CCTS
Review 41 - December 2009

Diana’s Presentation

After the introductions, Diana spoke to her paper, drawing attention to some of its principal points. It was focussed, she said, not only on us as professionals but on us as citizens, and on the larger context in which we work.

Achievements

She did not at all take a pessimistic view of what we and others in the field of conflict transformation had achieved. A major reason for optimism was the quality of those engaged in it, including inspiring people in different parts of the world, often working in dangerous circumstances. The world is a better place for their contribution.

But there are frustrations. These chiefly relate to conflict writ large. We have a good rationale for our way of working at different levels and can point to concrete achievements, some of which are outlined in the paper. But these can be blown away by decisions and policies over which we have no control – the decisions of policy makers to go to war, the outbreak of violent ethnic conflict. After years of work by Conciliation Resources and others in the Caucasus, hopes were shattered by Georgia’s military attack on South Ossetia. Of course the peacebuilders who remain after the cataclysm carry on and regroup, but the setbacks can be substantial.

Strategy and its limitations

Working to an agreed strategy is vital, but we also have to recognise that we do not control events and need to adapt our strategies as circumstances change, and seize new opportunities as they arise. This also means that we cannot claim any certainty in predicting the results of our efforts. Moreover, it is often difficult to prove cause and effect. The indicators we use are valid for things that are close at hand but evidence of impact on a bigger scale is hard to come by. The temptation, especially when fundraising or approaching donors, is to make more definite predictions, and paint a more optimistic picture after the event, than the circumstances justify. We can never be aware either of the full context of the situation in which we work or all the variables involved. This does not mean that we should stop analysing and strategising. But when we come from outside a country, our knowledge is likely to be incomplete and even those immersed in the situation are not able to predict which way things will move.

Relations with popular movements and policy makers

We have not found on the whole ways of linking with popular movements. There are some sound reasons for this. They are partisan, whereas we typically specialise in third party roles. They are often quarrelsome, are largely unaccountable and have little money. Nevertheless if we want our work to be large scale, it cannot stay within the NGO sector. Is there a way in which we can make common cause with at least some movements? We have insights and theory which could be of use to them , and access to influential people which they may not have. We in turn could benefit greatly from collaboration.

Nor need their partisan character necessarily be an obstacle. We are not value-free and there are cases where we should take sides, and some of us already do, for example in the confrontation between the Burmese junta and civil society organisations.

We should also strengthen links with policymakers. Many of us here in this room would be able to have a meeting with someone in the Foreign Office or other government department. We have a privileged position. To deserve it, we should use it.

Militarism and masculinity

The heart of her argument is that militarization and war are deeply embedded in a particular construct of masculinity. Heroism is identified with military heroism. Indeed, in many societies initiation into manhood is also initiation as a warrior. From childhood boys get foisted on them the idea that life is about getting the better of other people, and that they are in a win-lose paradigm. Girls, by contrast, are expected to be gentle and considerate, and some may get rather good at that. The win-lose model informs the way we do politics and the way we formulate foreign policy. It’s about putting the national interest first. The state as a construct and a unit of organisation is wrapped up in this. Even peace movements can be macho and bullying. We need therefore to address the problem of this culture of domination and the pervasive global militarism which is driving the whole system.

Making alliances

Finally we need to work with women’s movements that are already leading the way on new models of power and solidarity, as well as gender justice, and with movements for human rights, democracy, ecology and economic justice. Positive peace would have all those elements in it. These things are absolutely enmeshed. We cannot as individuals work on all of them because there are not enough days in the week to do so, but we need to make our analysis cross those boundaries, so that with these other movements we build our collective strength and energy and really change things.

