African Media and Conflict
By Abiodun Onadipe and David Lord
Part one - The Media and Society
In deeply divided societies, the media can shape opinions and decisions related to the nature and scope of conflicts, as well as how to constructively handle actual and potential conflict. Where social, political and economic conflict have degenerated into widespread violence, the role of information in mitigating the effects of violence or in presenting alternatives can be crucial. There is little doubt that information is a key component of power -- power to change social, political and economic conditions for good or ill. Robert Karl Manoff, Executive Director of the Centre for War, Peace and the News Media, has pointed out, "Overall, media influence is significant, and increasingly so ... as a result, the media constitute a major human resource whose potential to help prevent and moderate social violence begs to be discussed, evaluated, and where appropriate, mobilised."
Manoff’s assertion throws up the vexing issues of objectivity and impartiality of journalists. For some, a professional journalist is not expected to be a spokesman for a particular view but somehow find a way of reporting facts and larger truths from a neutral and objective standpoint. For others, the function of journalism is to promote a particular social or political world view. To do that, journalists should be militantly engaged in promoting the cause.
With a capacity to reach large or influential segments of a given population in the shortest possible time, and to provide factual information, analysis and opinion, the mass media helps shape popular perceptions of the nature of a society. In terms of basic human rights, the mass media can transform the ideas of freedom of opinion and expression into a concrete reality, by being able to openly communicate information and ideas and by acting as a "watchdog" on public institutions and leaders. In the words of Tanzanian High Court Justice James L. Mwalusanya: "In a democratic system the actions or omissions of the government must be subject to close scrutiny, not only by the legislature and juridical authorities, but also by the free press and public opinion." The principal roles of the media, according to Mwalusanya, are to expose shortcomings of the government, educate the public, popularise peace initiatives, and promote dialogue.
Whether journalists see themselves as impartial or engaged, it seems humanly impossible to completely separate subjective and objective reactions to events. Extreme situations, such as political and social conflict, are most likely to blur distinctions between objectivity and engagement for even the most self-aware communicator, when faced with the terror, brutality and personal danger inherent in violent conflict. In fact, it becomes an act of courage to maintain an objective stance when victims of violence and disputants do not see the media as neutral observers and every assignment and editorial decision has the potential of being seen as biased. The Nigerian Nobel laureate for literature and pro-democracy activist, Wole Soyinka, underscored this on his return to Nigeria after years in exile: "The press has been magnificent, really heroic" he told an interviewer, "and one of these days, when there's more pleasure, we are going to erect a statue to the heroism of the press at a prominent place in this country."
Without delving into the debate at greater length, it is pertinent for African journalists to ask themselves whether it is desirable to be totally impartial in general or in particular situations. Does being impartial enhance media credibility and effectiveness? As some commentators have suggested, communicators who make their biases abundantly clear can help their audience determine the level of their partisanship and allow their audience to make their own judgement on the validity of their positions. Another avenue is the separation of factual reporting from opinion and the clear labelling of each, which allows the reader, listener or viewer to form their own opinions.
The Roots of African Conflicts
No corner of the globe and no society is without conflict. Europe, Asia, Latin America and Africa have all been the scene of tremendous human carnage and material destruction in this century. But while many parts of the world have moved towards greater stability and political and economic co-operation, Africa and the territory of the former Soviet Union remain cauldrons of instability. The variety of possible conflicts in any society allows different perspectives and frameworks -- political, economic, historical, social, cultural, psychological -- for defining and describing them. The fullest explanations also take into account the internal and external dynamics of conflict. In recent years, those studying conflicts have paid increasing attention to multidisciplinary approaches to understanding and responding to a wide range of conflicts.
One way of looking at Africa's violent present and recent past is through the frameworks of identity, participation, distribution and legitimacy. According to political scientist Stephen Stedman, these causes of conflict can be subdivided further into struggles for power, ethnicity, militarism, alienation of people, and deep-rooted historical, socio-economic and cultural elements.
Identity relates to how the individual sees himself in relation to socially, politically and territorially delineated groups. Participation denotes how well an individual considers his access to political and economic decision-making will result in beneficial policy changes. Distribution refers to the level of perceived fairness and justice in the sharing of resources, such as land, financial and educational opportunities. Legitimacy refers to perceptions of the rightness of the rules governing political competition. These areas of conflict overlap and can often reinforce each other. For instance, identity conflicts can coincide with limits on political participation and uneven distribution of scarce resources, as can be observed in many conflicts in Africa.
