Practical guidance for anyone who wants to build peace
Among the key features of successful peacebuilding, one often stands out. This is that contributions to peace are made in almost any walk of life, and usually by people who do not see themselves first and foremost as ‘peacebuilders’. They may be politicians crafting legislation to help reduce economic imbalances in their society, diplomats negotiating to restore international relations and overcome a crisis, teachers building relationships between children of different ethnic or religious groups, or members of host communities taking the trouble to welcome and integrate refugees fleeing a disaster. There are thousands of ways – often commonplace ways – people contribute to reducing tensions and improving trust and collaboration among and between people, and between people and those who govern them – the essence of peacebuilding.
But how do people wishing to make a contribution to peace know how to get started? Often they either have to make it up for themselves, or else they decide not to get involved after all, for want of some basic guidance, and they and their communities are the worse for it.
Building Peace Together, a Practical Resource, was published by the Quaker Council for European Affairs (QCEA) last month, and it was designed with just this challenge in mind. After a short introduction setting out some of the basic concepts of peacebuilding, it goes on to provide simple, accessible and practical guidance under 12 headings: diplomacy, democracy & politics, justice, security, communications & media, arts & culture, education, business, trade & economics, infrastructure & planning, agriculture & the environment, and healthcare.
For each topic, it explains some of the ways people can help build peace. Under Education, for example, this includes designing curricula that encourage critical thinking, or which include an inclusive and tolerant narrative of national history. Under Planning, it includes the need for urban planning to be done in a consultative way that builds fruitful relationships between citizens and the authorities, and for urban environments that minimise segregation and isolation. And under Media it suggests that responsible and truthful reporting can avoid inflaming tensions and even help to reduce them.
What’s also great is that each chapter provides specific practical examples, which hopefully will inspire non-expert readers wanting to give it a go. Each chapter also sets out some caveats and limits: for example, the need for thorough background research and thorough training for journalists, along with a reminder that politicians may resist or try to counter attempts to use the media for peacebuilding. This is important, because although all of us absolutely can contribute to peacebuilding within our own spheres of influence, we also need to understand where the risks and limits lie.
Another feature of Building Peace Together that stands out is its essential humility. The world is unfortunately awash with exhortations and commands: what we should or must do… By contrast – and perhaps this is in keeping with Quaker culture, or perhaps it’s simply a clever tactical communications approach, or perhaps a little of both – this book is careful not to be too sure of itself. For the truth is, although peacebuilding is usually successful, there are no prescriptions: each situation has to be taken on its on terms, and a suitable approach defined accordingly. Hence, the handbook suggests approaches, rather than prescribing a clear course of action. To take just one example, under Justice:
“If victims hear the testimony of aggressors, and have the truth of war crimes recorded, it may increase understanding of how violations came about, creating a basis on which future violations can be prevented.”
Note the use of the word “may”, reflecting that the authors are confident of their ground, but are responsible enough to know that the line of cause and effect in social change and peacebuilding is seldom a straight one, and that – to adapt a military maxim – no plan survives contact with the real world. Hence, they are offering the intelligent reader some decent clues and well-informed broad guidance, while quite rightly leaving it up to him or her to work out the right thing to in their particular circumstances.
The book is being translated into Arabic, Russian and French, and executive summaries are already available in Dutch, French, German and Russian. While the document is free to download, and is produced under a Creative Commons licence, I sincerely hope the QCEA has a sizeable budget for printing and distribution, too. Because this is the kind of document that ought to be physically available: in libraries, and on the desks of civil servants, business people, NGO staff, international agencies and – yes – even politicians, all over the world. Indeed, if I’m allowed a cheeky suggestion, anyone with a few hundred dollars or a printing press to spare, and who wishes to make a contribution to peace, might even consider offering to expand the print and distribution run.
