has priorities. The liberal conversation favours certain groups, and has certain priorities. Not everyone is equal in the liberal concept. He was not saying that a liberal conversation was always an elite one, but in a state-territorial conversation it was so.

This produced the comment from one participant that Oliver was using the term liberal in different senses. In one sense it covered all of us who did not believe in an autocratic or theocratic state; in another it referred to an approach with a more narrow and specific agenda, which he was critiquing.

At another point in the discussion, Oliver said he was using the term liberalism as it is used in political philosophy and theory, not in ideological terms as we know it in political debates in the contemporary West. Liberalism in political philosophy is a broad church, which encompasses both the victors’ peace and emancipatory liberalism – an emancipatory approach that pre-dates Marxism and is the root of the conflict transformation approach. Liberalism lends itself to going off in all sorts of directions. It can end up in a glorification of power and money. It can also end up with the essence of spirituality or the humanistic understanding of the human being in society.  

Asked where he personally was coming from he replied that obviously he came from the emancipatory end of liberalism and saw the need for a political structure with checks and balances as well as freedom. However, he did not have to decide whether even emancipatory liberalism was viable. He was more inclined to see it as a transitional stage for something we have to reach for. The next stage would not be reached by a simple process or some technocratic fix. It would require deep reflection on contemporary interventions and other experiences.

Social contract

There was a discussion of Oliver’s contention that what was missing in the institutions being put in place as part of the liberal peacebuilding-statebuilding project was the social contract –support for the institutions, and active involvement in them, by the population. One contributor said that trust was an essential element of a peaceful society – trust in each other and trust in the institutions. The latter, however, developed over years and decades – if one was lucky. It required people to inhabit a similar moral universe, to have a shared sense of right and wrong; it was not something one could simply put in place from outside at short notice. 

Another speaker pointed out that trust was generally lacking in deeply divided societies such those as Bosnia or Northern Ireland. Efforts to overcome mistrust and create understanding, for instance through interfaith dialogue, should concentrate on the practicalities of co-existing peacefully. Oliver referred to a critical literature that maintained that Western liberal states have become obsessed with security. A Reith lecturer some years ago argued that we had lost trust in the community and were now relying increasingly on institutions such as insurance companies. The capacity not just to trust but to empathise was a crucial component that had been lost in our risk averse society. 

Oliver also questioned the widespread assumption that the social contract had to be with the state. There could be contracts with different forms of political organisation, whether international agencies, multinational organisations, regional organisations, community organisations. Why were we so ready to delegate all power to the state – particularly as in so many conflicts it is the state, or one state in particular, that is the obstacle to a settlement? 

Intervention

The problems of external military intervention, and sometimes of other forms, were discussed at various points during the day. In answer to questions, Oliver said he was not saying that there were no circumstances in which state intervention might be necessary. But it was also problematic to maintain that the only way to deal with, say, situations of ethnic cleansing or genocide was intervention by states acting under international law in a formal framework, and guided by the Security Council or whatever it might be. The notion that only states have military power had long gone, and the idea that only states can intervene should go too. Although his paper was critical of the way states and international organisations operate, he was not anti-state. But neither was he a state supporter. He was questioning the assumption that the state is the ultimate form of political organisation. 

One speaker said the structural dysfunctionality of emerging politics in Bosnia and East Timor raised major questions. Some critics of the intervention in these countries argued that the mistake was that it took a military form and that this mistake was compounded by the subsequent behaviour of the international bodies concerned. But at which point could one have disengaged from what occurred? Ought one to say that the UN should never have gone into Croatia in 1991 to effect a ceasefire there? Or intervened in Bosnia from 1992 onwards to attempt to create humanitarian corridors in the middle of the fighting, while purporting not to be on anybody’s side?  This claim itself was illogical because all material interventions affect the strategic outcome – that is the rationale for attacks on aid convoys. But what form of assistance leading to a humanistic outcome could one devise? 

