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On peacebuilding and the ‘problems’ of difference

By
Xavier Mathieu and Pol Bargués
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MONUSCO Photos, CC BY-SA 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons, Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo

MONUSCO Photos, CC BY-SA 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons, Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo

How can peacebuilding be made to work in a diverse world? How do differences impact peace operations? International peacebuilding as a practice and academic field has always been embroiled in the ‘problem’ of difference. Three errors are paradigmatic.

Throughout the 1990s and most of the 2000s, dominant understandings of peacebuilding relied on universalist frameworks and blueprints, rendering culture and cultural differences trivial. As the anthropologist Kevin Avruch (1998) explained, ‘undervaluing culture’ is the ‘first type of error’ in conflict resolution efforts. Conflict resolution, he explained, tended to focus on rational negotiations between the representatives of disputing parties, as if context, values, traditions, or ethnic differences played no role for participants in a conflict. International interventions to build peace in conflict-affected societies ignored the relevance of cultural difference and assumed that by merely fixing state institutions each society would transform into a peaceful liberal democracy (i.e. the West’s self-image). These interventions thus privileged the ‘universal’ values of international agencies and undermined ‘local’ culture and differences. 

The second error appeared in the process of overcoming the first. By becoming sensitive to cultural differences, peacebuilding ended up ‘over-valuing culture’ (Avruch 2003). Indeed, the emphasis on identities, differences, or on local perspectives on peace ran the risk of legitimizing belligerent ideas and reproducing frictions and divisions in societies affected by conflict – of making peacebuilding blinded by culture (Valbjørn 2008). Particularly when deploying essentialist conceptions of identity and culture, which assume that groups are primordial, homogenous and clearly separated by their differences, interventions were guilty of replicating ethno-nationalist perspectives and war-antagonisms (Behr 2018). For peace practitioners, overvaluing culture made finding a common ground among different groups difficult. In other words, difference became a problem to be solved. 

Trying to move away from these two errors, critical peacebuilding scholars have urged us to engage more fully with ‘local’ differences. For them, differences are a resource that local populations can mobilise to build peace rather than being a problem to be solved (Brigg 2018; Wilcock 2021). Peacebuilding operations should therefore be open to the myriad of differences in conflict-affected societies. These approaches became loosely gathered under the umbrella of the ‘local turn’ – a group of scholars and practitioners attached to a better inclusion and/or understanding of the ‘local’ as a way to improve peacebuilding outcomes. These approaches to peace are meant to be more tolerant of difference, solving both the first and second errors outlined above. 

However, these discussions essentialized difference insofar as the conditions that make difference exist in the first place were not acknowledged. Indeed, if the ‘local’ can be identified at all, it is thanks to its difference from the (intervening) Self. The result is the reproduction of the ‘stigma of difference’ (Mathieu 2019): the local is (what is) intrinsically different from the norm, and therefore deviant and inferior. This means that local differences are recognised and valued, but can never be considered as equal and equally useful to build peace.

Is there a productive way to think about difference and peacebuilding that overcomes these three errors? Even more importantly, can international peacebuilding be made to work in a diverse world? Yes, we argue: thinking about difference in peacebuilding requires continually thinking about relationality, performance and power. The first step is to recognize that differences are performative and as such situated in time and context. As feminist scholars show, attention should be placed on the multiple forms of identity and difference that defy categorization and are expressed in the everyday (Read 2018). Scholars and practitioners should look at how people identify themselves, express feelings, anxieties and fears, write culture, form associations and collectives, and the politics involved in these complex and relational processes (including their own place in them). A second step is to recognize that difference emerges in relation to power and is linked to social structures that enable and reinforce certain differences, while silencing others. Who is different (and for whom) is intrinsically linked to powerful worldviews about the ‘normal’. Imaginaries of peace that are open to difference must therefore be attentive to situations of domination and control, and how identities resist and move, adapt, evolve or fall silent. In the absence of such a reflection, the well-intentioned strategy of current peacebuilding – to value the ‘local’ as a resource for peace –  could lead to reproducing difference as a problem.

This post is based on the article: Pol Bargués-Pedreny & Xavier Mathieu (2018) Beyond Silence, Obstacle and Stigma: Revisiting the ‘Problem’ of Difference in Peacebuilding, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 12:3, 283-299. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17502977.2018.1513622

References

Avruch, Kevin. 2003. “Type I and Type II Errors in Culturally Sensitive Conflict Resolution Practice.” Conflict Resolution Quarterly 20 (3): 351–371.

Behr, H. 2018. “Peace-in-Difference: A Phenomenological Approach to Peace Through Difference.” Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 12 (3): 335–351.

Brigg, Morgan. 2018. “Relational and Essential: Theorizing Difference for Peacebuilding.” Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 12(3): 352-366.

Mathieu, Xavier. 2019. “Critical peacebuilding and the dilemma of difference: the stigma of the ‘local’ and the quest for equality.” Third World Quarterly 40(1): 36-52.

