Category: 01

After four years of peace negotiations, the 52-year-long civil war between the Colombian government and the left wing guerrilla FARC-EP recently came to an end. What will happen now to the thousands of combatants who are laying down their arms and what are the challenges to their reintegration? Could a gender aware reintegration programme hold the key to long-term peace?

On November 30, 2016 the Colombian government formally ratified a revised Peace Agreement after a national plebiscite rejected the original peace accord. The agreement ended the longest armed conflict in the western hemisphere and in Latina America.

The FARC-EP (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia – Ejército del Pueblo) started the demobilisation process in January 2017. The combatants are currently gathered in 23 transitory areas (zonas veredales transitorias de normalización) and 7 camps that will be in force for 180 days. The government is expecting around 6.300 combatants to reach the areas. In relation to children associated with the armed group, the High Commissioner said that the delivery´s protocols will be activated upon FARC´s arrival in the zones: as FARC combatants enter the zones they will be delivering the minors and UNICEF will receive them.

The FARC´s demobilisation and disarmament is supported by the United Nations Special Mission in Colombia. The mission has the mandate to monitor and verify the disarmament, and be part of the tripartite mechanism that will control and verify the definitive bilateral ceasefire and cessation of hostilities.

Once the FARC´s members are settled in the transitory areas, the first step will be for arms and weapons to be laid down and registered. Unstable armaments will be destroyed on site and the UN Mission will remove all the weapons from the camp after 180 days.

After the demobilisation and disarmament, the former combatants will also go through a reintegration process that, at present, is based on the current legal framework implemented by the Colombian Agency for Reintegration (Agencia Colombian para la Reintegración: ACR). The Colombian government agency ACR is the institution in charge of the reintegration process. The ACR was created on 3 November 2011 as a new state agency ascribed to the Administrative Department of the Presidency of the Republic.

Overview of the Colombian reintegration process

The reintegration of former combatants is a formidable challenge for Colombia. In addition to the FARC´s members that will soon reintegrate, data from the ACR shows that there are currently 15.043 persons taking part in the governmental reintegration process and a further 15.478 former combatants have completed the reintegration programme since the ACR´s creation. Among the persons currently going through the reintegration programme, 47% are former paramilitaries, 42% are former FARC´s combatants who demobilized before the peace agreement and most of the remaining former combatants were enrolled with the guerrilla ELN (Ejercito de Liberacion Nacional).

Additionally, if the on-going negotiation between the ELN and the Colombian government succeeds there will be another collective demobilization of about 2.500 combatants. This figure includes both men and women but not children. Although it is impossible to know with certainty how many children and adolescents are currently linked to the armed groups or have been demobilised in the last few decades, between 1999 and 2013 the Colombian Family Welfare Institute (ICBF) assisted 5,417 children and adolescents who were separated from illegal armed groups (28 percent of them are girls and 72 percent boys).

The ACR takes into account national and international guidelines on DDR, such as the United Nations Integrated Standards for Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration (IDDRS). The main components of the reintegration process are social and economic assistance (such as payments for basic living expenses), psychosocial care, vocational training, and access to the national health system. The reintegration model includes eight dimensions: personal, productive, family, habitability, health, educational, civic and security.

Challenges to the reintegration process

Image credit: Silvia Andrea Moreno/Flickr.

The reintegration of former combatants is a key factor in the stabilisation of countries that are transitioning from conflict to peace. Unsuccessful reintegration could lead to the creation of new armed groups, the expansion of criminal activities and the recurrence of violence. In transitional and violent settings “unemployed, demobilized young men, socialized to violence and brutality during war, are more likely than others to form gangs, particularly in urban areas, and pose a constant threat to the security of women and children” (De Watteville, 2002: ix). As it has been acknowledged by the international agencies working in reintegration, creating alternative livelihoods and jobs opportunities is exceptionally difficult in post-conflict or conflict settings. The high number of former combatants to reintegrate into the civilian life poses an arduous challenge for the second most economically unequal country in Latin America, with an estimated unemployment rate of 8.3 and one of the highest and most inequitable concentrations of land ownership in the world.

Colombia has already experienced the consequences of an incomplete reintegration process. After the demobilization of the paramilitary group United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (Spanish: Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia: AUC) in 2005 and 2006, new armed groups emerged. Those groups are referred to as Las Bandas emergentes en Colombia o bandas criminales emergentes (BACRIM), meaning emerging criminal gangs, by the Colombian government but it has shown similar continuity with the previous AUC structure and often some mid-level paramilitary commanders have joined this new groups.

There is a risk that many demobilized combatants will receive recruitment offers or will be threatened into joining the new organizations and narcotraffic groups, as has happened in the past. A recent Wall Steet Journal article reported that the Brazilian gang Primer Comando is recruiting FARC´s members in order to extend its drug network and routes. Since one of the main factors that can jeopardize the reintegration of former combatants is the enormous Colombian drugs trafficking market, the government launched a comprehensive strategy against illegal crops with the goal to substitute and clean about 50,000 hectares of illicit crops in 2017.

One of the main challenges for former combatants is to find a sustainable and decent employment. Most of the ex-combatants have an extremely limited education level and it will be very challenging for them to succeed in the increasingly competitive job market. Many of them joined the armed groups as teenagers and did not complete a formal school education. The governmental reintegration programme developed learning programs for adults and it offers education opportunities. However, adults’ education has many challenges and not all former combatants succeed in completing the studies. Among those who took part in the reintegration programme, 21.875 passed the primary level of elementary school, 8.064 passed the second grade of elementary education, 14.967 graduated from the high school and 2.763 attended further education. Most of the jobs that are accessible with a low education level are paid the national minimum wage, which in 2017 is about 240 euro (737,717 Colombian pesos). Without doubt, the drugs cartels and the armed groups offer payments that are much higher than those of the regular job market for unschooled persons.

Additionally, the former combatants have to overcome the trauma generated by the war. It has been estimated that in Colombia 90% of the people who enter the reintegration process have some kind of psychosocial affectation.There are also gender specific risks and challenges effecting the reintegration phase. Demobilised women may face stigma and discrimination. In Colombia, where gender roles and patriarchal models are very strong, female combatants that have transgressed traditional gender norms – by joining the armed groups – face difficulties in their personal lives and for many of them returning to their families is not an option. It has been reported that 87% of individually demobilised women choose to leave in anonymous urban environments like Bogotá and Medellín, instead of their native towns.

The gender dimension of reintegration programmes

The importance of a gender mainstreaming approach during the reintegration processes is widely recognized today and many manuals and guidelines have been designed to reflect this (United Nations 2014, UN Women 2012). Also, the literature emerging in the conflict resolution field examining masculinities and transitional justice shows the importance of addressing militarized and hegemonic identities as a key step toward peace (see Specht 2013; Enloe 2008; Cockburn 2010). However, the demobilization and reintegration of ex-combatants frequently overlooks the relationship between masculinities and the construction of peace (see Flisi 2016). Still there is limited knowledge on how to deconstruct wartime masculinities and too few attempts to promote non-violent ideals of manhood.

In Colombia different initiatives are emerging that focus on the gender dimensions of the transition to the civilian life, with a special focus on family relationship, positive masculinities and gender roles. In this sense, the Colombian ACR´s reintegration programme has elaborated a gender strategy. The strategy promotes non-violent gender relations, both in the reintegration process and in the families. This is done through the implementation of psychosocial activities that include a gender and new masculinities perspective. To this extent, competencies such as non-violent conflict resolution and assertive relationships are encouraged by cultivating the ability to identify and generate constructive relationships. The focus is on effective communication, tolerance, empathy, emotional assertiveness and the demilitarization of masculinities and femininities.

Many of the challenges of a reintegration programme are related to the community, family and domestic spheres. The anthropologist Kimberly Theidon, who researched the reintegration of former combatants in Colombia, highlights the risk of an increase and “domestication” of violence. Similarly, researchers showed an increase in sexual violence against women and girls as well as other forms of violence after the reintegration of paramilitaries (see Caicedo Delgado 2007; Londoño & Ramírez 2007). Tackling gender based violence is an important component of a holistic and integral reintegration programme. A successful gender strategy is not limited to a focus on womens’ needs and should also consider the gender dynamics and the relationship within the family and the community. A transformative gender reintegration programme should include activities that are able to tackle gender stereotypes such as initiatives to promote the role of men as care givers, equal redistribution of the childcare responsibilities and womens’ economic and political empowerment, among many others examples. Since the end of 2011 the ACR designed and implemented a special focus on tackling interfamily violence that is composed of 24 activities aimed to address both men and women. But the effectiveness of those activities is not known and further research is needed to identify the impact in the long term.