Among the economic causes of African conflict that have been noted by the United Nations are: "A hostile international economic environment and African vulnerability to the changes in external conditions (e.g. terms of trade), external debt burden, shift from a global economy based on the exploitation of natural resources (the base for most African economies) to one based on the exploitation of knowledge and information, declining national incomes accompanied by reduction in social spending, food insecurity, and increasing poverty and economic inequities, as well as poor economic performance."
Africa's colonial legacy is also often cited as a continuing source of conflict. With hundreds of ethnic and linguistic groups lumped together in 50-odd countries, the majority of their borders arbitrarily determined by colonial powers with little consideration for ethnic boundaries, state-building and the implantation of ideals of nationalism have proved difficult. African politicians and military leaders have too often chosen to consolidate their own positions and those of their immediate supporters by manipulating communal and internal competition over the allocation of resources, religion, identity, territorial claims and political participation. The result has often been communal warfare. In many cases, colonial borders also cause tension by dividing ethnic groups, cutting through shared resources and hindering economic and social mobility.
Conflict in Africa has also been portrayed as resulting from a clash between modernisation and democratisation and other entrenched forces in society. For example, leadership in Africa is largely authoritarian and based on systems of economic and social patronage. Pluralism, transparency and participative decision-making are rare commodities within African nation-states. Without open and responsive policies that are seen to be fair by the majority within a state, those in power are the sole winners and the governed the losers. Irresponsible leaders cling to power or the trappings and benefits of their limited power and refuse to accept political defeat, alternance and peaceable competition.
Last but not least is the psychological and biological perspective on conflict, aggression and violence. One example of this comes from Francis Fukuyama, an American academic, who writes:
"The basic social problem that any society faces is to control the aggressive tendencies of its young men. In hunter-gatherer societies, the vast preponderance of violence is over sex, a situation that continues to characterise domestic violent crime in contemporary post-industrial societies. Older men in the community have generally been responsible for socialising younger ones by ritualising their aggression, often by directing it toward enemies outside the community... Channelling aggression outside the community may not lower societies overall rate of violence, but it at least offers them the possibility of domestic peace between wars."
Widespread societal conflict in Africa is often played out against the backdrop of deep poverty, illiteracy and weak systems of governance. Undermined by unfavourable terms of trade and indebtedness, administrative failures to respond to social needs, underdeveloped infrastructure, low levels of education and widespread corruption, governments are hard pressed to also cope with ethnic, communal, religious and regional rivalries. Liberia and Somalia represent examples of "failed", "collapsed" or "fragmented" states where conflicts were and are being prosecuted by sub-state actors acting in a virtual power vacuum.
But the most horrendous violence in recent times did not take place in a failing state. The Hutu-led regime in Rwanda can be seen as an example of a government and its supporters who retained a monopoly on the means of violence. Feeling under threat, it unleashed genocide against a large segment of the country's population, while the international community largely ignored the ethnically-motivated carnage.
A Continent in Crisis
With Africa's diminished global strategic importance, new conflicts have emerged, while older ones have mutated. Prominent among these post-Cold War conflicts have been Rwanda, Burundi, Liberia, Somalia, Sudan, Sierra Leone, and now the Democratic Republic of Congo. The renewed battle for the Democratic Republic of Congo is no ordinary African war. At least five countries -- Uganda, Rwanda, Angola, Zimbabwe and Namibia -- have sent troops into the war that could split Africa's third largest country and much of the continent itself.
Throughout 1997 and 1998, there were dozens of violent and potentially violent conflicts in Africa, the number essentially unchanged since 1994. Most of them were internal but with international ramifications and causes. This is not to imply that the whole of Africa is aflame but to show that political or social crises can and do easily become violent if the mechanisms for preventing or handling them properly are absent. While some conflicts were violent, many had the potential of turning violent within a relatively short space of time for various reasons.
At the time of writing, the Great Lakes region still seemed to be the most unstable region south of the Sahara, with substantial violence in eastern Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, and northern Uganda. The war in Sudan continued, exacerbated by the onset of widespread famine with refugees and violence spilling over into Uganda, and Kenya. In the Horn of Africa, clan rivalries fed violence in Somalia. Clashes between Ethiopian and Eritrea over disputed borders became full-scale armed conflicts.
West Africa is not far behind the Great Lakes in the instability stakes. Despite pacts on cessation of hostilities and moves to consolidate its democratisation through demobilisation and disarmament, violent incidents were still being reported in Liberia. In Sierra Leone, the rump of the army ousted the democratically elected government only to be forced out of power by the West African peace-making force ECOMOG after nine months. Violent communal feuds in northern Ghana are still smouldering, while new ones are emerging in Nigeria -- a country persistently in a state of uneasy calm. The decade-long secession bid in the Casamance region of Senegal continued to claim lives. The army mutiny or attempted coup that preceded the civil conflict in the relatively peaceful Guinea-Bissau in June 1998 has further underlined the fragility of peace in the region.
