Structural Responses to Conflict and Peace Building in South Asia: Towards a Post-Westphalian Move (original) (raw)

The discourses on conflict and terrorism have important implications for the nature of peace and order, and the way it is politically, economically and socially constituted. With globalization and transnationalization of movement organizations, the post-colonial state is under constant vigil of a number of human rights and peace organizations. In academia, democratic peace theorists have explained state's behavior with respect to war and peace as outcomes of certain internal political arrangements. In many studies the structural characteristics of societies are commonly associated with conflict such as poverty, ethnic and social divisions, minority grievances, failing government institutions, lack of national identity, and low level of state legitimacy so on. i In structural response to conflicts, both in theory and practice, there have emerged various approaches to the study of conflicts and conflict resolution. In certain way, these approaches have contributed to a dialogic order towards a Post-westphalian framework on peace building that is significantly different from the so-called traditional state-centric discourses. ii At the post colonial context, we observe that the structural analyses and critical reading of the conflict studies reveal a trend sensitive to the needs of the marginalized and systematically excluded communities. With the development of some innovative approaches to study conflict and find solutions, greater attention is now given on some human characteristics and needs that are universal. There is increasing recognition of the prolonged struggle of communal groups for their basic needs that tend to be obscured by state-centric nature of international system. Besides these factors that lead to conflict and peacelessness, some observers stress on the pivotal role of conflict discourses, instigated by political entrepreneurs, as a key variable in generating internal conflict and war. iii In that sense, internal conflicts and violence are social constructions rooted in the social continuities of weak state structures and processes and reproduced through the rise and domination of certain kinds of conflict discourses that lead to the conflictual relations and ultimately violence. An understanding of the internal conflict in the contemporary society requires a through examination of the three levels-structure, process and discourse. In this article, I attempted to provide an operational definition of peace building and illustrate what this concept means in practice. In the first two parts of the paper, drawing from social science studies, I surveyed broadly the conceptual trends in understanding conflict and the processes involving the development of approaches for conflict transformation. The goal is to understand the complex processes and to provide policy makers and researchers insights in to the conflicting situations and the problematic responses under the global impact of international relations and security concerns. In response to new challenges, international organizations, including United Nations, are frequently called upon to improve the quality of the state institutions as part of development programs and peacekeeping. iv Some even proposed alternative legal and political mechanisms designed to validate politically legitimized humanitarian interventions and to counter the limitations of UN Charter principles, namely, nonintervention and the sovereign equality of the states, even by operating outside of the United Nations through a legal humanitarian council, especially in response to new challenges of severe human-rights abuse. v In the third part of the paper, I have described many of the structural features that have affected the peace building in South Asia, in general, and India's Northeast context, in particular. I have taken north east India as a particular case to illustrate how the Indian state is fractured and weakened through the particular nature of encounter with social forces and social groups who have tempered its claim to be ultimate authority. Increasingly, the social activists, critics have been focusing on the north-east region and, in various instances, state's `political reason' vi is criticized for its totalizing effects. In several instances of political reasoning, the communicative structures enabled a sympathetic understanding of `counter-hegemonic' forces pursue their various emancipatory political projects. In the discursive formation, implicitly, there is an emphasis to transcend the particular forms of exclusion by widening the 1 boundaries of communication and enabling a redress of injustice suffered through human rights violation. The article concludes keeping in view the South Asia's political landscape and suggests certain guidelines for enhancing the peace process.