Read, Róisín. 2018. “Embodying Difference: Reading Gender in Women’s Memoirs of Humanitarianism.” Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 12 (3): 300–318.

Valbjørn, Morten. 2008. “Before, During and After the Cultural Turn: A ‘Baedeker’ to IR’s Cultural Journey.” International Review of Sociology 18 (1): 55–82.

Wilcock. Cathy A. 2021. “From Hybridity to Networked Relationality: Actors, Ideologies and the Legacies of Sudan’s Comprehensive Peace Agreement.” Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 15(2): 221-243.

What Are “Climate Refugees”?

By
John Simms and Shahbaz Ali
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As the planet warms, people are being forced to flee their homes and land due to natural disasters, droughts, and other extreme weather events. These people are “climate refugees” if forced to flee their country, or internally displaced people or IDPs if forced to move to another part of the same country. According to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, each year, natural disasters force an average of 21.5 million people from their homes around the world.

Did you know that in 2022, one of the worst cases of climate IDPs to ever occur took place? It happened in Pakistan, where 33 million people were displaced. It all started with extreme heat in the early summer, which then led to intense monsoon rains and then catastrophic flooding that left a third of the country underwater. The flooding not only impacted agricultural production, but also damaged infrastructure and the stagnant water and lack of sanitation facilities has increased public health risks, creating a crisis fragilizing existing peace processes.

Peace News visited some of the IDPs in Pakistan to better understand the situation.

Can serious games help to transform the conflict in Yemen?

By
Philipp Busch
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Serious Game Peace News

If we want to reach out to a young audience, we need to adapt our use of media. A serious game is a game with a primary purpose other than pure entertainment. I was working as a project manager and consultant for the project “Peace Process Support for Yemen (PPSY)”, I will share some insights on the use of Serious Games to deliver a message of peaceful coexistence to our target audience: the youth of Yemen. 

Our games serve as an environment for intended learning, awareness raising and even behaviour change. The player’s actions in the games do not lead to direct consequences in the real world. The player finds him or herself in the so-called Magic Circle, in which they can try out different behaviours and learn from mistakes without being punished in the real world. In this protected learning environment, players interact with content on non-violent conflict transformation, are encouraged to reflect on related topics and apply certain approaches in their own lives.

The format of the digital serious game is particularly suitable for a young target group used to using a smartphone. 70% of the population in Yemen is 30  or younger. The majority of these young people have access to a smartphone and belong to the gamer generation, which is equally composed of female and male gamers and regularly plays games, especially on smartphones. Consequently, it was promising to use a game format to reach out to youth, especially in a country where it is extremely difficult to approach them physically due to the ongoing conflicts.

The games were developed in cooperation with a group of European game development studios led by the non-profit organisation Butterfly Works. Additionally, to ensure a user-centred design and create content and game environments adapted to the context and the target group, artists, gamers and developers from Yemen were contracted to accompany the process and add the “Yemeni touch”. During the development phase, the first unintended success of the project occurred: the loose network of Yemeni individuals founded their own game development studio in Sana’a called Arkadia Studio, in order to respond in a structured way to the requests of the project and to develop further games for peace support out of their own motivation. In the period 2016 – 2020, seven serious games were developed, each with a different approach and target group within the Yemeni population. 

The development process was divided into the phases of analysis, design, development, implementation and evaluation. In the analysis phase, the context and the target group were closely examined in cooperation with the Yemeni artists and complementary research. The Design Thinking approach was used as a way to ensure a user-centred solution. In the design phase, the game concept was created with a cross-functional and cross-cultural team and adapted to the target group. At the same time, the learning content was integrated into the game mechanics themselves to minimise a purely sequential order of learning and fun. 

In the development phase, the code for the game was created and artistic elements such as story, illustrations, animations and sound were integrated. Using agile project management, the games were developed iteratively. They were tested by the target group at certain intervals and the feedback on the game mechanics and technical improvements were incorporated. In the implementation phase, the games were uploaded to the Playstore and supported by an online and offline promotion campaign. The evaluation of the success of the games did not start after the implementation but was conducted throughout the duration of the project.  Various impact quantitative and qualitative impact measurement methods applied both inside and outside the games evaluated the project as a success. A community was born that was actively discussing the peacebuilding messages from the games and the promotion campaign. The discussions took place online on social media or offline on a variety of events supporting the games.

Each of the seven games was downloaded over 10,000 times from the Playstore, with over 90% of the downloads from Yemen. The accompanying Facebook page had over 40,000 followers at the time, and now has over 65,000. The average rating of the games was 4.4 out of 5 possible stars in the Playstore, and one game even appeared in the top 3 of the Playstore in Yemen for a short time. Meanwhile, the PPSY project is pursuing a multimedia approach, developing online campaigns on social media, short films and a TV series in cooperation with Yemeni stakeholders to spread the messages of non-violent conflict transformation in Yemen with a target group-oriented focus.