In the Central African Republic, French troops came to the rescue of a government besieged by army mutineers. The Congolese president was deposed by former military strongman General Sassou-Nguesso in November 1998 after a six-month civil war, allegedly financed by foreign multi-national companies. Further south, Angola's fragile peace process crumbled and threatens its neighbours’ security as it slides back to war. Zambia and Malawi were under threat of social and political violence, while Zimbabwe teetered on the edge of an abyss, wracked by sporadic but violent disturbances and riots. South Africa, despite the consolidation of the transition to a multi-ethnic democracy, was still beset by widespread social violence.
In North Africa, the civil war pitting Islamists against a more secular government in Algeria has led to an estimated 50,000 deaths, with journalists and media workers being deliberately targeted by both sides. In Egypt, Islamists have waged a violent campaign against the government of Hosni Mubarak. The occasionally violent and long-running dispute between Morocco and the Polisario in the Western Sahara remains unresolved.
Characteristics of Violent Conflict
Personal conflicts and all-out war can be seen as the two poles at either end of the range of human conflicts that entail violence. Though personal conflicts are beyond the scope of this paper, it should be noted that aspects of individual personality have a direct relevance to group violence. What we are more concerned with here are the beginnings of more general social violence and the extreme cases of all-out war.
Spousal abuse, violence against children and youths, disputes between neighbours over land, water and other resources, marital and extramarital disputes, and violent criminal activity are commonplace in all societies. So too are sporadic outbreaks of more organised violence -- clan, ethnic and religious clashes, state-sanctioned or tolerated violence against ordinary people, student riots, raiding for resources, to provide a small sample. The key differences in this escalation of conflict is that group leaders emerge to mobilise larger numbers of people to take part and human and material destruction increases.
At the far extreme of the spectrum of violent conflict is open warfare, which Nigerian academic Emeka Nwokedi has suggested is characterised by "sustainable military strategy, ideological unity, and organisational coherence." British military historian John Keegan describes war as "collective killing for some collective purpose, that is as far as I would go in attempting to describe it."
Africa's wars, as with other modern conflicts, consistently result in hugely disproportionate numbers of civilian casualties to military casualties. That, in part, is a result of the adoption of principles of total warfare by most modern armies where there is little, if any, discrimination between military and civilian targets, and the increased destructiveness of modern weapons from fighter planes to land mines to increasingly sophisticated and automatic small-arms.
A number of observers, including Amos Sawyer, the former President of Liberia's Interim Government of National Unity, have underscored the increase in African wars being fought by irregular militias. Sawyer asserts that this kind of warfare has "led to breakdown of African societies, massive destruction of lives and property, and the creation of new political orders."
"Until recently, the use of military power to effect change in Africa has generally come from national armies or significant sections thereof," observes Sawyer. According to Sawyer, "in most such situations, the question of command and control and of the establishment of order under the control of military principles and practices, have characterised the change. Indeed, there are cases in which military rule degenerated into personal rule, tyranny and organised plunder and pillage. There are very few cases in which military rule has been so disruptive of the very fabric of African societies to be compared with the condition of total breakdown and collapse brought about as a result of the intervention of irregular militias."
British political scientist Christopher Clapham has set out four types of African guerrilla insurgencies -- liberation insurgencies, such as in Algeria, Zimbabwe, Namibia and Mozambique; separatist insurgencies like in Eritrea and Casamance; reform insurgencies such as the overthrow of Milton Obote in Uganda and Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire, and warlord insurgencies as in Liberia and Sierra Leone. Clapham also points out that insurgencies are distinguishable by their level of leadership and organisation, their relationship with the local population, their international linkages and their degrees of success or failure.
In general, warfare in Africa has seen increasing use of the tactics of terrorism aimed at "soft" civilian targets, as well as people in positions of authority or influence, and, increasingly, aid workers. In Rwanda, then Zaire, Uganda, Sierra Leone and Liberia, mutilation, rape and forms of ritualised violence have been used to kill and intimidate. Attacks on people are coupled with massive destruction of infrastructure -- schools, clinics, wells, bridges, telecommunications -- as well as homes and agricultural land.
The availability of more light weapons with greater killing power has clearly had a significant impact on African warfare. Automatic weapons are cheap, readily available and, sadly, child's play to learn how to use. Child soldiers are often kidnapped and forced to remain with armies or violent groups, but sometimes are drawn by the lure of ideology, economic gain, training in warfare, or adventure. In states where educational or employment opportunities are rare and the youth population high, armies, guerrilla groups and civilian militias have found a vast pool of recruits or captives.
