Hoorcollege 5: conflict prevention and nonviolent resistance Flashcards
Conflict prevention is to prevent:
- The emergence of violent conflict.
- Ongoing conflicts from spreading.
- The re-emergence of violence.
Aim conflict prevention
To avert violent conflicts, not to avoid conflicts altogether.
Constructive conflict
When parties [eventually come to] regard the outcomes as mutually acceptable. Moreover, conflicts are constructive insofar as they provide a basis for an ongoing relationship in which future conflicts tend to be waged constructively.
How conflict formations emerge:
Social change –> people collectively define interests, formulate goals & act together, mobilizing support –> when goals are incompatible with others, this can lead to a conflict –> when incompatibility is severe –> relationships broken –> institutions and context they live in can’t contain the conflict –> violence possible.
Structural/deep prevention
Aims to address the root causes of the conflict. Here, preventors of war can be positive polcies, political inclusion and pluralism.
Direct/light prevention
Aims to prevent an existing conflict from becoming violent. Here, the capacity to manage a conflict is a preventor of war. Examples conflict management: mediation, confidence building measures and crisis management.
Questions that help think about conflict prevention:
- Can war be prevented by removing its necessary conditions?
a. Under what conditions is war not considered a
serious possibility? - Can the incidence of wars be reduced by controlling the circumstances under which they arise?
- Can a particular conflict be influenced to avoid it becoming violent?
Conflict early warning system:
- Identification of the conflicts that could become violent.
- Monitoring and assessing their progress with a view to assessing how close to violence they are.
Qualitative conflict monitoring
Comprises the mass of reports, news stories, academic analyses and general information that is available about particular situations. Offers vastly more content-rich and contextual information than quantitative statistical analysis, but presents problems of noise and information overload.
Key issue is mustering the political resources to make an appropriate early warning response when a warning has been issued.
Structural factors that prevent interstate wars
- ‘Universalistic’ periods where there is a common interest in system maintenance.
- Security communities.
- Complex bonds of interdependence create a set of interlocking issue areas in which security concerns aren’t necessarily privileged over others.
- Involvement in international organizations.
- Development.
- Democracy (only if both countries are democratic).
Liberal peace
Common trade, common democracy, development and participation in international organizations and security communities.
Effects liberal peace on developing countries
- Exposure of weaker economies to international competition leads to an uneven process of development which leads to global inequality.
- Democracy may tend to legitimize one-party rule, entrench the dominance of the largest ethnic group and pose a security threat to autocratic rulers in the region.
Structural factors that prevent civil wars
- Stable governance.
- Economic development.
- Political and economic inclusiveness.
- The mitigation of horizontal inequalities.
- Protection of human rights.
Direct prevention policy options
- Official diplomacy (mediation, conciliation, peace conferences, hotlines, etc.).
- Non-official diplomacy (private mediation, problem-solving workshops, round tables, conflict resolution training, etc.).
- Peacemaking efforts by local actors (church-facilitated talks, debates between politicians, etc.).
Prevention of conflict recurrence
Main factor of recurrence is political exclusion, so inclusive settlements form the main way of avoiding recurrence. Strong institutions are negatively associated with civil war recurrence, so strengthening legal and political institutions is a good way of getting countries out of the conflict trap.
Mass atrocity
At least 5000 citizens killed intentionally.
Prevention of genocide and mass atrocities
Many of the mass atrocities have occured within armed conflicts, so measures for preventing conflict should also prevent mass atrocities.
Structural prevention of genocide and mass atrocities
Includes efforts to reduce level of exclusiveness, improve governance, reduce discrimination and protect security and human rights.
Direct prevention of genocide and mass atrocities
Includes fact-finding missions, envoy and support for indigenous efforts for conflict resolution, responding with local and international police forces for investigations and arrests, and peacekeepers for protection in extreme cases.
Main point Chenoweth and Gallagher
We should do more research about nonviolent resistance.
3 reasons why conflict scholars have largely ignored nonviolent resistance:
- Violence is often viewed as a more pressing and troubling global problem.
- Nonviolent resistance may be viewed as extraordinarily difficult to measure empirically.
- There has been a trend in studies of conflict to equate the word ‘nonviolent’ with ‘passive’, ‘weak’, ‘pacifist’, or ‘activist’.
Nonviolence
The eschewing of violent or armed action because of a moral, philosophical, or principled commitment.
Practitioners are often engaged in instrumental action as well, but remaining committed to nonviolent means is as important to them for moral reasons as ‘winning’ the conflict is.
Civil resistance
Transgressive and non-institutional, whereas a variety of actor strategies may be nonviolent, legal, and institutionally sanctioned or recognized, such as participating in elections or engaging in government-sanctioned protest. A key characteristic of civil resistance is its organization, coordination, and purposive quality, in which civilians bring to bear certain methods toward a particular political, social, or economic goal.
Effective preventive strategies rest on 3 principles:
- Early reaction to immediate signs of trouble.
- Comprehensive balanced approach to alleviate the pressures that enable violent conflict.
- Extend effort to resolve underlying root causes of violence.