This welcome practical handbook represents a genuine step forward for peace, and joins other important manuals such as Responding to Conflict’s still excellent Working with Conflict as a major resource for all those interested in making a contribution. Its importance cannot be overestimated. Congratulations to the Quaker Council of European Affairs for this initiative, and to Olivia Caeymaex, Darijn Dilia Zwart and Terri Beswick, who wrote it. I humbly suggest that all those in a position to do so, help spread the word.
Promoting collaboration between people, not just organisations
This article was included in the February 2018 newsletter of INTRAC – the International NGO Training and Research Centre – where I am a trustee. INTRAC believes, as I do, that when people come together and organise in ways that are effective, sustainable and legitimate, they make the world a better place. INTRAC’s staff and associates provide high quality support to help civil society across the world challenge poverty and inequality, empowering people to gain greater control over their own future.
INTRAC, Peace Direct, Instituto de Comunicación y Desarollo (ICD), and Y Care International organised a webinar during the CIVICUS International Civil Society Week last November. Participants from across the world discussed responsible partnerships between international and indigenous civil society, which clearly remains a challenging ethical and practical issue.
The distinction between indigenous and international civil society is important. People from any context should be in the lead when framing the problems most in need of solutions there, and guiding international counterparts in identifying where and how to offer support. But external actors in many places still call too many of the shots, and – as the webinar report just released shows – changing this will need a sustained effort by all concerned.
The CIVICUS event led me to reflect further on this. I have been a volunteer or staff member in international development NGOs since 1985. I’ve always been conscious of my status as an outsider in other people’s countries, and tried to calibrate my behaviour accordingly – not always as successfully as I’d have liked. But I’m also a little uncomfortable with how ‘North’ and ‘South’ have come to be used in the context of this discussion: with North being code for outsiders with limited legitimacy, and South for those with more legitimacy.
A simple definition of civil society is when two or more people work together peacefully to promote or prevent something about which they jointly care. This can be short term – a group of traders mobilising to stop a fellow trader being harassed by border officials – or a longer-term initiative to advocate for a change in agricultural policy, or a women’s savings and loans group. It can be local or much wider in scope: protecting this stretch of river from pollution, or preventing global accumulation of greenhouse gases. It can be something overtly political, linked to protecting and expanding freedom of expression, or may have a simpler, social purpose: my local poetry society, for example.
If this is a useful definition, it’s one that allows for people from different contexts to work together. This is the basis of my trusteeship and support for INTRAC: the notion that collaboration across international boundaries can be beneficial. But international development norms can get in the way. Words like partnership, capacity-building, strategy, exit and sustainability conjure up images of organisations, not activists.
Looking back at my own experiences, it’s working with people I most recall – activists defined by their passion, competencies, values and actions, not by their employer. So in considering how to improve cooperation between international and indigenous civil society, I think we should focus as much on maximising collaboration between people, as between organisations. While it remains self-evident that sustainable solutions are normally those emerging locally, rather than those brought in by outsiders, this does not mean that outsiders have nothing to contribute.
To be sure, collaboration must be done ethically and responsibly. Collaboration must be freely entered into by all. Organisations must still define and enforce codes of quality and conduct for their members, staff or volunteers, and provide them with protection and practical resources. But we do need to remind ourselves, when considering big picture notions of strategy, sustainability and the like, that in the end, civil society is people coming together to work on something they jointly care about. We therefore need to ask how leaders in organisations can liberate their people to collaborate first and foremost as fellow activists, rather than as representatives of their organisations.
What’s it all about, Oxfam?
We should seize this opportunity to re-examine the future of foreign aid.
(First published on, and helpfully edited by Transformation, 20th February 2018)
The public heat generated by Oxfam’s scandal is focused on three issues. First, the absolute importance of protecting vulnerable people—project beneficiaries and collaborators, staff and volunteers; second, accusations of hubris, arrogance and self-serving behaviour by aid agencies; and third, the bigger questions of whether and how aid makes a difference. How are these connected?
