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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Bringing warring parties to the negotiating table is the aim of any peace process. But what happens when those negotiations falter and conflict resolution fails? Is everything lost or are there prospects for meaningful change in even the most intractable of conflicts?
In this insightful book, leading scholar-practitioner in conflict resolution Oliver Ramsbotham explores the phenomenon of radical disagreement as the main impediment to negotiation, problem solving and dialogue between conflict parties. Taking as his focus the long-running and seemingly irresolvable conflict between Israel and Palestine, he shows how what is needed in these circumstances is not less radical disagreement, but more. Only by understanding what is blocking the way and by promoting collective strategic engagement within, across and between the groups involved, can deadlock be transformed.
Rich in detail and accessibly written, this book introduces a new and as yet relatively unexplored frontier in conflict studies. Its wider application to other phases, levels and war zones holds out rich promise for extending conflict engagement in some of the world�s deadliest and most difficult hot spots.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
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Contents
Cover
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
Part I The Argument
1. Learning from Failure
Introduction
Second-order social learning and conflict resolution
Lessons from the frontiers of failure: conflict resolution in its first fifty years
Where are the frontiers of failure today?
Conclusion
Notes
2. Conflict Resolution and its Enemies
The ‘long peace’ post-1945 and the ‘new peace’ post-1990
The statistical evidence
Interpreting the evidence
Cosmopolitan conflict resolution and the challenge of intractability
Conclusion
Notes
3. Why Conflict Resolution Fails
What is communicative conflict resolution trying to achieve in relation to radical disagreement?
What are the theoretical assumptions about radical disagreement that underpin communicative conflict resolution?
What happens when communicative conflict resolution approaches are applied to examples of radical disagreement in intractable conflicts?
Hermeneutic dialogue and Afghanistan
Applying negotiation, problem-solving and dialogue approaches to identity/secession conflicts
Conclusion
Notes
4. Promoting Strategic Engagement
Acknowledging radical disagreement
Understanding radical disagreement: heuristic engagement
Adapting practice accordingly: strategic engagement
How to think strategically
Why should conflict parties want to engage in strategic thinking when they are not ready for conflict resolution?
How can strategic thinking be a placeholder for a revival of conflict resolution?
Conclusion
Notes
Part II Case Study: The Israel–Palestine Conflict
Notes
5. Strategic Thinking for Possessors: Israelis
Heuristic engagement: why conflict resolution fails – what Israelis say
Strategic engagement – what can be done? Promoting collective internal strategic thinking
Conclusion
Notes
6. Strategic Thinking for Challengers: Palestinians
Heuristic engagement: why conflict resolution fails – what Palestinians say
Strategic engagement – what can be done? Promoting collective internal strategic thinking
Conclusion
Notes
7. Strategic Engagement within, across and between Conflict Parties
Strategic engagement between the Israeli Strategic Forum (ISF) and the Palestine Strategy Group (PSG)
The Palestinian Citizens of Israel Group (PCIG): ‘Strategic Thinking for Palestinian Arabs in the State of Israel’ (2015)
Strategic engagement between the Palestinian Citizens of Israel Group (PCIG) and the Palestine Strategy Group (PSG)
Strategic engagement between the Palestinian Citizens of Israel Group (PCIG) and the Israeli Strategic Forum (ISF)
The connection to internal Israeli electoral politics
Conclusion
Notes
8. The Kerry Initiative and the Role of Third Parties
Conflict resolution: the elements of principled negotiation
Why did the Kerry initiative fail between July 2013 and April 2014?
What is the alternative? Principled negotiation and strategic negotiation compared
Summing up
Conclusion
Notes
Part III Implications
9. Other Phases, Other Levels, Other Conflicts
Other phases and other levels
Strategic dialogue
Strategic problem-solving
Strategic negotiation
Conclusion
Notes
10. Exploring Agonistic Dialogue
What conflict parties say individually in agonistic dialogue: the anatomy of radical disagreeing
Exploring the resulting radical disagreement: what happens when discourses clash?
Is there a theory of radical disagreement?
Conclusion
Notes
Conclusion: Living with Radical Disagreement
Notes
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Figures
4.1 The hexagon of radical disagreement
9.1 Extended conflict resolution
Tables
2.1 Post-war peace orders, 1648–1945
2.2 An interpretative framework for transnational conflict
4.1 Ten ways in which strategic thinking can mimic conflict resolution
Boxes
2.1 Statistics of direct and indirect violence
3.1 Negotiation, problem-solving and dialogue
3.2 Some communicative conflict resolution approaches reviewed
3.3 The tetralemma applied to the Sinhala–Tamil conflict
4.1 Engaging radical disagreement
4.2 A guide to collective strategic thinking
5.1 Non-linear strategic thinking in a complex environment
5.2 Possible futures
5.3 The Arab Peace Initiative, 2002
6.1
A Post Oslo Strategy
: opening section
7.1 The spectrum of political opinion on a Palestinian state in the March 2015 Israeli election
7.2 Scenarios revisited: further variations
8.1 The elements of principled negotiation
8.2 Strategic conditions for successful negotiations
8.3 Strategic scenarios and the Kerry initiative
8.4 Principled negotiation and strategic negotiation compared
9.1 Contributing elements in the 9 January 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement in Sudan
10.1 Putative theories of radical disagreement reviewed
Maps
5.1 The carve-up of the Middle East after the First World War (including mandatory Palestine)
5.2 The 1937 Peel Commission proposal
5.3 The 1947 United Nations partition plan
5.4 The 1949 armistice lines and Israeli gains in the 1967 war
6.1 The 1967 Allon Plan
6.2 The Israeli–Palestinian Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip (Oslo II), 1995
6.3 The separation barrier and Israeli settlements on the West Bank
6.4 The Bennett Plan
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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For Meredith, Herwald, Ben and Zand
Start where conflict parties are, not where third parties want them to be.