The unrestrained terror and destruction of contemporary warfare drives huge numbers of refugees and internally displaced people toward where they think they can find safety and relief. Local host governments and international agencies often try to respond to these flows of humanity by providing services, relief supplies and relief infrastructure, which, particularly with internally displaced populations, become sources of revenue for unscrupulous government and relief officials or attractive targets for armed factions.
"High profile interventions from the outside obviously have a role to play in relieving immediate human suffering, but they also contain a very large possibility of prolonging the conflict," according to Rakiya Omaar, co-director of African Rights. "They can end up giving a helping hand to one or the other of the combatants."
Massive refugee flows are only one of the many international impacts of internal conflicts. Peaceful regional economies are disrupted and overshadowed by illicit trade in weapons, loot, drugs and other commodities. Neighbouring states are destabilised by refugees and members of warring factions seeking refuge, while regional and international actors are drawn into backing sides or trying to broker peace.
Because communication is an integral part of conflict, it comes as no surprise that those participating in organised violence often make use of the media to attack opponents, spread disinformation or misinformation, or to rally external and internal support. As David Keen has written, "the need for good information on political process is underlined by the fact that interest groups who are manipulating crisis may also be manipulating the information surrounding the crisis."
The gruesome side of communication in conflict has been described by anthropologist Paul Richards, writing about Sierra Leone’s Revolutionary United Front (RUF):
"Driven out of Freetown and the main urban centres of Sierra Leone in February-March 1998 by ECOMOG, the RUF settled once again into its forest enclaves in the east of the country, from where it launched a new series of attacks... In the course of these raids, RUF cadres attacked and destroyed many villages, and killed, raped and mutilated thousands of defenceless rural civilians. The pattern of atrocity shocked and utterly puzzled the international community. The arbitrary wilfulness of the killing and maiming beggars belief. Victims of something known as the RUF ‘lottery of life’ describe being forced to draw lots to decide who would be killed, who might be spared, and who would have what limb amputated."
Richards notes that the war in Sierra Leone is frequently described as 'apolitical... "mindless" violence practised by "bandits"'. But based on interviews with members of the RUF, he argues that they feel they have rights, those have been infringed, that civilians rejected them in favour of pro-government militias and that makes the civilians legitimate targets.
"Additionally, attacks and episodes of atrocity fall into clear patterns, suggesting they are messages encoding statements about RUF objectives or responses to what the RUF considers government dirty tricks." What the government labels "banditry", the RUF sees as "political violence". Denying the political message leads to escalation of the violence against civilians.
In Uganda, the brutal tactics of the Lord’s Resistance Army -- mutilation and amputation of arms, legs, noses, lips -- have also been seen as symbolic acts of violence against alleged traitors, according to Heike Behrend. However, she also argues that brutal tactics by government soldiers prevented the LRA from becoming totally alienated from the Acholi populace in northern Uganda.
African Responses to Conflict
Governmental Responses
The United Nations has been a key actor in responding to African conflicts starting with the Congo crisis in 1960, and more so with the end of the Cold War. Recent UN involvement has included operations in Namibia, Rwanda, Somalia, Angola, Mozambique, Western Sahara, Liberia and recently Sierra Leone. The UN has used diplomacy, peacekeeping and observation as military intervention, and the relief, development and humanitarian activities of its various agencies to respond to African conflicts. Those initiatives have more often than not been constrained by ambiguous political and financial support from member states, unclear mandates and inefficient operations. Looking through the list of UN interventions above, failures to actually realise the promise of peacekeeping or peacebuilding have outweighed clear-cut successes by a wide margin. With the end of the superpower competition, increased demand on the UN for peacekeeping and peace enforcement and continuing heel-dragging on the part of member states to empower the world body, where they exist, regional organisations such as the Organisation for African Unity (OAU) are being pressed to assume greater responsibility for peace and security.
Although it was founded to manage inter-African conflict, the OAU's handling of internal conflict in member-states has been negligible. As Makumi Mwagiru has pointed out, OAU heads of state and government, "all come to the Assembly through different ways: political assassination, civil war, coups d'état, and for a few, through democratic elections. Yet all of them subscribe to the same Charter... which... condemns political assassinations, encourages the peaceful settlement of disputes, and affirms the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of states. That this can happen within the same organisation might be attributed by optimists to a certain cosmopolitanism in the organisation. But to serious analysts, it points to a crisis within the OAU, which continues to hamper its operations, particularly its conflict management."