Discussion

Assessing achievements

Several speakers said they could understand and empathise with the sense of frustration Diana had acknowledged feeling at times since it was often difficult to identify definite progress, especially at the macro level, and because real gains were sometimes swept away by events which are outside our control. One speaker commented that small scale objectives could sometimes be achieved relatively quickly, but that broader goals, such as ending deep seated conflicts, or militarization, would take a very long time, and be marked by setbacks and reversals. Complex systems were involved in these cases, as the revered pioneers of conflict resolution of the 1950s like Adam Curle were well aware. And in complex systems the elements are mutually reinforcing. You could change one thing and find it flipped back into place again. However, the grass roots work which looks as though it is not doing anything, and is sometimes apparently swept away, is not in fact swept away but is building to the point where it changes the system. Much of Gandhi’s energy went into building the constructive programme which did not at the start seem very relevant. But having a constructive programme means there is something in place when the shift comes. In Northern Ireland, all the constructive work at the local level was actually the foundation for the much improved situation there.

Diana agreed and said conflict transformation – the practice of doing conflict differently – is the constructive programme. So it is vital that we are making these experiments. The people at the Osijek Centre for Nonviolence couldn’t stop the war in Croatia but they did save lives and constructed a community of people who refused to be part of what was happening all around them. They lived a different way during the war and never stopped being who they were and behaving as they chose to behave, and came out the other side to help rebuild society when the war was over. The author/activist, Bill Moyer, writing about movements, draws attention to inertia and delayed effects. You think you have failed to change anything but the thinking itself may have changed and other changes flow from that.

Another speaker drew an analogy from chemistry. If you keep adding crystals of copper sulphate to a solution in a beaker, a point comes at which the solution is supersaturated and by adding just one more crystal the whole solution suddenly crystallises. It was for him a model of what happens when all the effort that has apparently gone to waste suddenly produces a tangible result. Another analogy was the arrival of Spring on land masses on the edge of the permafrost region, like parts of Russia. The ice starts to crack and there are loud crashing sounds as frozen rivers break up into icebergs, and suddenly within a day all the flowers of spring are revealed almost in full bloom. They were there already but covered by the ice.

Establishing links with popular movements and campaigns

Diana had pointed to some of the potential benefits of the conflict transformation sector linking up with popular movements and campaigns, as well as the difficulties that stood in the way of doing so. Several speakers thought networks like CCTS did have something important to contribute to popular movements. One speaker said he did not see the advocacy role of movements as a problem as he had difficulty in accepting the stance of neutrality which most NGOs take.

To be effective, in the view of several contributors, one has to focus on and become familiar with the facts and arguments surrounding a particular issue. For that reason, single issue campaigns were often the most effective. However many of the issues on which they campaigned are interrelated, and sometimes progress on one requires parallel progress on another if change is to be consolidated. Yet, it isn’t possible for one individual to become active on too many different fronts simultaneously.

One speaker, echoing Diana’s view, said that you had to prioritise, but at the same time be aware of and indicate support for other campaigns which you recognise as essential to achieve the necessary broader pattern of change.To this, someone responded that intuitively she agreed, but part of her wondered if we could do better. Would we not be more effective if we could somehow connect these different issues? We hardly ever talk about the peace movement in the conflict transformation sector, but where is it now and what does it need to do to provide a compelling response to 21st century peace and security? Another participant said that he and Diana had tried to get funding for a project to look at the links between various issues. They found the reaction of a lot of people was that this was so obvious it hardly needed to be said. But he thought there was a constituency out there that would respond.

Another related question was whether one should focus in a campaign on one’s ultimate goal – for instance total nuclear disarmament, or even general and complete disarmament – or work piecemeal to achieve more limited goals in alliance with others who may not share one’s ultimate objective? The Global Zero campaign on nuclear weapons was cited as an interesting example of that approach. Going from one nuclear weapon to zero, the speaker argued, is the most difficult part, but states could engage in a process to cut back radically the arsenals they now have and thereby make a crucial contribution to preventing proliferation. She found it interesting that there was little contact between conflict transformation practitioners and anti-nuclear campaigners, given that there is now so much momentum globally behind nuclear disarmament.