When Conflict Resolution Fails
An Alternative to Negotiation and Dialogue: Engaging Radical Disagreement in Intractable Conflicts
Oliver Ramsbotham
polity
Copyright © Oliver Ramsbotham 2017
The right of Oliver Ramsbotham to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2017 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8802-2
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Ramsbotham, Oliver, author.Title: When conflict resolution fails : an alternative to negotiation and dialogue / Oliver Ramsbotham.Description: Malden, MA : Polity Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2016011436 (print) | LCCN 2016023136 (ebook) | ISBN 9780745687988 (hardback) | ISBN 9780745687995 (pbk.) | ISBN 9780745688015 (Mobi) | ISBN 9780745688022 (Epub)Subjects: LCSH: Conflict management. | Arab-Israeli conflict.Classification: LCC JZ6010 .R263 2016 (print) | LCC JZ6010 (ebook) | DDC 303.6/9--dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016011436
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
PREFACE
Two factors have shaped the way this book is written. First, it is a short book about a large subject. Second, it is intended for readers some of whom will have no previous knowledge of conflict resolution or of the Israel–Palestine conflict that is taken as a case study. So the emphasis is on conveying main points clearly without too many qualifications which might obscure the argument. After a somewhat academic opening chapter to set the scene, the text is thereafter kept clear of jargon, acronyms and unnecessary references. Instead of lengthy literature reviews, wherever possible ideas are illustrated in the most simple way by direct quotation and then tested by concrete examples. Under pressure of space, preference has been given to the case study (chapters 5 to 8) over what precedes and follows it. So in chapter 3, for example, there is no attempt to do justice to the rich literatures on dialogue, problem-solving and negotiation. Instead, the main effort is to illustrate how classic conflict resolution sets aside or ignores the radical disagreements at the heart of intractable conflict and why, as a result, there may be no further recourse when that proves premature. Chapter 4 is then able to focus on what might be done to remedy this.
It should be made clear that this book is not a criticism of conflict resolution, which is my own topic and the field I have spent my professional life studying, teaching and writing about. But, however many successes there are, particular attention always needs to be paid to failure, because, as argued in chapter 1, this is where growth and development most readily occur. So the key question is: What can be done when, so far, conflict resolution approaches do not work? The book is intended not as a replacement of conflict resolution but – as made clear in chapter 9 – as an extension of it.
In relation to the case study, this preface is being written in early June 2016. In Israel the Labor Party in 2016 adopted a new Comprehensive Diplomatic Security Plan that affirms renewed commitment to a ‘two-state solution’, as noted in chapter 7, but Avigdor Lieberman’s virulently rejectionist party has recently joined the ruling coalition government. In line with the ‘two-track’ strategy set out in chapter 6, Palestinians plan a major international campaign focused around 5 June 2017, the fiftieth anniversary of the Israeli takeover, demanding an end to the ambiguity of the status quo and a stark choice for Israel: either end the occupation and deliver two states for two nations or give equal rights to all throughout the area subject to Israeli control until a political solution is found. Palestinians feel ambivalent about the nature of a renewed emphasis on a ‘regional setting’ for final agreement, which includes an Egyptian focus on intra-Palestinian reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas and Saudi Arabian intimations about adapting the 2002/2007 Arab Peace Initiative, possibly as part of a ‘Sunni’ Arab/Israeli front against Iran. There is great uncertainty about the succession to President Abbas. At wider international level there is a continually shifting ‘French initiative’, promise of a future ‘Quartet Report’ to rekindle international involvement, talk of a possible ‘swansong’ of ‘Obama parameters’ (perhaps in the form of a UN Security Council Resolution), and uncertainty about the new regional role of Russia. The impact of the outcome of the US presidential election is another imponderable.
Readers who would like to acquaint themselves further with the academic dimension of analysis can consult Contemporary Conflict Resolution (Ramsbotham, Woodhouse and Miall 2016), which provides a comprehensive overview of the conflict resolution field, and my book Transforming Violent Conflict: Radical Disagreement, Dialogue and Survival (2010), for more on the particular phenomenon of radical disagreement.
Kevin Avruch gives a characteristically accurate and succinct summary of the central argument in the book, from which the extract on the back cover is taken. I can do no better than to end this preface by reproducing the full version here:
In his earlier Transforming Violent Conflict (2010) Ramsbotham introduced the ideas of ‘radical disagreement’ (the main linguistic manifestation of intractable conflict) and its communicative counterpart ‘linguistic intractability’ to the lexicon of conflict resolution. He also demonstrated how and why, in the face of these two conditions, the usual methods in the conflict resolution ‘toolkit’ – principled (interest-based) negotiation, interactive problem-solving, and dialogue – so often fail. This book, using the Israeli–Palestinian conflict as its main case, begins where the earlier one leaves off. He describes a form of ‘extended conflict resolution’, built around ideas and practices of ‘strategic engagement’ that constitute the preconditions necessary for conflict resolution to have any chance of success. Along the way he challenges our ideas of the role of third parties and proposes what may be, ethically, the outer limits of conflict resolution itself.
