This Issue

The two articles in this issue's Commentary section are taken, with kind permission, from Betts Fetherston, (Issue Editor), NGOs in the Field of International Peace and Security: Problems and Perspectives, published by the SSRC-MacArthur Foundation, Programme on International Peace and Security Newsletter, Vol. 12, May 1999, pp. 9-10 (Stubbs); pp, 10-12 (Fetherston).

The Transformative Potential of NGOs: The Centre for Peace Studies in Croatia

Betts Fetherston
Lecturer in the Department of Peace Studies at the University of Bradford, UK, and an SSRC-MacArthur Foundation Fellow in Peace and Security in a Changing World.

The end of the Cold War has had a profound effect on studies of international peace and security. Areas previously left out in the cold, considered irrelevant by mainstream scholars such as the culture question and feminist perspectives have received more and more attention. These 'new perspectives' are part of a now on-going re-evaluation of our understandings of security. In this context the work of NGOs, from local community-based organisations to large international groups in this arena of peacebuilding has made manifest their connection to larger security issues. My research focuses on the work of one local non-governmental organisation, and seeks to understand the effect of its activities on its locality and to understand the significance of its work in the broader context of complex sets of global discourses and practices.

War in Croatia

Violent conflict erupted in Croatia in the latter half of 1991 between Croatian Serbs supported by the Yugoslav National Army (JNA) and Croatian government forces. Although cease-fires were signed and UN peacekeepers deployed, the war did not formally end until August 1995 when the Croatian army 'reintegrated' territory held by Croatian Serb forces.

The cost of the war was high. As well as thousands of deaths (many civilian), and many more missing, there were massive population movements where two-sided ethnic cleansing displaced hundreds of thousands, and large-scale destruction of buildings and economic infrastructure.(1) Even now, significant problems remain in Croatia including displaced and refugee populations, damaged property, severe restrictions on freedom of the press, limited political opposition, discrimination, harassment and human rights abuses. The present situation amply demonstrates the need to renegotiate, i.e. transform, the basis of social, political, cultural, economic life in Croatia.

Coping With the Aftermath of War

Like most of the small but growing NGO community in Croatia, the Centre for Peace Studies (CPS) emerged in this post-war environment. It is most indebted, for its existence, to the Anti-War Campaign Croatia (ARK) which was formed in 1991 as a response to the war and as a counter to the extreme nationalism and hate politics practiced by the Croatian government (and other ex-Yugoslav governments). As an umbrella group supporting, organising, and co-operating with civil initiatives around the region, ARK has provided supportive space in which a number of peace initiatives have been able to form, grow, and eventually, for some, become independent organisations. 

Among its many important functions, ARK has served as a 'training ground' for activism and a safe space for people to express their anger and disillusionment and channel it into constructive work. For ARK groups this initially meant working in communities divided by war both on physical and social reconstruction. Later, in response to the needs of communities and individuals, this emphasis changed to training and education, and a concerted refocusing from short-term reconstruction to long-term peace education work.

Peacebuilding training programs(2) were developed in response to the needs of activists who were often working in isolated and extreme circumstances and who needed both the information and skills-training offered but also the space to articulate and share their experiences. Similarly the idea of a Centre for Peace Studies which would be based around a one-year peace studies program of study emerged through the work activists were undertaking in the field.

From my research, including interviews of those involved in the Center for Peace Studies and its peace studies program, a picture emerges of radical peace education underpinned by activism which aims to transform social and political space in Croatia and the region through education, and which is deliberately counter-hegemonic. The work, what I call transformative peacebuilding, is characteristic of the activities of a number of local NGOs working in post-Yugoslav countries. My analysis suggests that transformative peacebuilding work can be distinguished from peacebuilding and conflict management efforts which seek to (re)form and that this distinction has important implications for, among other things, international peace and security.

The work of the Centre was conceptualised as an essential part of a wider peacebuilding process where knowledge could be gathered, articulated in greater depth and passed on to others. Its training and education programs were organised around five goals: (1) to enlarge the space for thinking and acting in civil society; (2) to engage with the public; (3) to empower both participants and facilitators; (4) to find creative and critical ways of engaging practical experience with theoretical knowledge; and (5) to utilise an experiential, participatory educational model (which emphasises non-hierarchical, non-judgemental, and critical orientation toward theory and practice).