The mechanisms required to protect vulnerable people from being preyed on by staff who abuse their positions of power (in any sector) are well-known: more care and better vetting in recruitment, including a mandatory phone call to previous employers; more open whistle-blowing policies; better induction and training of staff; an emphasis on clearly articulated and modelled ethics; and a commitment by managers to act swiftly and decisively, and steer away from impunity.
Although the aid sector can and should work collectively on an informal basis to strengthen these mechanisms and attributes, I think it’s a mistake to establish global regulations or a mandatory database of international development workers, because the sector isn’t really a single entity in the way that (perhaps) medicine is, and because of the messy, unpredictable, international nature of aid. How , for example, is a young woman in the Philippines supposed to register as an aid worker before the disaster which leads to her recruitment even happens? I also fear that external regulations can be the enemy of the proper internalisation and ownership of ethics.
On the second issue of self-serving corporate behaviour and hubris, there is clearly a problem, but it isn’t quite as simple as portrayed in the media. Aid agencies have long backed themselves into a corner by claiming in their marketing and fundraising that they have ‘the solution’ to poverty, and the public, despite being far too intelligent to think that poverty can be so easily ‘solved,’ have willingly gone along with this narrative.
When a willing buyer (the donor) and a willing seller (the charity) are both intentionally vague about the product they’re trading, they create a problem of accountability. So a flawed accountability loop has developed: you give me your money and I’ll take care of the problem while you continue to live your privileged lives. The seller is thus encouraged to create and sustain a narrative in which those who give money are making a difference through the charity’s actions—and to go to enormous lengths to protect this narrative when the real world threatens to undermine it.
Hence, a narrative has emerged of western charities ‘saving’ and even ‘transforming’ non-western lives. The narrative is an integral part of the model, so it can only be changed by disrupting that model. The interest generated by the current Oxfam story gives us an opportunity to do so, but that means looking at the third question: whether and how aid makes a difference.
Let’s divide aid into two categories for the sake of simple analysis: emergency aid and development aid. If providing help in natural or man-made emergencies is by no means easy, the task is relatively simple to define. There is a need to mobilise quickly, save and stabilise lives, and provide basic services to sustain and restore those who have been affected, so that they can rebuild their lives.
This should, of course, be carried out with all due care and attention so as to avoid the kinds of unintended negative consequences illustrated by the current scandal and described by Matthew Green in an excellent article in the Financial Times. It is also increasingly understood that conceptualising and preparing for post-disaster reconstruction should start as soon as possible, with the idea of “building back better” to create a new, more resilient baseline in terms of disaster-prevention and -preparedness, human rights fulfilment, fairness, empowerment and governance. This takes us into the realm of development aid.
Here, we have a real problem. To explore it we first need to separate development from development aid. The word ‘development’ is thrown around as if we all know and agree on what it means; all too often it is used as shorthand for aid. Orwell was right that jargon inhibits clear-eyed analysis, so let’s replace ‘development’ with ‘progress.’
As soon as we do this, the problem becomes clearer. Perhaps with the exception of ‘religion’, ‘progress’ is the most disputed concept in the world. It’s what politics seldom agrees on, whether ideologically (left and right) or on an issue by issue basis, as in how best to provide health care, for example, or whether to subsidise farming, or if it’s worth destroying hundreds of acres of forest to mine potash, iron or gold; or perhaps even whether to leave the European Union. So questions of development are political questions.
Should a country like Uganda use its limited fiscal resources to provide a mediocre quality of primary schooling to all children free of charge, or should it focus on shepherding a smaller number of brighter children through a better education system so they can play a leading role in politics, business and public service, and thus build a platform for further progress? How should a poor rural community allocate its farming land—only to those of the dominant language group or also to those who have migrated there from other districts? Should daughters as well as sons inherit land? Is stability more likely to improve children’s prospects, or should communities opt for a more risky process of transformative change?
