Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies

Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies Series Editor: Oliver P. Richmond, Professor, School of International Relations, University of St. Andrews Editorial Board: Roland Bleiker, University of Queensland, Australia; Henry F. Carey, Georgia State University, USA; Costas Constantinou, University of Keele, UK; A.J.R. Groom, University of Kent, UK; Vivienne Jabri, King s College London, UK; Edward Newman, University of Birmingham, UK; Sorpong Peou, Sophia University, Japan; Caroline Kennedy-Pipe, University of Sheffield, UK; Professor Michael Pugh, University of Bradford, UK; Chandra Sriram, University of East London, UK; Ian Taylor, University of St. Andrews, UK; Alison Watson, University of St. Andrews, UK; R.B.J. Walker, University of Victoria, Canada; Andrew Williams, University of St. Andrews, UK. Titles include: Morgan Brigg THE NEW POLITICS OF CONFLICT RESOLUTION Responding to Difference Susanne Buckley-Zistel CONFLICT TRANSFORMATION AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN UGANDA Remembering after Violence Jason Franks RETHINKING THE ROOTS OF TERRORISM Vivienne Jabri WAR AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF GLOBAL POLITICS James Ker-Lindsay EU ACCESSION AND UN PEACEMAKING IN CYPRUS Roger MacGinty NO WAR, NO PEACE The Rejuvenation of Stalled Peace Processes and Peace Accords Carol McQueen HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTION AND SAFETY ZONES Iraq, Bosnia and Rwanda Sorpong Peou INTERNATIONAL DEMOCRACY ASSISTANCE FOR PEACEBUILDING Cambodia and Beyond Sergei Prozorov UNDERSTANDING CONFLICT BETWEEN RUSSIA AND THE EU The Limits of Integration Oliver P. Richmond THE TRANSFORMATION OF PEACE Bahar Rumelili CONSTRUCTING REGIONAL COMMUNITY AND ORDER IN EUROPE AND SOUTHEAST ASIA Chandra Lekha Sriram PEACE AS GOVERNANCE Power-Sharing, Armed Groups and Contemporary Peace Negotiations

Stephan Stetter WORLD SOCIETY AND THE MIDDLE EAST Reconstructions in Regional Politics Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies Series Standing Order ISBN 978-1-4039-9575-9 (hardback) & 978-1-4039-9576-6 (paperback) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and one of the ISBNs quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England

The New Politics of Conflict Resolution Responding to Difference Morgan Brigg School of Political Science and International Studies University of Queensland, Australia

ISBN 978-1-349-99974-3 DOI 10.1057/9780230583375 ISBN 978-0-230-58337-5 (ebook) Morgan Brigg 2008 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2008 978-0-230-54710-0 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6 10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave and Macmillan are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Brigg, Morgan, 1970 The new politics of conflict resolution : responding to difference / Morgan Brigg. p. cm. (Rethinking peace and conflict studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Conflict management Cross-cultural studies. 2. Culture conflict Cross-cultural studies. I. Title. HM1126.B744 2008 303.6 dc22 2008029968 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08

Contents Preface Acknowledgments vii xi Introduction 1 The conflict resolution field 3 The difference challenge 6 Bringing difference to bear 12 Detailed overview 15 Part I Ordering Difference 1 The Culture Challenge 25 From behavior to meaning 28 The culture question expanded 31 Culture at the limit 34 Colonial encounters 35 The culture challenge with Kevin Avruch 39 Culture without Cultures 43 Possibilities of relatedness? 46 Conclusion 48 2 Governing Difference 50 Mapping cultural governance 52 Norms for governance 58 Facilitative governance 63 Normalization 64 Confessional problem-solving 68 Facilitating rational selves 71 Governance achieved? 75 Conclusion 77 3 Sovereign Selves 79 Sovereign knowledge and the subordination of difference 82 Facilitating liberal governance: Sovereign self, sovereign state 91 Fissured sovereignty 97 Conclusion 100 v

vi Contents Part II Exploring Relatedness 4 Recognition and Relatedness 105 Cosmopolitan conflict resolution 107 The risks of recognition 110 Recognizing selves 112 Relatedness: Complementing recognition 118 Relatedness: Beyond sovereignty? 120 Conclusion 128 5 Responding Anew 130 Selves as resources 132 Becoming-other 135 Beyond reflexivity 137 Avoiding self-indulgence 140 Responsive complexity 143 Networked relationality 149 Conclusion 152 Conclusion 154 Ordering difference 155 Toward a new politics? 159 Notes 165 Bibliography 194 Index 208