Part IThe Argument
1LEARNING FROM FAILURE
Bringing warring parties to the negotiating table is the aim of any peace process. But what happens when those negotiations falter and conflict resolution fails? Is everything lost, or are there prospects for meaningful change in even the most intractable of conflicts?
Introduction
This book sums up work I have done over several decades on the communicative aspect of intractable conflicts – beginning with Choices in 1987. Intractable conflicts are those in which attempts at peaceful containment, settlement and transformation have so far gained no purchase. In ‘frozen’ conflicts there is a semblance of peaceful management, but this is superficial and is likely to break down again. I say ‘so far’ because it is always possible that such attempts will succeed in future, as conflict resolution wants, and as has happened in many other cases. But ‘so far’ can go on for years, if not decades, during which time unimaginable destruction and damage to human lives and life hopes may be inflicted. The victims are overwhelmingly the most vulnerable. What, if anything, can be done in these circumstances? The focus is on how best to handle what I call linguistic intractability and its chief verbal manifestation radical disagreement.
In order to get to grips with this challenge we first need to know both what conflict resolution is trying to achieve and what aspects of prevailing patterns of large-scale conflict block the way. This is the job of chapters 1 and 2. The main argument begins in chapter 3.
It will be helpful to remember in what follows that the aim of conflict resolution is to overcome violence, not conflict. Conflict cannot be overcome, because it is inherent in social and political change. And conflict should not be overcome, because without it injustice and unjust systems cannot be challenged. Mahondas Gandhi and Martin Luther King were opposed to violence. But they were not opposed to conflict. They wanted to eliminate the British occupation of India and racial discrimination in the United States. Nelson Mandela wanted to overthrow apartheid in South Africa. To do this, levels of conflict had to be raised, not lowered. Here is King in his famous address from the Washington memorial on 23 August 1963:
We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquillizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. The whirlwind of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.1
What does this imply about peace processes in deep-rooted and intractable conflicts? First, that in peace talks between undefeated conflict parties the aim is often not to end the conflict, but to transmute it into non-violent forms of continuing struggle and change. Otherwise the conflict parties will not enter the peace process. For example, this is what happened in Northern Ireland in 1998. Here a ‘post-war settlement’ is a ‘continuation of the conflict by other means’ (which is why, for reasons explained below, I call it Clausewitz in reverse). Requiring an ‘end of conflict’ in such cases is unrealistic and self-defeating. It also follows that a further aim is to separate what I call extremists of ends, who are uncompromising about strategic goals, from extremists of means, who are uncompromising about the use of violence. This is a central distinction in dealing with terrorism, as made clear in chapter 9.
It may seem surprising in the light of this that conflict resolution regularly discounts the radical disagreement that lies at the heart of linguistic intractability as an ‘all-too-familiar’ dead end and a terminus to dialogue that needs from the outset to be transformed, not learnt from. In intractable conflicts this is premature. Radical disagreement turns out to be perhaps the least familiar aspect of intense political conflict. And conflict resolution fails when the conditions that it presupposes do not yet exist, the assumptions on which it rests (often drawn from the social and political sciences) do not yet apply, and conflict parties are not yet ready to behave in the way it wants. It may then find that it has no other recourse when it is confronted by the ‘war of words’ (the radical disagreement) that pervades intractable asymmetric conflict and blocks conflict resolution at all levels.
What is the alternative? The central argument in chapter 4 is that, when conflict resolution fails, we should turn in the opposite direction – to conflict engagement. Instead of ignoring radical disagreement, we should first try to understand what obstructs the way and then adapt practice accordingly. This means starting where conflict parties are, not where third parties want them to be. It means beginning not between conflict parties but within them. Internal disagreements are often more ferocious than external disagreements. And internal divisions can be the main blockage to external accommodation. Above all, it means promoting collective strategic thinking by the main identity groups: Where are they? Where do they want to be? How do they get there? Why are conflict parties prepared to do this when they are not prepared for conflict resolution? Because they want to overcome internal divisions – not in order to ‘understand the other’, but in order to win. So how can this nevertheless be a ‘placeholder’ for a possible future initiation or revival of conflict resolution? A number of reasons are given in chapter 4 and illustrated in the case study. This is the core of the book. Emphasizing strategic discourse within parties to a conflict is often the real key to progress when other avenues are blocked – including the regularly overlooked strategic question of how to influence the internal dynamics of the other side. Chapter 4 also offers a template for how to conduct collective strategic thinking of this kind based on the work of the strategy groups described in Part II. Practitioners may want to try this out for themselves.
Taking as its focus the long-running and seemingly irresolvable conflict between Israel and Palestine, the argument in the case study in Part II is that what is needed in these circumstances is not less radical disagreement, but more. Only by understanding what is blocking the way and by promoting collective strategic engagement within, across and between the groups involved – including third parties – can deadlock be transformed. Chapters 5 and 6 go beyond the tendency among behavioural scientists to treat ‘intractable’ conflicts as primarily the result of correctible subjective misunderstandings. They demonstrate how the differing narratives of the parties to the conflict come out of their ‘lived experience’ and are thus in a basic sense as real as the ‘objective’ conflicts over land and power – and inseparable from them. That is what blocks conflict resolution. In terms of strategic thinking, the case study shows how at the heart of asymmetric conflict lie the radically different requirements of possessors and challengers. The question of the dialectics of power is central here. For example, why should Israelis give up anything if the status quo continues to be better than any strategic alternative? And how can Palestinians transform the status quo when the process of bilateral negotiation brokered by the United States is itself part of what perpetuates it? It is only the promotion of strategic engagement that illuminates these critical dynamics.