These are not primarily questions about aid. They are typical, political questions about progress. And like most political questions they don’t have simple, normative answers. Nevertheless, they are important questions that do need answers, and which the political system in a country like Uganda may choose to answer in ways that people in other countries might disagree with, absent as they are from Ugandan politics and social dynamics.
The challenge for outsiders therefore—whether the UN, western governments or foreign NGOs —is how to play a legitimate political role without overstepping the boundaries of interference. This is probably hardest for western governments, who at one time, for example, were funding half the Ugandan Government’s budget.
Legitimacy is perhaps a little simpler for foreign NGOs, at least in principle, because they operate on a much smaller scale and with less power to abuse. Nevertheless, it’s a critical challenge they must contend with. It’s hard to see how most Haitians would view Oxfam—and by extension other foreign NGOs—as having much legitimacy after what has come out in the past two weeks.
But legitimacy is a subtle and complex notion; it’s not just about interpersonal behaviour and respect. What’s welcomed from foreign NGOs by local activists might be condemned as interference by their government—as current debates in Russia demonstrate. I once asked a Ugandan activist if the international organisation I represented could legitimately engage in political advocacy there. His answer was simple: pick the right issues and be effective, and you’ll be legitimate. So, for him at least, relevance and effectiveness confer legitimacy.
The more foreign NGOs see themselves as activist agents of specific, contextually relevant change (and not just as service deliverers), the more they’ll need to recruit leaders—preferably citizens of the country concerned—who see themselves as activists too, within the fabric of indigenous civil society and politics. But they should go further. Challenging the status quo implies an element of risk, so to increase their legitimacy foreign NGOs also need to be ready to take risks, including the risk they will be closed down by the authorities even if this disrupts their organisational interests.
Historians dispute the process of development or progress just as much as planners and politicians. So even from a vantage point in the future, it will be hard to know how and why change happened in a country like Uganda, and even harder to know how change will happen —and therefore how best foreign NGOs might contribute. So the Oxfams of the world must take an active part in, and support local groups to take part in, debates about these matters within civil society, holding up their own ideas and plans to scrutiny, and sharing lessons learned to further enrich the conversation. This can have the added benefit of helping to expand the scope of public debate and politics from questions of representation to questions of participation—to the policies governments should follow and the visions of the future around which society might cohere.
One way donors can help in this process is by moving away from models of funding which assume that cause and effect can be predetermined with confidence, and that consultation and political engagement can be carried out on the cheap. The same applies to Oxfam and its public narratives: by creating and sustaining the pretence that it knows what is needed, how to provide it, and how its interventions will work without unintended consequences, the aid sector risks denying itself the posture and resources—and perhaps even the legitimacy—required to contribute to progress where it can.
Thus, Michael Edwards is right that it isn’t gratuitous to link the Oxfam story to wider questions about aid. Indeed, surely we should seize this opportunity to do so.
Is peacebuilding just good development?
When writing International Alert’s report Redressing the balance last year, I shared the draft with colleagues for comments. When one colleague returned it, one of her main comments was that the report needed to say more clearly that peacebuilding is “just good development” in fragile and conflict-affected places.
This rang a bell for me. When I’d joined Alert back in 2004, peacebuilding was still a relatively distant cousin in the international development family, and many of my new colleagues were fiercely protective of its special status. Some, I felt, were even a little precious and esoteric about it. Whereas I was of the view that we were largely applying familiar development programming interventions: dialogue, capacity-building and training, participatory research, advocacy, knowledge transfer, solidarity, supporting local activism, underlying causes analysis, institutional strengthening, and so on, but with a clear intent to improve cohesion and conflict resolution, rather than – for example – to reduce poverty or improve schooling, as in the mainstream development community whence I had lately come. Certainly our desired outcomes largely fell under the same broad headings of changes in knowledge and awareness, and in individual and institutional behaviour.