Nevertheless, the OAU has managed to play roles in defusing tension in Congo in 1993 and in the border disputes between Nigeria and Cameroon, and Namibia and Botswana, and by deploying an observer mission in Rwanda in 1992. There have been numerous calls for the establishment of permanent conflict prevention structures -- an African Security Council. The stillborn Commission of Mediation, Conciliation and Arbitration would have enabled the OAU to effectively mediate in internal and interstate conflict. This function has been generally performed by ad hoc committees since the commission failed to materialise, as explained below. This trend led to increased pressure for a permanent conflict-handling facility. In 1993 the OAU heads of state agreed to establish a Mechanism for Conflict Prevention and Resolution.
The roles of other international organisations are also worth noting. The Commonwealth has consistently played a mediatory role in African conflicts, especially in Zimbabwe and South Africa and more recently in Nigeria's political crisis. The Organisation of Islamic States has also been involved in the Western Sahara dispute between Morocco and the Polisario Front. A relative newcomer to intergovernmental mediation, has been the French-speaking counterpart to the Commonwealth, la Francophonie, in Rwanda and Burundi.
With the OAU largely sidelined in internal disputes because of the ineffectiveness of its Mediation Commission, the field has been virtually open for individual states and sub-regional groupings to intervene in conflicts. This has in part been driven by the increasing reluctance of the broader international community to run the political, military and financial risks of intervening in African conflicts. But it has also been attributed to the realisation by African leaders that modern internal conflicts, aside from the massive destruction of human life, the fuelling of disease and the devastation of infrastructure, agricultural land and private property, can have extremely costly regional impacts. On the negative side, some commentators have pointed to competition for international prestige, personal and state financial interests and cronyism as the motivating forces behind the emerging trend toward interstate intervention.
The Nigerian-led Economic Community of West African States Ceasefire Monitoring Group (ECOMOG) in Liberia and the triumvirate of Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda in the Great Lakes region are two examples of regional initiatives. After the May 1997 coup which ousted President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah in Sierra Leone, the OAU commended ECOMOG’s attempts to pressure the junta to relinquish power. This was achieved by force in February 1998. However, nearly 10 months later remnants of the junta and the RUF were far from being neutralised and ECOWAS and donor nations faced a long-term investment of lives and money in re-establishing adequate levels of security within the country.
In southern Africa, the leaders of Botswana, South Africa and Zimbabwe have formed a mediation forum and since 1994 have played the lead role in attempting to resolve constitutional crises in the region, notably in Lesotho, Swaziland and Malawi. This co-operation apparently laid the foundation for the Southern African Development Community's (SADC) Organ for Politics, Security and Defence, which was established in 1996. SADC’s conflict resolution credentials were badly tarnished by South Africa's ham-handed military intervention in Lesotho in September 1998 to prop up the contested government, as well as by the personal antipathy between South African President Nelson Mandela and Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe.
Beyond the efforts of African and non-African governmental organisations to establish effective mechanisms to deal with African conflicts, the individual efforts of a number of former heads of government or top international bureaucrats merit mention. Julius Nyerere, Olusegun Obasanjo, Canaan Banana, Mohammed Sahnoun, James Jonah and others have been in the forefront of conflict resolution efforts as Special Envoys of the Secretary General of the United Nations or OAU, in eminent persons groups, or on their own initiative.
The complexity of modern conflicts has led some observers to conclude that formal peacemaking can seem a fruitless task. Tim Allen has written, "one consequence of these characteristics [of modern conflict] is that many agreements, conventions and other mechanisms which have been painstakingly negotiated since the 1940s to contain or limit violence have proved fragile or irrelevant."
On the other hand, of the dozens of internal and international wars which have taken place since the 1940s, most have come to either a negotiated or de facto conclusion. Even though more international wars end through negotiation than do internal conflicts, some internal wars have formally been ended through peace negotiations and agreements and some of those settlements remain a foundation for continuing peace, as in Mozambique and Mali.
However, it is apparent that focusing on formal settlements to disputes is far too narrow a framework for understanding and responding to the variety of complex social and political conflicts within Africa. In recent years there has been a growing realisation that responses to complex and multi-levelled problems demand a variety of responses at different levels from governments, ordinary people and non-governmental social and political groups.
Non-Governmental Responses
The myriad networks of African voluntary organisations, community groups, women's associations and co-operatives, student and youth groups, religious organisations, traditional and social societies, human rights organisations and the media all provide evidence of a vibrant, if not always free, civil society in many African countries.
Ghanaian political scientist Michael Oquaye has written that, "The extent to which a civic public realm exists and how it is operated by political actors, some of which are in the state and others who are in the civil society, determine political stability. A free and vibrant civil society promotes competition in the body politic."