Chapter 7 shows the importance of including all the main cross-cutting identity groups in the strategic engagement process in complex transnational conflicts. In this case, it is the neglected constituency of Israeli Palestinians (20 per cent of the population of Israel) that needs for the first time to be fully represented as a ‘core group’ in strategic negotiations.
Using the example of the attempt, between July 2013 and April 2014, by US Secretary of State John Kerry to end the conflict, chapter 8 shows that third parties are not neutral, impartial or disinterested in intractable political conflicts of this kind. It also demonstrates how a conflict resolution approach to negotiation such as principled negotiation needs to be supplemented in times of maximum attrition by a prior strategic negotiation approach, which links strategic thinking within conflict parties to the wider (regional, international) strategic context where prevailing patterns of transnational conflict are now increasingly determined.
Part III looks at wider applications in terms of other phases, other levels and other conflicts. This introduces a new and as yet relatively unexplored frontier in conflict studies. It holds out rich promise for extending conflict engagement in some of the world’s deadliest and most difficult hot spots. A central argument here is for linking conflict resolution to strategic studies. Turning from strategic engagement to ‘heuristic engagement’ (from the Greek word for ‘discover’), chapter 10 explores agonistic dialogue (the dialogue of struggle or dialogue between enemies) and concludes that, in intractable conflicts, conflict parties are not nearer, but much further apart than was supposed. It uncovers why there is no adequate third-party theory or ‘philosophy’ of radical disagreement. Part III ends on a suitably humble note by asking what happens when even strategic conflict engagement and ‘extended conflict resolution’ fail.
Summing the whole thing up, the book argues that, during times of maximum attrition, the radical disagreements that constitute the core of linguistic intractability are best seen as an opportunity rather than as a terminus. This opens up a new dimension in conflict studies. Learning how to understand and respond to this is the central task of the as yet underdeveloped field of heuristic and strategic conflict engagement.
The rest of this chapter offers a survey of the conflict resolution field under the theme most suitable for this book – learning how to respond to failure.
Second-order social learning and conflict resolution
From the beginning social learning theory has been at the heart of conflict resolution. The founders of the field stressed the importance of understanding complex systems in the search for ways of transforming violent into non-violent conflict. Morton Deutsch, John Burton and others drew on general systems theory to explain the cooperative and competitive behaviour of social organisms2 and on game theory to analyse the variety of options available to conflict parties.3 Burton was particularly influenced by the idea of first-order and second-order learning.4 It is not only individuals who need to learn adaptive responses in order to survive but socio-cultural systems in general, whose underlying assumptions and habitual patterns of behaviour tend to resist necessary change. If a system – or species – does not adapt, it is discarded. History is littered with examples of systemic obsolescence. It is a never-ending process, as previous success may prove counter-productive in a new environment. Then it is important to stop investing in what may have worked before and to discover what the altered circumstances demand. The requirement is to learn the right lessons and to adapt accordingly. What are the right lessons? It is by looking at the frontiers of failure – those locations where the system is malfunctioning – that second-order social learning is best achieved.
In the 1950s, when the conflict resolution field was established, the advent of nuclear weapons meant that violent human conflict now threatened the future of Homo sapiens as a whole. This was an existential crisis. For Kenneth Boulding (whose systemic training was in economics), ‘the international system is by far the most pathological and costly segment of the whole social system.’5 For Anatol Rapoport (biologist and mathematician), ‘the illusion that increasing losses for the other side is equivalent to winning is the reason that the struggles are so prolonged and the conflicting parties play the game to a lose/ lose end.’6 Social systems that cling to what Rapoport called ‘default values’ (first-order learning) are not capable of achieving the transformation required. So the ‘critical issue of peace’ – the need to convert destructive into constructive conflict – demanded the ‘incorporation of second order learning in social systems’. And, given the changed environment, this could only be done ‘through a participative design process’.7
Such were the ideas that inspired the ‘early church’ of conflict resolvers in the 1950s and 1960s. The first issue of the Journal of Conflict Resolution (1957) put it like this:
The reasons which have led us to this enterprise may be summed up in two propositions. The first is that by far the most practical problem facing the world today is that of international relations – more specifically the prevention of global war. The second is that if intellectual progress is to be made in this area, the study of international relations must be made an interdisciplinary enterprise, drawing its discourse from all the social sciences and even further.8
The complex systems that made war not only possible but, in some cases, likely operated in many overlapping spheres – military, political, economic, social, psychological – and at many different levels. So this must be matched by the requisite responses from conflict resolution. That is why the new field had to be interdisciplinary.