Preface Early in my experience of cross-cultural conflict resolution work, I was faced with a paradox: the practice in which I was involved was characterized by little if any exchange of underlying cultural values and frameworks. Instead, the broadly Western values of my society dominated, serving as a type of natural and unquestioned backdrop for guiding conflict resolution practice. This changed for me when, in a mediation session I was running, an elderly Australian Aboriginal woman repudiated my authority to act upon her by asserting her tradition. In effect, she invoked the fact of colonization to challenge the liberal settler-colonial administrative and legislative basis for my practice and by extension the wider transnational liberalism deployed in globalized conflict resolution and peacebuilding efforts. Her rebuff motivated me to explore the lack of exchange about values underpinning intercultural conflict resolution. In this work, a broad pattern emerged. On one hand, conflict resolution promises responsiveness to people in conflict, including to their cultural, identity and other differences. But conflict resolution is compromised in delivering on this promise by the way it relies upon, and explicitly or implicitly promotes, conventional Western approaches to conflict and social and political life. This situation led me to oscillate between excitement and frustration about the conflict resolution field, and energized my efforts to better understand and address conflict resolution s relationship with difference. This book is the result. Over time my research made it clear that I needed to critically examine the politics of knowledge in the conflict resolution field by exploring linkages between ways of knowing and conflict resolution practice. Questions about how conflict resolution relates to difference in practice cannot be separated from how we know difference, or from the dominance of Western ways of knowing in social science and political thinking. The powerful idea of sovereignty, for instance, influences our understanding about the nature of selfhood and the organization of political life. These and related understandings underpin much conflict resolution scholarship as well as processes such as mediation and problem-solving workshops and the encounters across difference that occur through them. The types of education, socialization, and training that conflict resolution scholars and practitioners receive, and who they are as individuals, also play a role. Often overlooked, though, are the ways in which efforts vii

viii Preface to facilitate order regularly see conflict workers serve as the agents of longstanding and quite particular Western ways of conceiving of selves, of political community, and of resolving conflict. This frequently leads the conflict resolution field to bypass or override non-western ways of dealing with conflict to deny difference even as it attempts to implement a progressive and responsive politics. Cultural, religious, and identity differences animate key conflicts of our time, and are likely to continue to do so in coming decades. We therefore cannot rely solely upon conventional Western ways of knowing and approaching conflict. To do so fails to recognize that these ways of knowing are themselves culturally constrained and are unlikely to adequately respond to other realities, worldviews, and ways of knowing. Indeed, to persist in operating from a Western worldview without asking questions of it is to risk contributing to conflict rather than working to address it. This is precisely the difficulty we face. While conflict resolution has taken on a transnational character and draws to some extent from a number of traditions, it predominantly operates through Western knowledge frameworks, values, and problem-solving practices. In short, it has a tendency to return to itself for familiar but not universal, or necessarily useful ways of understanding and resolving conflict. Difference, then, presents a particularly tricky challenge for conflict resolution scholarship and practice. To begin to address this challenge, I draw upon critical theory and my own self and experiences as methodological resources to analyze and question existing conflict resolution assumptions, categories, and processes, sometimes by revealing their historical and cultural specificity and contingency. This analysis shows that conflict resolution often unwittingly reinscribes dominant ways of thinking about political community, order, and conflict on Western liberal terms. I also show, however, that a combination of critical analysis at the limits of contemporary social science, and the practical commitment to responsiveness and personal engagement on the part of many conflict resolution scholars and practitioners, offers prospects for rethinking the field s relationship with difference. The book undertakes this analysis in two parts. Part I explores the ways in which conflict resolution orders and governs difference. The Introduction provides an overview of the conflict resolution field and expands on the above themes, outlining the challenge that difference presents for conflict resolution and how I attempt to bring difference to bear in the book without subordinating it to mainstream Western ways of knowing. Chapter 1 rethinks the way we frame difference in the social sciences, providing a new take on the challenge that cultural difference

