Category: 2016

International Relations scholars, politicians, religious institutions and religious leaders can no longer debate whether religion is relevant to global or national governance issues and they can no longer afford to ignore the roles and functions of religious identity in many violent and nonviolent conflict areas in the world today. From European to South Asian societies, the headlines are related to the potentially destructive role that religion can play in everyday policy making. Those cases include, but are not limited to, the self-declared Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS); the civil war in the Central African Republic in which religious identity was thrown into the midst of the political conflict; and the ongoing conflict in Myanmar where religious identity is utilized to justify certain governmental policies.

The issue that practitioners (policy makers, religious institutions and religious leaders) are really struggling to effectively address is how to understand the interreligious dynamics of conflicts and constructively link this to future policies. The response of policy makers in Europe to the ongoing global refugee crisis represents an important case of the need for further linkages between religious leaders and policy makers. Given that the majority of the refugees are Muslims, how are secular European policy makers going to develop an approach to manage or mediate the inherent difference of cultural and religious Islamic ways of living and do so without stereotyping or inciting violence and exclusion towards refuges?  An even more challenging task is facing policy makers in the Muslim world, especially those in the Middle East where religious and sectarian identities have been systematically manipulated to justify political and even inter- and intra-communal violence with brutal effects. Unlike the European reality, in the Middle East, delinking religious identity and institutions from governmental policies and from justifying wars and certain governance frameworks is the primary needed change. In this context, politicians continuously enlist religious leaders in pursuing their own interests.

Despite their problems grasping the issues, there is a growing agreement amongst policy makers and researchers that engaging religious leaders and institutions in peacebuilding on all levels is crucial to bringing the message of tolerance, pluralism and peaceful resolution of conflicts to communities. However, the research on such tools and techniques is still limited. Most studies continue to focus on the theological bases of peace and harmony in different faith groups (See Abu-Nimer’s 2007 book, Unity in Diversity). There are few studies on the mechanism and tools (design, processes, and evaluation of success) of interreligious peacebuilding which will allow policy makers to engage religious leaders and their institutions in a systematic process of mediation, negotiation, or problem solving to respond to a concrete social or political problem. As result of this shortage in experiences, many interreligious peacebuilding activities resort to the traditional and old models of symbolic and ceremonial representation of religious leaders in policy making circles. For example, a prime minster invites Abrahamic faith leaders to bless his/her new policy towards refugees in a certain area. In most cases such blessings take place outside of areas of worship and in the public secular space. The lack of systematic engagement of religious agencies in such peace processes and the instrumentalization of such agencies in a symbolic way only at the end of the process reduces the capacity of religious peacemakers in their own communities.

This approach of limited (time and resources) and symbolic engagement with religious identity (via leaders, symbols, rituals, etc.) has been around for centuries: a ceremonial role but not genuine engagement as a serious stakeholder in the conflict (using the cross or holy books as part of the ceremony to celebrate a peace agreement in a conflict situation like Northern Ireland, Palestine-Israel, Mindanao Philippines, etc.). In fact, a similar approach is taken by those who use religion to justify their war plans and violence in general (such as the use of religion for justification of violence in the wars in Bosnia in the 1990s, conflict in Northern Ireland, etc). The selective and partisan hijacking of certain religious values to explain the need to exclude, discriminate, dehumanize the “different other.” In both cases, there is an instrumentalization of the religious identity but not deep and nuanced engagement.

In current interreligious peacebuilding practices there are genuine efforts to move beyond this instrumentalization and bring a more holistic and integrative approach to engage religious leaders and institutions (See the recent 2015 report on CVE). Such trends can be vied in the most recent revisions of the American White House Summit responding to countering violent extremism (CVE) in which a strong call for a community based approach is an integral part of the CVE efforts; the KAICIID campaign, “United Against Violence in the Name of Religion”; Network of Religious and Traditional Peacemakers (launched by Finn Church Aid, Religions for Peace, KAICIID, USIP, OIC, etc.).

The Main Challenges Ahead

In spite of such efforts, there are still number of core challenges and potential pitfalls that face the field of interreligious peacebuilding in its development as a recognized field of researchers and practice, these include the following:

• First, there is the western post Industrial Revolution framework that endorses the cultural assumption (some argue myth) that religion and faith can and should be left outside of public spheres. Thus, bringing faith into academic institutions becomes a major struggle and threatens the foundation of its knowledge generating paradigm. This assumption that dealing with religion and faith is a private matter that ought to be compartmentalized to the Sociology of Religion or Theological Studies has obstructed many international relations and political scientists from systematically exploring the complex relations between religion and peace and war.
• Second is the assumption that conflicts and their causes reside primarily with material resources and not religion (identity or ideology). Such assumptions can lead many researchers and practitioners to dismiss or underestimate the role that religious identity and ideology can play in both triggering and sustaining conflict, as well as peace. There is no doubt that religion plays a complex and to some extent unique role in many conflict dynamics and outcomes. However, many aspects of this role are similar to other identity-based conflicts in which the stakeholder’s identity is deployed in the process of conflict escalation and de-escalation. Ethnicity, culture, race, gender, and sexual orientation are identities that have also been linked to conflict and violence, often through aggressive parties employing dehumanizing framing of an ‘other’, and there are many studies in both social science and the humanities that have explored the links between these identities and conflict and peace (see From Identity-Based Conflict to Identity-Based Cooperation, edited by Jay Rothman; and Ashmore, Jussim and Wilder of Rutgers University’s Department of Psychology’s publication: Social Identity, Intergroup Conflict, and Conflict Reduction).  The study of interreligious peacebuilding can draw on this wealth of research on conflict and identity and develop its own analytical frameworks and practices (R. Scott Appleby addresses religious identity and documents many of these the conflicts in his book, The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion Violence and Reconciliation).
• Third, resources and support by professional organizations, donors, religious leaders and institutions are limited due to the above perceptions and biases. Thus many interreligious analysts and practitioners are rarely invited to the table as recognized and credible actor or agency who can contribute to the processes of peace or policy managements.
• The fourth challenge is understanding that religious peacebuilding is not the ultimate solution for all social and political problems in any given society, since religious identity and its manipulation is rarely the main cause of the violence in any conflict situation. In such cases, we should relate to interreligious peacebuilding agencies as serving a complementary role in a wider range of peacebuilding efforts carried out by many other peace agencies (such as media, educators, business sector, civil society, etc.) (See Abu-Nimer)

Conclusion

Despite the above challenges, the field of religious peacebuilding has been growing and gradually recognized by policy makers and donors as an important agency to engage with. Also, it is important to recognize that interreligious peacebuilders have been able to create significant progress in relief, development and aid. Faith based Organizations (FBOs) have illustrated that through interreligious cooperation they can significantly contribute to eradication of malaria in West Africa, provide relief to Tsunami victims in Sri Lanka and Indonesia, and fight hunger and poverty around the world in many local communities; and NIFA, a Nigerian interfaith organization that launched a campaign to eradicate malaria; also see the recent International Partnership on Religion and Sustainable Development (PaRD), a network for linking development and religion, which was launched by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Nevertheless, the field of interreligious peacebuilding still has a long road ahead in terms of its research and study agenda, especially in producing empirical research that articulates the detailed processes, conditions and dynamics in every conflict and that lead certain communities to be easily mobilized through their religious identities (symbols, rituals, and institutions) to endorse violence or peace.

Mohammed Abu-Nimer is Senior Advisor Interreligious and Intercultural Dialogue Center (KAICIID); and Prof. of Peace and Conflicts Resolution, American University, Washington DC.

The Syrian war is one of the worst political and humanitarian crises since the Second World War and mediation attempts have proven largely fruitless. What are the reasons behind their failure, and what are the prospects for peace in the future?

January 2017 will see new leadership both at the UN and in the US. António Guterres will become the 9th Secretary-General of the United Nations and Donald Trump will take office as the 45th President. These leaders will inherit from their predecessors a problem that ranks among the toughest and most complex in the world today: the Syrian civil war a, conflict that began in 2011 and since then has seen between 312,000 and 470,000 deaths.

Both men have declared Syria a policy priority. Trump has given few specifics beyond a desire to depart from current U.S. policy, whereas Guterres has said that, under his leadership, ending the Syrian civil war will be the UN’s most important task.

Guterres faces tough odds: the catalogue of failed mediation efforts in Syria has by now grown quite long. After the Arab League’s failed attempt in the early phase of the conflict, the UN dispatched to Syria first Kofi Annan and then Lakhdar Brahimi, both of whom fervently tried to broker various ceasefire arrangements, and both of whom returned empty-handed. More recently, the diplomatic initiative has rested with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who have sought to find a way to collaborate on Syria despite diverging priorities.

In September 2016, this duo managed to negotiate a ceasefire, but, in a rather typical display of how tenuous progress is in Syria, the deal fell apart within days, following an ill-timed accidental American bombardment of Syrian troops in Deir el-Zour and unrelenting combat in Aleppo. In parallel, Staffan de Mistura, the UN’s third envoy since the war began, has continued to probe for breakthroughs, however small and local, to keep a semblance of a process alive, but without substantive progress.