The Carnegie Commission's final report on Preventing Deadly Conflict published in 1997 had a slightly different emphasis: "Non-governmental organisations, an institutional expression of civil society, are important to the political health of virtually all countries, and their current and potential contributions to the prevention of deadly conflict, especially mass violence within states, is rapidly becoming one of the hallmarks of the post-Cold war era.
"As pillars of any thriving society, NGOs, at their best provide a vast array of human services unmatched by either government or the market, and are the self-designated advocates for action on virtually all matters of public concern..."
Despite the increased attention being paid to civil society and its potential to constructively influence conflict situations, faced with repressive regimes or armed insurgents, the impact of civic groups has been limited to date. Nonetheless, in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Kenya, Nigeria and elsewhere, individuals and groups have continued to demonstrate and lobby against violence, injustice and inequality, and, in some instances, have been directly involved in peace negotiation and mediation efforts, as well as efforts to promote reconciliation and reconstruction.
Religious and women's organisations have most often been in the forefront of these activities. Religious organisations, with their constituencies of followers, a unifying spiritual message, and effective organisations, have often come together or acted individually to promote peaceful resolution of conflict, protection of human rights and reconciliation. Women's groups have also shown their ability to mobilise massive support for peace initiatives and, in doing so, have rallied women and men across ethnic, political, economic and social divisions.
Other actors who have a significant influence on African conflicts are development and relief organisations, which have proliferated in Africa in response to natural disasters and the consequences of civil wars and international wars, now euphemistically called "complex emergencies".
While there are fundamental problems with the mode of operations of some international NGOs, including direct or indirect support for oppressive governments, lack of proper consultation with local populations, cultural insensitivity and disempowerment of ordinary people and local organisations, NGOs have saved countless lives and provided social and economic support for tens of thousands of people in distress. Often at the grass-roots level and on the front lines in providing humanitarian assistance in conflict situations, NGOs also have opportunities to reshape conflict situations and influence outcomes. Although their actions or inaction can inflame tensions, their (sometimes unfounded) reputation for non-partisanship often means that the information they provide and the local and international warnings they sound about conflict situations can be crucial to conflict prevention, management and resolution.
There are also a growing number of conflict resolution and transformation organisations, both African-based and international, which have become involved in attempting to help prevent or mediate conflict situations. Among these are the Nairobi Peace Initiative, Responding to Conflict, the Institute for Multi-Track Diplomacy, the International Crisis Group, International Alert and Conciliation Resources.
Grassroots Responses
For ordinary people at the grassroots level who face severe conflict the paramount instinct is self-preservation. The most common response to armed conflict or the threat of conflict is flight. In Africa, widespread violence has predominantly led to massive refugee flows and the internal displacement of millions of people. That dislocation has meant the abandonment of property and livelihoods, reliance on humanitarian assistance and usually harsh and sometimes life-threatening subsistence in refugee camps, in shanty towns or on the streets of urban centres.
But even in desperate circumstances, ordinary people have shown sometimes astonishing resilience in adapting to new circumstances and reconstituting social, political and economic activities. In many cases, the dispossessed have also been welcomed and aided by generous relatives, friends and complete strangers, as they flee the consequences of war.
It is also ordinary people that are the principal actors in reconstruction and reconciliation when violence subsides, because settlements signed by the leaders of opposing groups are only the first step on the road to social peace. Building new, non-conflictual relationships within society necessitates the involvement of victims of violence and perpetrators of violence. "Bottom-up" peacebuilding can be carried out by all members of society, acting individually or within organisations.
Conflict Resolution
It is probably safe to say that the act of resolving conflict has always been part of human interaction and social development. Every society has created various means of regulating disputes among its own members and between it and other societies. These have most often involved people in positions of authority judging between the right and wrong actions of others and deciding the proper means of punishing, controlling or redressing wrongs. For governments, authority is backed up by the ability to use force against individuals and groups within society and to make war against other states.
In most societies -- whether it is a case judged by a parent over a child, village elders over adults, or an international court judging the rights or wrongs of nations -- the basic principles of resolving disputes remain the same. A party who feels aggrieved complains and the case is argued before someone whose role it is to decide who is right and who is wrong. In some cases, the person found to be in the wrong can be punished with force, made to apologise, seek forgiveness or provide some compensation, or is simply warned not to repeat the offence. This process implies that the judge or arbiter has authority and credibility, as well as the power -- either moral or coercive -- to impose a decision on a wrongdoer. It also implies that the decision is accepted by all involved as being the appropriate outcome.
