In recent years some analysts have begun to use the term 'conflict transformation' as shorthand for the longer-term and deeper structural, relational and cultural dimensions of conflict resolution. The contention is that 'resolution' carries the connotation of bringing conflict to permanent conclusion, negating the possible social value of positively channelled conflict. Like most terminological debates, it sheds more heat than light on the situation. We use conflict resolution as the comprehensive term to encompass various approaches and methods used to handle conflict non-violently at all levels in society, while conflict transformation indicates the deepest level of change in the conflict resolution process.
As a descriptive and theoretical perspective, conflict transformation can yield rich insights, particularly in regard to asymmetric and protracted conflict. It focuses on the dynamic processes through which conflict becomes violent, rather than focusing narrowly on how to bring a violent conflict to a cease-fire or settlement. An emphasis on the transformative aspects of conflict helps us to understand the changes that occur in individuals, relationships, cultures and countries as a result of the experiences of violent conflict.
Transformation is also used to refer to a specific approach to ameliorating violent conflict which concentrates on the changes needed at many different levels of society in order for peace to take hold in the long term. This approach aims to transform a conflict from violence and destruction into a constructive force which produces social change, progressively removing or at least reducing the conditions from which the conflict and violence have arisen. The peace which develops will then be deeply rooted and sustainable. Transformational interventions promote non-violent mechanisms that reduce and ultimately eliminate violence, foster structures that meet basic human needs and maximise participation of people in decisions that affect them. On the cultural level, transformation is linked to the idea of 'peacebuilding from below' discussed in the next section. It seeks to identify, promote and build on the resources and mechanisms within a cultural setting for constructively responding to and handling conflict.
An example of conflict transformation is taking place in South Africa. There, the severely skewed power relations were at the heart of the conflict. The (relatively) peaceful transition to majority rule in the country represented a fundamental shift in the way social conflict was handled, from an oppressive, violent system to a power-sharing relationship. No one would suggest that all conflicts between social groups in South Africa have been resolved—there are huge problems such as continuing inequality in the distribution of wealth and continued opposition to the democratic transition among certain groups. However, the National Peace Accord represents a fundamental transformation of power relationships in South Africa and a commitment to the resolution of inevitable differences through dialogue and negotiation rather than through oppression and violence.
The persistence of many of the worlds protracted violent conflicts in the face of repeated attempts to establish peace has led to the idea that effective peacemaking processes are based on much more than agreements negotiated between elites (i.e. politicians, factional or military leaders). Practitioners and scholars have begun to use the phrase 'peacebuilding from below' to describe the importance of empowering people at all levels in conflict-affected communities to build an effective and sustainable peace.
This recognition has led to a revision of thinking in three areas:
1. The recognition that embedded cultures and economies of violence provide more formidable barriers to constructive intervention than early conflict theories had assumed. In these conflicts, 'simple' one-dimensional interventions—whether by traditional mediators aimed at formal peace agreements or peacekeepers placed to supervise cease-fires or oversee elections—are unlikely to produce comprehensive or lasting resolution.
2. A greater appreciation of the significance of post-settlement (sometimes called post-conflict) peacebuilding, or the idea that formal agreements need to be underpinned by structures and long-term development frameworks that will erode cultures of violence and sustain peace processes on the ground.
3. A renewed understanding of the significance of local actors, the non-governmental sector ('civil society') and of using local knowledge and wisdom as resources for the sustainable transformation of violent conflict.
These three ideas have created new support among third-party intervenors for sustainable citizen-based peacebuilding initiatives that open up participatory public political spaces in order to allow the institutions of civil society to flourish.
These shifts in thinking, which have given greater recognition to peacebuilding from below, can be illustrated in the work of two scholar-practitioners, Adam Curle and John Paul Lederach. Curle, who is a Quaker and served as the founding Professor of Peace Studies at the University of Bradford, has been deeply involved in the practice of peacemaking throughout his academic career and since his formal retirement. In the 1990s, his primary activity has been supporting the Osijek Centre for Peace, Non-violence and Human Rights. Osijek and the adjacent town of Vukovar in the Eastern Slavonia province of Croatia were the sites of some of the most violent fighting in the Serb-Croat War of 1992-1995. Curle's involvement with the people of Osijek, who were trying to rebuild a tolerant society while surrounded by the enraged and embittered feelings caused by the war, caused him to reflect on the problems of practical peacemaking. It became apparent, for example, that the model of mediation set out in his book In the Middle, which had been distilled from his experiences in conflicts throughout 1970s and 1980s, was very difficult to apply on the ground in the confusion and chaos of the type of conflict epitomised by the wars in former Yugoslavia. He felt that mediation was more likely to produce the shift in attitudes necessary for the construction of a stable peace than the use of conventional diplomacy alone, but realised that "solutions reached through negotiation may be simply expedient and not imply any change of heart. And this is the crux of peace. There must be a change of heart. Without this no settlement can be considered secure." Through his involvement with the Osijek project, Curle realised that the range of conflict traumas and problems were so vast that mediation based on the intervention of outsiders was simply not powerful or relevant enough to promote peace. He made two important revisions to his peace praxis. Firstly:
Since conflict resolution by outside bodies and individuals has so far proved ineffective [in the chaotic conditions of contemporary ethnic conflict - particularly, but not exclusively, in Somalia, Eastern Europe and the former USSR], it is essential to consider the peacemaking potential within the conflicting communities themselves (Curle, 1994, p. 96).