Why Syria is a mediator’s “mission impossible”

There are several reasons why previous mediation has fallen short in Syria. International disunity and distrust in the various mediators are important factors – rebels rejected the most recent UN initiative, a limited humanitarian ceasefire in Aleppo, on the grounds that the UN was “biased” against them. The main explanation, however, lies in the nature of the conflict. Kofi Annan labeled it a mediator’s “mission impossible”: a war fought between many and fractured coalitions, infused with sectarian enmity, and subject to constant meddling from foreign powers.

Academic research sheds light on all of these factors, and why and how they effect peace mediation. First, the higher the number of belligerents, the harder a conflict is to settle. In Syria, where the number of actors is extraordinarily high, it has proven impossible to design a deal that is attractive to a critical mass of parties. This problem has been particularly acute with respect to the opposition, which frequently have fallen to infighting and agree on little beyond the necessity of ousting President Bashar al-Assad.

Second, historical evidence shows that conflicts where belligerents anchor their demands in religious traditions are more intractable than other conflicts. In Syria, religious fault lines have gradually hardened, especially between Sunni and Shia, raising the threshold for peace deals that depend on sectarian co-existence. The widespread presence of jihadists who view the conflict in cosmic, Manichean terms add one further barrier to initiating a process premised on the exchange of concessions.

Third, with the possible exception of the Islamic State, nearly all actors in Syria enjoy the material and diplomatic support of foreign sponsors. Conflicts that attract external interventions tend to be more resistant to mediation, most likely because foreign powers can offset shifts on the battlefield by escalating the influx of weapons and other resources to their preferred client. Further, support from foreign sponsors makes belligerents less dependent on support from the local population, which otherwise can generate social pressure that incents negotiations.

Combined, these factors have created a situation where it has been difficult for mediators to identify a viable power-sharing deal, and even less, generate firm expectations that such a deal could be implemented.

The conflict will end, but how?

Like all wars, the war in Syria will end. The question is how long it will take and the means through which this will be achieved. Logically, the war in Syria can end in three ways: through a military victory, by petering out into a “cold war”, or via a negotiated agreement.

Even though the majority of civil wars end in military victory, most analysts have held the view that this is an unlikely outcome in Syria. Neither side has had the resources to impose, much less maintain, a monopoly on violence in the entirety of the country. However, there are signs that a regime victory has become, if not likely, at least a possibility. The fall of Aleppo to regime troops in December 2016 will free up considerable forces that can be reallocated for tactical offensives in other areas. Continued Russian efforts and a realignment of U.S. priorities in Syria under a Trump Presidency may allow the regime to make further gains.

Another scenario is that the war gradually de-escalates into a “cold war”, with little or no active fighting. In parts of the country, especially the South, this is already the de facto situation, as localized truces and standoffs have produced a state of suspended warfare. A generalization of this scenario, though, is premised on the exhaustion not only of the primary belligerents (e.g., via manpower shortages), but also of their foreign sponsors, which would require significant shifts in both regional and international politics.

The third way the war can end is via a negotiated agreement, either induced via external mediation of the kind discussed above, or emerging from direct negotiations between the parties within Syria. We know from statistical research that a growing number of civil wars end in negotiated agreements, but, in light of the challenges listed above, there is clearly some way to go before that will happen in Syria.

A changing landscape?

As neither of three paths to peace appears imminent, continued war is therefore the only realistic scenario in the short- to mid-term. But there are signs of a changing landscape, both militarily and politically, which may open up avenues to a negotiated agreement, at least in limited forms between the regime and the non-jihadist opposition.

The most important shift, potentially, is the election of Donald Trump as the next U.S. President. While the details of the President-elect’s Syria policy remains opaque, it is likely to include two ingredients: more direct coordination with Russia and stronger military efforts against the Islamic State. With Trump as President, the U.S. may be willing to shift publicly on issues that are currently recognized only implicitly, such as the acceptance of Assad’s staying in power, the failure of train-and-supply efforts, and the Islamist domination within the opposition. The current battery of economic sanctions may also be revisited.

The coming of Trump is therefore likely to favor Damascus, but it could also increase the prospects for substantive negotiations. Historically, when great powers favoring opposing belligerents in a civil war come together, it have tended to favor negotiated outcomes. If Russia, Turkey and the U.S. can maximize their leverage with their respective clients, they could help push them to the negotiation table. But chances are still slim: they have tried before without succeeding and Trump’s Syria policy may alienate the opposition, reducing U.S. leverage.

The fall of Aleppo signifies another important change in the strategic landscape. By capturing the city, regime forces dealt a demoralizing blow to the opposition, while further alienating Western audiences. It remains unlikely that the regime can claw back all lost territory, let alone rule it in a legitimate manner, but the victory in Aleppo may add further leverage to its strategy of seeking local “reconciliation agreements”. Several hundred such local truces have already been struck across the country and, if generalized, may portend a demographic “sorting out” that would leave Syria organized into more or less autonomous zones, akin to the  “cold war” scenario above.

For its part, the UN is likely to continue its valiant search for solutions, small and large. If the new UN Secretary General is to deliver on his promise to prioritize a peaceful solution in Syria, he needs to find a way to capitalize on the expected rapprochement between Russia and the U.S. His man in the field, envoy de Mistura has signaled that he concurs with the military fight against the Islamic State but that a military strategy needs to be accompanied by “political devolution” in Syria. This indicates that the UN is considering an arrangement styled on Bosnia or Iraq – essentially power-sharing along sectarian lines – for Syria. Even if the UN manages to leverage the U.S. and Russia behind such a plan, however, it currently appears unlikely that the opposition would give up on its demands for regime change, and that Damascus, smelling military victory, would seriously consider it.

Magnus Lundgren is a postdoctoral research fellow at Stockholm University, Sweden. His research focuses on conflict resolution in civil wars and on decision-making in international organizations such as the UN. His most recent publications include ”Which international organizations can settle civil wars” and ”Mediation in Syria: Initiatives, strategies, and obstacles, 2011-2016”. He is the co-founder of the Multilateral Negotiation Project, a non-profit that seeks to enable better global negotiation processes. He can be followed on Twitter @magnusllundgre

This concluding part of a two-part article series continues the discussion on the UK’s naval nuclear power programme and its potential impact on Britain’s energy policy. Read part 1 here.

In Part 1, we described the intensity of UK commitments to new civil nuclear power and why this is so hard to fully explain. The proposed 16GWe of new nuclear capacity is a difficult policy to justify based on economics, energy security and conventional approaches to understanding innovation and technological transitions. There are serious problems with the UK nuclear power programme, including significant delays, rising costs, and uncertainty surrounding essential foreign investment. The UK government’s own figures show renewables, including onshore wind and solar, to be cheaper than nuclear. As the prospects of resolving underperforming nuclear plans get ever more distant and unlikely, increasingly favourable renewable projects remain ever more threatened by cut-backs. This has led to serious problems in that sector. Taken at face value, these patterns are very difficult to explain.

What drives these counter-intuitive trends? Many factors will be at play, but, as discussed in Part 1, there is a particular major driver that remains almost entirely unexamined in analysis of UK energy policy. This concerns the pressure to sustain UK nuclear submarine infrastructures by maintaining  more general national reservoirs of specialist nuclear expertise, education, training, skills, production, design and regulatory capacities.

Could these pressures to maintain capabilities, perceived to be necessary for the country’s naval nuclear propulsion programme, be influencing the intensity of UK commitments to new civil nuclear power? We now examine a crucial period in UK civil nuclear policy during which concerns around defence-related nuclear skills came to the fore shortly after a key policy moment when, for the first time since 1955, UK policy was considering an energy trajectory that did not include new nuclear.

2003–2006: the unexplained nuclear ‘U-turn’

For a brief period between 2003 and 2006, nuclear energy seemed to fall out of high-level favour in the UK. The nuclear firm, British Energy was bailed out and brought back into state control in 2002 and nuclear privatisation was widely recognised to have failed. The UK civil nuclear industry was dogged by scandals and cases of costs overrunning. . Meanwhile, New Labour’s earlier efforts to democratise decision-making helped free one initially minor policy initiative from the shackles of bureaucratic inertia and industrial interests. For the first time, nuclear energy strategy escaped the domain of the dedicated ministry.

Approaching energy policy by the indirect route of “resources”, the new Performance and Innovation Unit (PIU) – reporting directly to the Cabinet Office – was charged with undertaking an extensive reappraisal. This marked a significant departure from the traditional practice where energy policy assessments were closely guarded by the relevant ministry. The PIU review was staffed entirely by civil servants, with half of the review team comprised of leading independent energy analysts recruited from outside government. Freed from the incumbent pressures which constrained earlier UK energy reviews, the 2002 PIU study found that unresolved nuclear waste and economic problems meant that the UK should move towards a more decentralised electricity grid based around renewables and energy efficiency. The February 2003 White Paper Our energy future: Creating a low carbon economy upheld these recommendations. While it did not entirely rule out future investment in nuclear energy, it did find nuclear power to be economically and environmentally “unattractive” for Britain.