Conclusions

In Colombia fighting narcotraffic and criminal armed groups should be at the forefront of the government strategies to ensure a successful reintegration. However, there other many other aspects of the reintegration that are equally important and should not be overlooked such as technical and professional education, employment generation, psychosocial caring, family and community support, domestic violence and gender specific needs. There is important evidence of the Colombian Government´s efforts to incorporate a gender approach into the reintegration programme. Colombia could provide valuable examples in elaborating strategies to tackle violence against women and deconstructing militarized masculinities as part of the reintegration process but further evidence on this needs to be collected.

Isabella Flisi is an international development worker and researcher with almost 10 years of experience working on human rights in Colombia and in Latin America. She has worked with different international organizations: Peace Brigades International, Christian Aid, War Child Holland, FAO and KIT-Royal Tropical Institute. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the Ulster University Transitional Justice Institute, where she is researching child soldiers´ reintegration and reparations programs from a gender perspective. Flisi has both a master’s degree in international cooperation and a B.A. in anthropology from the University of Bologna, Italy. Her expertise covers conflict transformation, peace-building, DDR, gender-based violence and human rights with a strong focus on women and child rights. She has published the article The reintegration of former combatants in Colombia: addressing violent masculinities in a fragile context in Gender & Development. She wrote about the reparations for victims of sexual violence in Colombia in PassBlue.

Chemical weapons elicit a very specific emotive and political response from populations, namely, anxiety. What are the drivers behind the fears surrounding chemical weapons? 

“War, like revolution, is founded upon intimidation. A victorious war…destroys only an insignificant part of the conquered army, intimidating the remainder and breaking their will…Terror…kills individuals, and intimidates thousands”.

Writing in 1920, Leon Trotsky thus attributed the power of war and terrorism to its psychological effect. The ability to intimidate and coerce is the key strategy in a world in flux; fear and uncertainty are the weapons of choice for terrorist groups. The observation that terrorists endeavour to kill few and create fear among many has been woven tightly into the fabric of terrorism discourse for decades.  

But the current century has witnessed an evolved threat paradigm in which the aim of a new type of terrorist group is to achieve “a lot of people watching and a lot of people dead”. Chemical weapons are often presented as the apex of such a goal. Yet increasingly it is argued that chemical weapons are merely a tool to elicit fear that far exceeds their actual destructive clout. This fear is a very human response. The psychological power of chemical weapons is intrinsically linked to their contaminant nature, indiscriminate harm and ability to undermine an individual’s sense of security.

Are chemical weapons really weapons of mass destruction, with a devastating impact on infrastructure, life, and property? Or, are they weapons of terror? Distinguishing between the two, this article queries how uncertainty feeds the fears surrounding chemical weapons. To what extent does the weapon of terror moniker depend on the concept of mass destruction?

The enduring power of contamination

Image credit: New York National Guard/Flickr.

Chemical weapons have an ancient history. Early hunter-gatherers learned to poison their arrows to ensure an effective kill. Poison gas as a weapon of war was recorded by Thucydides in 428 BCE. The scorched earth tactic of poisoning wells using the rotten corpses of people who had died from infectious disease was used across the Ottoman era and Middle Ages. Chemical weapons have been utilised – or attempted – in many conflicts since then. The British government, for example, approved the use of sulphur fumes at the siege of Sebastopol during the Crimean War. Even in Afghanistan and Iraq, the US Army used white phosphorous grenades, as did the British.

As scientific advances began to allow a greater multiplicity of chemical agents in industrial quantities, concerns mounted over potential consequences. In recognition of the sentiment that injury or death by poison is inhumane, the Hague Conventions (1899 & 1907) outlawed the battlefield use of poisoned weapons and toxic gas via projectiles. The declaration prohibiting the dissemination of asphyxiating and deleterious gases was ratified by all major powers except the US which refused to sign, arguing that projectiles as detailed in the convention had not yet been fully developed.

The use of poison has long been regarded as morally reprehensible. This harks back to disdain inherent to poisoning and its associations with chemical weapons: in contrast to the hero’s death by sword in battle, poisoning is regarded as cowardly and secretive. Yet this became more acute in the aftermath of the Hague Conventions: moral indignation follows the breaking of accepted conventions, shattering indoctrinated agreement as to non-use. In the early 20^th century, both Allies and Axis powers were reluctant to be the first to breach the law.

Even General John Pershing, having established the U.S. military’s first gas warfare unit in 1917, denounced chemical weapons as “abhorrent to civilization…a cruel, unfair and improper use of science…fraught with the gravest danger to non-combatants”. By the end of WWI, over 124,000 tonnes of chlorine, phosgene and mustard gases had been dispersed, causing approximately 90,000 deaths and 1,230,853 injuries and earning WWI the moniker, “the chemist’s war”. Though the development of gas masks reduced the number of casualties in the later years, the scale of chemical warfare had set the precedent for a lingering psychological and moral response. That even Hitler refused to use chemical weapons on the battlefield (if not in the gas chambers) cemented their standing as a wholly unacceptable weapon of war.

For decades, the threat from chemical weapons remained largely in the hands of states. Almost two decades since the Chemical Weapons Convention came into force outlawing the production, stockpiling, and use of chemical weapons, the threat of non-state actors obtaining or producing chemical weapons has become of increasing concern. Large quantities of improperly disposed unconventional weapons have been unearthed in recent decades. After WWII, for instance, tons of mustard gas, sarin, soman, tabun, hydrogen cyanide and many other agents were left in storage facilities near towns and cities, buried in landfills across the world or dumped at sea. During the Cold War, chemical weapons facilities proliferated across the world, shrouded in secrecy. Throughout this time, in the Soviet Union thousands of tonnes of chemical materials were simply dumped in undisclosed, unchartered locations. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, some chemical research units were abandoned, leaving available a mass of untraced and unacknowledged weaponry.

Chemical weapons and non-state actors

Various terrorist organisations have spent years working on developing chemical weapons, of which the so-called Islamic State (IS) is but one. The eleventh volume of al-Qaida’s Encyclopaedia of Jihad provides instructions on how to construct chemical and biological weapons, although al-Qaida seems to have balked at actually using such weapons. Where groups have succeeded in their use, they have created vast shockwaves, with minimal outlay. In 1978, a Palestinian group injected non-lethal quantities of mercury into Jaffa oranges leading many countries to cease imports, jeopardising a market worth $172 million to Israel at the time. In 1989, terrorists reportedly laced Chilean grapes with cyanide, costing the Chilean fruit industry $333 million, despite the chemical only having been identified in two grapes.

In 1995, Aum Shinrikyo unleashed the largest gas attack in peacetime history on several lines of the Tokyo subway, killing 12 people and injuring thousands. Though the proportion of people killed was relatively low compared to numbers injured, the attack demonstrated the ability of non-state actors to obtain and use significant quantities of non-conventional weapons. It has subsequently been cast as a “crossing of the Rubicon” (to pass a point of no return), foreshadowing further similar attacks.

Chemical anxieties

Chemical weapons elicit a very specific emotive and political response. When the threat and impact of terrorist attacks using conventional weapons against Western targets is so real, why does the as-yet unrealised potential for chemical terror attacks in the West retain a particular power over our thinking?

Attempts to explain the anxieties surrounding chemical weapons remain incomplete when considered alongside conventional weapons with similarly cruel capabilities. Why, as in Aleppo or Homs, do we regard using explosives to tear people apart as more humane than burning or asphyxiating them to death? Weapons such as “soft nosed” bullets (which disintegrate upon entry to the body) were banned alongside asphyxiating gases by the 1899 Hague Conventions, yet they do not receive such global censure.

Part of the concern specifically attributed to chemical weapons lies in the human fear of unpredictable, adverse events such as the potential to develop illness after exposure. The most terrifying threats are those perceived not just as lethal but as dehumanising. The fear of chemical weapons is therefore, at least partially, a result of their potential to cause insidious harm.