Curle now sees the role of conflict resolution in post-Cold War conflicts as the provision of a variety of advisory, consultative-facilitative support to local peacemakers, offering workshops and training in whichever fields local groups identify as necessary. The task is to empower people of good will in conflict-affected communities to rebuild democratic institutions and the starting point for this is to help in "the development of the local peacemakers' inner resources of wisdom, courage and compassionate non-violence (Ibid., p. 104)." Out of this empowerment, opportunities for more formal mediation might arise.
Secondly, Curle recognises an important role for the UN in this process of empowerment, and so acknowledges the need to make connections between the official mandates of the UN agencies, including peacekeeping, and the unofficial roles of the NGOs in conflict zones. He has transformed his original idea of active mediation from the intervention of outsiders into a much more context-sensitive empowerment approach. This is the essence of peacebuilding from below.
John Paul Lederach, working as a scholar-practitioner in Central America within a Mennonite tradition, which shares many of the values and ideas of the Quakers, has also contributed to the development of the peacebuilding from below approach. He refers to it as 'indigenous empowerment.'
The principle of indigenous empowerment suggests that conflict transformation must actively envision, include, respect, and promote the human and cultural resources from within a given setting. This involves a new set of lenses through which we do not primarily 'see' the setting and the people in it as the 'problem' and the outsider as the 'answer.' (Lederach, 1995, p. 212)"
This would suggest that it is important to identify specific cultural practices and resources that can be drawn upon in the transformation of violent conflict.
Lederach's comprehensive approach entails building an infrastructure for peace "that legitimates and integrates multiple levels of the population affected, in terms of both input in the peace process and its implementation (Ibid., p. 207)." He describes the affected population as a triangle (see Box 8 below), with the key military and political leaders at the apex, or level one. In the middle, at level two, is a larger group of national leaders who have significance in sectors such as health, education and within the military hierarchy. Finally, at level three, is the vast majority of the affected population: the common people, displaced and refugee populations, local leaders, elders, religious and community groups and locally based NGOs. The bulk of armed combatants, the guerrillas and soldiers, are also contained in this level.
Most peacemaking of the international diplomacy type operates at level one of this triangle, but for conflict resolution to be successful and sustainable, the co-ordination of peacemaking strategies across all three levels must be undertaken. In this new thinking, peacebuilding from below is of decisive importance, for it is the means by which a constituency of people who support and work for peace can be built within the setting of the conflict itself.
In applying a peacebuilding from below approach, the way in which a conflict is viewed is transformed. Typically, people within the conflict are seen as the problem, with outsiders (diplomats, third party intervenors, etc.) providing the solution to the conflict. In contrast, in a more comprehensive perspective solutions are derived and built from local resources. This does not deny a role for outsider third parties, but it does suggest a need for a reorientation of their roles. Firstly, outsiders need to be more culturally sensitive with respect to the application of 'universal' intervention strategies (we discuss this further in the culture and conflict resolution section below). Secondly, outside intervenors should pay more attention to how their inevitably short-term interventions are integrated with long-term local resolution processes. A long-term strategy will be sustainable if outsiders/experts support and nurture—rather than displace—peacemaking assets that exist within the community and if the strategy addresses all levels of the affected population.
In this unit we have discussed the importance of conflict resolution projects that support conflict-affected communities in designing their own peace processes. One such project was attempted in the Eastern Slavonia region of Croatia, which we have encountered in the previous section as the site of some of Adam Curle's recent work. The experiment in peacebuilding and peaceful integration involved a complementary network of actors and initiatives at different levels of the society, including Track I (official), Track II (non-official) and Track III (indigenous) initiatives.
At the time of the 1995 Dayton peace agreement in neighbouring Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Croatian territories of Eastern Slavonia, Baranja and Western Sirmium, which had large, long-standing Serb communities, were still occupied by the Serbian army. The Eastern Slavonia area was widely regarded as a potential flashpoint for re-igniting the war between Serbs and Croats. Track I level talks resulted in the signing of the Basic Agreement on the Region of Eastern Slavonia, Baranja and Western Sirmium by Presidents Tudjman of Croatia and Milosevic of Serbia on 12 November 1995, which envisaged a staged hand-over to Croatia. At the political and security levels this was to be supervised by the United Nations Transitional Administration in Eastern Slavonia, Baranja and Western Sirmium (UNTAES), a post-settlement peacebuilding operation established on 15 January 1996 by UN Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1037. The mandate of UNTAES included: demilitarisation to be completed on 20 June 1996; a Transitional Police Force to be established by July 1996; local and regional elections to be held in April 1997; and the return of displaced Croat and Serb residents to their homes.