What came next was one of the most abrupt policy turnarounds in UK history. For reasons never officially declared, Prime Minister Tony Blair launched another energy review in November 2005. This second review was not conducted in a transparent and independent way like the PIU process. Instead, it was undertaken by a few partially identified individuals inside the Cabinet Office under the leadership of Blair’s close personal associate, John Birt. According to nuclear advocate Simon Taylor, this involved a select group that most other civil servants in the Cabinet Office did not know even existed, working “in secret” to “re-examine” the case for nuclear energy. Managed by the former Atomic Energy Authority, the consultative part of this exercise was much shallower and shorter than before. Amid other widespread criticism, Greenpeace successfully took the Government to the High Court, where this second review was declared “unlawful” and “deeply flawed”. Yet Blair’s reaction was that this court ruling would “not affect policy at all”. With a further round of consultation, again alienating NGOs, the January 2008 White Paper Meeting the Energy Challenge duly announced a British ‘nuclear renaissance’.

Among those questioning these events was the Parliamentary Environmental Audit Committee, which in March 2006 asked (without receiving an official answer) why a second energy review was deemed necessary so soon after such a comprehensive predecessor. Four months later, the House of Commons Trade and Industry Select Committee branded the second review a “rubber stamping” exercise designed to give legitimacy to a pre-ordained decision rather than being an ‘open’ consultation.

It still remains unexplained what (or even who) could have driven this rethink. It is in this light that nuclear expert Steve Thomas has highlighted the ambiguities around exactly what ‘the UK nuclear lobby’ consists of.  With the UK civil nuclear engineering industry so weak and historically unsuccessful (as discussed in part 1), it is unclear where in this languishing domestic sector sufficient political-economic capital might have accumulated to force such an unprecedented and poorly justified national policy turnaround.

Investment and skills concerns around the UK’s Naval Nuclear Propulsion Programme

This is where the  imperatives around national submarine capabilities comes into play. It is in exactly this same critical juncture between 2003 and 2006 that an unprecedented intensification can be observed in concerns around the UK’s nuclear submarine capability. Significant problems emerged with the construction of British ‘Astute’ class of submarines. Policies related to nuclear submarines were unveiled in rapid succession – with the December 2003 Defence Review White Paper followed by the December 2006 White Paper on the Future of the UK’s nuclear deterrent, leading up to the ‘initial gate’ House of Commons vote to proceed with a replacement to the nuclear-powered Vanguard-class ballistic missile submarines in March 2007. Inconveniently, it was just prior to this marked intensification of activity on the military side, that civil nuclear power was officially acknowledged to be “unattractive”.

One notable development emerging at the beginning of this period was an intense lobbying campaign started in March 2004. The well-funded Keep Our Future Afloat Campaign (KOFAC) emanated from the Barrow shipyards, BAE Systems’ construction site for all UK submarines. Trade unions, local councils, county councils and KOFAC relentlessly targeted politicians, party conferences and governmental consultations. Closely connected with KOFAC and lobbying in support of the submarine industry at this time was then MP for Barrow-in-Furness and close ally of Tony Blair, John Hutton, also one of the most significant supporters of civil nuclear power. KOFAC’s lobbying campaign was recognised by parliamentarians as being “one of the most effective” ever seen.  Focusing resolutely on how to protect UK nuclear submarine manufacturing interests, KOFAC highlighted the importance of supporting integrated civil and defence-related nuclear capabilities. For its part, BAE Systems was also evidently busy in other ways behind the scenes – positioning itself (rather extraordinarily) in a memorandum of understanding of 2006 with the ailing US civil reactor vendor Westinghouse to extend its own military submarine focus to a role in civil nuclear supply chains.

Although internal government reactions to this pressure were invisible, the public response was strikingly accommodating. In 2005, the MoD funded the RAND Corporation to conduct an in-depth two-volume report: “The United Kingdom’s Nuclear Submarine Industrial Base”. The report endorsed crucial links between key skills and capabilities relevant both to submarine and civil nuclear industries. A series of Select Committee consultations and reports ensued, with influential stakeholders in the nuclear submarine supply chain raising many concerns. Lead submarine nuclear propulsion contractors, Rolls Royce, claimed that the depletion of nuclear skills in the civil sector would “reduce the support network available to the military programmes”. The Royal Academy of Engineering noted that “the skills required in the design, build, operation and disposal of Naval Nuclear Propulsion Plant … are in short supply and increasingly expensive… Overall, the decline of the civil nuclear programme has forced the military nuclear programme, and in particular the nuclear submarine programme, to develop and fund its own expertise and personnel in order to remain operational”.

Recognising that “links between the civil and naval sector need to be encouraged” , a key witness to a 2008 Parliamentary Innovation and Skills Select Committee inquiry noted: “The UK is not now in the position of having financial or personnel resources to develop both programmes in isolation”. In a rare acknowledgement of this relationship from the civil energy side, a detailed low-key Government consultancy report later amplified the same message: “the naval and civil reactor industries are often viewed as separate and to some extent unrelated from a government policy perspective. However, the timeline of the UK nuclear industry has clear interactions between the two, particularly from a supply chain development point of view.”  It was apparently in this crucial period 2003-2006 that this longstanding but under-appreciated industrial dependency between military and civil nuclear sectors finally commanded intense – albeit undeclared – attention at the highest political levels.

It is remarkable that these patterns were so obvious to see on the military side of UK policy making, but so virtually invisible on the energy side. Yet this selective discretion is hardly surprising. There are strong incentives to keep these kinds of links as invisible as possible. As the National Audit Office has ominously noted of the costs of Trident: “[o]ne assumption of the future deterrent programme is that the United Kingdom submarine industry will be sustainable and that the costs of supporting it will not fall directly on the future deterrent programme.” Acknowledging this – and reflecting implied industrial practice in the military sector – a seconded BAE Systems Submarine Solutions employee writing in a 2007 report for the Royal United Services Institute, discussed the desirability and difficulty of absorbing or ‘masking’ costs of submarine construction in ostensibly civilian supply chains.   Connections between civil and military nuclear infrastructures are also sensitive internationally, with serious tensions surrounding global nuclear proliferation regimes. This is why one Parliamentary witness emphasised that civil-military nuclear links must be “carefully managed to avoid the perception that they are one and the same”.

It was arguably for such reasons that the UK Government response to the nuclear policy crisis of 2003-2006 was so fast and energetic – with the reasons well acknowledged on the defence side, but virtually invisible on the energy side. Corresponding with the unprecedented U-turn on civil nuclear power was an equally unprecedented intensification in efforts to preserve nuclear skills for the military sector. In 2006, a key suppliers group was set up by BAE Systems involving firms in both military and civil nuclear supply chains. The following year the Department of Trade and Industry expanded the National Nuclear Laboratory (NNL) and established a new National Nuclear Skills Academy.

Since then, the UK Government has gone on to reserve key parts of the HPC contracts for Rolls Royce. BAE Systems has consolidated its interest in civil nuclear construction as well as defence. A huge programme of publicly-funded research has been announced in small modular civil power reactors to build on Rolls Royce’s experience with submarines. And most recently – against a backdrop of massive overcapacity among global nuclear power vendors in what is evidently one of the most economically perilous of sectors – Roll Royce has announced an especially remarkable initiative. Notwithstanding strong pressures for international integration in this overcrowded sector – and a national history in this field of sustained industrial failure – Rolls Royce is now seeking to lead an entirely new industrial consortium branded as distinctively British and dedicated to an untested submarine-derived civil power reactor design. Despite the acknowledged incentives for concealment, these clear linkages between submarine and civil nuclear reactor construction interests provide a key missing link to decipher the otherwise unexplained abrupt reversal in UK nuclear power policy in 2006.

Submerged drivers of UK energy policy?

So, what is the role of UK military nuclear commitments in driving a national low-carbon energy strategy that is manifestly more costly and less effective than it otherwise could be? The complexity and secrecy in this field inevitably makes it difficult to be definite. Nevertheless, the wealth of official documentation on the military side and the remarkable conjunction of events around and beyond the period 2003-2006 do seem to present a plausible case. The UK Government’s commitments to military nuclear capabilities do seem to be a significant (albeit undeclared) factor in civil energy strategies, and of industrial policy more generally.

There are broader questions here over what the military influences on wider British Government policy say about the current state of the UK’s democratic system. It is not necessary to invoke simplistic “conspiracies”. Just as iron filings line up in magnetic fields, so these kinds of institutional pressures can – without any single controlling actor – instil exactly these kinds of patterns. If massive UK civil infrastructure investments really are being shaped to the degree implied by these kinds of perceived military imperatives, then the most important issue is why they are almost completely absent from any kind of discussion or scrutiny – let alone accountability – either in energy policy literatures, or in wider political and media debates. If these institutional forces are as powerful and concealed as they seem, then very serious questions are posed for the health of British democracy in general.