So the potency of chemical weapons lies in the unknown and in how they fester in the imagination of those who have felt threatened by them. Chemical weapons attacks are distinguished by the propagation of functional somatic – medically unexplained – physical symptoms, bestowing unconventional weapons a “psychogenic” hallmark. A result of the potential for chemical weapons to yield psychiatric illness, the notion that the long-term psychological consequences of unconventional weapons may be worse than acute physical, is popular in psychological circles. The many chemical incidents in which low-risk patients far outnumbered those whose exposure could be confirmed, contribute to this “weapon of terror” epithet: the perception of exposure to a toxin is a greater determinant of health status and anxiety than actual exposure. After the Aum Shinrikyo attack, over 4,000 people with no sign of exposure sought medical care.

Many chemicals are perceived by the public as having a high to extreme degree of uncertainty; many, too, elicit strong anxiety, which can drive somatic symptoms. In order to form judgement under uncertainty, people form intuitive assessments upon relevant information. Attempting to decrease their uncertainty, people may apply preconceived beliefs (for instance, that chemicals are dangerous) to symptoms, even if benign, constructing a causal link between symptom and event.

Consider, for instance, cases in Israel, a nation so subject to the corollaries of war that it has been termed a natural station for the study of stress. During the 1991 Gulf War, Israel endured 18 Scud ballistic missile attacks from Iraq. The stress of conventional bombardment was compounded by the fear that the missiles contained nerve agents; residents had been instructed to carry gas masks and prepare for Iraqi use of biological or chemical weapons. Fearing contamination, over 1,000 patients attended medical facilities with symptoms such as tremors and breathing difficulties. Only 22% of patients had been genuinely injured: none by biochemical agents. 27% of casualties had mistakenly injected themselves with atropine, an antidote to nerve agents.

Conclusion

There are two schools of thought explaining the power of chemical weapons. On one hand is the argument that chemical weapons can be harnessed as weapons of mass destruction. This bears significant political pull. On the other, there is scepticism as to their capabilities, where instead they are branded weapons of psychological terror. The schism between “weapon of terror” and “weapon of mass destruction” is rarely acknowledged. Conflation of the two allowed Tony Blair to drawn upon their psychological power to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which shattered the Middle East.

The truth lies somewhere in between. The psychological and physical fallout of chemical weapons are, essentially, two sides of the same coin. Feared or sustained physical harm gives rise to short-term anxiety and long-term psychological distress. Chemical weapons victims may never be definitively free from the physical effect, thus the psychological effects may endure. Uncertainty directly impacts upon fear, and is thus one of the most influential features of human history. As human experience is a complex nexus of affect, behaviour, cognition and physiology, chemical weapons are disturbing for their ability to bear upon each, fracturing this integration. Uncertainty can become visceral. While war does not accommodate certainty, the potential use of chemical weapons will feed doubt and continue to draw substantial political influence.

Clare Henley divides her time between acting as Assistant to the Director of the Oxford Process, and as Project Officer at Refugee Trauma Initiative. She previously worked on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons Initiative at Chatham House, and at the Maudsley Hospital’s Centre for Anxiety Disorders and Trauma. Prior to this, she interned on a decontamination project with the Behavioural Science team at Porton Down, Public Health England. Clare has an MSc in War and Psychiatry from King’s College London, where her thesis focused on the psychological impact of chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons. Her other work focused on topics such as the impact of war on child soldiers and of being held hostage. She also has a BSc in Psychology from the University of Exeter.

With right-wing populism growing across Europe, Germany was thought to be an exemption to this trend. However, the rise of Alternative for Germany could potentially change this.

While far right parties have been on the rise throughout Europe for decades, it seemed like Germany was immune to the seduction of the far-right. Whereas, among others, the National Front in France, the Dansk Folkeparti, Flemish Interest in Belgium and the Freedom Party in Austria recorded growing electoral results, parties such as the Republicans (REP), the National Democratic Party (NPD) or the German People’s Union (DVU) were unable to overcome the electoral threshold. Although successful at the national level and represented in several regional parliaments (Landtage), no party to the right of the Christian Democrats has managed to gain seats in the Bundestag since 1949. Why has this been the case in Germany?

Germany’s “special status”

Political scientists and other observers both in and outside the country were puzzled by the ‘special status’ of the German party system, all the more so because the key conditions for the electoral success of right-wing populist and radical right parties were not that different from the European neighbors. Several studies have shown a small but relatively stable presence of nativist, even xenophobic attitudes within the German society. However, although right-wing populist parties profited from these preconditions in several state elections – e.g. in Baden-Württemberg in the early 1990s and some East German states from the beginning the new millennium onwards – they were not able to establish at the federal level. One can hardly identify one single reason for this mismatch, but according to most scholars, the answer lies in three German characteristics.

Firstly, the German political right was divided and fractioned. While in France, Austria, Switzerland and other European countries, major far right parties were able to unify the right beyond the Conservatives, the right spectrum in Germany was distinguished by a high degree of competition. For instance, with NPD and DVU, two main players of the extreme right competed against each other in several Land elections until their consolidation in 2011. At the same time, the populist radical right spectrum was marked by the coexistence of various small parties, such as The Freedom or the so-called ‘Pro’ Movement, a minuscule group that basically operates in North Rhine-Westphalia.

Secondly, the yearlong strategy of the Christian Democrats, which consisted in the integration of conservative streams within the German society, might have had a negative impact on newcomers on the right. Especially the Bavarian CSU, an autonomous party that is embedded in the Christian Democratic Union at the federal level—the CDU, in turn, holds no regional branch in Bavaria—was able to address conservative voters beyond the Bavarian borders and helped to maintain the strategy of the Union.

The third reason relates to German history. Since the end of World War II, radical or extreme right parties have been dealing with stigmatization and exclusion from the political discourse.  While far right parties are treated as outsiders in almost all countries, in Germany, they are suspected of standing in the tradition of historical Nazism and thus barred. For instance, when the NPD found its way into the state parliament of Mecklenburg-West Pomerania in 2006, the other parties decided to not to support any of the NPD’s parliamentary initiatives (so-called ‘Schweriner Weg’ – ‘Way of Schwerin’).

These unfavorable conditions contributed a great deal to keeping far right parties out of the German party system for more than six decades. At the beginning of 2017, however, it seems like the ‘anti-fascist consensus’ of the German post-war era has begun to totter. Violent acts against refugees have risen. In 2015, the German Federal Office of Criminal Investigation (Bundeskriminalamt) had registered a right-wing populist political movement (‘Pegida’), although solely a regional phenomenon in the city of Dresden, has dominated media coverage on East Germany. The most impressive evidence for the establishment of a far right stream is the ongoing success of a new right-wing populist party: the Alternative for Germany (AfD).

Accounting for the AfD’s rise

Image credit: Metropollco.org/Flickr.

Since its foundation in the first quarter of 2013, the AfD has been denoting growing electoral support. Whereas it had failed to jump over the electoral threshold in the 2013 general election, the party won seats in every state election since that time. With partly extremely high results—such as 24.3 percent in Saxony-Anhalt and 20.8 percent in Mecklenburg-West Pomerania—the AfD is already the most successful new party in the history of the Federal Republic.

To some scholars—including the author of this piece—one crucial reason for the popularity of the AfD are the arbitrary features of its ideology in the first two years of its existence. While clearly Eurosceptic and populist in terms of its anti-elitist appeal, the official program of the AfD in 2013/2014 did not include any nativist or xenophobic components.

However, studies diagnose a clearly right-wing populist profile for both the sympathizers and the members of the AfD from the start. Other inquiries illustrate that in 2013, the public opinion as well as the first studies on the party located the AfD firmly at the right of CDU and CSU but did not imply a far right profile. The party therefore profited from its moderate but populist program while at the same time, as it was slightly more conservative than the Christian Democrats, the AfD was attractive for far right voters and activists from the very beginning. At the same time, the success of the AfD mirrors the evolution of the Christian Democrats, which have turned to a more liberal party under the leadership of Chancellor Angela Merkel. While this strategy has clearly marginalized the SPD, which scores just under 21 percent in the national polls, it has annoyed a great deal of more conservative voters, who now lean towards the AfD.

It is not surprising that that the agenda of the AfD changed after the 2014 European election. Whereas anti-Euro and anti-EU positions had dominated its program until May or so, the party highlighted its conservative social values in the face of the state elections in autumn 2014. During this phase of the party’s history, growing tensions about the leadership of its founder Bernd Lucke, an economist from the University of Hamburg and the ideological direction of the AfD, including its relationship to Pegida, occurred. In summer 2015, Mr Lucke lost the election to the party executive against the leader of the Saxonian regional branch and parliamentary party, Frauke Petry, who chairs the party until today together with co-speaker Jörg Meuthen. Even though scandals and internal conflicts have been shattering the party, some observers’ expectation that the party will break down did not prove true. At the beginning of the election year 2017, the polls indicate high electoral support (around 12 percent) for the AfD at the general election in September.