The UN saw the success of UNTAES as a precedent for peace throughout the former Yugoslavia, providing a positive example of post-settlement peacebuilding in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The mandate of UNTAES was terminated in January 1998, its political and demilitarisation tasks having been largely achieved. A post-UNTAES Civilian Police Support Group was left to liase closely with the OSCE in supervising the continuing resettlement of returnees and other residual arrangements. By the end of 1997, 6,000 Croats and 9,000 Serbs had returned, although continuing harassment induced large numbers of Serbs to cross into Serb-held territory, leaving 12,900 displaced Serbs still in the region in early 1998.
This was the context within which local peace groups in Osijek, Baranja and elsewhere, who had struggled to resist the violence, hatred and war that had swept over the region in the previous years, began to use their existing cross-community work to try to contribute to longer-term peacebuilding. Locally, they created peace support groups such as the Osijek Centre for Peace, Non-Violence and Human Rights. International NGOs and networks such as the Co-ordinating Committee for Conflict Resolution Training in Europe (CCCRTE), the Swedish-based Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research (TFF), and Quaker Peace and Service provided support and encouragement. International and regional organisations, such as UNTAES, UNHCR, OSCE and the Council of Europe lent support at the inter-governmental level. These complementary interventions have combined to defuse the tension and have begun the process of long-term reconciliation and sustained peacebuilding in the area.
These areas were only returned to Croatian control in the summer of 1997, having been Serb-occupied since 1991. Given the level of mistrust and the need for reassurance on the part of local Serbs, the support of international and local non-governmental organisations was essential for lasting, peaceful reintegration. The Agreement of 1995 and the work of UNTAES meant that the Croats who fled the area beginning in 1991, and the Serbs who colonised abandoned properties, could now return to their original homes. However, many of these homes had been destroyed and many people were wary of returning to live with former neighbours who had since become bitter enemies. According to Adam Curle, coping with such issues is not a matter of rebuilding the societies that originally spawned the horrors of war, but of developing trust between communities and creating new peaceful values and attitudes so that war is unlikely to recur.
One aspect of this work is educational. For example, TFF was invited by UNTAES to report on educational policy in relation to conflict and reconciliation in Eastern Slavonia. It concluded that, while UNTAES had achieved impressive results at the military and political levels, at the local level "there are very few signs of forgiveness. There is a serious feeling of frustration, insecurity and hurt among Serb teachers, students and their parents that urgently needs to be addressed (TFF 1997)." The nationally agreed Programme on the Re-establishment of Trust in War Affected Regions was not very effective at the local level, where among other problems, anti-Serb textbooks and media continued to make young Croatian citizens of Serbian descent feel unwelcome. In order to rectify this, TFF recommended that assistance should be given to the Croatian government on practical ways of implementing a policy of trust building and reconciliation. Relevant programmes would include training in conflict management, problem-solving skills, and in healing inter-ethnic relations after violent conflict, offered through schools, higher education, and the media. Finally, TFF recommended that an inter-ethnic council of national reconciliation and trust-building should be established. The educational objective of the whole programme was to provide an opportunity for students all over Croatia to experience the meaning of conflict resolution and reconciliation.
Another significant project was the Osijek Peace Centre, formed by a small group of concerned Croatian citizens in 1992 in response to the growing fever of hatred and violence in the area. By 1993 the Centre had a core group of about 50 people, mainly women, plus many others working on specific projects. Their work included the protection of local people threatened with eviction from their homes, particularly Croatian citizens of Serbian descent, work with refugees and displaced people and peace education in local schools and universities. The Centre was well respected in the community although the members often came under verbal attack (and worse) from nationalists on both sides. However, it was able to make a real contribution to peacebuilding in a small area through sustained commitment to non-partisanship.
In contrast to dramatic high-level political negotiations, it is easy for outside critics to be dismissive of such small-scale and usually unpublicised cross-community peace-building initiatives, but this is not how things look from the inside. Here it is the practical transformative work of all those in a community who oppose the use of violence and the promotion of hatred that is cumulatively crucial. Judith Large, a member of the CCCRTE, comments that, "for activists inside, it mattered too much not to try." In endorsing Large's conclusion, and applying it to the innumerable indigenous peace-building enterprises undertaken world wide, we are strongly reminded of Edmund Burke's dictum: 'it is only necessary for the good man to do nothing for evil to triumph'.