Phil Johnstone is Research Fellow at the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU),  the University of Sussex. His current research is focussed on disruptive innovation in the energy systems of Denmark, the UK and Germany. Previously Phil worked on the Discontinuity in Technological Systems (DiscGo) project and is a member of the Sussex Energy Group (SEG). 

Andy Stirling is a professor in SPRU and co-directs the STEPS Centre at Sussex University. An interdisciplinary researcher with a background in natural and social science, he has served on many EU and UK advisory bodies on issues of around science policy and emerging technologies.

Today’s younger generations of Palestinians desperately need to become more engaged in community peacebuilding activities to end the division of Palestinian society.

The engagement of the younger generation in civil society work to promote peacebuilding concepts and practices at both grassroots and political levels is necessary for restoring order and security in societies divided by conflict and violence. This is particularly true of Gaza in Palestine where the inhabitants live in an environment where there is violence, extreme poverty and a lack of freedom.

Palestinian youth and civil society face many challenges related to the harsh circumstances imposed by a lack of peace, security and economic development since the failure of the so called ‘Peace Process’ in 2000 between the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Israel. There have, however, been a variety of projects and programmes installed to raise youth awareness and the importance of civil society values and practices to achieve human rights, peacebuilding and good governance that help bring hope to a young generation, despite some of the local cynicism.

Cynicism towards youth

I always remember the cynical questions raised by many Palestinian citizens while engaging in civil society activities at different levels: “What kind of civil society under occupation are you talking about?” “How will civil society promote and advocate the values of peacebuilding under a territory experiencing foreign occupation?” There are still some Palestinian intellectuals, leaders and activists who do not believe in education for peacebuilding in a country under occupation, but they believe strongly in community peacebuilding to restore the order and security of their own society, after years of division and the failure of the ‘peace process’.

They also go beyond just cynicism and move into absolute pessimism and defeatism by asking: “How can empowering youth in peacebuilding be effective, while they still suffer from the violence under Israeli occupation and a lack of freedom?” “How will civil society organisations promote and persuade youth to become engaged in activities while an overwhelming majority are poor, jobless and losing hope in the future?”

An example is often raised that during the last five years, several young people committed suicide in the Gaza Strip, owing to the harsh economic and social circumstances. This society, however, has little experience of suicide, as it is known for its spirit of religious education and social solidarity, which have always prevailed and are considered to be the highest in the region.

Cynics believe that talking about the empowerment of youth involvement in peacebuilding activities in Gaza is a matter of ‘idealism’ and ‘luxury’, a waste of resources and time because they see such pursuits as being only achievable through  concurrently obtaining freedom and national independence in a viable Palestinian state. Cynics often point out that there were many peacebuilding activities implemented in the Green Line between 1995 and 2000.

Many Palestinian citizens from the various health, NGOs and environmental sector participated at capacity building development courses inside the Green Line. They enjoyed education, trips and nice food, but not sustained peace or security, as the main cause of the problems, the need to establish of a Palestinian state, had not yet been solved. These activities passed without any glimpse of hope or peace after the failure of the ‘peace process’ that led to the breakout of various cycles of violence including the latest war in the Gaza Strip in the summer of 2014 and changed both the context and style of life, after massive destruction.

Life Style

The Palestinian people are used to the daily life style of suffering and the absence of human security; they lost their top priority of securing their own basic human, needs during the failure of the 2000 ‘peace process’ and the collective punishment policies exercised by the occupation. They have lost their own economic, food, health, environmental, personal, community, political and human security. In 1994, the UNDP defined human security, which is achieved when people can exercise their choices safely and freely, and when they can be relatively confident that the opportunities they have today will not be entirely lost tomorrow.

The Gazan people cannot plan their own day without any interruption, owing to the circumstances imposed by a lack of electricity, pollution and a devastated economy. As Mohammed Srour, a field researcher at a human rights organisation in Gaza says

“The Palestinian people now busy with their own daily affairs, living without electricity and facing the entire closure on the strip and the invasion of pollution of their environment and beaches, owing to the lack of electricity. The citizens have no place to go in Gaza to escape the heat of the summer because of the lack of electricity. The sewage flows into the sea as the pumps and wasting stations do not work without electricity. The beaches are fully polluted and people cannot enjoy swimming in the sea to escape from the extreme heat any more in most coastal areas”.

Gaza’s economy has actually been virtually stagnant for the past ten years, with an average annual real GDP growth rate over the decade not exceeding 1.44%, while Gaza’s population has grown by 38.4% over the same period.

Today’s younger generations of Palestinians desperately need to become more engaged in community peacebuilding activities to end the division of Palestinian society. But the dire circumstances have deepened the wounds of Gazan society and made the life of the younger generation almost unbearable and impossible. Consequently, many young Palestinians have decided to leave rather than stay and help build peace.

The Brain Drain of Palestinian Youth

Many young minds have already left Palestine to find a new environment and hope. More than 21 young people who attempted to find their way to Europe lost their lives in the Mediterranean in 2014 when one of their boats was wrecked and their fate is still unknown to this day. However, the rest of the youth who could not leave after the full closure of the tunnels between the Gaza Strip and Egypt spend their time navigating social media and the internet.

They enjoy their chats which help them escape from the harsh politics and economic realities, attempting to watch any developments posted by other fellows or friends online. Facebook, in particular, is considered their own ideal ‘city’ of information and it is a way of ‘killing the time’, as many young people are always informing me when I have a conversation with them. They have lost hope in local politicians, political groups, the international community and civil society organisations in helping them to change their circumstances. There are many who accuse these actors of lying, trading off and using the suffering of the Gazans to increase their power, wealth and business. But not all have abandoned hope.

Resilience and Hope

Despite the seemingly dire straits of life, the youths of Palestine are still resilient enough to try change the de facto situation, by engaging in community initiatives. They have, for example, on different occasions, engaged in non-violent and peaceful protests to contribute to the ending of the circumstances in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. For example, the youth march movement in 2012 during ‘the Arab Spring’ to end the Palestinian division. After 2014 war in Gaza, they also participated actively, in non-violent activities to end the siege in the Gaza Strip by protesting close to the ‘buffer zone’ or in front of the ‘security fence’ with Israel in the Gaza Strip.

Now, in 2017, the Palestinian youth, across their homeland, have seized the initiative again to protest peacefully against the closure of Al Aqsa. They are still seeking a better future and attempting to find any opportunity for hope and change. They attempt to find out about the latest leaks of reconciliation between Hamas and a Fatah wing in the Gaza Strip to end the conflict between the two sides that has divided the Palestinian house. If reconciliation takes place between the two sides, it will contribute to changing the social and political circumstances of the entire society and of youth in particular.

In addition to these political developments, there have been a number of community activities to help keep youth hopeful for a better future. For example, the Gaza youth UNRWA Football team that won the Norway Cup last year continued preparation and already left the Strip for Denmark and Norway to participate in two different international football tournaments in the last week of July and the First week of August. This kind of participation always gives youth and the whole society hope that there is still a bright future coming soon where they can achieve justice, peace and freedom.

Dr Ibrahim Natil is a Fellow at the Institute for International Conflict Resolution and Reconstruction, Dublin City University http://iicrr.ie/people/fellows/dr-ibrahim-natil/. He is an international human rights campaigner, nominee for the Tällberg Foundation Global Leadership Prize, 2016 and the founder of Society Voice Foundation http://www.mbialumniassociation.org/alumni-news/news-folder/year-of-publication/2016/qa-ibrahim-natil/

The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) is a significant, if controversial, development in international affairs. China has proposed its own semi-official version of R2P called “Responsible Protection”.

Author’s Note: This article highlights issues discussed in more depth in various publications, including Andrew Garwood-Gowers, ‘China’s “Responsible Protection” Concept: Reinterpreting the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) and Military Intervention for Humanitarian Purposes’ (2016) 6 Asian Journal of International Law 89 and Andrew Garwood-Gowers, ‘R2P Ten Years after the World Summit: Explaining Ongoing Contestation over Pillar III’ (2015) 7 Global Responsibility to Protect 300.

Introduction

Over the last decade and a half the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) principle has emerged as a significant normative development in international efforts to prevent and respond to genocide and other mass atrocity crimes. Yet it has also been controversial, both in theory and in practice. R2P’s legal status and normative impact continue to be debated in academic and policy circles, while its implementation in Libya in 2011 reignited longstanding concerns among many non-Western states over its potential to be misused as a smokescreen for regime change. These misgivings prompted Brazil to launch its “Responsibility while Protecting” (RwP) concept as a means of complementing and tightening the existing R2P principle. China, too, has proposed its own semi-official version of R2P called “Responsible Protection” (RP). This contribution explores the key features and implications of the lesser known Chinese initiative.

The R2P Principle

R2P first appeared in a 2001 report by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), a body set up by the Canadian government to consider how the international community should address intra-state humanitarian crises. However, after the initial concept proved contentious a modified version of R2P – labelled “R2P-lite” by one commentator – was unanimously endorsed by states at the 2005 World Summit. In its current form R2P consists of three mutually reinforcing pillars. The first is that each state has a responsibility to protect its populations from the four mass atrocity crimes (genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing). Pillar two stipulates that the international community should encourage and assist states in fulfilling their pillar one duties. Finally, pillar three provides that if a state is manifestly failing to protect its populations the international community is prepared to take collective action in a timely and decisive manner on a case-by-case basis, in accordance with Chapter VII of the UN Charter.