While it is right that a successful far right party in Germany mirrors a normalcy in Europe, it is also a benchmark for the crisis of representative democracy and the elites and the parties that underpin it. Populist far right parties—including Donald Trump in the United States by the way—benefit from growing contempt towards the political elites and the perception of individual powerlessness in the political process. In that sense, parties like the FPÖ in Austria, the French Front National or the AfD in Germany are phenomena of modernization, although they do not directly profit from its negative economic consequences (e.g. unemployment), as scholars have argued for years.

Not surprisingly, recent studies show that electoral support for the AfD is not entirely based on protest—in fact, there is a great deal of convergence between the political positions of the voters and the ideology of the party. Empirical results also illustrate that the share of losers of the modernization process within the AfD electorate is high, but they do not represent the majority of their voters. In other words, the AfD is at least as much the exponent of a latent new right movement as it is the vehicle of discontent. At the same time, it represents to a certain extent an invisible coalition of middle-class and lower-class voters.

In contrast to its predecessors in the far right spectrum, the AfD faces hardly any competitors in its niche. Founded by both neo-liberal, Eurosceptical economists (e.g. former party leader Bernd Luck and Joachim Starbatty) and socially conservative activists (e.g. Beatrix von Storch), the AfD became the center of attraction for right-wing networks without being right-wing extremist on its own terms. Due to its electoral successes, the AfD became a much more attractive player in the spectrum than other, much less successful parties did.

The political public, especially the established parties, still seem somehow paralyzed and helpless. Strategies oscillate between stigmatization—the approach that embossed the exposure to the far right for sixty years—and dispute. While some argue that the—in part—extreme ideology of the party prohibits its inclusion in the democratic discourse, approaches that are more pragmatic allude to three crucial facts.

First, they highlight the ‘normative power of the factual’: by being represented in more than half of the state parliaments and likely to master the electoral threshold in the upcoming federal election, the AfD is already an established actor, at least in the medium term. Ignoring is thus no strategic option. Secondly, while it was easy to demonize other right-wing parties, such as the NPD, due to their extremist ideology and appeal, the AfD, although clearly part of the far right, is not a fascist party. Even if the party has evolved from a moderate conservative-Eurosceptic to a far right party, it still lacks a clear racist and anti-system agenda. Neither its anti-elitist appeal to the people nor its Islamophobia resemble the neo-Nazi agenda of the NPD or other parties of this spectrum. It is thus not surprising that the anti-fascist reflexes of the political public failed.

Finally, the common strategy of demonization (or stigmatization) could even prove to be counterproductive: populist far right parties feed on their perception as political outsiders. Therefore, any attempt to exclude the AfD from the political discourse can be interpreted as another move by the ‘aloof’ political class and strengthen the bond between the party and its supporters.

Outlook

In the face of the increasing establishment of the AfD and constantly high results in the polls, the prospects for the newcomer party are auspicious. The AfD will almost certainly be represented in the next German Bundestag. This will pose a challenge to the established parties. As to parliamentary strategies, a strong far right fraction could prevent the realization of preferred coalitions. While the SPD is unlikely to gain enough seats to claim the chancellorship, the CDU/CSU might become the strongest party but without the perspective of a two-party alliance other than a grand coalition. However, the only possible outcome might as well be the worst.

Not only is the grand coalition highly unpopular among Social Democrats. As the case of Austria shows, grand coalitions in persistence lead to the increasing perception of the ‘cartelization’ of the political class, which fosters support for the far right. Considering the options of government formation after the 2017 general election, the AfD might well become the beneficiary of the situation it contributed to: political sclerosis. In that case, Germany might face a long period of bounded competition between the major mainstream parties and growing polarization in terms of increasing successes of the far right.

Dr. Marcel Lewandowsky (* 1982) is a political scientist and research fellow and the University of the Federal Armed Forces in Hamburg, Germany. His current research focuses on right-wing populism in Europe with special consideration to the AfD in Germany.

by Joe Thwaites

Last Wednesday, the United Nations Security Council held its second ever debate on climate change, at the request of Germany, who holds the monthly presidency. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, Director of the UN Environment Program Achim Steiner, President of Nauru Marcus Stephen, and Australia’s Parliamentary Secretary for Pacific Island Affairs Richard Marles all addressed the Council, along with representatives of 62 member states.

Stephen wrote powerfully in the New York Times last week about the threat rising sea levels pose to his Pacific island country’s existence, and did not hold back in the Council, usually a place of diplomatic stoicism. Speaking on behalf of the Pacific Small Island Developing States, he said they were facing “the single greatest security challenge of all – that is, our survival” and put the question: “Where would we be if the roles were reversed? What if the pollution coming from our island nations was threatening the very existence of the major emitters? What would be the nature of today’s debate under those circumstances?”

As it happened, the nature of the debate was twofold. On the ostensible subject, “Maintenance of international peace and security: impact of climate change”, most states agreed that it would have – and in some cases already is having – profound implications for international peace and security, and that the UN had a key role to play coordinating efforts on mitigation and adaptation to climate change. But discussion on this remained secondary to complex political wrangling over the role of the Security Council in addressing the topic. Whilst this is the case for any issue before the body – in discussions on whether to mandate armed intervention into a specific country, for example, the debate focuses not just on the rights and wrongs in that instance, but also the wider precedent it may set – there were added complexities with climate change.

China and Russia displayed their usual reticence about extending the Security Council’s competencies into new areas. They were joined by Brazil, India, and many developing countries in the G77 bloc, who opposed attempts to move the issue away from the General Assembly-mandated UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), in which all member states have equal footing and decisions are made by consensus, and into the 15 member body where China, Russia, France, the UK and U.S. hold veto power, and are some of the biggest greenhouse gas emitters, on either cumulative or per capita bases. The underlying fear of developing countries was that such a move would circumvent the core principles which make the existing climate change regime palatable – namely, the recognition of states’ “common but differentiated responsibilities” to act on climate change, and the right to sustainable development.

Indeed, if the Security Council were to take overall control of climate action, this would be a regressive step, potentially allowing developed countries off the hook for their failure to meet existing targets under the Kyoto Protocol, and removing the impetus to agree a further UNFCCC commitment period. States proposing that the Security Council address the issue (primarily the EU, U.S. and small island states) were therefore at pains to stress that it would be complementary to existing UN bodies and processes, and should not encroach upon their remits. They argued that as a major security threat, it was right that the Council afford these dimensions of climate change due consideration. But as the UN body with the most diplomatic bite – only the Security Council has the power to authorise military force – it is easy to see why there are concerns that it could dominate the issue.

During the debate there was related apprehension about the excessive securitisation of climate change. Many states pointed out that climate change was a cross-cutting issue, as much related to sustainable development and humanitarian relief as security, and that looking at it as a security issue would not address the underlying causes of the problem. Bolivia noted that developed countries gave $10 billion in climate change finance annually, which amounted to just 1% of defence spending, and suggested the Council adopt a resolution to cut defence and security spending by 20%, using the money saved to address the impacts of climate change. Papua New Guinea echoed Nauru’s Marcus Stephen, pointing out that if the Security Council could address issues such as development and HIV/AIDs as security problems (without them becoming militarised), then why not climate change?

The non-binding Presidential Statement which was finally agreed did not include mention of a Special Representative on Climate Change and Security, which had been one of Germany’s original proposals. Many countries remained open to the idea of a representative, but opposed them being answerable to the Security Council, instead suggesting they be appointed by the General Assembly.

On one level, the outcome was disappointing. Russia initially vetoed adoption of the statement, later agreeing to a watered down version merely noting the “possible security implications” of climate change. Ambassador Susan Rice of the U.S. lambasted the lack of stronger action as “pathetic”, “short sighted” and “a dereliction of duty”. However, given that the first Council debate on climate change in 2007 was unable to agree any formal outcome, getting a Presidential Statement was something of a success.

There remains wide disagreement between states over whether climate change merely exacerbates conflict, or is a distinct threat itself. Academic opinion is still divided, and the Security Council’s position often lags a good ten years behind the latest research on peacebuilding and conflict prevention, so this is not hugely surprising. It is also difficult to untangle the opposition to climate-security links on conceptual grounds from opposition for political reasons related to Security Council ‘mission creep’, as discussed above.

