Week 3 - Peacebuilding Flashcards
four peace theories
how we define peace determines how we build peace
Peace as the absence of war… just war theory (VITORIA)
Peace as the absence of violence… democratic peace theory (RICHMOND)
Peace as development… liberal peace framework (RICHMOND)
Peace as individual agency… grassroots peacebuilding (LEDERACH)
peacekeeping (galtung)
The idea of having a third party to mitigate conflict
Usually, this type of peacekeeping does not apply to a superpower… they also have the power to be their peacekeeping
ex: colonization
Vertical warfare (contesting/opposing domination) from the bottom up for liberation: A state-based conflict between a government and a non-governmental party.
ex: foreign intervention
peacemaking (galtung)
Horizontal warfare (cannot be explained in terms of domination)… A non-state conflict between two organized armed groups, neither of which is a government.
Usually war between two relatively equal nations… no power struggle… ex: cold war
Third-party involvement
They believe in peace agreements but the actors disintegrate the agreement and the cycle repeats itself.
peacebuilding (galtung)
Galtung is very critical of peace because he thinks there is no structure
WHAT IS THE STRUCTURE OF PEACE?
Peacebuilding is the structure of peace that Galtung created FATHER OF PEACE STUDIES
galtung’s 6 structures of peace
Mneumonic: Every Egg Sees Large Semen
Equity
No party be exploited
Entropy
Not just governments participate, but a broad variety of people, institutions take place
People to people interactions
Not just between states but also at the grassroots level
Symbiosis
High level of interdependence
Structure of peace has to emphasize the need for relationships between states, peoples and nations
Broad scope
Large domain
More than just two or three parties to the exchange
State representative, civil society representative, international organization
Multiple people who are part of this peacebuilding
Superstructure
Communities like the European Union or NAFTA that holds all elements together
elites and nonelites and peacebuilding
Peacebuilding recognizes that non-elites are not just subjects of peace, but agents of peace.
As agents of peace, non-elites bring an infrastructure to peacebuilding.
The fundamental element is that through the individuals, the structure of peace gets embedded with cultural norms and is contextualized. However, elites cannot do this because they are too removed from the local issue.
The infrastructure of peacebuilding is bounded by the state.
Jean-Paul Lederach on peacebuilding
His work is the first in the line of peacebuilding where we get to see not just the agency of the individual but also how critical this agency is.
He is a Mennonite: antiwar
He was very focused on conflict transformation: how we help societies transition from conflict to peacebuilding
Very focused on grassroots mobilization… the concept of moral imagination: is the infrastructure of peace where we get individuals to become agents and not just subjects of peace
His argument: we need to put crisis intervention in the context of time which is the context of peacebuilding which is the context of moral imagination.
Having a vision for the future is THE infrastructure of peace
PEACE IS RESPONDING TO AN IMMEDIATE NEED, PEACEBUILDING IS RESPONDING TO AN IMMEDIATE FUTURE NEED
Without peacebuilding’s focus on the future, it won’t be sustainable
He outlines a framework that brings together the various components of peacebuilding that is responsive to the realities of contemporary conflict
In the interest of transforming a conflict, short-term efforts must be measured primarily by their long-term implications
The nested paradigm suggests that crisis responses should be seen as embedded in the need for better preparation for undertaking crisis management, and for building a capacity to deal more constructively with conflicts before they become full-blown crises
An infrastructure for peacebuilding should be understood as a process structure, which is made up of systems that maintain form over time yet have no hard rigidity of structure
The goal is not stasis, but rather the generation of continuous, dynamic, self-regenerating processes that maintain form over time and can adapt to environmental changes
How do we imagine peace in wartime? (Boulding)
- Know the past
- Gain knowledge of the cultures and aspirations of others
Galtung… peace has a structure
Not in the classic sense that peace is negotiated by states but rather assumes states as bound to the territory and technically they are still part of it
Lederach … peace has an infrastructure
Decentralizes states, and also recognizes the roles of states in peacekeeping, but he focuses on the middle range of peacekeeping
Moral imagination, a lot of the values and beliefs that get us into the conflict are the same that would get us out of it
Autessere on infrastructure of peace
every day is how we build both a structure and an infrastructure of peace
Peacebuilding is not just a moment peace agreement between states, not just a process of negotiating between parties, it is the everyday act of building a future
Speaks about how EU diplomats have been trained to analyze conflict from the top down, working with governments and national elites and this approach allows for foreign peacebuilders to run the show but this approach still remains the status quo.
The author believes the best way to understand any conflict is through immersion and participant observations.
The very concept of working at the grassroots to address tensions that may affect only a few hundred people but are connected to broader conflicts is crucial and very foreign to many UN staff.
Thus peacekeepers should start from the bottom up and work with grassroots organizations rather than pursuing the typical top-down outsider-led approach which is fundamentally flawed.
Agency vs. Structure in Reconciliation by James Hughes
Individuals have agency, but that agency is structured by the power around them (international, state, NGOs and civil society, the low level and personal)
Main argument: reconciliation theories, discourses, and practice prioritize agency over structure
Reconciliation is a form of normative theory because it is bound up with notions of peace-making, positive transformation, toleration, atonement, and harmony.
Agency and contact theory are given prominence in explanations for the major cases that are considered to be successful examples of post-conflict reconciliation and reducing societal prejudice
Contact theory informs peace processes through dialogue which can be seen as a faith-based approach to reconciliation
Developed by Allport, contact theory is a process for positively transforming race relations in the USA, and is the main conceptual frame underpinning the study of reconciliation more generally, irrespective of whether the deep cleavage is race, religion, ethnicity, or other
Contact Theory:
Contact creates a virtuous cycle of mutual respect, and shared narratives leading to a common identity, and thereby the possibilities of cooperation increase, and the potential for conflict decreases
Contact theory is the theory of humanization
The problem of contact theory is social structures
He is writing based on the experiences of northern Ireland and specifically the segregation of societies
The Dissimilarity Index
Determines percentage of residents that would have to move from one neighborhood to another so the proportion of each ethnic group would be equal to the proportion in the city
Democratic Peace Theory
Posits that democratic nations do not go to war with each other