Action under pillar three can encompass non-coercive tools such as diplomacy and humanitarian assistance, as well as coercive means including sanctions and the use of force. The international community’s pillar three responsibility is framed in conservative terms, creating only a duty to consider taking appropriate action, rather than a positive obligation to actually respond to a state’s manifest failure to protect. Crucially, the UN Security Council remains the only body that can authorise coercive, non-consensual measures under pillar three. R2P does not grant states a right to undertake unilateral humanitarian intervention outside the Charter’s collective security framework. Overall, R2P is best characterised as a multi-faceted political principle based on existing international law principles and mechanisms.

The most well-known instance of pillar III action to date is the international community’s rapid and decisive response to the Libyan crisis in early 2011. The Security Council initially imposed sanctions and travel bans on members of the Gaddafi regime before passing resolution 1973 authorising the use of force to “protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack’’. China, Russia, Brazil and India each abstained on the vote to mandate military force against Libya. As the extent of NATO’s military targets and support for the Libyan rebels became apparent, many non-Western powers criticised the campaign for exceeding the terms of the Security Council resolution. For these states, the eventual removal of the Gaddafi regime confirmed their perception that R2P’s third pillar could be manipulated for the pursuit of ulterior motives such as the replacement of unfriendly governments.

The post-Libya backlash against R2P was at least partly responsible for Security Council deadlock over Syria. Russia and China have exercised their vetoes on four separate occasions to block resolutions that sought to impose a range of non-forcible measures on the Syrian regime. At the same time, there has been renewed debate about the strengths and weaknesses of R2P’s third pillar. In late 2011 Brazil’s RwP initiative proposed a series of decision-making criteria and monitoring mechanisms to guide the implementation of coercive pillar three measures. While RwP initially attracted significant attention and discussion, Brazil’s foray into norm entrepreneurship was short-lived and R2P has remained unaltered.

Reframing R2P as “Responsible Protection”

China’s traditional insistence on a strict interpretation of sovereignty and non-intervention has made it uncomfortable with the coercive, non-consensual aspects of R2P’s third pillar. As a result, Beijing has consistently emphasised the primacy of pillars one and two, while downplaying the scope for pillar three action. In this respect, its decision not to veto resolution 1973 on Libya came as something of a surprise.

China’s contribution to the post-Libya debate over R2P’s third pillar is less widely documented than Brazil’s efforts. In mid-2012 the notion of “Responsible Protection” was floated by Ruan Zongze, the Vice President of the China Institute for International Studies (CIIS),  which is the official think tank of China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Although China has not explicitly adopted the concept as a formal policy statement on R2P, its implicit endorsement means it can be described as a “semi-official” initiative.

RP is primarily concerned with R2P’s third pillar and, in particular, providing a set of guidelines to constrain the implementation of non-consensual, coercive measures. It consists of six elements or principles, which are drawn from just war theory and earlier R2P proposals such as the 2001 ICISS report and Brazil’s RwP. In this respect, RP represents a repackaging of previous ideas, rather than an entirely original initiative. However, by reframing these concepts in stricter terms it reflects a distinctive Chinese interpretation of R2P that seeks to narrow the circumstances in which non-consensual use of force can be applied for humanitarian purposes.

The first element draws on the just war notion of “right intention”. It provides that the purpose of any intervention must be to protect civilian populations, rather than to support “specific political parties or armed forces”. This conveys Beijing’s concerns over the motives and objectives of those intervening under the banner of R2P, as expressed during the Libyan experience. Element two relates to the “right authority” criterion. It reiterates the longstanding Chinese position that only the Security Council can authorise the use of coercive measures, and that there is no right of unilateral humanitarian intervention granted to states.

RP’s third element is based on the traditional principle that military intervention should be a “last resort”. Its call for “exhaustion of diplomatic and political means of solution” is consistent with Beijing’s broader policy preference for diplomacy and dialogue over forcible measures. However, insisting on a strict, chronological sequencing of responses may deprive the international community of the flexibility needed to ensure timely and decisive action on humanitarian crisis. For this reason, some clarification or refinement of element three may be needed. The fourth element of RP draws on aspects of the just war principles of “right intention” (like element one) and “reasonable prospects”. In relation to the latter, it provides that “it is absolutely forbidden to create greater humanitarian disasters” when carrying out international action. This stipulation reflects Beijing’s position that external intervention often exacerbates humanitarian crises and can ultimately cause more harm than good.

Element five of RP provides that those who intervene “should be responsible for the post-intervention and post-protection reconstruction of the state concerned”. Although the notion of a responsibility to rebuild appeared in the original 2001 ICISS report it was not included in the text of the World Summit Outcome document in 2005 and therefore does not form a component of the current concept of R2P. It is unclear whether China’s RP concept is explicitly seeking to resurrect this dimension or whether this element is simply intended to emphasise Beijing’s broader perspective on peacebuilding and development in post-conflict societies. Finally, element six calls for greater supervision and accountability of those carrying out UN authorised civilian protection action. This is a similar demand to that made in Brazil’s RwP proposal, though little detail is given as to what form any such monitoring mechanism would take.

Conclusion

Overall, the Chinese notion of RP is an attempt to reinterpret and tighten the content of R2P’s third pillar so that it aligns more closely with Beijing’s own normative preferences and foreign policy objectives. Compared to RwP and the ICISS report, RP outlines a narrower set of circumstances in which military intervention for humanitarian purposes would be appropriate. Some aspects of the proposal would certainly benefit from clarification and refinement.

However, it is notable that despite strongly criticising the way R2P was implemented in Libya, China has chosen to engage with, and actively shape, the future development of the norm. This illustrates the extent to which China, as a permanent member of the Security Council, is enmeshed in the ongoing debate over R2P. In fact, RP is explicitly framed as an example of China “contributing its public goods to the international community”. In the future we can expect China and other non-Western powers to play increasingly influential roles in the development of international security and global governance norms.

Andrew Garwood-Gowers is a lecturer at the Faculty of Law at Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Brisbane, Australia. He has written extensively on R2P and the law governing the use of military force, with publications in leading journals including Global Responsibility to Protect, the Asian Journal of International Law, Journal of Conflict and Security Law and the Melbourne Journal of International Law.

This article was originally published on openSecurity’s monthly Sustainable Security column on 18 May 2015. Every month, a rotating network of experts from Oxford Research Group’s Sustainable Security programme explore pertinent issues of global and regional insecurity.

The truce declared in 2012 may have been imperfect and controversial but positive lessons must be learned amid the country’s current crisis of violence.

Violence is escalating again in El Salvador. March 2015 was the most violent month in over a decade, and the government is preparing army and police battalions to fight the gangs. These trends mark the definitive end of a process which started in 2012 with a truce between the two main gangs—MS-13 and Barrio 18—and evolved into a more complex and multidimensional approach to reducing violence, with a degree of international support.

The process was complicated, imperfect and subject to public controversy but it stands as one of the most significant examples worldwide of an effort to reduce violence through negotiation with criminal groups. With an annual homicide rate of 60 murders per 100,000 inhabitants, El Salvador is one of the most violent countries in the world. It is also a notable example of the trend towards non-conventional, hybrid and criminal violence.

A peace agreement reached in 1992 put an end to civil war and initiated a peacebuilding process, which saw rebels of the leftist Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) make a successful transition to civilian and political life. The FMLN finally won the presidency by a tiny margin in 2009, and by an even smaller sliver in 2014, overturning 20 years of rule by the right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA).

Meanwhile, a complex set of factors triggered a transformation of violence, which became criminal and perpetrated by illegal armed groups, most notably the gangs (maras). A profound crisis of public security has since shaken the country, as well as neighbours Honduras and Guatemala. Successive governments have responded with ‘iron-fist’ approaches focused on crime suppression and militarisation of security. These policies, although of limited effectiveness, have helped to cement the electoral support of a population angered and traumatised by decades of violence.

Surprise news

In March 2012 the country was taken by surprise by news of a truce between Barrio 18 and MS-13, facilitated by two mediators (a former insurgent and government advisor, and a Catholic bishop) and tacitly supported by the government of the FMLN president, Mauricio Funes. Imprisoned gang leaders were transferred from a maximum-security prison to other jails in exchange for a reduction in violence. The gangs agreed to end forced recruitment of children and young people, respect schools and buses as zones of peace and reduce attacks on the security forces.

In the succeeding months, the gangs surrendered limited amounts of weapons and the government acted to address shortcomings in the overcrowded prison system, such as softening visitor searches and removing the army from the task. For the first time since the war, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) was invited to contribute and in October 2012 it established a special mission to monitor human rights in prison. The drop in homicides was immediate—from 14 per day to five.