Working at the Limits of Conflict Management

While in practice it is not always easy to distinguish activities which are transformative from those which are not, and organisations, agencies, and governments may shift their activities in response to the needs or trends of the moment, it is possible to identify two distinct kinds of projects.

Peacebuilding which mainly (re)forms characterises much of the conflict management and intervention efforts of the international community, and is the focus of most research in the field of international peace and security. This kind of peacebuilding is aimed at maintaining, for example, the state system, which violent conflict can threaten. The aim of peace initiatives and peacebuilding work is to ensure that 'rogue' states or groups are reintegrated politically, economically and culturally into existing international-global frameworks. Conflict management at a national or local level follows this pattern of re-establishing an order which is within a scope of 'legitimation' prescribed by the dominant neo-liberal discourse of international relations.(3) Criticism of such efforts is becoming more common, as the long term effects of interventions are called into question.

In contrast, peacebuilding which mainly transforms challenges those frameworks (by questioning, for example, national and to a less direct degree, international discourses of identity, ethnicity, nationalism and violence), and seeks to uncover and question the 'unspoken' foundation of their validity as a sustainable, socially just basis for organizing social meaning and practice.  From this perspective violent conflict is caused, enabled, and reproduced by particular social structures and institutions which favor a dominant group and strengthen certain political and economic forms. Ironically, what threatens the peace of the international system are the structures at is heart. To change these propensities, it is axiomatic that such structures and institutions must also change.

The activities of the Centre for Peace Studies aim to be transformative. Within the Peace Studies Program, for example, participants found space for critical engagement with their 'normalised' selves and problematisation of the hegemonic 'culture of violence' in Croatia. Most participants reported 'shifts' in their attitudes and behavior, becoming more tolerant, more able to listen, less aggressive, and more critically aware of discourses of violence in their everyday lives. A surprisingly large number have become active in various other peacebuilding projects.  In this respect the work of the Center has increased the number of people who question the status quo and who are engaged in practices which seek change.

Counter-Hegemonic NGOs in Globalised Contexts

The hegemonically confined practices of conflict management should not necessarily lead to the conclusion that all such work is valueless. It is quite possible to see the need for much greater diversity in coping with the effects of violent conflict and for providing critical re-assessments without wishing to ditch the entire project. Still, from an international security perspective at least, more critical and diverse theory and practice is needed to cope with the peace and security challenges posed by the complex, shifting problems of post-war societies.  I argue that the practices of some local NGOs, the Centre for Peace Studies for example, suggest some potentially fruitful, transformative, directions.

In taking on a broader research agenda in international peace and security, complex interrelationships between 'international', 'national', and 'local' levels of meaning and practice are of critical issue. It seems inadequate to talk about war, conflict management, or peacebuilding without considering, for example, how these practices are internationalised ('national' practices are constituted and constituting of a global hegemony) and particularised (local peacebuilding initiatives are constituted and constituting of a global hegemony). This, at least, raises the question of how the international community can be involved in transformative peacebuilding given its investment in prevailing discourses. The study of NGOs offers a micro-arena of analysis of these larger issues. In any event, though, the work of NGOs, their increasing power, their potential success or failure at peacebuilding - however defined - has force within the 'old' and 'new' terrain of international peace and security, whether or not we choose to take note.

NOTES

(1) Marcus Tanner. Croatia: A Nation Forced to War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997, pp. 277-279); Paul Stubbs. "Social Reconstruction and Social Development in Croatia and Slovenia: The Role of the NGO Sector." Occasional Paper No. 7 (Leeds, UK: International Social Policy Research Unit, Leeds Metropolitan University, 1997).

(2) For example, those which emerged from the Pakrac Social Reconstruction Project, MIRamiDA Basic, MIRamiDA Plus, and MIRamiDA Training for Trainers.

(3) For A.B. Fetherston and Andrew Parkin. "Transforming Violent Conflict: Contributions from Social Theory." in Lee-Anne Broadhead, ed. Issues in Peace Research, 1997-8: Theory and Practice (Bradford: Bradford University Press, 1997, pp. 19-57).

Action Research on NGOs and Peacebuilding in Croatia and Other Post-Yugoslav Countries

Paul Stubbs
Associate Senior Research Fellow of the Globalism and Social Policy Research Programme (GASPP), Sheffield, UK and Helsinki, Finland. He currently lives in Zagreb, Croatia. 