Indeed, I remember writing an article then, for publication in a now-defunct journal, which argued that the human security and livelihood security frameworks – then both still in vogue – were almost the same, in that both took the individual citizen’s perspective as the starting point for trying to understand what needed to change in order to increase resilience, but applied a holistic and structure-based analytical framework to map opportunities and obstacles. Later I co-led the team that articulated Alert’s Programme Framework – its peacebuilding methodology – and we borrowed unashamedly from livelihood security ideas. So the peacebuilding and development projects were certainly related: cousins, perhaps, if not so distant after all.
A key difference between peacebuilding and development programming, it seemed, was not so much the issues one looked at through the analytical lens (governance, economic participation, services, relationships, security, justice, gender and so forth), but the reason one was looking in the first place. If the mainstream development project was looking for obstacles to, opportunities for and drivers of sustained welfare and economic improvement, peacebuilders were looking at obstacles to, opportunities for and drivers of sustained and peaceful coexistence. Of course, they found many of the same things to work on: good governance was beneficial – essential, in fact – for both; and while peace was good for development, development was also very good for peace.
So, are peacebuilding and development very close cousins, or are they in fact the same thing? I kind of agree with my colleague that peacebuilding is “just good development practice” in places where conflict and fragility are dominant issues, simply because there seems no moral or logical justification for not emphasising peace as the main desired impact in any concept of progress there. And progress, surely, is the most appropriate synonym in normal language, for that jaded and overused jargon word: development. Nevertheless, there are, it seems to me, three things which continue typically to mark out and differentiate peacebuilding approaches from development approaches:
- Goals. When the higher goal or aim is defined explicitly in terms of peace, this affects programming choices. These may at first sight seem the same as development approaches. But there will be subtle differences. For example, a peacebuilding programme focused on economic development will promote the kind of economic development that reduces grievances, and increases good relationships, rather than merely one that improves the livelihoods of a particular set of people or aims to increase GDP.
- Vision-based, vs problem-solving. If development programming is still typically based on articulating and then solving a given and well-comprehended problem – why girls are not attending school, for example – peacebuilding more often requires a vision-based approach. This is because, while there is common agreement on what peace looks, tastes, smells and feels like, less is known about how to reach it. Mainly because the history of peaceful places is disputed, and because the pathways to peace are not based on clear linear relationships between the many variables involved. Transforming conflict into peace is a wicked problem. Using a vision-based approach, peacebuilders may determine the outcomes they seek – perhaps improved trust among people, or between people and those who govern them – and use tentative, iterative approaches which they regularly recalibrate, to do so. In other words, the type of approach appropriate to wicked problems. Not that development programming couldn’t – even shouldn’t – adopt this approach, but typically it does not.
- Appreciative inquiry. If development is still focused on overcoming problems and obstacles, the better starting point for vision-based peacebuilding is rather appreciative inquiry: what peaceful mechanisms already exist, and how can they be reinforced?
There is no reason for mainstream development activists not to follow these same approaches. But typically, they don’t. If my colleague and I are right that peacebuilding is “just good development” in conflict-affected and fragile places, then I’d argue that in such places, they should.
Ethical challenges facing mining companies?
Last week a friend who knows I have spent a fair amount of time working on mining/oil and with mining/oil companies in recent years asked me what are some of the major societal challenges facing mining companies in the next few years. My response to her question led me to write this blog post. I should say that much of what I’ve written is informed and borrowed from what I’ve heard others say. So little of this represents my own original thinking. I thought of five responses to her question.
Fairness/unfairness
In the background is the question which is often wrongly diagnosed as one of trust: a lack of trust in mining companies (along with other institutions, to be sure.) This interpretation seems like a classic example of transactional miners interpreting the problem through the lens of their own interest, as in: “we need the public’s trust, to be able to make money, so how can we restore it?” Just another version of the old, ought-to-be-discredited Social Licence to Operate idea.
Of course there is a trust deficit, but why, and what is the bigger issue? Fairness is a more useful lens to use. Whether you look locally, sub-nationally, nationally or internationally, there is a real problem of seemingly growing inequality – not just inequality of income, but inequality of wealth and opportunity.
