Turkey’s Kurdish Peace Process from a Conflict Resolution Perspective Summer 2016 Vol. 18 No.3- (original) (raw)
Post-Conflict Peacebuilding: Engaging Paradox, Paradigm, & Potential
During war and conflict, violence often becomes a frequent and thereby normal individual and group experience. To survive, individuals subjectively engage with the violently normal through appraisal processes and (re) conceptualizations of the self, others, and contextual determinations (Das et al. 2000). On the other hand, subjectivity also plays a role in the initial path to war and violence. For example, war generally results from political, economic, and institutional power enacted over individuals and groups by powerful individuals in leadership positions, followed by individuals and groups reacting in response. Whether individuals living through war and violence fall into the by-stander, elite, or opposition categories, the injuries, deprivations, and inequities caused by policy and social action can link personal, political, and societal problems. This interpersonal sharing of negative, often violent, experience moves suffering from an individual to a social experience . The idea of social suffering blurs the boundaries between the individual and the group and opens the door to the consideration of political, economic, institutional, and socio-cultural factors as dimensions of the suffering, as well as the healing, dynamic.
What kind of peace? The case of the Turkish and Kurdish peace process
2015
Past experience suggests that this unclarity about the peace process may once again open the door for brutal conflict. Turkey and the Kurds share the aim of ending their long-standing conflict. So what of the so-called peace process between the Turkish state and the PKK, especially their imprisoned leader Abdullah Ocalan? And what is the potential role of Kurdish diaspora groups in ‘peace-making’, ‘peacebuilding’ and ‘reconciliation’ processes with Turkey? I have been exploring the experiences of Kurdish individuals and families in the diaspora, specifically looking at involvement in homeland politics, conflict and peace between April 2014 and May 2015 for my research, facilitating five focus groups and securing interviews with those from different parts of Kurdistan now living in the UK and Germany. In total, my research involved 60 Kurdish adults, of whom 29 were women, and 31 were men, building on work on the Kurdish diaspora in the UK and Germany since 2008.
The Making of Peace: Processes and Agreements
Armed Conflict Survey, 2018
The term 'peace process' captures a wide range of different phenomena primarily related to the (mostly) international management of intra-state conflicts. As a label, it has been applied to processes at the end of which some form of peace had actually been achieved (such as in Northern Ireland), as well as to processes that are outright failures, including extreme cases like Rwanda where a peace agreement in 1993 became the precursor of a genocide in 1994. Between these extremes, however, a third type of peace process can be identified that would be better described as protracted, and which can take the form either of a serial failure to make a negotiated agreement last (such as the situation in South Sudan since late 2013), or of processes that are caught in more or less stable ceasefires without achieving a sustainable conflict settlement (such as Ukraine). This categorisation is admittedly crude: the great variety of actors involved, the relationships they have with each other and the types of agreements that they achieve (or not) speak to the uniqueness of each such process, but underneath the specifics of each situation, there are important commonalities that many peace processes share and that are worth exploring in an effort to understand the causes of both success and failure. Broadly defined, a peace process might be understood as the process towards a non-military solution sought by the respective parties to a conflict, often supported by international involvement. Yet the local and international commitments that are necessary to achieve durable peace are not always sincere or sustained; they can be undermined by domestic and/or third parties; and they may suffer from unrealistic expectations that, if unfulfilled, cause peace processes to stall or collapse back into violent conflict. Given the human and material costs of conflict and its
FROM Practical Approaches to Peacebuilding : Putting Theory to Work
2016
Peacebuilding is a term that spans a wide array of activities influencing sustainable peace in different phases of conflict. It can be found at all points on the war to peace continuum, but it attends primarily to the requirements of conflict-affected communities. This includes concerns related to development, security, legal and institutional reform, peace education, and indigenous peacemaking efforts. Because the term is so broad, it can also be easily co-opted and used by local and international actors to promote programs that do not build peace. In this regard, there are examples, such as the Iraq war, where conflict resolution and peacebuilding processes have been used to win over factions in violent conflicts in an attempt to build a bigger coalition to militarily defeat a targeted enemy. In instances like these, conflict resolution and peacebuilding knowledge and skills can be nefariously coopted into functions of warfare, transforming them into instruments of war efforts and skewing their original intentions to work for sustainable peace. Yet, many communities have benefited from international peacebuilding efforts and studies have found that multilateral, United Nations peace operations have made a positive difference on sustainable peace (Doyle and Sambanis 2000), but many others have become political pawns or, worse, have borne the brunt of harmful policies that were carried out thoughtlessly or, worse yet, imposed on communities without their inclusion. With these communities in mind, we developed this book about peacebuilding. We believe that the path to peace is paved with good intentions, but can be perilous to maneuver. Therefore, reflection on experience and the rigorous study of the components of peace must be a fundamental part of any discussions on peacebuilding. Most conflicts around the world share some similar general features. Scholars in peace and conflict studies have studied the dynamics of conflict escalation and the ensuing alienation between rival parties that result in the construction of divergent narratives, which often portray mutually exclusive worldviews and become a part of the collective memory, precipitating