One speaker said advocacy was always a process of political preparation. You do not try to spell out an overall vision, because that would fracture the process. Instead you put the vision to one side and looked at interests. ‘This is my interest, this is your interest – can we meet somewhere in the middle?’ In this way you might persuade people to do what you think is right but for the wrong reasons. That was the kind of political advocacy he had always been involved in. He often questioned it, wondering if it was right. He has an ideology and was committed to it, but he just did not see it as a way of changing things.

However, this way of working could confront you with appalling dilemmas. He had worked over many years in Sri Lanka where in the last few weeks a coalition of civil society and opposition political groups from the far left to the far right had come together in ‘critical collaboration’. They acknowledged that they did not agree about everything but saw a danger of fascism, and agreed to work together to combat it, and to abolish the post of Executive Presidency. Then suddenly someone proposed the former head of the army, a particularly unsavoury character, as the presidential candidate. It was likely that in the next few weeks he would become the official opposition candidate, with a strong possibility of winning the election. The grassroots networks face a tough choice because this man does not represent an ideology which they want in any way to buy into. Coming from a peace movement background, he feels he has nothing to offer them.

Shared values and theories of change

Several participants spoke of the importance of values and noted that we do share values with people in a range of groups and movements concerned with such things as human rights, economic justice and the environment. One participant noted that the people who had originally promoted and developed conflict resolution/conflict transformation were inspired by big values whether grounded in Quaker or Mennonite pacifism or cosmopolitanism. He found that though his students were quite interested in processes and techniques they wanted to move beyond them to the big ideas of tackling militarism, and achieving general and complete disarmament. There was a climate, he thought, in which to re-engage with Gandhian pacifist groups and the theory of nonviolence, and a hunger for the ethical values that drive this work on. Diana’s paper was an encouragement to re-direct our thinking in this way.

Another contributor said she had in the past worked for a Quaker programme which was trying to hand on the Gandhi-Martin Luther King approach to activists. Not all movements are by definition positive, and values are central in relation not only to a movement’s goals but also to the methods they use. The hard lesson she had to learn was that many activists struggling for important causes – whether the Greenham women of the 1980s or the environmental protesters of the 1990s – felt their cause was too urgent for them to spend time on the thinking and strategising that she was talking about. There are, however, moments when a movement, or key people in it, are in a position to step back and reflect and articulate what is happening, and so to become strategic actors, as opposed to just going to the barricades and ‘doing it’. That is the kind of opportunity we have to be looking for.

Someone else said he agreed with the proposition that some changes could trigger a wider change in the system. But he was sceptical about the validity of some grand theory of change. Always when you worked in a specific situation, like Sri Lanka, you tried to analyse it as best you could and acquire the evidence to understand the potential for some small changes. He also accepted Diana’s point that we never fully understand what we are dealing with. He had done some work recently in the Lebanon and found it extremely difficult to get much understanding of what was going on. A few years ago he thought he knew what that country was about, but now he did not believe that he did. If you were born and grew up in a particular place you would have a better idea of where to put your energy and political work. The most important thing was to have reasons for your choices.

Responding to violence

A recurrent question discussed at various points during the day was whether there were some situations in which it would be necessary and right to use violence. One example given was of a young policewoman in Bradford, Sharon Beshinevsky, who was shot dead in 2005 after being called out with other officers to deal with an armed robbery at a shop. The police called in an armed unit to arrest the gang. Could one have reasonably expected unarmed officers to try to apprehend the armed gang in such circumstances?

At another level, what should be done when people in another country are being expelled from their homes or massacred, for instance in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s? Diana had drawn attention to the work of Peace Brigades International (PBI) and Nonviolent Peaceforce; maybe given time and training there would be a sufficient number of unarmed peacekeepers to deal with some of those situations. But that was not the case at the moment, and given that, what do we think our government, or perhaps the United Nations should do?