Since the 1960s, social scientists and others with an interest in lessening the dangers and consequences of widespread violent conflict through peaceful processes have been attempting to more systematically describe, evaluate and refine different means of settling conflicts. This has involved testing assumptions about what conflict is, how it escalates or de-escalates, and how and by whom it can best be managed, resolved or transformed. Many proponents of conflict resolution have also attempted to promote the substitution of negotiation and mediation for the use of force in resolving disputes, while others have retained the possibility of the use of force as one instrument among many that can be used to terminate a dispute.
There are two broad orientations or approaches to conflict resolution -- competitive and co-operative. The competitive processes are often associated with what are now termed "zero-sum" situations, where the winner takes all, and which involve adversarial behaviour. Co-operative approaches are said to result in "positive-sum" situations, resulting in a ‘win-win’ outcome, where all are winners. Ranged along this competitive/co-operative continuum are the actual or threatened use of force, litigation, adjudication or arbitration, conciliation, traditional mediation, and facilitated problem-solving aimed at coming to integrative and collaborative solutions. These different kinds of approaches are used in conflicts between individuals, groups, communities, and states.
In general, much of conflict resolution theory builds the case for using co-operative and peaceful means of resolving disputes. Rather than a judgment being brought down on two adversaries, conflict resolution seeks to build consensus among parties to a dispute and those affected by it -- a family, an extended family, a clan, community or national polity. This kind of process can involve prolonged discussion leading to better understanding of the issues involved and the gradual realisation by all involved that alternatives exist to pursuing the original claim for punishment or compensation or a combination of the two.
Current definitions of conflict differ whether you are talking to a political scientist, a communications expert, religious philosopher, a security expert, a psychologist or others -- and often among practitioners of the same discipline. A key problem with coming to a hard and fast definition of conflict is that it is regularly described in subjective rather than objective terms. In fact, rigidly defining conflict may hinder our ability to understand conflict in all its complexity.
With those qualifications in mind, one general working definition is that conflict is a situation in which an individual or group is engaged in conscious opposition to one or more individuals or groups because both are pursuing goals which are perceived to be incompatible. Another way of looking at conflict is as a multi-dimensional social phenomenon which is an essential part of human interaction and interdependence. It is often directly related to change, sometimes violent change, and in general terms, represents part of a decision-making process which leads to making a choice between perceived possibilities.
For many, violence is the most extreme manifestation of conflict. Peace researcher Johan Galtung draws a distinction between physical and psychological violence, the first being direct physical violence against a person that causes hurt and can include killing, and, the second, "violence that works on the soul" -- lies, brainwashing, threats. Galtung also differentiates between direct or personal violence and structural violence, the latter being synonymous with social injustice. Within these two broad categories, types of violence can be broken down further into ethnic, religious, social, political or economic violence.
Often, various types of violence are part of a widespread interwoven dynamic which can engulf or directly affect localities, states or entire regions. For example, in many parts of Africa, intergenerational conflict and blocked economic and educational opportunities are seen to partly explain the readiness of disaffected youths to become involved in violence.
Evidently, conflict is both the cause and consequence of change. Nevertheless, some consider conflict to be an aberration from the norm because it can provoke deviant and often dysfunctional behaviour. Others have equated conflict with sex because it provides cathartic events necessary for human existence. Conflict is also seen by some to be a useful means of bargaining at both the domestic and international levels of human society. Kwame Ninsin describes conflict "...as a struggle for access to opportunities, life chances -- to the existing rights and privileges of society, which define citizenship within the nation state. Citizenship refers to the rights and obligations associated with membership of the nation-state. Conflict is the means by which deprived groups seek to obtain those rights and privileges, which define one's position in the prevailing political order."
One cause of conflict has been identified by social scientists as the non-fulfilment of needs. A fundamental element in this framework for describing conflict is the role of communication, which can generate perceptions and misperceptions about issues such as justice and injustice. "Fear and threat, denial of participation rights, perceived injustice, disappointment in expectations are typical origins of conflict," according to conflict resolution theorist and practitioner John Burton. Misperceptions of the environment in which conflict takes place are also causal factors.
The socio-biological interpretation of what conflict is also differentiates between values, interests and needs. Internal and international conflicts are not simply products of misunderstandings or misperceptions or competing definitions of national interest. Interests are negotiable, values are cultural and less subject to change, but universal human needs for security, participation, identity, and recognition are non-negotiable. The argument is that these needs are considered vital to both the individual and the organisation and survival of the society as a whole and will be relentlessly pursued.
As soon as conflict turns violent, its nature changes. Immediately, concerns about security and survival form a layer on top of the matrix of conflictual but, until then, non-violent competition over interests and needs. Resolving violent conflict must take into account these two dimensions -- underlying interests and needs and the dynamics and consequences of violence. Often, in attempts at putting a rapid end to violence, the latter takes precedence over the underlying causes of conflicts -- addressing issues of insecurity then takes precedence over achieving just relationships in society.
