Peace and Conflict Resolution

OUP: pp. 143-148 - Defining Peace

OUP: pp. 186-193 - Conflict Resolution

Pearson: pp. 64-69 - Peace and Peacekeeping

Lamy: pp. 179-185 - Maintenance of International Peace and Security

1. What are the four stages and four types of social movements?

2. What are Moore's five categories of conflict?

3. What is the Realism, Liberal and Marxist view on national security?

4. What is the von Clausewitz rationale for war? What are the criticisms of this rationale?

5. What some of revolutions in military affairs (RMAs)?

6. Describe two causes and two responses to terrorism?

• Third-party involvement in conflict (also discussed at length in a previous lesson here)

• Peacemaking, including negotiations and treaties

• Peacebuilding, including reconciliation and work of justice institutions

Conflict Resolution Terminology

Conflict settlement means the reaching of an agreement between the parties to settle a political conflict, so forestalling or ending an armed conflict. This suggests finality, but in practice conflicts that have reached settlements are often reopened later. Conflict attitudes and underlying structural contradictions may not have been addressed.

Conflict containment involves peacekeeping and war limitation (geographical constraint, mitigation and alleviation of intensity, and termination at the earliest opportunity).

Conflict management, like the associated term ‘conflict regulation’, has been used as a generic term to cover the whole gamut of positive conflict handling. Here we understand it to refer in a more limited way to the settlement and containment of violent conflict.

Conflict resolution is a more comprehensive term, which implies that the deep- rooted sources of conflict are addressed and transformed. This implies that behaviour is no longer violent, attitudes are no longer hostile, and the structure of the conflict has been changed. It is difficult to avoid ambiguity, since the term is used to refer both to the process (or the intention) to bring about these changes and to the completion of the process. A further ambiguity is that conflict resolution refers to a particular defined specialist field (as in ‘conflict resolution journals’), as well as to an activity carried on by people who may or may not use the term or even be aware of it (as in ‘conflict resolution in Central America’). Nevertheless, these two senses of the term are tending to merge.

Conflict transformation is a term which for some analysts is a significant step beyond conflict resolution, but which in our view represents its deepest level. It implies a deep transformation in the institutions and discourses that reproduce violence, as well as in the conflict parties themselves and their relationships. It corresponds to the underlying tasks of structural and cultural peacebuilding. Where this becomes manifest across global cultures, linking the personal, societal, global and ecological spheres, we call this cosmopolitan conflict resolution.

Negotiation is the process whereby parties seek to settle or resolve their conflicts. Mediation involves the intervention of a third party; it is a voluntary process in which the parties retain control over the outcome (pure mediation), although it is sometimes combined with positive and negative inducements (mediation with muscle). Conciliation or facilitation is close in meaning to pure mediation, and refers to intermediary efforts to encourage the parties to move towards negotiations, as does the more minimalist role of providing good offices. Problem- solving is a more ambitious undertaking in which parties are invited to reconceptualize the conflict with a view to finding creative, win–win outcomes. Reconciliation is a longer- term process of overcoming hostility and mistrust between divided peoples. We use peacemaking in the sense of moving towards settlement of armed conflict, where parties are induced to reach agreement voluntarily – for example, as envisaged in Chapter VI of the UN Charter on the ‘Pacific settlement of disputes’ (Article 33).

Peacekeeping (traditionally with the consent of the conflict parties) refers to the interposition of international armed forces to separate the armed forces of belligerents, often now associated with civil tasks such as monitoring and policing and supporting humanitarian intervention. Peace- enforcement is the imposition of a settlement by a powerful third party. Peacebuilding underpins the work of peacemaking and peacekeeping by addressing structural issues and the long- term relationships between conflictants. With reference to the conflict triangle, it can be suggested that peacemaking aims to change the attitudes of the main protagonists, peacekeeping lowers the level of destructive behaviour, and peacebuilding tries to overcome the contradictions which lie at the root of the conflict (Galtung, 1996: 112).

Finally, following the original lead of Morton Deutsch, as noted above, it is important to recognize that the aim of conflict resolution is not the elimination of conflict, which would be both impossible (conflict is inherent in social change) and, as is made clear in Curle’s model of the transformation of asymmetric conflicts, is often undesirable (there may need to be more, not less, conflict in struggles against injustice). Rather, the aim of conflict resolution is to transform actually or potentially violent conflict into peaceful (non-violent) processes of social and political change. This is an unending task as new forms and sources of conflict arise.

• Contemporary Conflict Resolution by Hugh Miall, Oliver Ramsbotham, and Tom Woodhouse

Choose TWO of the following articles you are most interested in (more if you like) and answer the associated guiding prompts

What approaches to conflict resolution have been undertaken in your case study?