In 2009, the General Assembly requested that the Secretary General produce a report on the possible security implications of climate change. A few states strongly disputed its findings on Wednesday. Nevertheless, the Presidential Statement recommended that in his regular reports to the Council, the Secretary General begin to include information on the possible influence of climate change upon conflict situations around the world. These are important first steps towards mainstreaming climate change in conflict assessments, even if we are a long way from any legally binding resolution.

Another reason for optimism is the level of participation in the debate. I followed many Security Council meetings whilst working in the UN community last year, and never saw so many member states request to speak. Most countries took the discussion seriously, and even where they disagreed on whether the Council had a mandate to act, they spoke strongly on the devastating impacts of climate change.

The question now is: how long will it take for states to take this rhetoric seriously; to realise the gravity of the situation, break the cycle of mistrust in international negotiations and commit to unified multilateral action to address this issue – in whatever forum they choose? The answer is unclear.
There is one thing we can be confident about – this won’t be the last time the Security Council discusses climate change.

Joe Thwaites is a graduate in politics from the University of York, UK. He has worked on conflict prevention at the Quaker United Nations Office and represented Friends of the Earth at the UNFCCC.

Image Source: United Nations Photo

Author’s note: In this article, I use the terms “war” and “civil war” interchangeably. They refer to a contested armed incompatibility involving a government and a non-state actor that generates at least 25 battle-related fatalities annually. Whereas ethnic civil wars refer to those armed conflicts that include ethnic challengers that are at odds with the identity of a state, seek to redefine or divide the state itself, or strive for major changes in their relationship with the state ( see Sambanis 2001).

Under what conditions can religion play a constructive role in peacebuilding and what are the obstacles to this process?

Religion, war, and peace are among the “thickest” and multifaceted concepts. Thus, tackling the relationship between them is a daunting task and calls for a greater scrutiny.

A great deal of existing scholarship on civil war, particularly those statistically examining the effects of various social, economic, and political factors on war dynamics, almost exclusively refer to the term “peace” in the negative sense, i.e., the absence of violence. This “narrow” approach to peace is in part driven by its simplicity that allows for large-n cross-national comparison. While useful in reaching generalizable findings, such an approach could potentially mask the underlying causes of war, preventing us from addressing the root causes of conflict eruption.

Here I refer to peace in the positive sense, or the absence of “structural violence” that calls for going beyond the mere absence of physical violence and points toward “social justice” (see Galtung 1969). This positive or “quality peace,” in the words of Peter Wallensteen, requires the creation of postwar conditions that not only prevent countries from relapsing back into another episode of violence but also allows for security and dignity for the members of the war-torn society.

How does religion help or hinder the creation of such circumstances? Under what conditions can religion as a powerful, potent force help reinforce and strengthen peace? What are the obstacles to religion playing such a constructive role in peacebuilding?

A complicated relationship

Photo credit (edited): murdelta/Flickr. 

A number of scholars have identified religion to be the cause of deadlier, longer, and more intractable civil wars (see Svensson 2007; Fox, James, and Li 2009; Basedau et al. 2011). Yet others have drawn attention to “the seeds of tolerance, justice, compassion, and peace” in religious traditions and argued that religion can help bring about peace and democracy (Johansen 1997, 53; see also Appleby 2000; Driessen 2010).  Religion, as Philpott states, “devastates not only New York skyscrapers but also authoritarian regimes; it constructs not only bellicose communal identities but also democratic civil society.” Thus, this group of scholars concludes that religion can also be used in conflict resolution and peacebuilding processes (see Abu-Nimer 2001; Alger 2002).

These contradictory findings stem from a number of sources. First and foremost, the literature on the relationship between war, peace, and religion often conceptualizes and measures these concepts from different points of view. In addition to the narrow conceptualization of peace noted above, the question of what entails a civil war and how it should be operationalized has caused much controversy. While scholars often agree on what a civil war is, the casualty threshold used to mark the onset of a civil war, ranging from 25 to 1,000 annual battle-related deaths, has resulted in a number of civil war datasets on which most of empirical findings are based, and that are not always comparable.

Second, the peacebuilding capacity of religion is applied to cases that are not necessarily analogous. For example, as Nichols argues, religious actors played a positive role in bringing about peace in the conflict between the Sandinistas and East Coast Indians of Nicaragua in the late 1980s through helping to develop a common language of conciliation and infusing Christian values into the negotiating process. Appleby, drawing on the case of Northern Ireland, maintains that religious leaders can gradually “saturate” the society by transforming the conflict environment and issues, condemn violence, and thus foster cross-communal cooperation. However, Appleby warns that such an outcome requires special situations characterized by a strong civil society and democratic tradition as well as assistance from the international community. Partly because of the lack of agreement on the casualty threshold noted above, current literature on civil war often treats the case of the Sandinistas vs. East Coast Indians within the broader conflict between Nicaragua under the Sandinistas and Contras, making it a somewhat “marginal” case. Whereas, the Northern Ireland conflict, as Appleby aptly warns, is characterized by some unique characteristics that are that are rarely present in many war-torn countries.

Third, existing literature is still in the process of identifying the complex and complicated causal mechanisms between religion and peacebuilding. This is in part due to the ambivalent, contextual nature of religion. Religion and politics are connected in complicated ways that make it nearly impossible to disentangle one from another. A religious tradition as Armstrong summarizes is “never a single, unchanging essence that impels people to act in a uniform way.” Instead, religions and religious interpretations “are susceptible to different readings in different contexts and become entangled in or influenced by newer sociopolitical context”. In the context of civil war, religion often becomes a part of the political arsenal to sustain the fight. As religion turns into another instrument of legitimation and mobilization in the hands of political actors it loses its power as a peacemaker.

Finally, and relatedly, the politicization of religion is most prevalent in ethnic civil wars in which fighters are lined up along identity lines and rebels are by and large secessionist in goals or desires. Therefore, the effect of religion on conflict processes in a case like Chechnya where Muslim Chechens fought destructive civil wars against Russia dominated by Orthodox Christians needs to be distinguished from the role religion plays in ethnic conflicts that involve groups hailing from the same faith, as in the case of Kurds vs. Turkey. While civil war between groups hailing from different faiths can contribute to identity formation in such a way that fuels the violence, war between co-religionists does not necessarily help foster peace. Instead, religion as the common denominator is often subsumed to ethnic, national identities and interests. The war realities often constrain, if not shape, religion, rendering religion an ineffective peacemaker (Gurses 2015).

Religion and ethnic civil war

Nicolas Rost and I have shown that due mainly to this “politicization of religion,” the hypothesized peacemaker role of religion does not hold against a global sample of ethnic civil wars. War and country characteristics, rather than shared religion, are better predictors of peace duration after ethnic civil wars. While the peace duration in our study refers to the absence of violence, in further support of studies that have pointed to discriminatory state policies as the culprit behind ethnic civil war onset and recurrence (Cederman, Wimmer, and Min 2010; Gurses and Rost 2013), we found that the level of discrimination faced by members of ethnic groups that rebelled against their government after the end of the war is the most robust predictor of peace duration. Thus, state policies that address the demands of aggrieved minorities and re-adjust their relationship with the state that could make them a part of the system are more likely to help build sustainable peace. Resorting to a shared religion to help reconcile warring groups without addressing the root causes of conflict is more rhetoric than reality.

Observations 

• There is a need to clarify the terms in order to delineate the religion-peacebuilding nexus. The terms war, religion, and peace are multidimensional and hence defy reaching a consensus on the exact nature of religion’s relationship with peacebuilding. Avoiding law-like, general explanations is more likely to be fruitful. Just as religion’s role in identity formation varies, so does the role it plays in conflict onset, duration, outcome, as well as building peace in postwar environments.
• The role religion plays in peacebuilding should be qualified. Religion in conflicts fought over government, also known as ideological civil wars, could take on a dramatically different role than in conflicts involving competing identities which are often secessionist in nature. While it is much easier for religious actors to mediate between warring groups that share the same ethnicity, speak the same language, and believe in the same “God,” their role is likely to be diminished, tarnished by political considerations in situations where protagonists use religion to either distinguish themselves as a group from one another (e.g., Palestinians vs. Israel) or religion as a common denominator ceases to be a marker that separates members of warring groups (e.g., Acehnese vs. Indonesia, 1976-2005; Kurds vs. Turkey, 1984-Ongoing). Thus sharing the same faith in the context of such ethnic civil wars often results in relegating religion to a secondary role as the war dynamics help bring ethnic identities front and center.
• Sustainable peace requires addressing structural causes of violence. Merely stressing shared faith as a solution to conflict without undertaking reforms that can re-adjust the warring groups’ relationship with the state is not likely to be effective.