Whether dealing with reintegration, disarmament, development or peace negotiations, the peacebuilding discourse has moved beyond mere interventions at a 'ripe' point in time, towards being recognized as complex processes of promoting constructive social change. Furthermore, due to effects of increased trans-border activity and the emergence of 'new wars', the international community is finding it harder to engage in 'positive peacebuilding', distinguishing perpetrators from victims and locating the core of violence and conflict. Lessons learned from e.g. Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel/Palestine and Sri Lanka depict the 'shadow side' of peacebuilding operations aiming to put in action thoroughly designed plans for achieving a relative peace. This essay will argue that it is this 'liberal peace' itself that contributes to the continuation of 'cultures of violence', which in turn embraces all actors involved in the peace building process. In order to further this point, the essay will first make an inquiry into the very nature of violence itself and its manifestations in wider society and culture. Different forms of violence such as 'direct', 'structural' and 'cultural' will be underlined in order to reveal the complex workings of violence on all levels of a society and permeates all levels of international peace-building. The essay will then address the relative impact of violent groups on the process and examine to what extent their inclusion in the peace process will determine the final outcome. The analysis will to show that the discourse of peacebuilding is not violent because of its cooperation with violent groups, destructive functions and manifestations, but rather because of the violence inherent in the system within which all actors operate.
Power or peace? Restoration or emancipation through peace processes
Peacebuilding, 2021
Recent critical academic work in Peace and Conflict Studies has concentrated on the agential aspects of peace but has somewhat neglected structural issues and the different types of power that may be an obstacle to peace. Yet, for peace to take root, to be emancipatory and truly transformative, it seems that issues of hard power, geo-politics and the structures of states, societies and economies need to be re-addressed in a new set of contexts. This special issue concentrates on how peace scholarship and agendas can be furthered in an era of realism, hard power, the primacy of geopolitics, nationalism, authoritarianism and unfettered capitalism. This article explores the fluid and multifaceted relationship between power and peace, while also introducing the contributions to this special issue.
Shaping peace: an investigation of the mechanisms underlying post- conflict peacebuilding
Peace, Conflict & Development, 2016
What shapes peace, and how can peace be successfully built in those countries affected by armed conflict? This paper examines peacebuilding in the aftermath of civil wars in order to identify the conditions for post-conflict peace. The field of civil war research is characterised by case studies, comparative analyses and quantitative research, which relate relatively little to each other. Furthermore, the complex dynamics of peacebuilding have hardly been investigated so far. Thus, the question remains of how best to enhance the prospects of a stable peace in post-conflict societies. Therefore, it is necessary to capture the dynamics of post-conflict peace. This paper aims at helping to narrow these research gaps by 1) presenting the benefits of set-theoretic methods for peace and conflict studies; 2) identifying remote conflict environment factors and proximate peacebuilding factors which have an influence on the peacebuilding process and 3) proposing a set-theoretic multi-method research approach in order to identify the causal structures and mechanisms underlying the complex realm of post-conflict peacebuilding. By implementing this transparent and systematic comparative approach, it will become possible to discover the dynamics of post-conflict peace.
Review-Rethinking Peacebuilding
2020
Although the term ‘just peace’ is common in peacebuilding literature, and is frequently invoked as a desired goal of contemporary peacebuilding activities, there is surprisingly little research focused on what a ‘just peace’ may entail. Karin Aggestam and Annika Björkdahl’s edited volume Rethinking Peacebuilding: The quest for just peace in the Middle East and Western Balkans takes up the timely challenge of reframing both peacebuilding theory and practice to better address questions related to the relationship between peace and justice in contemporary peacebuilding. This volume takes a highly interdisciplinary approach to address three core challenges: the quest for justice in contemporary peace processes; the quest for a durable peace; and the quest for effective peacebuilding strategies (p. 1). This review will highlight some of the main conceptual insights of the volume, pertinent details about individual chapter contributions, and then assess the strengths and weaknesses of the...