Once developed, a serious game can be scaled up and developed further. The Yemeni context is one of many examples of applications in which serious games have been successfully used to convey complex learning content in a contextualised, user-centred and interactive way. A well-designed serious game not only provides access to and interaction with relevant learning content but also fulfills another important criterion: it is fun to play.

Working on behalf of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and the European Union (EU), the Project “Peace Process Support for Yemen (PPSY)”, implemented by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH is improving the capacities for non-violent conflict resolution in Yemen. The company Mind Games GmbH from Germany supports the project and other actors of international organizations on the development of serious games that are tailored to the target audience, context and culture.

Maintaining Peace During Crisis in Pakistan

By
John Simms and Hanzala Daud
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Pakistan is facing one of its worst crises in decades. Peacebuilders are hoping this will allow dialogue and cooperation amongst communities in conflict.

Experts interviewed: Shabir Hussain

Relational sensitivities in Peace Research and Practise: Attainments and challenges

By
Ignasi Torrent
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UN_Peacebuiding_Sierra_Leone_Peace_News

Relations are increasingly emerging as a tool to understand war-torn scenarios for peace scholars and policymakers. In peacebuilding debates, authors have emphasised the suitability to focus on relations and interactions between actors and actions in conflict-affected contexts to capture the complex interconnectedness that shape the peacebuilding milieu. In brief, the relational perspective in peacebuilding centres on the outcomes that these encounters entail as well as on the seeming unpredictability in which these unfold.

Morgan Brigg argues that the prime position of a peacebuilder in a relational approach is the acknowledgment of the absence of authority and the capacity of the individual to know the world over the recipient of peacebuilding, as that epistemological collision mutually constitutes its participants. The author suggests that from a relational position hierarchy is less important than openness and change. Thus, Brigg emphasises the need to recognise other forms of thinking, doing and knowing as equivalent to our forms of thinking, doing and knowing. In all, relational peacebuilding perspectives focus on the unexpected negotiations between actors to reach a more comprehensive understanding of the complexity of peacebuilding settings, in which these relations produce unforeseeable effects, such as the ‘local resistance’ of the so-called peace spoilers.

Based on narratives and practices emerging from fieldwork observation, reports, and interviews, the following lines allow for the production of a broader picture of the emergent challenges in the peacebuilding milieu; particularly three. First, through critically reflecting upon the limited results of UN peacebuilding efforts in Sierra Leone in knowing and engaging ‘the locals’ in peacebuilding projects, I came to problematise the UN mode of knowing and capturing the host society as a homogenous actor independent from the international organisation. Rather, I hint that the UN and the ‘locals’ are mutually reshaped in relation. Thus, I hint at the benefits of not thinking both actors as fully separate entities, but instead as stakeholders that constantly transform one another. Second, thinking with the UN flawed performance to achieve organisational system-wide coherence in Burundi as a necessary step to enhance the peacebuilding outcomes, I interrogate the assumption that events unfold in a linear and rational mode in conflict-affected scenarios. Everyday reality shows that actors cannot expect that strategy A will lead to strategy B unproblematically. Beyond these deterministic cause-effect relations, I suggest that peacebuilders center on their potential resilience and ability to respond to the unpredictable. Third, in light of the UN faulty performance amidst a network of numerous deployed actors in the Central African Republic, I hint that the more stakeholders deployed in the war-torn milieu, the more vulnerable the autonomous agency of actors, since they can avoid influencing one another. This is indicative of the need for collective ways of doing.

In other words, by engaging with these three real cases, the relational lens allows for, first, questioning the efforts towards engaging ‘the locals’ as if these were ‘out-there’ independent actors,. Secondly, it allows for actors to realise the importance of being resilient and ready for the unexpected. Third, it allows for undermining a supposedly autonomous agency of actors and invoke for a networked action. In the words of the English philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, ‘the experience of Peace is largely beyond the control of purpose’, an assumption that frees peacebuilders from their protracted anxiety induced by the constant failure of peace efforts. It is not the object of this brief text to provide a recipe or a formula for peacebuilders, for there is none. Entanglements, relations, collisions, tensions, negotiations, frictions, entwinements, knots and so forth are not presented here to claim how the world should be. Rather, they are introduced as tools for a better comprehension of peace processes. Seeking to impose a particular peace, even if it follows a relational sensitivity, it is bound to reproduce exclusionary schemes that will leave behind those segments of the local population which resist it or simply cannot jump on board the strategy. Different from the goal-oriented stance of UN peacebuilding endeavours, and many other organisations, relationality in this text offers an invitation to see the peacebuilding milieu, and by extension the broader world, as radical openness, where events result from the clash of an infinite multiplicity of world-making possibilities. Being open to affirm this radical openness, I suggest, might be a first good step towards thinking and doing peace.

For a more developed version of the above arguments, see:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21647259.2021.1999166

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