Conclusion

Religion is a potent force and can serve as a peacemaker. Its role, however, is contingent upon characteristics of the civil war and the nation in question. It is worthwhile to note that “ethnic conflict remains one of the prevailing challenges to international security in our time” and “conflicts that in some way involve an ethnic dimension can be found across each of the world’s continents”. Furthermore, as Fox notes, of 268 politically active ethnic minorities worldwide for the 1990-1995 period, 163 (61%) are not religiously distinct from the dominant group. Gurses and Rost, building on datasets drawn from two different sources, find that in about half of the ethnic civil wars that started and ended between 1950 and 2006 ethnic rebels shared the same religion as the governing ethnic group. Thus, it is essential to differentiate such cases in which religion is likely to be politicized and used as an instrument of legitimation and mobilization than those cases involving groups hailing from the same ethnicity, culture, and faith.

Still, religion can serve as a peacemaker by injecting “meaning” and repair social ties that were destroyed during the war. Ideally a change of mind should coincide with a change of heart in order to reach positive or “quality” peace. However, given the discriminatory state policies toward ethno-national minorities that account for armed conflict, concrete measures, a change of mind, should precede a change of heart to build and sustain the peace in the aftermath of seemingly intractable ethnic civil wars. Sustainable peace is a dignified peace. Religion can help bring about sustainable peace only after ethnic minorities’ relations with the state are re-adjusted to a degree that minority groups feel secure and certain of their future.

Mehmet Gurses is an associate professor of Political Science at Florida Atlantic University. He received his B.A. degree in political science and international relations from Marmara University in Istanbul, Turkey, and his doctorate from University of North Texas. His research interests include democracy and democratization, ethnic and religious conflict, post-civil war peace building, post-civil war democratization, Kurdish politics, and the emergence and evolution of the Islamist parties in the Middle East. His publications have appeared in International Interactions, Social Science Quarterly, Civil Wars, Defense and Peace Economics, Democratization, Party Politics, International Journal of Human Rights, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, Conflict Management and Peace Science, and Political Research Quarterly.

Author’s note: In this article, I use the terms “war” and “civil war” interchangeably. They refer to a contested armed incompatibility involving a government and a non-state actor that generates at least 25 battle-related fatalities annually. Whereas ethnic civil wars refer to those armed conflicts that include ethnic challengers that are at odds with the identity of a state, seek to redefine or divide the state itself, or strive for major changes in their relationship with the state ( see Sambanis 2001).

Under what conditions can religion play a constructive role in peacebuilding and what are the obstacles to this process?

Religion, war, and peace are among the “thickest” and multifaceted concepts. Thus, tackling the relationship between them is a daunting task and calls for a greater scrutiny.

A great deal of existing scholarship on civil war, particularly those statistically examining the effects of various social, economic, and political factors on war dynamics, almost exclusively refer to the term “peace” in the negative sense, i.e., the absence of violence. This “narrow” approach to peace is in part driven by its simplicity that allows for large-n cross-national comparison. While useful in reaching generalizable findings, such an approach could potentially mask the underlying causes of war, preventing us from addressing the root causes of conflict eruption.

Here I refer to peace in the positive sense, or the absence of “structural violence” that calls for going beyond the mere absence of physical violence and points toward “social justice” (see Galtung 1969). This positive or “quality peace,” in the words of Peter Wallensteen, requires the creation of postwar conditions that not only prevent countries from relapsing back into another episode of violence but also allows for security and dignity for the members of the war-torn society.

How does religion help or hinder the creation of such circumstances? Under what conditions can religion as a powerful, potent force help reinforce and strengthen peace? What are the obstacles to religion playing such a constructive role in peacebuilding?

A complicated relationship

Photo credit (edited): murdelta/Flickr. 

A number of scholars have identified religion to be the cause of deadlier, longer, and more intractable civil wars (see Svensson 2007; Fox, James, and Li 2009; Basedau et al. 2011). Yet others have drawn attention to “the seeds of tolerance, justice, compassion, and peace” in religious traditions and argued that religion can help bring about peace and democracy (Johansen 1997, 53; see also Appleby 2000; Driessen 2010).  Religion, as Philpott states, “devastates not only New York skyscrapers but also authoritarian regimes; it constructs not only bellicose communal identities but also democratic civil society.” Thus, this group of scholars concludes that religion can also be used in conflict resolution and peacebuilding processes (see Abu-Nimer 2001; Alger 2002).

These contradictory findings stem from a number of sources. First and foremost, the literature on the relationship between war, peace, and religion often conceptualizes and measures these concepts from different points of view. In addition to the narrow conceptualization of peace noted above, the question of what entails a civil war and how it should be operationalized has caused much controversy. While scholars often agree on what a civil war is, the casualty threshold used to mark the onset of a civil war, ranging from 25 to 1,000 annual battle-related deaths, has resulted in a number of civil war datasets on which most of empirical findings are based, and that are not always comparable.

Second, the peacebuilding capacity of religion is applied to cases that are not necessarily analogous. For example, as Nichols argues, religious actors played a positive role in bringing about peace in the conflict between the Sandinistas and East Coast Indians of Nicaragua in the late 1980s through helping to develop a common language of conciliation and infusing Christian values into the negotiating process. Appleby, drawing on the case of Northern Ireland, maintains that religious leaders can gradually “saturate” the society by transforming the conflict environment and issues, condemn violence, and thus foster cross-communal cooperation. However, Appleby warns that such an outcome requires special situations characterized by a strong civil society and democratic tradition as well as assistance from the international community. Partly because of the lack of agreement on the casualty threshold noted above, current literature on civil war often treats the case of the Sandinistas vs. East Coast Indians within the broader conflict between Nicaragua under the Sandinistas and Contras, making it a somewhat “marginal” case. Whereas, the Northern Ireland conflict, as Appleby aptly warns, is characterized by some unique characteristics that are that are rarely present in many war-torn countries.

Third, existing literature is still in the process of identifying the complex and complicated causal mechanisms between religion and peacebuilding. This is in part due to the ambivalent, contextual nature of religion. Religion and politics are connected in complicated ways that make it nearly impossible to disentangle one from another. A religious tradition as Armstrong summarizes is “never a single, unchanging essence that impels people to act in a uniform way.” Instead, religions and religious interpretations “are susceptible to different readings in different contexts and become entangled in or influenced by newer sociopolitical context”. In the context of civil war, religion often becomes a part of the political arsenal to sustain the fight. As religion turns into another instrument of legitimation and mobilization in the hands of political actors it loses its power as a peacemaker.

Finally, and relatedly, the politicization of religion is most prevalent in ethnic civil wars in which fighters are lined up along identity lines and rebels are by and large secessionist in goals or desires. Therefore, the effect of religion on conflict processes in a case like Chechnya where Muslim Chechens fought destructive civil wars against Russia dominated by Orthodox Christians needs to be distinguished from the role religion plays in ethnic conflicts that involve groups hailing from the same faith, as in the case of Kurds vs. Turkey. While civil war between groups hailing from different faiths can contribute to identity formation in such a way that fuels the violence, war between co-religionists does not necessarily help foster peace. Instead, religion as the common denominator is often subsumed to ethnic, national identities and interests. The war realities often constrain, if not shape, religion, rendering religion an ineffective peacemaker (Gurses 2015).

Religion and ethnic civil war

Nicolas Rost and I have shown that due mainly to this “politicization of religion,” the hypothesized peacemaker role of religion does not hold against a global sample of ethnic civil wars. War and country characteristics, rather than shared religion, are better predictors of peace duration after ethnic civil wars. While the peace duration in our study refers to the absence of violence, in further support of studies that have pointed to discriminatory state policies as the culprit behind ethnic civil war onset and recurrence (Cederman, Wimmer, and Min 2010; Gurses and Rost 2013), we found that the level of discrimination faced by members of ethnic groups that rebelled against their government after the end of the war is the most robust predictor of peace duration. Thus, state policies that address the demands of aggrieved minorities and re-adjust their relationship with the state that could make them a part of the system are more likely to help build sustainable peace. Resorting to a shared religion to help reconcile warring groups without addressing the root causes of conflict is more rhetoric than reality.