Rethinking Peacebpeacebuilding The quest for just peace in the Middle East and the Western Balkans
Evolving EU peacebuilding framework The European Union (EU) is emerging as a major actor in regional and global peacebuilding. It represents, in aggregated terms, one of the world’s largest donors, contributing both to development and conflict resolution. In historical terms the EU has been conceived as a peace project. The strong self-image of the EU is articulated in the “discourse of universal ethics which defines the EU as a ‘power for good’ and a ‘peacebuilder’ on the international scene” (Aggestam 2008: 1). In European terms the EU’s historical achievement of building peace among its member states is unsurpassed in its social, economic and political potential. It has also been deemed successful in exporting the values and norms that guide the EU’s internal relations and structuring the new democracies of Eastern Europe through political conditionality, with either membership or close trade and cooperation agreements as incentives (see Carlsaes et al. 2004; Tonra and Christiansen 2004). This potential of EU’s transformative influence extends also to the Western Balkans, where the dynamics of peacebuilding is connected to the enlargement process emphasized by the attraction of membership. Outside the Union’s geographical sphere of influence, where the integrationist logic does not apply, and where EU accession is not an opportunity, the peacebuilding approach of the EU has less impact. This is clearly visible in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, as Anders Persson underlines in this volume, as well as in the analysis by Momani and Rennick of EU regional peacebuilding strategies. The EU framework for peacebuilding is, to a large extent, based on the liberal peace model. This framework is, as pointed out by Björkdahl et al. (2009), based on the sum of the EU’s uncoordinated constituent parts, which include aspirations for normative power, the individual interest of the different member states as well as their collective interests, and the Union’s specific historical character in political, economic and social terms. Yet the EU seems to aspire to a more sophisticated and locally relevant form of peacebuilding than the one that developed from the Washington consensus. As several scholars have concluded, the EU is not just concerned with putting an end to a specific conflict or addressing the symptoms of conflict, but aims to eradicate the root causes of conflict, whether social, political or economic, and to transform conflict into a sustainable peace (Manners 2002; Juncos 2005; Tocci 2008). Hence it can be assumed that the evolving EU peacebuilding framework seems to have the potential, as Oliver Richmond argues in his chapter, to move beyond the critiques of liberal peacebuilding towards a transformative approach to peacebuilding that is less state-centric and more inclusive. A regional approach has emerged as a cornerstone of the EU’s peacebuilding approach in both the Western Balkans and the Middle East. This is linked to the European Union’s own experience of regional integration and a firm belief in 14 Karin Aggestam and Annika Björkdahl regional integration and interdependencies as a key to durable peace. With this approach, the EU established a coordinated set of political and economic conditionalities aimed at infrastructure reconstruction and institution-building. Promoting civil society from the grassroots has emerged as a second cornerstone of the EU peacebuilding framework, as a strategy to counterbalance elite power, to enhance accountability of the elite by the society, and to circumvent political stagnation. Liberal peacebuilding relies on a notion of civil society that is “relatively free from ethno-nationalism and generally oriented towards the norms and values of the peacebuilding and statebuilding project” (Belloni 2001; Kappler and Richmond 2011). Despite the fact that the EU itself is a post-modern polity that transcends territorial sovereignty and has ambitions to change traditional notions of national sovereignty, its peacebuilding remains to a large extent state-centric. When engaging with the local context, the EU does so through the state, and it prefers governments or powerful elites as interlocutors on the state level. Hence the success of EU peacebuilding becomes dependent on the functioning of the government and state institutions (Kappler and Richmond 2011). This state-centrism obviously challenges, and to some extent contradicts, the two other cornerstones of the EU peacebuilding framework – the regionalist approach and the civil society approach. In sum, the variety and richness of the conceptual and empirical chapters included in this volume together constitute an original contribution to the growing literature on peacebuilding in conflict-ridden societies through its focus on justice and the quality of the peace. It also represents a significant addition to the growing research field on transitional justice by advancing synergies and complementarities between transitional justice and peacebuilding processes. Finally, it contains policy-relevant knowledge about effective peacebuilding strategies and in-depth empirical assessments of the contemporary peace processes in the Middle East and Western Balkans. As editors, we hope that this will provide you as a reader with a comprehensive understanding of the complex notion of just peace, as well as compelling you to further probe its problematique. Notes