The Impact of Overseas Conflict on UK Communities (original) (raw)

Although current patterns of globalisation may be traced back more than a century, two recent changes have affected the impact of overseas conflict on UK communities. First, changes in communication technologies now allow direct access to information from a tremendously wide variety of sources, in real time. This ‘globalisation from below’ contrasts with previous stages of globalisation where such tools were concentrated in the hands of state institutions or multinational companies. Second, geopolitical changes, particularly since 1990, have resulted in a growing diversity of migrant groups arriving in the UK, frequently providing direct links to parts of the world undergoing conflict. Links between overseas conflict and UK communities have received very little attention in the social sciences. The limited literature is focused on the potential for ethno-national diaspora communities in the UK to affect the conditions of conflict elsewhere. This research has expanded and reversed this focus to consider how overseas conflict affects a broad array of communities in the UK. The understanding of community is central to this research. Notions of ‘community’ were downplayed in public policy in the UK throughout the 1980s and 1990s, but the Cantle report of 2001 marked a return to a language of community in public policy discourse. Yet there is limited conceptual clarity in the ways in which ‘community’ is used. There is particular confusion between the widespread usage of ‘community’ to refer both to local places and to ethno-national groups. This report has distinguished between these two understandings of community, since public institutions must engage in different ways with each of them. The report uses the term ‘local communities’ to refer to place-based social groups. Rather than the common term ‘black and minority ethnic’ (BME) communities, this report uses the broader term ‘ethno-national communities’. This term also includes minority communities that do not self-identify as ‘black’ or ‘ethnic’, and the ‘majority’ ‘white British’ community. This report has also considered ‘communities of choice’, in this case used to describe civil society mobilisations around particular conflicts, and ‘communities of practice’, which refers to coalitions of professionals focused on an individual issue. Research for this project has concentrated on the impact of three specific conflicts, selected to provide contrasting examples of UK involvement, geographical area and current intensity. These are: Afghanistan/Pakistan, the Great Lakes (Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo [DRC], Rwanda, Uganda) and the western Balkans. Following a mapping exercise to determine the extent of the links between these conflicts and the UK, six case studies were identified to cover a broad cross section of the four types of communities considered earlier. Each of the six case studies was the focus of a separate sub-project involving 15–20 interviews and several focus groups. The research identified six important variables influencing the extent and nature of the impact of these conflicts on UK communities: • nature of UK involvement; • proximity of conflict to the UK; • timing and duration of the conflict; • size and date of the arrival of diaspora communities in the UK; • transnational engagement of diaspora; and • media coverage. Local communities in London and Birmingham were involved in this research. Two important impacts on local communities were identified as a result of conflict. First, local communities evolve as a result of new entrants. Good practice examples of institutional responses involved the distribution of information to all those local services potentially involved in responding to new arrivals. Second, particular conflicts may alter the relationship between members of local communities and national institutions, such as the Birmingham neighbourhoods where the predominantly Pakistani population felt targeted by security responses to the conflict in Pakistan. This is most likely to be the case where the UK is directly involved in the conflict, either militarily or diplomatically. Communities of choice identified in this research took the form of civil society organisations formed in response to conflict, often with the aim of challenging the public characterisation of conflict, as in the case of Help for Heroes, or as a way of challenging particular tendencies in UK national policy towards a conflict region. Communities of practice can describe a wide range of activities, but in this case was used to describe networking of professionals responding to a particular impact of conflict, here the arrival of significant numbers of unaccompanied Afghan asylum-seeking children in two London boroughs, which had implications for health care, education, housing and foster care. The term ‘community of practice’ was coined in the early 1990s, but the idea did not really take off in the public sector in the UK until 2007. There seems to be considerable potential for developing such ad hoc professional coalitions in order to share information and develop policy approaches. Ethno-national communities were also influenced by the conflicts considered. This research identified situations where interactions between different ethno-national communities from one particular conflict area arose in the UK. One such interaction was between Kosovar Albanians, Bosniacs and Serbians. Given the post-conflict changes in ethnic residential patterns in the former Yugoslavia, spaces for such exchanges have reduced there. Religious organisations also have an important role to play. This research did not explicitly set out to examine the role of religious organisations. However, it found that, in some cases, they provide a relatively rare opportunity for individuals from a wide variety of other forms of community to come together. The activities of the communities we considered focused most frequently on questions of perception and information. This includes challenging mainstream media representations of conflict, which tend towards simplified characterisations of conflict based in antipathy between opposing sides. The opening of the Serbian section in Fulham library is a good example of a proactive information campaign resulting from engagement of the local Serbian ethno-national community. Alternative sources of media provide one possible remedy to the limited information available in mainstream media. In some cases, this involves turning to media sources from foreign countries, which are increasingly widely available through the Internet. An alternative strategy is for community groups to develop particularly focused alternative information sources, by establishing specialist websites. Both of these strategies have the disadvantage that communication with broader public opinion in the UK is limited.