During the morning session, Diana responded that if you were in a system like ours which is massively militarized and were trying to move to a radically different one there were bound to be genuine dilemmas of this kind. In the US, every citizen has the right to carry a gun, but did that make the society any safer? We were lucky in this country that the police were not routinely armed and did not want to be because they knew that if they were more criminals would also carry guns and the relationship would become increasingly militarized. We expect soldiers to to go out daily and risk their lives or receive terrible injuries but we do not take that view about unarmed intervention. The Sharpville massacre was always cited as the reason that the armed wing of the ANC, the Spear of the Nation, had to be formed. But in fact apartheid ended because people refused en masse to tolerate it any longer. It wasn’t all wonderfully Gandhian, but it was an uprising of a much more popular sort and it stopped the system working for those it was supposed to work for. We all have to look at those very hard questions and to accept that the system we have doesn’t prevent people being killed – quite the reverse.

Unarmed power, if we had a bit more courage and imagination about developing it, could be very powerful. It relies very much on numbers and on making a human connection. A friend of hers who was being threatened with rape managed to hold the would-be rapist’s face in her hands and say ‘Do you have no-one to love you?’ That changed the situation. It might not have done – he might have battered her into the ground, killed her and then raped her. But it did actually change him. She was also very impressed to hear John Simpson – who goes to some very dangerous places – say that he never has an armed bodyguard because he does not think his life is worth more than anybody else’s.

Another participant told of a meeting she had in the West Bank with a Palestinian university professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevekian, who has written brilliantly about a growing movement of people creating counter-spaces and counter narratives. Nadera – a psycho-analyst who speaks both Arabic and Hebrew – described how she was stopped at a checkpoint and was shivering with fright facing armed Israeli soldiers. Then a Palestinian peasant women, who had also been stopped, said ‘Why don’t you go and get your coat?’. At first they were not allowed to move, but eventually one woman who wanted to feed her baby was permitted to go and sit in a car to do so, and Nadera was allowed to get her coat. There was also a schoolgirl who was late for school, and the old woman said to her ‘Why don’t you get out your schoolbooks?’. In this way they reclaimed the space and were able to re-establish some kind of normality. Meanwhile, less than twenty yards away, Palestinian men were made to keep their hands up and were humiliated and subjected to body-searches. It was a striking example of what could be done. In one of the two afternoon workgroups participants gave other accounts of creative nonviolent action in response to violence or extremely threatening situations.

The sharpest disagreements surfaced in the other sub-group over whether sending in the military or an armed police force would be justified in some circumstances, like the one mentioned in Bradford. Some said that to do so would be to compromise one’s values in the interests of expediency. An alternative view was that it would be wrong to assume that having a commitment to values necessarily implied absolute pacifism. Your values might be such that, for example, if someone was about to strike a child, you would use whatever force or violence you could to stop them.

Supporting this view, another contributor said it would be insulting to suggest that those who regard violence as necessary in some circumstances do not have values. In 1943 inmates at the Subibor death camp in Poland rose up and attacked and killed a number of guards and succeeded in making a mass break out. Most were eventually re-captured and killed but some survived the war.  The camp itself was demolished by Nazi soldiers and never re-established. Did those inmates not have values? The case was in the news at present because of the forthcoming trial in Munich of John Demanjuk, a guard at Subibor accused of participating in the murder of 29,000 Jews. These were extreme examples, but also real.

To this, another participant responded that if you had a sense of the kind of society you wanted to move to, you had to ask what you needed to do in order to bring it about. Unless you retained that vision and tried to apply it in the normal sphere, all you would do would be to repeat the cycle of violence and destruction. This led to a discussion as to whether we needed such a final vision. That notion, one participant suggested, was deeply ingrained in Christian thinking but it would be better to analyse each situation and work out the best way to make improvements.

Building nonviolence and working for the abolition of war. Where to begin?

This was one of the headings which Diana flagged up for the meeting to consider at the end of her talk. There was much support for the idea that the conflict transformation community should commit to it, though with a rider to the effect that it was not a matter of where to begin since the work of building nonviolence had already begun. However, there was no unanimity about what the parallel objective of achieving global disarmament implied. For some it implied pacifism, or at any rate refusing ever to endorse the use of the military or an armed police force. For others the implications were not so clear-cut.