But, as they developed their programme, conflict resolution theorists and practitioners found that more and more ‘frontiers of failure’ needed to be taken into account and addressed if the complex system as a whole was to be transformed. What had begun as a focus on the pathology of interstate war had expanded twenty years later (Journal of Conflict Resolution 1973) to take in major drivers of conflict, such as both north–south socio-economic divisions and environmental constraints, which were seen as potential generators of global conflict and therefore in urgent need of systemic transformation:
The threat of nuclear holocaust remains with us and may well continue to do so for centuries, but other problems are competing with deterrence and disarmament studies for our attention. The journal must also attend to international conflict over justice, equality and human dignity; problems of conflict resolution for ecological balance and control are within our proper scope and especially suited for interdisciplinary attention.9
A critical early realization among some of the most creative shapers of the new conflict resolution field was that the stipulations of second-order social learning applied as much to their own enterprise as to any others. In order to keep the field adaptive, innovative and effective, therefore, it was necessary to focus continually on the ‘frontiers of failure’ – those sites where conflict resolution itself did not (or did not yet) work. These were the locations where adaptation and growth were most needed, where reality checks could best be taken, and where new ways of responding were most likely to be discovered.
A brief history of the field can be seen to reflect this Popperian perspective.10
Lessons from the frontiers of failure: conflict resolution in its first fifty years
In the first, heroic period in the 1950s and 1960s, the existing study of international relations was seen to have been taken over by first-order realist ways of thinking which offered no solution to the main systemic threats. The pioneers of the conflict resolution field challenged realist reliance on competitive military defence preparations, balance of power theory, and deterrence as the main preventers of war, because these could no longer be relied on to work in the nuclear age and the penalty of failure would be too high. Instead they looked to a far wider study of human conflict that also embraced non-interstate wars, revolutions, insurrections, and human conflicts at other levels right down to small group and individual struggles. The statistical underpinning for this study was found in earlier analyses of ‘deadly quarrels’ in general by Pitirim Sorokin (1937), Lewis Fry Richardson (1960, posthumous publication) and Quincy Wright (1942). There are accounts of the excitement with which founders of the field greeted the arrival in the United States of Stephen Richardson with microfiches of his father’s as yet unpublished work.
As well as being multidisciplinary and multi-level, the new field also aspired to be multicultural – drawing from non-Western Gandhian, Buddhist and other traditions – and aimed to be both analytic (polemology) and normative (eirenics) and to combine the theoretic (theoria) and the applied (praxis).11 This manifested itself in the way innovative pre-1950 initiatives at different levels were now brought together and integrated into what it was hoped would be a decisive paradigm-shift – including Mary Parker Follett’s ‘mutual gains’ approach in labour relations (1942), Von Neumann’s and Morgenstern’s game theory (1944), Kurt Lewin’s work on the social psychology of group conflict (1948), Crane Brinton’s ‘anatomy of political revolution’ (1938) and David Mitrany’s argument for the ‘functional development of international organisation’ as the foundation of a ‘working peace system’ (later seen to have anticipated the European Coal and Steel Community and eventually the European Union) (1943).
At the heart of this distinctive new conflict resolution field were three conceptual nodal points that are worth bearing in mind.
First there was Morton Deutsch’s distinction between destructive and constructive conflict.12 We have already noted in the introduction how the aim of conflict resolution is to prevent or end violent conflict, but not ‘constructive’ conflict.
Second, there was Johan Galtung’s contrast between direct, structural and cultural violence.13 Direct violence is where children are murdered. Structural violence is where children die through poverty. Cultural violence is whatever blinds us to this or seeks to justify it. We end direct violence by changing conflict behaviour, structural violence by removing structural contradictions and injustices, and cultural violence by changing attitudes. These responses relate in turn to broader strategies of peacekeeping, peacebuilding and peacemaking respectively. Negative peace is defined as the cessation of direct violence, and positive peace as the overcoming of structural and cultural violence as well.
Putting Deutsch’s and Galtung’s ideas together, the normative aim of conflict resolution was to transform actually or potentially violent conflict into non-violent forms of struggle and change. In contrast to the determinism inherent in some forms of realism and Marxism, conflict resolution insisted that violence in all its forms is ultimately subject to the possibility of human decision, and that it can and must be overcome if future generations are to survive. Given the deep biological, psychological and institutional roots of violence, this was bound to be an uphill – indeed perpetual – struggle. The odds were not in favour of conflict resolution. There would be setbacks en route.
Third, there was John Burton’s idea that intractable conflicts are rooted in the failure of existing institutions to satisfy non-negotiable basic human needs:
The conclusion to which we are coming is that seemingly different and separate social problems, from street violence to industrial frictions, to ethnic and international conflicts, are symptoms of the same cause: institutional denial of needs of recognition and identity, and the sense of security provided when they are satisfied, despite losses through violent conflict.14
For Burton, although basic human needs – identity needs, security needs, autonomy needs, development needs – are non-negotiable, they are also non-zero sum, so that the door to resolution is always open. The term ‘non-zero sum’ comes from game theory and means that, unlike some conflicts over scarce resources, one side’s gain does not mean another’s loss – indeed, one side often cannot gain security or maximize development unless the other side does the same.