People can live with a lot of inequality. It’s normal. What gets people’s goat is not having less, but unfairly having not enough – the idea that they or their people are not getting a fair slice – and in the worst case, losing their dignity. Increasingly people are driven by a frustration that they are being treated unfairly. They can see it first hand when they compare their circumstances with others nearby. And they can see on their phones and tv screens how much better off are others who have no more right to opportunity than they. And they (rightly) blame the institutions for that. Mining companies are not only institutions in their own right, but they are a fundamental and influential part of the institutional rules of the game which are manifestly unfair in people’s eyes – a key feature of the institutions whose success appears to be predicated on maintaining an unfair status quo.
There is no simple answer to this. Indeed, it’s part of what’s sometimes known as a ‘wicked problem‘ – one which defies accurate description, is hard to problemetise, let alone solve. But a key to addressing and unlocking this issue – which is part of a set of wicked problems linked to politics, demography, climate change, history, education, governance, luck, etc – is at least to recognise it.
Corporate citizenship – a common stake
This then is the background against which to consider the role of mining companies as corporate citizens. Citizenship can be defined by the nature of a person’s relations with his/her fellow citizens, and with the state. Companies wishing to be good corporate citizens – as they should, and as many already claim they are – therefore need to consider their relationship with fellow citizens. First and foremost, companies need to move away from seeing others as “their stakeholders”, towards seeing them as “fellow stakeholders”: fellows with a common stake in a future which is prosperous and sustainable in terms of the environment, society, health, security, justice, etc. This is a major shift for mining companies, who still tend to see others in transactional terms: what do I need to do for you, so you’ll do what I need you to do for me….
Secondly, the point about the relationship with the state. What does a good citizen do, vis a vis the state? S/he abides by the law, helps out, and contributes to sustainable progress in society. But in liberal democracies in particular, s/he also votes, pays taxes, and desires, campaigns, and lobbies for good government policies: not just government policies which affect his or her immediate interests, but those in line with his or her interpretation of society more broadly. And s/he holds government to account. So enlightened mining companies – which are often among the largest sources of government revenue, and around 40% across Africa – should presumably be taking steps to consult with others and determine what ‘good government policy and investment’ looks like in their operating environments, and using their considerable skills and access to lobby for those. This takes companies out of their comfort zone, but following one’s values and principles often does that, no?
The fiscal element is particularly important here because – as Paul Collier has written – mining royalties represent drawing down the capital or the patrimony of society, and they can only be drawn down once. Collier’s idea, I think, was they should therefore be treated as a special capital fund and only used for capital investment: i.e. an investment in making a better future. That means it’s even more essential that they are spent on only the best ideas, arrived at through only the best, well-informed consultation processes.
Of course its wrong to recommend that giant mining companies should have a voice commensurate with the revenues they remit: that’s a recipe for bad policy, and anyway, a citizen only has one vote. Exercising this citizen role requires a careful approach. But – recognising that there is no monopoly on good ideas, much less the right idea – maybe one of the ways for miners to contribute would be to use their sophistication and wealth and access to support and facilitate well informed consultation processes to help other citizens make up their minds; fund eclectic social policy think tanks, and so on …..
Fragile states
There’s a particular issue for companies operating in fragile or conflict-affected countries, where abudant sources of minable minerals seem to lie. Governance is inadequate there, and the minerals sector is frequently linked to instability, corruption and conflict. Yet natural resources governance is seldom addressed directly in civil war peace agreements – hence the problems recur. This is a major area for companies – especiallty the better companies – take responsibility for helping address. Another very “wicked problem”.
Kramer’s and Porter’s ‘shared value’ concept is the idea of “Policies and operating practices that enhance the competitiveness of a company while simultaneously advancing the economic and social conditions in the communities in which it operates. Shared value creation focuses on identifying and expanding the connections between societal and economic progress.” (M. E. Porter and M. R. Kramer, Creating shared value, Harvard Business Review, 2011). Surely in a fragile state, “social progress” includes – indeed substantially means – reducing the risk of conflict. So mining companies, as corporate citizens who believe in shared value, have to ask, how can they explicitly invest in progress towards peace? (I touched on this question at a much broader level in a published report in 2015: Peace through prosperity.)
