Considering conflict
by Judith Large, Concept Paper for First Health as a Bridge for Peace Consultative Meeting, Les Pensières, Annecy, 30-31 October 1997
The objective of world society theorists was to discover, in the literature of social science, ideas which would enable the international relations discipline to view conflict much as the physician regards pain. 'In medicine, to suppress pain with sedatives or painkillers is not enough; the main therapeutic effort must be directed at the underlying disorder. So, in the world society, the forcible conflict-suppressing devices so long employed power balancing, peacekeeping, hostile intervention would need to be replaced with other procedures which would not only control conflict symptoms, but also develop the capacity of the world society to become a self-regulating system capable of avoiding destructive conflicts’ (Banks, 1984, p. 20).
This paper is intended to generate discussion and debate on the relevance of mainstream conflict analysis to current policy questions facing the WHO Health as a Bridge for Peace (Consultation document 1996) working group.
1. The problem: current context
It will seek to offer a brief conceptual framework including 1) Current context and need; 2) Working definitions and typologies of conflict; 3) Stages of progression or cycles of conflict; 4) social and behavioural dynamics, and 5) mechanisms of intervention and engagement. Of necessity this will be a concise overview; it cannot claim to be a comprehensive study, and is at best introductory.
In its Human Development Report for 1994 the United Nations Development Programme recorded only three wars between states in the period between 1989 and 1992, while documenting seventy-nine instances of intra-state conflicts over the same period, many of which had been underway for a decade or more. (UNDP, 1994, p47) . In what the Carnegie Commission (1996) refers to as the 'Problem of Deadly Conflict', (also increasingly referred to as 'complex political emergencies') wars are fought with conventional weapons and strategies of ethnic annihilation and population explosion. The proliferation of small arms and land mines coupled with low intensity 'dirty war' tactics result in a staggering estimate of 95% non-combatant or civilian casualties (ODA, 1996). Wars of state formation or goals of 'national interest' has been superseded by political violence linked to the disintegration of states; it has been suggested that in the post cold war 'systemic crisis' violence has become an important instrument for economic and political survival (Duffield, 1994, p.38) The implications for governments, international organisations, development agencies and the relief and humanitarian NGO sectors are grave (Minear and Weiss, 1995, Cahill, ed. 1993, Harris 1995, Esman and Telhami, 1995), giving rise to calls for organisational adaptation and policy review (Adams and Bradbury, 1994).
Duffield (ibid.) went so far as to state: 'The UN and the international aid apparatus were shaped to a more certain world. They are now strained to the limit in the face of new complex emergencies. characterised by unprecedented levels of abject poverty, political insecurity, conflict, state disintegration and population displacement.' More recently WHO writers draw our attention to the problems of politics and 'difficult pockets' of civil strife (Aluwihare 1997), and to multi-level manifestations of violence. (Health for All 1997).
1.1 The need: physical
The transfer of war to the internal civilian arena generates acute physical and medical dislocation for entire populations.
1.2 The need: strategic
The crippling of community health provision, injuries due to attack and ordnance, breakdown in basic sanitation and disease prevention, nutritional deficiencies, increased mortality, trauma, and physical impairment need no further elaboration here. The True Cost of Conflict (Cranna, ed. 1994) documents the health and related costs of seven contemporary conflicts. Zwi and Ugalde (1989) found a strong correlation between infant mortality rates and the level of GNP devoted to military expenditure.
WHO has contributed to peace processes in different areas including Mozambique, Central America, Afghanistan, Bulgaria, former Yugoslavia, Iraq and Rwanda. (WHO 1996) In some cases cease-fires have been temporarily brokered for medical reasons, such as immunisation as in El Salvador 1985-1989, Lebanon 1987 (Reid in Cahill, ed. 1993) and Afghanistan, Uganda, Sudan and the Philippines (Peters, 1996).
2. Conflict: definition and typology
Major shifts in international response to humanitarian crisis have included the adoption of negotiated access programmes (as in Operation Lifeline Sudan and in Iraqi Kurdistan), the forging of IGO/NGO partnerships and belief in a 'relief-to-development' continuum of operations.
2.1 Considering violence
'Conflict' is all too generic a word, and the starting point for discussion is a necessary clarification of terms and meanings. As a situation where parties pursue opposing goals, conflict may entail but need not equal violence. As a creative tension or dynamic, conflict may be an inherent factor in processes of change, in which case our concern is for how conflicts are carried out. Organised violence in pursuit of goals has massive social costs.
Conflict analysis seeks to understand the contributing factors and processes which give rise to war, genocide, or armed attack. It shifts emphasis from the 'event' of violence to the processes and influences which bring it about. Appendix I introduces a holistic or 'systems' view as developed by Chris Mitchell.
Personal violence is generally taken to mean the infliction of physical or psychological harm. Beating, hitting, torture, killing, solitary confinement and brainwashing are all forms of personal violence. Collective or organised violence takes many forms among which is war.
A sample typology of organised violence is offered below. (2.3).
The term structural violence is used when damage to an individual or group occurs because of an unequal distribution of resources (or access to them) in a given society. Johan Galtung made this distinction, noting that people experienced violence in their lives even when their societies are not technically at 'war'. The absence of personal violence he called 'negative peace'. The absence of both personal and structural violence he called 'positive peace'.
Structural violence is not the same thing as inequality, nor is it 'relative deprivation'; a condition when 'poverty' and 'enough' are defined according to what someone else has. It is possible for members of a given community or society to live in different material ways, even to be unequal in status, but still to thrive and grow and find creative self-expression. For structural violence to exist, damaging inequalities are the result of relations between groups.
Structural violence is controversial because it rejects traditional notions of 'war' and 'peace'. Thus, although the intensive combat of the 1989/90 Gulf War against Iraq is formally over, the advocate of this idea looks at Baghdad's impoverished population, destroyed buildings, and lack of sanitation/hygiene three years later and does not call society there 'peaceful'. South Africa under apartheid would be another extreme example of structural violence.
Peace then, is more than the absence of war, just as health is more than the absence of disease. Peace is a condition is which individuals or groups do no damage to each other and can develop their potential in growth, creative forms of productivity, or change.
Some analysts refer to 'negative peace' as a condition where there is an absence of war or acute collective violence, but conditions of extreme deprivation or repression.
2.2 Hot and cold conflict
Hot conflict refers to the outbreak of violence, heated exchanges, riots or organised armed attack. Cold conflict on the other hand could be a rigid social situation of latent tensions, as negative peace above.