It seems fair to conclude that, in its first two decades, the founders of the conflict resolution field had indeed creatively explored the ‘frontiers of failure’ in the management of human conflict and, as a result, had put together a promising alternative paradigm. The institutional bases for the new approach had been laid, mainly in North America and Europe. A set of complementary methodologies had been formulated, encompassing the ‘subjectivist’ dialogue approach, the ‘objectivist’ rational negotiation approach, and the ‘structuralist’ social justice approach – tentatively corresponding to attempts to address the ‘attitude’, ‘behaviour’ and ‘contradiction’ vertices of Galtung’s conflict triangle. And there had been the beginning of a testing out of theory in practice with the early experiments in ‘controlled communication’ or ‘problem-solving’ workshops.15 Some internal disputes within the field were still unresolved, but this can itself be seen as a sign of potential future growth from a social learning perspective.16
During the next period in the 1970s and 1980s, those working in the conflict resolution field continued to labour under the constraints of the Cold War, intensified by the Soviet takeover in Afghanistan (1979) and complicated by the Iranian revolution (1979). In the early 1980s the nuclear arms race reached its zenith. This was a period of consolidation and development in conflict resolution, possibly less innovative, but still responsive to newly perceived challenges. Notable here at international level, building on Charles Osgood’s ‘graduated and reciprocated initiatives in tension reduction’ (GRIT) approach to détente, were Robert Axelrod’s associated conclusions about the ‘evolution of cooperation’ in game theory, together with its implications for arms control (in which Rapoport’s ‘tit-for-tat’ strategy came out surprisingly strongly).17 At domestic level, the whole field of Alternative Dispute Resolution began to be elaborated (covering labour relations, public policy disputes, neighbourhood conflicts, family mediation, etc.).18 While, between the two, Burton’s needs theory was applied with great prescience by Edward Azar to a host of non-interstate intractable conflicts that he called ‘protracted social conflicts’. His analysis in terms of preconditions that made certain societies more prone to conflict, and process dynamics that dictated whether or not in the event major armed conflict erupted, laid a sound theoretical base for what the Carnegie Commission later called ‘structural’ and ‘operational’ prevention.19 All of this was innovative at a time when international relations and security studies were preoccupied mainly with the Cold War confrontation.
This was a period in which negotiation studies (notably the Harvard Program on Negotiation), multi-track diplomacy and mediation studies were put on a firm analytic basis. Conflict resolution centres spread around the world, and the idea of a global civil society that transcended gender and culture barriers was articulated, notably by Elise Boulding, Secretary-General of the International Peace Research Association (IPRA), with her promotion of the idea of ‘future imaging’ in all social and political planning, so that decisions are taken in terms of human needs over a ‘200-year present’, which in terms of explanation and understanding reaches back into the past but in terms of impact takes in the equal interests of future generations.20
In the 1990s, the conflict resolution field had reached a point of maturity where the end of the Cold War made a number of its terms and approaches, relatively marginalized in the earlier period, all at once the stock-in-trade of politicians and pundits. Peacekeeping, peacemaking and peacebuilding occupied international attention, while ‘conflict prevention’ moved to the centre of the UN’s agenda – and the agendas of regional organizations (OSCE, African Union) and international financial institutions (World Bank, International Monetary Fund). The ending of the Cold War revealed a world that had long been familiar in conflict resolution – a plethora of protracted social conflicts in which economic struggles to control the resources of vulnerable states, ethno-national efforts to redraw the boundaries of states, and ideological attempts to change the nature of states all demanded a more sophisticated array of management, settlement and transformation approaches than had been widely familiar before. The conflict resolution field responded by elaborating ideas of ‘contingency’ (varying requirements in different conflict types and phases) and ‘complementarity’ (synchronizing a range of responses).21 For example, aid and development agencies that had hitherto avoided conflict resolution, because they did not see their role as ‘political’, now acknowledged that good conflict analysis was essential for the success of their missions and that good conflict impact assessment was necessary to ensure that they ‘did no harm’.22 Most of the environments within which they now worked were intense conflict zones of the kind with which conflict resolution had long been engaged, where traditional ideas of political neutrality were compromised.
Where are the frontiers of failure today?
But greater exposure also brought greater criticism. After a honeymoon period in the early 1990s, when some hoped that the original declared purposes of the United Nations and associated international organizations might at last be realized – and the paradigm shift envisaged by the founders of conflict resolution might actually take place – the skies soon clouded over. Debacles in Bosnia and Rwanda (no doubt unfairly) discredited UN-led peacekeeping interventions. The Oslo peace process in Israel/Palestine, hailed in the conflict resolution field as a textbook example of its methodology, stalled in the second half of the decade and appeared to discredit this mode of peacemaking, while post-war peacebuilding projects in countries such as Cambodia and Haiti also ran into difficulties. The 11 September 2001 attacks on the USA ushered in the ‘war on terror’, to be followed by the embroilments in Afghanistan and Iraq. Much of the Islamic world was convulsed by struggles to define its ideological and political identity. Ominous echoes of the Cold War resounded around confrontation in Ukraine. The quiet voice of conflict resolution seemed to be drowned out.
At theoretical level, too, conflict resolution was assailed by critics from the right and from the left. For traditional realists, in a world where irreconcilable interests compete for power, ‘soft’ conflict resolution approaches were dismissed as ineffective and dangerous. What possible answer could conflict resolution have to the lethal combination of rogue states, globalized crime, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and the fanatical ideologues of international terrorism? For critical theoretic inheritors of the Marxist mantle, in the structurally unequal world of late capitalism, ‘problem-solving’ conflict resolution approaches were seen to reinforce existing imbalances and to fail to address the need for underlying change. For post-structural theorists, conflict resolution discourse about cosmopolitan values was permeated by unwarranted universalizing assumptions about truth and reality. Beyond this lay even broader assaults such as Paul Salem’s ‘critique of western conflict resolution from a non-western perspective’.23
The key question for the conflict resolution field from the standpoint of second-order social learning is whether it is responding creatively to these critiques. Have theorists and practitioners from around the world acknowledged the cases in which established conflict resolution approaches have so far failed, and adapted accordingly? How are success and failure measured? Is adequate ongoing evaluation built in to the different enterprises so that they can be self-correcting? Is the field still innovative and dynamic? Are lessons being learnt from the frontiers of failure?