The gangs’ leaderships and the mediators were discussing a list of issues to be included in an enlarged process with a wider pacification agenda. Their Proposal for a Framework Agreement for the Recovery of Social Peace in El Salvador included reform of the prison system, a public-private body with gang participation to oversee rehabilitation and reinsertion, derogation of the anti-gang law and removal of the army from public-security duties. Notably absent was any demand for amnesty or reduction of prison sentences. The proposals included suspension of all acts of violence, voluntary surrender to security forces, decommissioning of weapons and explosives, and an end to forced disappearances.

As more details emerged, however, public opinion about the truce became increasingly polarised. The main opposition came from conservative sectors, parts of the legal establishment and law enforcement, and the media. Contributing to scepticism were unabated extortion and other violent crimes, such as ‘disappearances’—allied to concern about the potential empowerment and legitimisation of criminal structures and a widely-held perception that violence was being rewarded.

But a second school of thought saw the truce as a way to reduce violence and reintegrate gang members. This vision was shared by segments of civil society and the Organization of American States, which became an observer and guarantor of the process. A formal agreement with the government resulted in the creation of a Technical Committee for the Co-ordination of the Process of Violence Reduction in El Salvador.

Nevertheless, the government remained equivocal. Funes and other members refused to admit any participation and delivered contradictory statements, which fed distrust and confusion. But the sustained impact on violence and better understanding of the process gradually legitimised it and allowed the government to acknowledge involvement.

The government’s ambivalence can be contextualised. This was the first FMLN administration and conservatives controlled the National Assembly. The United States prohibits negotiations between a government and a criminal organisation and in November 2012 it so labelled the MS-13. The US is El Salvador’s main trading partner and co-operation in trade and security has resulted in US support and military and police aid from programmes such as the Central America Regional Security Initiative. In what has been described as the performance of “a trapeze artist”, the FMLN has thus tried to develop progressive policies while not antagonising the US, foreign capital and the Salvadoran establishment (in control of the media).

Transfer of gang leaders

The truce was supported by the minister of justice and public security, David Munguía, a retired general and former minister of defence. Although his appointment in 2011 (and the removal of FMLN members from those positions) was largely interpreted as a move towards remilitarisation, he surprised his critics by encouraging the first steps of the truce—authorising the transfer of gang leaders to other jails. According to the analyst of Salvadoran politics Paolo Lubers, he and other generals took the initiative after improved intelligence co-ordination convinced them that most violence was gang-driven.

Opposition came, however, from the Office of the Prosecutor and, later, sections of the police. They alleged that the truce was an opportunity for the gangs to reorganise, and that the drop in homicides was driving other crimes such as ‘disappearances’ and extortion. Some of this was a legacy of the peace accords, which disbanded the old security forces, established the National Civil Police (PNC) and reined in the armed forces.

The PNC comprised civilians, demobilised guerrilla fighters and vetted members of the prior security forces—whose most authoritarian members, however, were able to secure the most prominent positions in the new service, particularly during the two decades of ARENA governments. The police force is thus politicised and plagued by poor performance, corruption and authoritarian practices. Meanwhile, the Office of the Attorney-General (as with Supreme Court judges) is marked by political appointments by the Legislative Assembly, which have benefited ARENA hitherto.

More complex

In 2013, the process entered a more complex second phase, centred on the creation of violence-free municipalities. These ‘peace zones’ were based on agreement among local authorities, gangs and facilitators, with groups committing to cease violence and crime in exchange for a reduction in police operations and raids and reinsertion programmes. The first four municipalities, presented in January 2013, were soon extended to 11, with a combined population of more than 1m (out of 6m in all in El Salvador) and support from the OAS and the European Commission.

Mayors from both main parties, the FMLN and ARENA, participated in the initiative. Again, an ambivalent government promised, but then failed to deliver, grants and loans for prevention and rehabilitation. In Ilopango, the first peace zone, reduced violence presented an opportunity for the creation of a bakery and a chicken farm to generate employment, and the local government set up education centres and sports fields in marginalised neighbourhoods. But the mayor complained that the municipality had not received any of the $9 million promised by the government. Other cities were also left to their own devices.

In May 2013, the process suffered a major blow: the Constitutional Court nullified the appointment of Munguía as minister of justice and public security and forced Funes to restructure the security cabinet. The new minister, Ricardo Perdomo, proved a sharp critic of the truce. Amidst a polarised debate leading up to the February 2014 presidential election, his hard-line discourse and the restrictions placed on the mediation mechanisms weakened the process. The downward trend in murder rates began to reverse, amid a turf war between two factions of Barrio 18.

Support discontinued

At the beginning of 2015, the new president, the former rebel Salvador Sánchez Ceren, said he would discontinue support for the truce. Leaders of the gangs were returned to the maximum security prison of Zacatecoluca.

In March 2015 481 homicides were reported by the PNC (16 per day), a 52% increase on a year earlier. There were six massacres and on average 4.5 persons ‘disappeared’ each day.

A recent report however suggests that the truce has had a lasting effect on the geographical distribution of violence. Murder figures remain lower than average in regions where the truce was strong and coalitions of local actors (such as mayors, churches and NGOs) took advantage of the opportunity to promote new policies. The trend is even more striking in the ‘peace zones’: in seven the drop in murders has been sustained in spite of the setbacks.

But in other areas violence is soaring and tough positions are gaining a foothold. Sánchez Ceren has announced the creation of three battalions, with more than 1,200 troops, to fight crime in areas most affected by violence. And the rightist business association ANEP has hired the former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani as an adviser.

Particular problems

This truce can be counted among so-called second-generation security promotion activities, which depart from conventional top-down approaches and are forged on “formal and informal cooperation with existing (including customary) sub-national institutions”. But making peace with criminal (as against political) actors poses particular problems.

As James Cockayne put it, these cases are fraught with moral and political hazards, and there are critical questions. What is the desired end-state of negotiation? Is it a reduction of violence, a reduction of all criminal activities or dissolution of the illegal actor? The response to these questions will largely determine the contours of any negotiation in El Salvador and elsewhere.

Despite its flaws and shortcomings, the experience can however provide invaluable lessons. Apart from a drastic reduction in homicides, it contributed to a recognition of the social contours of the gang phenomenon and opened discussions at national and international levels about prevention, reintegration and rehabilitation.

The truce also demonstrated that a vast proportion of the violence afflicting the country was due to inter-gang confrontation. It revealed gang leaderships with a capacity for command-and-control and a sophisticated understanding of their role in society. Their ability to articulate demands surprised many, and to some extent changed conventional thinking.

But exploitation of public security in electoral politics tends to favour hard-line approaches. As criticism and polarisation grew to politically untenable levels, the government adopted contradictory statements and policies and later distanced itself from the process. An overall lack of planning and co-ordination hampered effectiveness—not least because the civil-society actors with more experience in working with gangs and communities were not involved.

Fear that the gangs might use the truce to rearm and reorganise, and anger towards perceived preferential treatment, is common in countries in transition from war to peace and with schemes of disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration (DDR) of former combatants. The accumulated experience of the global peacebuilding community can provide useful insights, including the adoption of community-based approaches to reintegration. Similarly, adaptation and use of mechanisms of transitional justice can help find a balance between security, justice and reconciliation.

The truce in El Salvador has been a lost opportunity to take advantage of reduced violence to strengthen the institutional presence in communities affected by gangs and implement comprehensive approaches to prevention, reintegration and reconciliation. Any future attempt will need stronger political commitment, a long-term strategy and engagement with civil society and public opinion. Given the scope of the problem and an estimated gang membership in the tens of thousands, socio-economic programmes and opportunities are also imperative for sustainability. But, for the time being, the horses of war are riding again.

Mabel González Bustelo (@MabelBustelo) is a journalist, researcher and international consultant specialising in international peace and security. She is author of Narcotráfico y crimen organizado: ¿Hay alternativas? (Narco-trafficking and Organized Crime: Are There Alternatives?), Icaria, Barcelona, 2014.

Featured image: Salvadoran police officers. Source: Flickr | Paulien Osse

Kristian Skrede Gleditsch is Professor in the Department of Government at the University of Essex, director of the Michael Nicholson Centre for Conflict and Cooperation, and a research associate at the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO). His research interests include conflict and cooperation, democratization, and spatial dimensions of social and political processes. He is the author of All International Politics is Local: The Diffusion of Conflict, Integration, and Democratization (University of Michigan Press, 2002), Spatial Regression Models (Sage, 2008, with Michael D. Ward), Inequality, Grievances, and Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2013, with Lars-Erik Cederman and Halvard Buhaug), and journal articles in the American Journal of Political Science, American Political Science Review, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Biological Reviews, Comparative Political Studies, Conflict and Cooperation, Defence and Peace Economics, Economic History Review, European Journal of International Relations, International Interactions, International Organization, Internasjonal Politikk, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Peace Research, Journal of Politics, PLOS One, Political Analysis, Political Psychology, R Journal, and World Politics.

In this interview, Professor Gleditsch discusses the global decline of violence since World War II and some of the challenges to this trend.