Essentially, conflict resolution for social scientists is meant to change attitudes and perceptions of disputants and allow them to absorb new information and engage in a process of creative problem-solving through the reviewing or "reframing" of the conflict situation with the use of "controlled" communication. This is based on the premise that resolving conflicts is possible by bringing about altered perceptions through the drawing of attention to options not previously considered. This is done by improving communication between conflicting parties.
The Media as 'Conflict Resolvers'
Conflict is a form of communication. As communications analysts Michael Burgoon, Frank Hunsaker and Edwin Dawson have pointed out: "Although it is possible to communicate without conflict, conflict without some type of communication is impossible".
Conflict and the media apparently go hand in hand. Experience around the world has shown that journalists, intentionally or otherwise, are conflict specialists. This is because much energy and time is spent describing and analysing the behaviour of individuals and groups in conflict.
In conflict situations, Johannes Botes, a journalism and conflict resolution trainer, has noted a range of similarities and differences between the media and third-party "conflict resolvers" -- mediators or arbiters involved in trying to resolve disputes. Firstly, they both provide protagonists with a voice and representation. Secondly, journalism, like mediation, requires open and perceptive minds with the ability to crystallise vague ideas. Both begin by analysing conflicts, finding out who is engaged in the conflict, what motivates them, what are the realities behind the dispute and what the conflict could probably or possibly lead to. Thirdly, operating under strict confidentiality rules, both usually try not to take sides and to give an impartial and accurate view of the dispute. They also look at whether a conflict might become more intense or de-escalate and where there could be common ground for a settlement because they both do not want continued conflict. Also, journalists, like mediators, are expected to get the facts right in cases where one side's facts are the other's propaganda -- often within very tight schedules.
It is self-evident that both journalists and third-party mediators can have substantial influence on conflict and conflict resolution processes through their action or inaction. In a proactive role which is essentially different from reporting the facts, journalists and mediators can provide a forum for parties to a conflict and interested third parties to express their views and alternatives; and, in some instances, bring the parties into face-to-face discussions. Both types of interveners can ask questions that shed new light on the conflict to enable those involved to examine their attitudes or motivations -- what conflict resolution practitioners call the process of "reframing" the conflict.
Nevertheless, journalists are often accused of making mistakes because of inattention or spite, their inability to grasp and communicate complicated issues, the rush to meet deadlines and putting profit ahead of other considerations. In effect, too many journalists treat boils with a "sharp lance", rather than with "anti-inflammatory balm" and are preoccupied with who appear to be winners and losers in a given conflict.
Looking at the dissimilarities, Botes notes that mediators and journalists have different employers and different professional prerogatives. The media has a strong tendency to dramatise events, give prominence to entrenched positions, and extreme or incendiary statements. Media attention to and interest in conflict usually increases when it escalates or becomes more violent. "But an important story -- how local institutions can prevent destructive conflict from occurring -- remains untold." While to be effective a mediator must be able to exercise discretion, for a journalist, telling the story is the name of the game. Not telling the story or even postponing telling the story can be seen to compromise a journalist. "Problem-solving and publicity on difficult, divisive conflicts seldom mix," maintains Botes.
Nonetheless, journalists generally have a role to play in conflict analysis, prevention and resolution. The media often provide fora for the exchange of views and the consideration of various options at the initial stages of conflict. At the negotiation stage, journalists can engage in keeping the public informed of sensitive contacts and discussions. By monitoring and reporting adherence or breaches of peace accords and post-conflict reconstruction the media can play an important role in the implementation stage of conflict resolution.
Whatever the inclination of individual journalists to embrace all or some of the principles of conflict resolution, better informed and trained communicators can do a lot to increase the amount of factual information and analysis available to policy makers and mediators. Better information can also help ordinary people understand and probably influence conflicts around them, as well as to consider what their options are.
Although it has been noted that the media functions in complex and interdependent societies, and that the media tries to mirror society, it is important to underline the special problems that journalists face in doing their jobs. This is the basis of the argument for the development of training facilities for local and national journalists in particularly vulnerable countries on issues relating to peace, reconciliation and development.
A discussion about journalists as conflict resolvers would not be complete without taking on board the ongoing debate over whether journalists should be actually engaged in mediation or not. One school of thought believes that the media should continue its traditional role of informing, educating and entertaining and leave the resolution of conflict to professionals. The second, encourages journalists to be more proactive and to search for viable options for conflict resolution. As this debate continues a third point of view is emerging, which considers that journalists are already acting as mediators by providing vehicles for dialogue and examining alternatives to deadlock.
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