Conclusion
In summary, the main thing to take from this chapter is the idea from second-order learning that, when conflict resolution fails, the obstruction must not be ignored or prematurely set aside. On the contrary, what blocks the way must be actively acknowledged, understood and adapted to. We will turn to this task in chapters 3 and 4. But first we must ask how serious current failures are. How high is the mountain that those who espouse the hopes and aspirations of conflict resolution have to climb? What are the dimensions of intractable conflict that conflict resolution seeks to address?
Notes
1
. King ([1963] 1992), pp. 533–4.
2
. Coser (1956); Coleman (1957).
3
. Schelling (1960); Rapoport and Chammah (1965).
4
. Burton (1968, 1969, 1972, 1990a).
5
. Quoted Kerman (1974), p. 83.
6
. Rapoport (1960) p. 441; original emphasis.
7
. For this paragraph and the previous paragraph I am indebted to my colleague Tom Woodhouse, who did the original research into this topic for chapter 2 of
Contemporary Conflict Resolution
(Miall, Ramsbotham and Woodhouse 1999).
8
.
Journal of Conflict Resolution
, 1/1 (1957): 1.
9
.
Journal of Conflict Resolution
, 27/1 (1973): 5.
10
. Karl Popper’s well-known test for the empirical content of hypotheses is whether they are falsifiable. If they are not, as scientific theories they are devoid of content (1959). So scientific advance depends on searching for ‘failure’. In the same vein, Thomas Kuhn (1962) argued that scientific revolutions take the form of paradigm shifts as a result of anomalies in the old paradigm. It can thus be said that the old paradigm (for example, the Ptolemaic world system) deserves the credit for identifying its own ‘failure’ and therefore generating the new paradigm (for example, the Copernican system). And so on.
11
. Polemology is the study of struggle and war; eirenics is the study of conditions for peace. Both are required in conflict resolution.
12
. Deutsch (1949, 1973).
13
. Galtung (1976, 1996).
14
. Burton (1997), p. 38; see also Burton (1987, 1990b).
15
. Summed up in Kelman (1996) and Mitchell and Banks (1996).
16
. E.g., Boulding (1977) vs. Galtung (1987).
17
. Osgood (1962); Axelrod (1984).
18
. Barber (1984); Susskind and Cruikshank (1987); Floyer Acland (1995); Dukes (1996).
19
. Azar (1990); Azar and Burton (1986); Carnegie Commission (1997).
20
. Boulding (1976, 1990).
21
. Fisher and Keashly (1991).
22
. Anderson (1996).
23
. Salem (1993, 1997).
2CONFLICT RESOLUTION AND ITS ENEMIES
In this chapter we survey the current situation in order to get some idea of the scale of the challenge that conflict resolution faces in its quest to reduce violence in international politics. What does the conflict and violence data tell us? How should it be interpreted? What is the conflict resolution response? And how does all of this help us to pinpoint where the impediments to conflict resolution lie?1
We can begin with the optimistic thesis of Steven Pinker in his influential but controversial book The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2011),2 in which he argues that measurable violence in the world has been declining for millennia and that ‘we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species’ existence’.3 By ‘violence’, Pinker means war, homicide, genocide, domestic violence, how children, minorities, and animals are treated, and so on. His survey is based on comparative measures of violence relative to size of population. The main metric he applies for measuring violence is deaths per 100,000 per year. On Pinker’s vast canvas the decline in violence is seen to have gone through five phases: the ‘pacification process’ from hunter-gatherers to agricultural civilizations; the ‘civilizing process’ from the Middle Ages to nation-states; the ‘humanitarian revolution’ associated with the abolition of slavery and slow reduction in torture; the ‘long peace’ after the Second World War; and the ‘new peace’ after the end of the Cold War.
For Pinker, the ‘shockingly high homicide rates of pre-state societies, with 10 to 60 per cent of the men dying at the hands of other men’, have been progressively tempered by the evolution of the modern democratic state with its monopoly of force; by the bringing of potential enemies ‘into each other’s moral circles by facilitating trade, cultural exchanges, and people-to-people activities’; by a progressive ‘feminization’ of society; by increased cosmopolitanism brought about by mass literacy and mobility; and by the ‘escalator of reason’, which reframes violence as a problem to be solved rather than a contest to be won. This is a pretty good summary of the conflict resolution approach outlined in chapter 1. At the root of this for Pinker is that the human mind is a ‘combinatorial, recursive system’: we have not only thoughts, but thoughts about thoughts. So, in a passage reminiscent of Burton’s second-order learning argument, he sees the ‘advances in human conflict resolution’ as ‘dependent on this ability’. For Pinker, the mindsets predisposed to violence ‘evolved to deal with hostilities in the ancestral past, and we must bring them into the open if we are to work around them in the present.’ Antievolutionists avert their gaze from ‘the evolutionary logic of violence’, because they fear that ‘acknowledging it is tantamount to accepting it or even to approving it’:
Instead they have pursued the comforting delusion of the Noble Savage, in which violence is an arbitrary product of learning or a pathogen that bores into us from outside. But denying the logic of violence makes it easy to forget how readily violence can flare up, and ignoring the parts of the mind that ignite violence makes it easy to overlook the parts that can extinguish it. With violence, as with so many other concerns, human nature is the problem, but human nature is also the solution.4
Not surprisingly the topic is highly disputed. Some of this relates to the huge literature on the nature and roots of aggression and violence in human society. Some concerns the evolution of warfare and the modern state. Some is to do with Pinker’s statistical methodology itself. Many readers, confronted by shocking recent levels of violence in the Middle East, Africa, Ukraine and elsewhere that have erupted since Pinker’s book was published, may remain unconvinced by the thesis.