Preface ix presents to conflict resolution. Current conflict resolution approaches to culture exhibit shortcomings, but Chapter 1 also shows how the recent move to view culture as a relational effect promises some solutions and innovative ways of thinking about connections across difference. Chapter 2 utilizes a transnational Foucauldian analysis to show how conflict resolution processes such as mediation and problem-solving workshops govern difference according to liberal Western understandings of selfhood, order, and conflict, even as they promote and encourage liberal freedom. Chapter 3 explains how the influential idea of sovereignty contributes to the subordination of difference by facilitating the return of Western knowledge to itself (thereby bypassing and denying other traditions) and the integration of individual lives into sovereign states and transnational liberalism through conflict resolution processes. At the same time, sovereignty is necessarily fractured because it is in-and-of the world. Chapter 3 concludes by examining how this fracturing represents possibilities for moving beyond the ordering and governing of difference. Part II explores how conflict resolution might move past the challenges discussed in Part I to fulfill its promise of responsiveness to people in conflict. It treats the practical and engaged nature of conflict resolution as a valuable way of moving the field forward while exploring theoretical resources which might support rigorous ways of responding across difference that have hitherto remained obscured and unutilized. Chapter 4 reviews the notion of a cosmopolitan conflict resolution before engaging ideas of recognition, often mobilized in struggles for cultural rights and justice, and relatedness, which promises relationship across difference based on intersubjective vulnerability deriving from the beingin-common of human existence. Both are necessary, but where recognition risks falling back upon sovereignty, relatedness mitigates these risks and offers more thoroughgoing possibilities for connecting across difference. Chapter 5 explores innovations for responding anew at the limits of contemporary conflict resolution scholarship and practice. It critically examines how the selves of individual conflict workers and the burgeoning field of complexity studies can serve as resources for connecting with others and analyzing conflict. The last section of the chapter explores the value of the network metaphor for conceptualizing the pursuit of relatedness to address the challenges of difference in conflict resolution. The Conclusion summarizes the key themes and arguments of the book and looks to future difficulties and possibilities for conflict resolution s engagement with difference. While cultural, identity, and other differences clearly present challenges in the twenty-first century, I argue that conventional social science assumptions about difference, selves,

x Preface order, and conflict often exacerbate these challenges. To move beyond these assumptions to new and more peaceful ways of relating across difference requires foregoing the reassurance on offer through familiar ways of knowing and operating in conflict resolution. Questioning ingrained approaches is challenging, but to respond to others is also a key conflict resolution goal. To do so is to necessarily become vulnerable to other people s ways of knowing the world, entertaining the possibilities for social order and conflict resolution suggested by their political systems, and opening to their understandings of themselves and their existence. This book hopes to move us closer toward this possibility. The process is only partially achieved here, but facing this task is both necessary and an opportunity for dealing with difference in the twenty-first century.

Acknowledgments Many people have contributed to the development of this work. Key arguments in Chapter 1 are drawn from an article developed jointly with Kate Muller, and Kate has generously agreed for me to use this material. Rebecca Duffy has offered continual support along with comments and advice on the text. Catherine Mills has provided continuous intellectual companionship and encouragement. Roland Bleiker has been a constant source of support and guidance. I particularly want to thank him for contributing his time and energy. Numerous other people, including colleagues at the School of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Queensland, have provided various forms of assistance. While I am unable to recall or name all who have contributed, I note the support and input provided by Charlie Watson, Mark Davidheiser, Mneesha Gellman, Lyndon Murphy, and Oliver Richmond. I take full responsibility for the text. xi