Recently, several authors have declared that there has been a decline in armed conflict since the end of World War II. From your research on this topic, what does the data say about the global patterns of violence and is war really waning?

On the question, yes, I think war is declining in most common data sources, although the causes remain contested. For civil wars there is at least some evidence that accommodation and conflict management has promoted a decline of war. Although Syria is a sever conflict, it is not by itself sufficient to say that we have a clear reversal. Perhaps the greatest current challenge is the alleged increase in terrorism. However, it is not obvious why we should see an increase in less severe and less organized conflict, and there is also some evidence that ethic terrorism has declined following accommodation in ways similar to civil war.

You mention that the causes of this decline in war remain contested. What are some of the main explanations offered by scholars for this development and what do you feel are the main areas of disagreement on this issue?

I think some of the key explanations include more democratization, less ethnic discrimination, globalization/increase in trade, and greater scope for conflict management by the UN and other regional organizations. All of these in my view are plausible and likely to be part of the explanation, but I think it is also fair to say that none of these alone provide a clear explanation for the decline in conflict.

There has been a great deal of skepticism about some of these factors, especially democratization, as many point to examples where conflict has followed after elections. However, some of this research takes a very binary approach to violence, where any conflict is regarded as a failure even if the level of conflict declines or fewer actors engage in violence. To use another example, although some dissident republicans in Norther Ireland continue to use terrorist tactics, it would be absurd to say that there has been no decline in the volume terrorism after the Good Friday agreement.

Do you feel that there has been a gradual shift in the attitudes of people towards war and, if so, that this might have also contributed to this decline of war?

I think there has been a dramatic shift in attitudes to war. At least a 100 years ago it was common to glorify war as heroic and character forming. Countries had ministries of war. Now war tends to be seen as a regrettable last resort, and we have ministries of defense, and literature on the horrors of war. All of this contributes to make war a much harder sell. That is not to say that aversion to war is universal or that people have never approve of conflict, and attitudes can influenced, in both directions. Moreover, attitudes are probably influenced by views on the costs of war and feasibility of alternatives.

I have been involved in some experiments on support for escalatory actions in territorial conflict with China among Japanese respondents, and there is some evidence that although people are generally quite hard line they become less belligerent when provided with information on the military or economic costs of conflict.

With regards to democratization, why do you feel that democracy reduces the risk of war?

For interstate war, then I think it is fairly well established that democracies rarely fight severe wars with each other. Of course, the risk of interstate conflict is low in general, at least for severe conflicts. Moreover, democracies may fight other states, and the democratic major superpowers are much more likely to be involved in conflict. However, I think there is also some evidence that the increased role of public opinion can constrain the use of force more generally, and that democratic states have supported a liberal order with emphasis on stronger international institutions and conflict management approaches that have helped reduce the risk of conflict more generally.

I also believe that transitions to democracy reduce the risk of civil war, despite widespread pessimism and fears of democracies increasing conflict. Democracies provide alternative political avenues for conflict, and decrease the motivation to use violence compared to autocracies. Transitions to democracy may not eradicate all domestic violence. Many democracies have inherited ethnic separatist conflicts that started before democratization, and established organizations may remain active after transitions (ETA in Spain and the IRA can be interpreted in this perspective). Moreover, we may see violence around elections, under a climate of mistrust. However, the overall magnitude of civil violence tends to be lower under democracies.

Whilst civil war is in decline, it became the principle form of armed conflict after the end of the Second World War. What were the main drivers for civil war becoming the main form of conflict?

Civil wars became particularly common with decolonialization. Some anti-colonial movements turned violent, and, in some cases, competing factions continued to fight each other after independence (e.g., Angola). Moreover, after independence, many colonial states were prone to violence for a host of reasons. One the one hand, state weakness can by itself encourage violence as the barriers for taking on the state are lower. Moreover, the post-colonial states often had various features that could encourage violence such as ethnic nepotism, poor governance, or lack of legitimacy. Finally, although the Cold War did not escalate to a direct confrontation between the superpowers, many civil wars escalated as the opposing sides could obtain support from the superpowers.

The end of the Cold War coincided with a spike in civil wars for somewhat similar reasons. Many weak states faced a loss of external support that weakened the central government (e.g., Somalia), and some larger federal units faced challenges form ethnic groups who sought independence and who might be willing to use violence (e.g., former USSR and Yugoslavia). However, other factors such as democratizations, decrease ethnic discrimination and powersharing, as well as more active UN conflict management efforts have likely all helped reduce the incidence of civil war from the immediate post cold war peak.

Some studies have discussed an apparent revolution in warfare in the post-Cold War world, described using terms such as ‘new wars’, ‘hybrid wars’, and ‘post-modern wars’. Some of the characteristics of these wars include blurred distinctions between public and private combatants, warlords, and criminals; regular targeting of civilians and other war atrocities; war economies sustained by illegal trade in drugs, weapons, resources such as oil or diamonds; and violence being driven more by identity than ideology. Do you feel that these so called ‘new wars’ represent a revolution in warfare and have they also marked a shift in the nature of warfare?

I am actually very skeptical of whether the concept of new wars is very helpful or whether the alleged trends exist at all. It is certainly not the case that targeting of civilians is a new feature – recall the shelling of cities during sieges in the 30 years war. The opium war was thus named for a reason. And the blurred lines between criminal gangs and warfare cannot be a new thing – the North African coast was known as the barbary coast due to the endemic piracy and the Mongol hordes probably picked up some things along the way too.

I suppose this raises the question of why some find this concept so compelling. I can only speculate on this since I do not share this myself, but I believe that the decline of a master narrative of conflict after the Cold War increases people’s sense of new wars as different from old war. However, all systematic research that I have seen raises serious question over this.

In addition to the alleged increase in terrorism, what do you see as the other greatest challenges to the decline in violence in the near and distant future?

 I actually think the long-term outlooks is relatively favorable, but I can imagine some cases that may contribute to long-term challenges

1. increasing tension between the major power is unlikely to lead to direct conflict, but it may increase support to opposing sides in civil war and decrease the prospects for the UN to become involved.
2. globalization has in all likelihood increased the costs of conflict and increased the value of peace, but there is a chance that globalization could be rolled back with increasing protectionism. This can make it more difficult to contain some territorial conflicts, such as the ones seen in Asia
3. global challenges such as refugees change require cooperation, and if states fail to cooperate on these then poorer relations may weaken the ties that prevent conflict
4. the consequences of climate change could increase the risk of conflict by undermining livelihoods and increasing competition between states. My own reading of the evidence says that there is little evidence of this happening so far, but skeptics would argue that dramatic consequences would move us into a new scenario.

These are serious concerns, but at best indicate risk, and none of them imply that the decline of violence must be reversed.

The political changes in certain South American countries, including most notably the case of Bolivia, could act as inspirations in the ongoing search for locally grown, hybrid variants of a post-liberal peace.

Author’s Note: This article presents key arguments from my article Jonas Wolff (2015) Beyond the liberal peace: Latin American inspirations for post-liberal peacebuilding, Peacebuilding, 3:3, 279-296, DOI: 10.1080/21647259.2015.1040606.

Responding to the sobering results of international peacebuilding missions around the world, a rich academic debate has emerged that, from different perspectives and with different aims, criticizes the practices and premises of peacebuilding. In particular, critics have suggested that the liberal template of social and political order (‘liberal peace’ and ‘liberal democracy’) which guides peacebuilding is a crucial part of the problem. As a consequence, scholars have started to think about – and empirically study – alternatives to the liberal peace. This idea of a hybrid, peaceful order that develops out of the encounter between external and local efforts at building peace is captured, most prominently, by Oliver Richmond’s notion of ‘post-liberal peace’. The crux of this deliberately ill-defined concept is that it denotes the emergence of hybrid social orders that somehow combine liberal and non-liberal (but not necessarily anti-liberal or non-democratic) norms and practices. Such orders, thereby, go beyond and may also partially contradict liberal principles – but do so without following an established, alternative template. According to Richmond (and other critical peacebuilding scholars), local resistance to, and local appropriation of, international peacebuilding activities will inevitably produce such hybridity. Yet, there is still limited empirical evidence and rather abstract theoretical ideas about what such post-liberal forms of peace could look like.

With this piece, I bring in experiences that are usually not reflected in the debate about peacebuilding, namely: current political changes in a series of South American countries, including most notably the case of Bolivia. The context in which these processes occur is very different from the so-called post-conflict societies in which peacebuilding takes place. Yet, precisely because of these differences, conditions for locally driven experiments with post-liberalism are arguably better in Latin America.

While the attempt to move beyond liberal peacebuilding does certainly not need yet another template to be implemented worldwide, these experiences might well serve as inspirations in the ongoing search for locally grown, hybrid variants of a post-liberal peace. Against those that defend liberal peacebuilding by suggesting that there is, simply, no alternative (as Roland Paris has argued), the Latin American experience at the very least shows that there are actual alternatives to liberal mainstream conceptions of political and economic order – even if post-liberal experiments in South America are limited and uncertain, diverse and contradictory.