Stewardship
There is increasing (legal and moral) recognition that the supply chain is part of the company’s zone of responsibility – for human rights, for example. But downstream also matters. E.g. to me, a mining company should not sell Uranium to nuclear industries operating in societies without a culture of transparency and challenge. We saw what happened in Japan with the Tsunami. Who knows what the scenario would have been in a more open society, but we can say there’s a good chance that safety planning would have been better if there had been a culture of openness and challenge in the sector – something conspicuously absent in nuclear industry in Japan, where even politicians were kept at bay. Uranium is relatively easy to consider in this respect. Quantities are small, and it is anyway subject to extremely detailed and pervasive international tracking systems.
It’s much harder to consider downstream stewardship when we think about the kinds of materials which are commoditised, but surely staff and shareholders of a mining company should at least want to know if the materials they sell are being used – for example – to make weapons, or build torture prisons, or build shopping malls or bridges or schools, and know how they feel about it, as a first ethical step. Coal of course brings another dimension to this story, in an era of dangerous pollution and climate change …..
Automation
Finally, ever since a mining company proudly played me its cartoon video of the fully automated mine, about 5 years ago – a scenario which it and other companies continue to work towards – I have been worried about this. How do you “sit” within society, when your wealth is being created by digging and exporting raw materials elsewhere without even providing many jobs? I don’t know the answer but it will have an impact on the “corporate citizenship” issue above… especially in fragile places….
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I’ve written before on this blog about the importance that companies with an inherently long view of things take their responsibilities very seriously. When you think about it, the major institutions in society are failing structurally to take a long view: democratic governments because voters don’t ask them to; undemocratic governments because their main interest is maintaining power for its own sake; most companies because neither consumers nor their all-too-fleeting shjareholders care enough to ask them to; and the major religious institutions frequently seem more interested in either the life hereafter or compliance with very specific individual and family norms and behaviours. So – strangely, perhaps – we must look to the insurance companies, pension funds and natural resources companies – especially forestry and mining who almost by definition have a long term stake – to take their leadership seriously.
The root causes of what? How root causes analysis can get in the way of peacebuilding
Peacebuilders often say we need to address the root causes of conflict, rather than just the symptoms. They are right, of course. Treating only the symptoms means conflicts remain unresolved, and violence will likely recur. But the language of root causes, while useful – essential, even – if wielded well, can also be unhelpful and misleading.
Root causes analysis has its origins in the field of transport safety and accident investigation. This makes good sense as there is no point finding road accidents are caused by inattentive truck drivers if their inattentiveness is due to weariness resulting from unsafe shift patterns, poor recruitment techniques, or unergonomic lorry cabs. These root causes can be addressed relatively easily, and clearly have the potential to deliver safety improvements. But in conflict and peacebuilding analysis, identifying the root causes of conflict can sometimes lead us too far away from what can readily be addressed.
It is of course essential for peacebuilders to understand the underlying causes of conflict as best they can. Otherwise they’ll have an incomplete picture of things, and may inadvertently make things worse by reinforcing a conflict cause they had not seen or understood. A conflict between two ethnic groups may seem on the surface to be about identity, when in fact it is at an underlying level about access to land and economic opportunity. Knowing that, allows peacebuilders to engage members of both ethnic groups in developing solutions geared to improving their access to economic opportunity, and thus potentially contribute to a sustainable peace by removing one of the underlying causes of the conflict, and allowing both sides to meet their needs and aspirations, without undermining those of the other side.