Observations 

• There is a need to clarify the terms in order to delineate the religion-peacebuilding nexus. The terms war, religion, and peace are multidimensional and hence defy reaching a consensus on the exact nature of religion’s relationship with peacebuilding. Avoiding law-like, general explanations is more likely to be fruitful. Just as religion’s role in identity formation varies, so does the role it plays in conflict onset, duration, outcome, as well as building peace in postwar environments.
• The role religion plays in peacebuilding should be qualified. Religion in conflicts fought over government, also known as ideological civil wars, could take on a dramatically different role than in conflicts involving competing identities which are often secessionist in nature. While it is much easier for religious actors to mediate between warring groups that share the same ethnicity, speak the same language, and believe in the same “God,” their role is likely to be diminished, tarnished by political considerations in situations where protagonists use religion to either distinguish themselves as a group from one another (e.g., Palestinians vs. Israel) or religion as a common denominator ceases to be a marker that separates members of warring groups (e.g., Acehnese vs. Indonesia, 1976-2005; Kurds vs. Turkey, 1984-Ongoing). Thus sharing the same faith in the context of such ethnic civil wars often results in relegating religion to a secondary role as the war dynamics help bring ethnic identities front and center.
• Sustainable peace requires addressing structural causes of violence. Merely stressing shared faith as a solution to conflict without undertaking reforms that can re-adjust the warring groups’ relationship with the state is not likely to be effective.

Conclusion

Religion is a potent force and can serve as a peacemaker. Its role, however, is contingent upon characteristics of the civil war and the nation in question. It is worthwhile to note that “ethnic conflict remains one of the prevailing challenges to international security in our time” and “conflicts that in some way involve an ethnic dimension can be found across each of the world’s continents”. Furthermore, as Fox notes, of 268 politically active ethnic minorities worldwide for the 1990-1995 period, 163 (61%) are not religiously distinct from the dominant group. Gurses and Rost, building on datasets drawn from two different sources, find that in about half of the ethnic civil wars that started and ended between 1950 and 2006 ethnic rebels shared the same religion as the governing ethnic group. Thus, it is essential to differentiate such cases in which religion is likely to be politicized and used as an instrument of legitimation and mobilization than those cases involving groups hailing from the same ethnicity, culture, and faith.

Still, religion can serve as a peacemaker by injecting “meaning” and repair social ties that were destroyed during the war. Ideally a change of mind should coincide with a change of heart in order to reach positive or “quality” peace. However, given the discriminatory state policies toward ethno-national minorities that account for armed conflict, concrete measures, a change of mind, should precede a change of heart to build and sustain the peace in the aftermath of seemingly intractable ethnic civil wars. Sustainable peace is a dignified peace. Religion can help bring about sustainable peace only after ethnic minorities’ relations with the state are re-adjusted to a degree that minority groups feel secure and certain of their future.

Mehmet Gurses is an associate professor of Political Science at Florida Atlantic University. He received his B.A. degree in political science and international relations from Marmara University in Istanbul, Turkey, and his doctorate from University of North Texas. His research interests include democracy and democratization, ethnic and religious conflict, post-civil war peace building, post-civil war democratization, Kurdish politics, and the emergence and evolution of the Islamist parties in the Middle East. His publications have appeared in International Interactions, Social Science Quarterly, Civil Wars, Defense and Peace Economics, Democratization, Party Politics, International Journal of Human Rights, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, Conflict Management and Peace Science, and Political Research Quarterly.

 (This piece was originally published by Channel 4 News on  January 22, 2013 and is the first of two parts by Anna Alissa Hitzemann and Ben Zala)

Britain is on standby and the US is already transporting French troops into Mali. But a new paper says the west is “betting on the wrong horse” by intervening in the region.

Environmental changes in the Arctic are making the region more accessible which many believe will lead to competition and conflict over its resources. But is this really the case?

The Great Game moves North

A battle to ‘carve up’ the Arctic

‘Ice Wars’ heating up the Arctic

Melting ice caps open up Arctic for ‘white gold rush’

Warming Arctic opens way to competition for resources

Conflict ahead in Arctic waters

The above are just some of the many headlines and titles that have described the state of the Arctic over the last decade. Ever since a Russian flag was planted on the seabed at the North Pole in 2007, media outlets, academics and policy-makers have been pondering the conflict potential of a warming Arctic.

Their concerns surely have a dramatic background. The Arctic, the region commonly defined as all land and water areas above the Arctic Circle at 66 degrees north, has over the past 50 years warmed twice as fast as the global average. Consequently, the Arctic ice sheet has retreated significantly. In September 2012, the ice extend dropped to around half of what it was in the late 1970s, and is lingering on low extent numbers ever since. The diminishing sea ice has made the resources of the Arctic, such as oil and gas, increasingly accessible for exploration and exploitation.

This increasing accessibility of the region combined with, thus far, inaccessible and high-in-demand resources and still existing boundary disputes between the Arctic coastal states, made (and still makes) many believe that we are heading towards a region of conflict.

But is this really so? Should we expect the region in the north to erupt into hot conflicts about access to oil and gas, shipping lanes and fishing grounds that the retreating ice lays open? Does a warming Arctic inevitably mean increasing conflict potential with little hope for cooperation to emerge?

Cooperation and conflict: a misleading dichotomy

Image credit: Fulbright Arctic Initiative/Flickr.

Most of the debates aiming to answer these questions circle around the issue of whether the Arctic is a region of “conflict” or “cooperation”. The cardinal error of this debate is that “cooperation” and “conflict” are taken as two sides of the same coin. Taking cooperation and conflict as the two ends of a continuum inadequately twists the empirical perceptions and expectations as to future developments in the Arctic.

As a matter of fact, cooperation and conflict are part of two different coins. Conflict is first of all a situation in which the interests of two or more actors overlap in the sense that they pursue different goals or that they prefer different means to achieve a specific goal. The opposite of conflict is then harmony, a situation in which actors’ interests do not touch each other. This is one coin.

If there is a case of conflict, actors can react to this situation in different ways. Roughly speaking, they can either react with “cooperation” or “confrontation”. They can decide to solve the conflict through negotiation and looking for compromises, or they can revert to using force of some kind, such as sanctions or military actions. These possible options for actions in a situation of conflict are the second coin.

Once one has understood the difference between these two coins, it is possible to analyze how actors have reacted to Arctic conflict cases in the past (like open boundary disputes, of which many have been solved since the 1970s), and which options for resolution exist in response to possible future Arctic conflict cases (like still open boundary disputes, competing interests for access to resources or shipping lanes etc.).

Unfortunately, in the past and current Arctic conflict debate the existence of a conflict is usually treated the same as a confrontation– a situation in which breakdown of relations and even violent actions are imminent. But if we equalize conflict and confrontation, we face a very alarming situation in the Arctic since there are cases where the interests of Arctic actors (including those from south of the Arctic Circle) overlap. The open maritime delimitations around the area of the North Pole and the question how much of the Arctic is to be legally treated as a common heritage of mankind are just two examples of Arctic conflicts.

But if we were to conduct a sound analysis with the two-coin understanding as outlined above, we would understand that conflict is the very prerequisite to make cooperation and confrontation happen in the first place. In other words, there is no cooperation or confrontation if there is no conflict (since actors do not interact in a situation of harmony). Then we can look at the Arctic world out there and check which options for action Arctic actors choose to react to conflict situations.

The Arctic Council – A prime example of Arctic cooperation

We find a multitude of examples for actors choosing cooperative options for actions, especially among the members of the Arctic Council, which are the eight Arctic states Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden and the United States. Since the flag-planting in 2007, and also since Russia’s more recent assertive actions elsewhere in the world, cooperation in the preeminent political forum of the region, the Arctic Council, has been strengthened. The Council has evolved from a forum for debate to a policy-shaping body through the adoption of several intergovernmental agreements under its auspices. These range from provisions for preparedness and response for oil spills in Arctic waters, a search and rescue cooperation agreement, and will soon be added by an agreement on Arctic scientific cooperation.

On the international level, an “International Code of Safety for Ships Operating in Polar Waters” or short “Polar Code” has been negotiated under the International Maritime Organization to regulate the increasing shipping activity in the Arctic. Arctic countries are working on their submissions to the UN to verify their extensions of their continental shelves, and have in unison pledged to settle any overlapping claims peacefully and in close consultation with each other.