But the thesis has also received quite widespread analytic support – for example, from Andrew Mack and his colleagues in the carefully argued Human Security Report 2013: The Decline of Global Violence: Evidence, Explanation and Contestation,5 which also attributes much of the decline in violence to the evolution of a new ‘global security governance system’ since 1945 along lines advocated and supported by the founders of the conflict resolution field in the same period:
In its current stage of development, this continually expanding system of global security remains inchoate, disputatious, inefficient, and prone to tragic mistakes. But as previous Human Security Reports have argued, the evidence suggests that it has also been remarkably effective in driving down the number and deadliness of armed conflicts.6
In 2016 Pinker and Mack reasserted this thesis.7
Who is right?
The ‘long peace’ post-1945 and the ‘new peace’ post-1990
Turning to the last two of Pinker’s phases, the new ‘international order’ after 1945 was only the latest in a series of attempts to construct what Kalevi Holsti calls a ‘peace system’ after previous periods of convulsion and war, such as the Thirty Years’ War (Westphalia 1648), Louis XIV’s wars (Utrecht 1713), the Napoleonic wars (Vienna 1815) and the First World War (Paris 1919).
Table 2.1 reproduces Holsti’s comparison of post-war peace orders over the last 350 years, together with eight ‘prerequisites for peace’ on which his comparison is based.8 Holsti concludes that the greater the number of criteria met, the more stable the ensuing period turned out to be. According to him there has been least success in relation to the last two criteria – developing methods of peaceful change and anticipating future conflict-generating issues. This is where the capacity for second-order social learning, discussed in chapter 1, comes in.
Although the nature of the post-1945 system was largely dictated by the victors of the Second World War, the values expressed in the Preamble to the UN Charter reflected the two main conflict resolution aims of promoting both negative peace (ending large-scale direct violence) – ‘to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind . . .’ – and positive peace (overcoming structural and cultural violence):
to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small; to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained; and to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom.9
By the time Holsti was writing, in 1989, it could be argued that, despite the fact that the political, economic, psychological and ideological forces that generate violence are deeply rooted in human institutions, human historical memory and, in the view of some, human nature, remarkable gains had been made. It was extraordinary that, unlike the League of Nations, the United Nations had retained membership of all major states – even surviving the advent of Maoist China – and presided over a dramatic decline in the incidence of interstate war. It had been equally notable that the imperial era had been brought to an end with decolonization and a fourfold increase in UN state membership (from about fifty in 1945 to nearly 200 today). The world trade system now included Russia, India and China. Regional organizations were linked actively into this global system. There had been striking gains in overall human welfare according to a number of measures, despite gross inequalities and exceptions, and there was no reason why over the next decades these would not be spread wider.
Table 2.1 Post-war peace orders, 1648–1945
Source: Holsti, 1991: ch.13
*short-lived governance mechanism in League of Nations
**failure to develop deterrent capacity such as proposed Military Staff Committee or UN Standing Forces
Prerequisites for peace
Governance
(some system of responsibility for regulating behaviour in terms of the conditions of an agreement)
Legitimacy
(a new order following war cannot be based on perceived injustice or repression, and principles of justice have to be embodied into the post-war settlement)
Assimilation
(linked to legitimacy: the gains of living within a system are greater than the potential advantages of seeking to destroy it)
A deterrent system
(victors should create a coalition strong enough to deter defection, by force if necessary, to protect settlement norms or to change them by peaceful means)
Conflict resolving procedures and institutions
(the system of governance should include provision and capacity for identifying, monitoring, managing and resolving major conflict between members of the system, and the norms of the system would include willingness to use such institutions)
Consensus on war
(a recognition that war is the fundamental problem, acknowledgement of the need to develop and foster strong norms against the use of force and clear guiding principles for the legitimate use of force)
Procedures for peaceful change
(the need to review and adapt when agreements no longer relate to the reality of particular situations: peace agreements need to have built-in mechanisms for review and adaptation)
Anticipation of future issues
(peacemakers need to incorporate some ability to anticipate what may constitute conflict causes in the future: institutions and system norms should include provision for identifying, monitoring and handling not just the problems that created the last conflict but future conflicts as well)
There are, of course, other explanations for the decline in interstate war during this period, including realist balance of power and deterrence explanations (Churchill: ‘safety will be the sturdy child of terror’) and arguments that anti-colonial wars and civil wars were ‘proxy’ great power wars.