Another participant said that whatever criticisms could be made of the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement, it did end the fighting. Oliver agreed that there was no choice but to have the Dayton agreement, given the circumstances of the time. But the subsequent use of Dayton as a political act was problematic. It established the complex governmental system of the state, scripted a constitution and put in place the Office of the High Representative (OHR). Dayton was not a peace process but a ceasefire agreement onto which the Americans tagged a whole legal regime and constitution. It imposed the liberal model without any agency at the local level having a say in what kind of state people wanted.  

One speaker who has done a lot of work in East Timor, said she was heavily involved in getting the UN to intervene there, but was hugely critical of what happened afterwards. However, the UN was what we had, and we needed to look at the criticisms and decide whether to oppose UN intervention and let the country go to hell in a handbasket, or support UN intervention and possibly see the country go to hell in a handbasket anyway. Was it possible for the UN to intervene but then not to act in a way that prevented genuine progress? What tended to happen, as it did in East Timor and to some extent in Nepal, was that the UN came in with the big ideas and big money, and everyone ran after the money – including INGOs and many of the people we work for. And we don’t challenge that as much as we should. We challenge ad-hoc. This or that small thing here shouldn’t happen. We allow ourselves to be put in the position where the choice is between the UN and nothing. 

A discussion ensued on how far it was necessary or desirable for the people who had taken part in violence to be involved in the peace process. One participant thought this was essential and that it did not rule out participation by other actors. Another said she found this a difficult issue, as the involvement of the perpetrators of violence demonstrated that using violence does give people power. However, she reflected that people can change, and that this can be true of the people who had been involved in the maiming and killing but were now willing to participate in making peace. Another speaker said there was a central contradiction in the idea that it was permissible for state with large arsenals to dictate not only the outcomes but the processes, and the structures which lead to the processes, whilst claiming to be constructing a liberal amphitheatre. ‘I will use my coercive and indeed violent powers to allow you to be part of the debate so long as you do as I say. Otherwise. I’ll kill you.’ That actually was the nexus within which we all worked.  

We had been speaking, one participant remarked, about intervention by the international community, and in some instances this referred to a ‘coalition of the willing’, partly because the UN did not function properly. Her ideal world would be one in which the UN was a global government, with police powers to intervene where necessary; this would ensure that if force had to be used it would not be used in the pursuit of national interests. Part of the paradox was that the much derided liberal states were arguing that there are times when, on humanitarian grounds, military intervention in another state was necessary because that state was killing its own people. It was the non-liberal states which objected to such intervention, maintaining that what happened inside a state was its own business. They could then block action by the UN, resulting in ‘coalitions of the willing’ who were prepared to take action. However, another participant said she did not want to see a global government of any sort but an active global citizenry that had woken up to its responsibilities and took them seriously. 

At what point, another participant wondered, was it ethical to intervene in any way, since all of us are always structurally implicated in some system or other? Was it possible for individuals to disengage, spiritually, personally or in any other way, in order to make space for emancipation? He favoured the Kantean approach – acting as if one were free in the hope that this would begin to grow a little pool of freedom. He gave examples of how some people kept going in extreme circumstances. In one case a Croatian woman, married to a Serb, fought for sixteen years to bring the killers of her nineteen year old daughter to justice, despite obstruction from the Croatian State and court system. In another, a woman teacher in central Bosnia set up a youth centre right on the Bosniak-Croat cease-fire line in the divided town of Vorni Vaku.  

These people and others acted with enormous civil courage, disengaging from the materiality of their situations, and from fatalism. By small acts of solidarity, and by providing some material help, one was growing space that could expand. Individuals were moulded by the society in which they are born, but were we simply the aggregate of the causal influences or was there a still source of emancipatory capacity within individuals, and potentially within clusters of human beings which permitted them to explore ways forward that were not automatically co-opted? He thought there was, and said he cited these cases not for sentimental reasons, but because they were examples of power. It would be wrong to see them as completely autonomous. They started off that way, but to keep going they needed and received solidarity and support. The issue, then, for all of us was this: in which direction do we push the causal structures in which we are implicated and how can we best support those in other countries who are doing so? 

Closing the meeting, Diana Francis thanked Oliver, remarking that we had had an energetic and responsive discussion. We had not given either him or ourselves an easy time, but that was all to the good.   

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