All these cooperative actions have included the Arctic states as well as many state and non-state actors beyond the region, for example in the form of observers to the Arctic Council. The short result of this analysis is: Yes, the Arctic is full of conflict but also full of cooperation since across the board actors are reacting cooperatively to cases of conflict.

The crux is that these instances of cooperation can be observed. In contrast, most foreboding of a confrontation in the Arctic only refers to what could happen now that the Arctic is accessible and its resources up for grasp. In other words, these contributions can only be speculative.

A lingering problem of the Arctic conflict debate is that a conflict over Arctic issues is usually very easily and quickly proclaimed and seldom reflected upon or questioned again. So once a conflict is said to exist, it is hard to get rid of again, even if observations show that there is no real ground for the conflict or if actors react cooperatively to it. A prominent example is the rising Chinese interest in Arctic issues, which peaked 2013 when China was admitted as an observer to the Arctic Council. Since then, many have depicted Chinese Arctic interests as a “conflict” since China as a powerful player would undermine other Arctic voices and generally would bring turmoil to Arctic affairs. In contrast, when talking to the members and Permanent Participants (the representatives of Indigenous Peoples’ Organizations) of the Council, one hears that after some initial concerns everyone is pretty happy about the presence of important players like China. Not least, China has to be part of the solution to the global climate change problem, which heavily affects the Arctic. And having China present at Arctic Council meetings is a rare opportunity for small, Indigenous organizations to get into a direct conversation with countries like China.

Conclusion

In sum, if we consider how often the “next Cold War” in the Arctic has been proclaimed now that we have entered the tenth (!) year after the Russian flag-planting, one keeps wondering why this war has failed to materialize. This may be sign that the assessment of the Arctic as a region of confrontational conflict is not for nothing predominantly based on speculation. In fact, the predication of a next Cold War in the Arctic may be exactly that: a wild guess.

Dr. Kathrin Keil is Scientific Project Leader at the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies (IASS) in Potsdam, Germany, where she is leading the Arctic research work on Sustainable Arctic Futures: A Regional and Global Challenge. She is also Senior Fellow at The Arctic Institute – Center for Circumpolar Security Studies where she regularly writes about and comments on current Arctic developments. Further, Kathrin is part of the official German observer delegation to the Sustainable Development Working Group (SDWG) of the Arctic Council.

Over 10 years ago, the Cathedral Peak Hotel, which nestles among the peaks of South Africa’s majestic Drakensburg Mountains, played host to what was, at the time, a unique gathering. Scholars from around the globe (the United States, Britain, Switzerland, Australia, Germany, South Africa, and Israel) met with representatives of international NGOs (the International committee of the Red Cross and the Geneva Center for the Democratic Study of Armed Forces, among others) and members of the private military and security industry to discuss and debate the growing role of private contractors in contemporary conflict zones. I was the convener of that conference and co-editor of the subsequent volume of the same title, Private Military and Security Companies: Ethics, Policies and Civil-Military Relations (Routledge 2008).

Though the modern private military company can be traced back to companies such as David Stirling’s WatchGuard International in the 1960’s, and though there was some related early scholarly research, it was the massive use of contractors by the United States in Iraq in the civil war that emerged after the 2003 invasion which ultimately sparked serious public and scholarly interest in the sector. Just a year before the conference, the killing and gruesome mutilation of four Blackwater contractors by insurgents had been a major cause of the bloody and ultimately fruitless first battle of Fallujah. Given the context, it’s particularly interesting that Doug Brooks – then the President of the largest industry body for PMSCs, the International Peace Operations Association (now the International Stability Operations Association) – chose to focus his contribution to the conference, and his co-authored contribution to the book, on peacekeeping operations.

Brooks argued then that, with the growth of what he called ‘Westernless peacekeeping’ (i.e. UN and African Union peacekeeping operations carried out without major support from NATO and ‘NATO-class’ military forces) PMSCs should have an increasing role in peacekeeping operations, contributing capabilities not possessed by the military forces of developing world countries like Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Nepal, Indonesia and Rwanda, who contribute the bulk of peacekeepers for UN operations.  Contractors, Brooks contended, offer ‘faster, better and cheaper’ solutions to capability challenges in peacekeeping operations, operate with a smaller and less culturally sensitive footprint than equivalent military forces, and act as a force-multiplier through the provision of specialist and niche capabilities.

Private military contractors in Baghdad, Iraq. Image by Babeltravel via Flickr.

A decade on and Iraq is still in the news, but Western boots on the ground are largely absent, and the previously booming market for contractors there and in Afghanistan has shrunk dramatically. As Molly Dunigan and Ulrich Petersohn and their collaborators show in a recent edited collection, the once-championed ‘global market for force’ has proven itself to be, in fact, a conglomeration of quite different markets for force, and it is a mistake to conflate the legitimate with the illegitimate. The United States, Britain and other nations continue to employ the services of private military contractors for lower priority tasks where doing so is (or at least appears to be) cost and manpower effective.

The US State Department’s five-year $10.2 billion Worldwide Protective Services contract, the next phase of which was announced in mid February, is distributed largely among companies like SOC, Triple Canopy and Aegis Services which made their names during the Iraq post-invasion boom. And the old stomping ground is showing signs of a revival – according to a report by Bloomberg Business week, “Operation Inherent Resolve, the Pentagon’s anti-Islamic State initiative, employed 7,773 contractors in the second quarter of 2016, up from 5,000 in the first quarter of 2015.” Many of those contracts are for logistical, training and advisory roles in conflict and post-conflict environments in Africa and the developed world. And, quietly, the United Nations has also become a significant employer of PMSCs, as a careful reading of the UN Department of Procurement’s list of registered vendors reveals. As long ago as 2011 the Geneva Center for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces (DCAF) released a report showing that, despite the sensitivities involved, “the UN has increasingly paid private military and security companies (PMSCs) for a range of services in the areas of humanitarian affairs, peacebuilding and development.” The companies themselves have become increasingly corporatized and professional in their structures and practices, an evolutionary necessity for those companies which survived the ‘gold rush’ days of post-invasion Iraq.

The more dramatic pronouncements by both proponents and opponents of the PMSC industry have failed to come to pass. Contractors have neither rendered state-based peacekeeping and stability operations obsolete, nor have they radically undermined the monopoly on force of the states that employ them or created greater instability in the international sphere.

Looking to the future, what might we expect regarding the involvement of PMSCs in peacekeeping and stabilization operations? Despite their popularity as ‘bad guys’ in television dramas and Hollywood films, and an uncomfortable legacy of past serious human rights abuses committed by contractors, the evidence suggests that in the real world the use of PMSCs is increasingly becoming normalized, and that in policy circles there is a growing understanding of the potential value contractors can provide if properly employed. While there are still contractors operating in the global periphery who better fit the old ‘mercenary’ moniker, we can expect this process of normalization to lead to an increase in the employment, and more open employment, of PMSC’s in peacekeeping operations (though the term ‘PMSC’ will likely decline in usage).

The improved clarity about the status and responsibilities of contractors in zones of armed conflict that resulted from the publication of the ICRC sponsored Montreaux Document of 2008 has played an important role in this process of normalization. Though this was unquestionably not the intended purpose of the creation of the document (which carries no legal weight but summarizes the status of contractors under international law and gives recommendations to both PMSCs and the states that contract them), the Montreaux process cleared up numerous misconceptions and provided a firm framework to which companies could attach their claims to legitimacy.

Over the past decade there has been much debate and discussion over what functions ought to be considered by states to be ‘inherently governmental’ and which therefore ought not to be contracted out. A similar discussion will likely occur as the outsourcing of peacekeeping functions becomes more publicly acknowledge. However, it will likely be pragmatic factors which establish the limits of outsourcing.  Whatever those limits turn out to be in practice, it is certain that there will be limits. Even in today’s complex and spoiler afflicted environment, effective peacekeeping relies heavily on the perception of legitimacy, and that means blue UN helmets or the green berets of the African Union, not beards and Oakley sunglasses.

Dr Deane-Peter Baker is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at UNSW Canberra, located at the Australian Defence Force Academy. He is also a Researcher in the Australian Center for the Study of Armed Conflict and Society. His research interests include military ethics, private military and security companies, special operations, military strategy and the ethics of public policy. He is the author of Just Warriors Inc.: The Ethics of Privatized Force and Citizen Killings: Liberalism, State Policy and Moral Risk.