Things are always more complex than that, and understanding the web of underlying causes can not only help third parties identify possible solutions, it can also be a useful participatory peacebuilding technique. Engaging the conflict parties themselves in a careful exercise to describe the web of interconnected root causes of their conflict, can help them take a step back from their own assumptions about what is at stake, see that the picture is more complex – and sometimes identify common purpose with the other side, they might not otherwise have been able to articulate so readily.
How deeply should we dig?
But there are two ways in which I’ve seen root causes analysis can get in the way: by identifying insoluble problems, and thus unwittingly creating an idea that peaceful solutions aren’t possible, hence reinvigorating the call for violence; and by reinforcing a skewed framing of the problem.
In an example of the first issue, the root causes of the various ongoing conflicts in the middle east, include unresolved historical injustice, in some cases stretching back at least 1400 years, as well as more recent ones linked to the break-up of the Ottoman Empire, crass Franco-British colonialism, the Great Bitter Lake agreement, the creation of modern Israel, and so on. Knowing this is good, but root causes in history have already happened. They can’t be changed, so emphasising them can get in the way of more tractable issues, like for example understanding present day behaviours which impede trust, and working to reduce these.
The root causes of what?
Even more importantly, a focus on the causes of conflict tempts peacebuilders always to see conflict resolution – resolving or addressing the root causes of conflict – as their core goal. It guides them to frame the problematique in terms of unresolved conflicts with a complex web of causes, and the need to address and resolve those causes. That is certainly an important aspect of peacebuilding. But it needs to be allied with an arguably more sustainable approach, which frames the challenge in terms of the inadequate capacity to anticipate, manage, mitigate and resolve conflicts – or in the jargon, an insufficiency of Positive Peace. There will always be conflicts, so it is not enough to resolve the one most in evidence today as, without the capacity to anticipate and address new conflicts, the next one will surely come along to undermine stability again.
If the challenge is thus expressed in terms of insufficient capacity to anticipate, manage, mitigate and resolve conflicts, the search for underlying causes becomes the search for why this capacity is inadequate, and how it can be reinforced – rather than merely looking for the causes of today’s conflicts.
The root causes of the lack of positive peace
Positive peace is often expressed in terms of resilient, two-way relationships of trust among and between peoples, as well as between people and those they are governed by; and by fair access to economic opportunity, security, the means of justice, and other aspects of well-being such as health, education. This generic framework gives us a map we can use to identify where opportunities for strengthening positive peace may lie, by identifying the underlying causes of low levels of positive peace, and how these might be addressed.
The positive peace lens has other advantages. First, it takes people away from the perpetual examination of their conflicts, and provides an often welcome opportunity to embrace a different challenge. This is particularly helpful in long-lasting conflicts where the causes of the conflict – and, often, the demonization of the other side – have become normalised as simply part of the way the world is, and the prevalence of conflict analysis among thought leaders displaces peacebuilding analysis. This is what has happened in the South Caucasus for example, where the conflicts which were frozen by peace agreements in the 1990s remain unresolved, and a constant trope of politics and culture which impedes development.
Another advantage is that the positive peace framework is tremendously accessible, because it is built on the main preoccupations of politics and the development sector: welfare, economic development, governance, justice and security. This makes peacebuilding open to all, rather than the domain of a narrow field of expertise. The task of peacebuilders then becomes guiding others to maximise the degree to which their policies and programmes promote fairness, and thus undermine grievances, while building trusting relationships. To widen access to jobs and political voice, and ensure all citizens are safe and have access to a decent justice system, and can continue to meet their aspirations for improving their welfare and that of their families and communities.
In conclusion then, we need to know why conflicts happen, and this means understand the underlying, as well as the more obvious causes. And it is, of course, important to try and address these where possible. But it is also important to understand why the capacity of societies to anticipate, manage, mitigate and where possible resolve conflicts is below par, and prioritise steps to improve this, and thus strengthen positive peace. Something which the UN is focused on globally in 2018, through its Sustaining Peace agenda; and something to focus on nationally and locally, everywhere, for peace to increase and be sustained.