One participant argued that the consequences of war were not necessarily all negative. Sri Lanka, it seemed to him, was an example of a huge transformation, not in the sense we are applying it in conflict transformation work, but in that the situation has been transformed fundamentally from a violent war into a conflict which, although still continuing, is not doing so in the same violent manner. How do we evaluate that morally and politically? Angola was another example. What came out of military victory was not completely negative because at least the war is over, and maybe that makes it possible for peacebuilding to start. Whether that will in fact happen in Angola or Sri Lanka remains to be seen. The Second World War was another example. Many people, including him, would argue that it was necessary to stop the Nazis and that, it has brought peace in most of Europe since then, in particular between France and Germany. It takes a long time, and there may be still conflicts, but in the end something positive can come out of these wars and violent conflicts, even accepting Diana’s points about people killing and getting killed.  Ending particular wars, in some cases by imposing peace through war, might be a way to move toward the goal of bringing about a more peaceful world.

A counter argument was put that the wars in Sri Lanka and Angola may have created a heightened sense of grievance amongst the minority population who would recover in time, and then the whole cycle would start again. The Sri Lankan military attack on the LTTE had also prompted the government in the Philippines to pursue a military solution there.  Its President recently announced that the government would defeat the rebels by the time of the next election, and ordered bombardments to begin. So the resort to a military approach in one country can lead to the same approach being adopted elsewhere. In Uganda too, someone added, the government launched a major military attack on the Lords Resistance Army (LRA), which has been totally counterproductive. The LRA became more violent and dispersed into surrounding countries.

Another speaker said it was necessary to ask the question – ‘Success for whom?’ Western governments have a control paradigm for conflict, and our government would probably argue that the defeat in Sri Lanka of the LTTE freed up liberal Tamil voices to engage in a different kind of politics. How could you use those examples to challenge the control paradigm of dealing with conflict? Individuals might see human costs and consequences, but many governments like that of the UK have a different take on the outcome. Moreover it is very difficult to point to an unequivocal success for peacebuilding – just as it is for the military approach.

The traditional way of dealing with disputes between nations, one participant suggested, was through war – and in a sense it worked. We are trying to reach beyond that for whatever reason – perhaps a new confluence of values. However, what he sensed at the moment was that there has been a huge step backwards, particularly in Sri Lanka. His contacts in Sri Lanka told him that the middle line, the approach of conflict transformation and building peace movements, had been swept away and all the confidence that people gained from that has gone.

Militarisation, in the judgement of another contributor, gives rise to the very conflicts which the military are then called in to solve. It is necessary to look at the underlying causes, including the very existence of the military. That was what we had to unpick. If you were considering what problems war had resolved, you had also to ask at what cost to people, to societies and to development.

Conclusion

At the conclusion of the seminar, Diana as chair of CCTS thanked all the participants. This would be the last seminar, as the committee had run its course. Its archives of minutes, letters and Reviews would be housed at Bradford University. The website, too, would remain in existence, under the wing of Conciliation Resources. Diana also thanked all those who had contributed to the work of the committee, particularly her two fellow officers, Paul Clifford, its Treasurer, and Michael Randle, its minute taker and co-editor with her of the CCTS Review. The committee owed a particular debt of gratitude to

Conciliation Resources, who had provided us with a meeting room, secretariat and website, and to Adrian Platt, who for some years now had acted as its administrative secretary and brilliantly serviced its needs at the meetings.

The closing down of the committee need not mean the end to the exchange of information and ideas between those working in the field of conflict transformation.

Jane Gabriel then spoke about the online current affairs website, Open Democracy, which could be particularly valuable in this respect. Jane runs a section on it called 50-50 which gives space for women’s voices. During the coming year, starting from the end of this month, Diana would be making a regular monthly contribution called ‘From War to Peace’. CCTS members were warmly invited to comment and contribute. The web address is: www.opendemocracy.net

Finally the meeting thanked Diana who has devoted a vast amount of time and energy to the committee without which it could not have survived.

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