The potential role of NGOs in peacebuilding in conflict and post-conflict societies, often expressed in terms of the importance of building local capacity and civil society, is increasingly central to international debates concerned to link relief and development in what have been termed 'complex emergencies'. Research which I have been engaged in since 1993, in Croatia and other post-Yugoslav countries, questions some of the central tenets of this new orthodoxy, not for the sake of 'theory' and 'academic knowledge' per se, but in order to outline, and engage in implementing, new policy and practice options. Above all, the research has been based on a long-term engagement with local social processes, including working with local NGOs, activism, and a number of consultancies for international agencies and donors.

The wars of the Yugoslav succession have tended to blur a distinction between the big 'supertanker' International NGOs and the smaller, more advocacy- and solidaristic-oriented INGOs, which has not yet been reflected in the growing literature on NGOs. Many of the larger, increasingly multi-mandated, INGOs have stayed beyond the emergency phase and got much more involved in local civil society development, and some of the latter have received large sums of money to give to their local partners, in order to engage in the same thing. Increasingly, then, all INGOs have to be judged by what they do rather than what they believe in.

Indeed, in some post-Yugoslav countries, particularly Bosnia-Herzegovina, there are so many INGOs operating (ICVA's database included 200 INGOs as of August 1997), that it is difficult for any of them, regardless of their commitments, to have a positive effect on the ground since, however well conceived any one agency's strategy was, there would be countless others, implicitly or explicitly, acting against it. All are desperate, in their own ways, to find Local NGOs as 'partners', with only a very few taking the time and trouble to build real partnerships. Indeed, there is a multiplication of supranational and regional bodies, particularly in Bosnia-Herzegovina, so that even UN agencies such as UNICEF and UNDP began to resemble INGOs in their increasing projectisation rather than having the ability to develop coherent programs based on clear visions and objectives. There is also an increasing 'recycling' of staff, including the incompetent, between different international agencies, and a lack of any real evaluation of their work, with no attempts to involve the users of services in evaluations.

Something of a split is emerging between those LNGOs which are increasingly used by donors and INGOs as a kind of cheap service delivery agency, and those which are more concerned with promoting and keeping alive alternative values and ideals. It is very hard, however, to evaluate the impact of the second group which might represent only the interests of a very small, urban, educated, elite. NGO activism has become, then, one strategy for a strand of the middle class to, at least partially, overcome economic hardships. Increasingly, this group are encouraged to 'network' in regional and global contexts, accumulating what I have termed 'global cultural capital', which might mitigate against the need to build a real constituency 'at home'.

My own work is increasingly concerned with the possibility of supporting those individuals and groups which contributed to trust and a viable social order before the conflicts: church leaders, sports groups, leisure associations, and such like, on the grounds that most of the high profile INGO support for civil society, in the guise of peace building, is as likely to produce mistrust between different groups as it is to rebuild trust. In any case, many INGOs and donors have, at best, only a very scant understanding of the history of civil society movements before the conflicts. Hence, donor and INGO understandings of what is to constitute an NGO, together with their criteria for funding, have tended to inhibit diversity within the sector and, indeed, to have turned many grassroots initiatives into large bureaucracies, a further instance of projectisation.

Whilst it is very tempting to advocate 'grassroots' solutions as the only way to promote transformatory peacebuilding as against more conservative, mainstream approaches, the 'lure of the grassroots' can be overstated. Traditional top-down infrastructural approaches to development, which assume that economic development will bring peace, are in danger of being replaced by their opposite, psychologistic 'conflict resolution' orthodoxies. Neither trend focuses on the need to work at different levels and to be informed by an analysis of the political economy of conflict.

New partnerships between local and international actors must be based on structural understandings of the space for counter-hegemonic practices, and must be longer-term, and less project-focused, than currently. Action research can play a role in promoting ongoing reflection on the possibilities of new alliances for social change in post-Yugoslav countries. Indeed, local organisations such as the Zagreb-based Centre for Peace Studies, in seeking to break down the traditional divisions of theory and practice, from within the context of activism against the wars, offer one key strand for a new direction.

Back to top of page
 

Index to Issues

[Index] [About Monitor]