Post-liberalism in South America

In recent years, scholars working on Latin American politics have noted ‘post-neoliberal’ and ‘post-liberal’ trends in the region. On the one hand, the so-called left turn, i.e. the election and reelection of several left-of-center governments across the region, has been accompanied by attempts to turn away from neoliberal economic policies. On the other, with diverse experiences of participatory democracy at the local level and, in the Andean region, the adoption of new constitutions that partially deviate from the mainstream model of liberal democracy, contours of a possible post-liberal democracy have begun to take shape. These developments are diverse and contradictory, but they share one basic commonality: They are the result of attempts to go beyond liberal, representative democracy and neoliberal, market-oriented economics without entirely replacing the preexisting political or economic order through a new, alternative model of development. The new constitutions in Bolivia and Ecuador, for instance, maintain all the well-known institutions of representative democracy and the usual series of political and civil rights but add or strengthen mechanisms of direct democracy and societal participation, expand the notion of human rights in areas of economic, social and cultural rights and include collective indigenous rights.

In the area of economic policy, contemporary attempts to strengthen the economic role of the state and expand social policies, to deepen the domestic market and implement some kind of redistributive policies differ from country to country, but in general do not break with the entire neoliberal model. The prefix ‘post’ in both post-liberal democracy and post-neoliberalism is precisely meant to capture this partial, and hybrid, combination of continuity and change.

Redefining the nation-state and the rule of law

A core question for international peacebuilding concerns the related task of nation-building. For obvious reasons, most post-conflict societies lack a common national identity. An innovative response that has emerged from Latin America, and particularly from the indigenous movements in Bolivia and Ecuador, is the notion of a ‘plurinational state’. On the one hand, this concept openly breaks with the unitary conception of the nation-state: The state at hand is supposed to not only include different cultures (‘multicultural’) or ethnic communities (‘pluriethnic’), but several nations or peoples that have their own right to self-determination. On the other hand, however, the concept as used and constitutionally recognized in Bolivia and Ecuador is rather a hybrid: It combines an overarching national identity with an acknowledgment of particular indigenous identities. The plurinational state, contradictory as this may seem, is both a unitary nation-state and an umbrella organization that includes partially autonomous indigenous peoples. This formula has been severely contested – and continues to be so – in both countries and is, certainly, far from offering a panacea for the complex problems of nation-building in divided societies. But it may still be worthwhile to take into account.

Directly related to this, another crucial issue in the peacebuilding debate concerns the rule of law – and, more specifically, the tension between liberal state law that is to be implemented ‘from above’ (but usually does not work very well) and local forms of community justice that exist at the grassroots level (and frequently work much better but exhibit non- or illiberal features). The same kind of tension exists in a series of Latin American countries and concerns the existence of indigenous or community justice at the local level – also not least a result of the factual absence of the state’s judicial institutions especially in rural areas. Responding to this reality and to increasing claims by indigenous movements, several Latin American countries since the 1990s have progressively recognized indigenous customs and practices. In the case of Bolivia, the new constitution goes so far as to place ordinary and indigenous legal jurisdiction on an equal footing.

In general, research on indigenous community justice in the Andean region shows that it works relative well: When compared to the state’s justice system, which is often hardly pre-sent in rural areas and frequently perceived as alien, community justice provides an important mechanism for resolving a broad range of conflicts in ways that local populations generally regard as much more efficient and legitimate. While studies show that indigenous community justice is not at all arbitrary, but follows specific rationalities, its logic is clearly different from the rationality guiding ordinary state justice: The overall aim is to preserve the social harmony of a given community; its main strategy is some kind of reconciliation. From this perspective, long-term imprisonment is irrational, while what is regarded as physical punishment from a liberal perspective (e.g., whipping with nettles, ice water baths) is considered rather symbolic acts of purification and/or reconciliation.

Just as in quite a few post-conflict societies legal pluralism in the Andean region is both an empirical reality and a normative challenge – and research on the experiences in Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru offers a series of crucial insights about both the diverse practices of indigenous/community justice and about different ways of dealing with legal pluralism in more or less pluralist ways.

Broadening democratic participation and human rights

In the mainstream model of liberal democracy, the people do not in fact govern but through elected representatives. In debates about peacebuilding, a common criticism has precisely been directed against an overly focus on (early) elections. In South America, disenchantment with the ways in which real-existing representative democracy worked has led to experiments with more direct and ‘participatory’ forms of democracy. Important innovations in this regard include the introduction of recall referenda that enable the citizens to revoke the mandate of their elected representatives and different types of participatory budgeting and participatory development planning.

A related criticism of liberal peacebuilding concerns its focus on a relatively narrow, and specifically liberal, set of political and civil rights. Especially when combined with neoliberal recipes of economic reform, this frequently implies a disregard for economic, social and cultural rights, which are equally established as human rights at the international level. Yet, given the existing socioeconomic conditions in the global South, liberal democracy’s emphasis on formal political equality rings quite hollow to many people. As a consequence, across Latin America, the failure of democratic regimes to significantly reduce the dramatic socioeconomic inequalities has led, since the turn of the century, to a reemergence of the ‘social question’ and the ‘left turn’ discussed above.

Social and economic rights have consequently been strengthened in several countries, but most notably in the new constitutions adopted in Bolivia and Ecuador (but, previously, also in Brazil, Colombia and Venezuela). And, with the ‘leftist turn’ (and the commodity boom), governments have generally started to govern a bit more in line with this notion of socioeconomic rights by expanding social policies, improving basic public services, and reducing poverty. To be sure, nowhere in the region has the constitutional recognition of a broad catalog of human rights led to a consistent policy of guaranteeing universal socioeconomic rights. Still, the constitutional promise of progressive change at least establishes an important normative reference point for those that mobilize in the name of ‘social justice’.

Caveats

The experiences indicated above also caution against expecting too much from experiments with alternatives to liberal democracy and neoliberal economics. Most notably for the debate on peacebuilding, the search for (some kind of) post-liberal political order – and, thus, also for post-liberal peace – is itself a conflict-ridden process. While ‘localizing’ peacebuilding may plausibly reduce conflicts between external and local actors, it may well increase intra-local struggle – precisely because local-local interactions then become decisive. If the very fundamentals of the politico-economic order are up for discussion, this plausibly increases the risk of violent conflict. In fact, the process of constitutional change in Bolivia was characterized by an open clash between different conceptions of democracy – and by mutual allegations that what was presented as democratic by the opponent was precisely the opposite (colonial or imperialist, exclusive or secessionist, autocratic or totalitarian).

The Bolivian attempt to construct some kind of post-liberal democracy also brought about more specific risks. On the one hand, the transition process meant dismantling an existing structure of democratic institutions and led to a certain, if temporary, institutional vacuum during which the democratic shape of the future political order was uncertain. On the other hand, features of Bolivia’s new political order such as the emphasis on direct democracy do not only increase the power of the people, but more specifically the power of the majority; at the same time, a popular president can use plebiscitary mechanisms to further increase and consolidate his/her power vis-à-vis the opposition, minorities or other powers and levels of the state.

Finally, the current economic crisis, triggered by the decrease in international commodity prices, reveals the limitations of the post-neoliberal economic policies in the region – and immediately threatens the advances in the reduction of poverty and inequality.

Conclusion

The most important feature of the debates about post-liberal peace, post-neoliberal economics and post-liberal democracy is, arguably, that they are not aimed at identifying yet another universal peacebuilding template. If anything, the main academic and political purpose is to open up discussions that have been too narrow and closed for too long. Thinking about alternatives, however, still requires concrete ideas about elements and characteristics, dynamics and paths that may characterize (different) post-liberal configurations. And while theoretical reflections are certainly needed, the very idea of post-liberalism as something arising ‘bottom up’ from dynamics at least partially driven by local knowledge and local agency points to the need to empirically study developments that point in some post-liberal direction. In this sense, I have argued, recent experiences from Latin America do offer political inspirations as well as important caveats which might be of interest for both scholars of peacebuilding and for those engaged in building whatever kind of hybrid peace in whatever kind of place.

Jonas Wolff is head of the research department ‘Governance and Societal Peace’ and executive board member of the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (PRIF) as well as adjunct professor (Privatdozent) at Kassel University. He studied Political Science, Economics and Sociology at University of Frankfurt, where he also received his PhD. He completed his habilitation at the University of Kassel. His research focuses on Latin American politics, international democracy promotion, and the interrelation between social conflict, political transformation and economic development.

The Anthropocene denotes the current geological age, in which human activity has had a significant impact on climate and the environment. The pressing issue of this epoch is whether the global consequences of these interactions between humans and the environment can be governed on a global scale.

The 1972 report to the Club of Rome on “The Limits to Growth” demonstrated the natural boundaries to human expansion which began in the Holocene era, following the end of the last glacial period around 12,000 years ago. The continued growth of human activities since the industrial revolution has become a driving force of reshaping the face of the planet into a new geological epoch, the “Anthropocene”, associated with multiple global consequences such as climate change, land degradation, resource scarcity and biodiversity loss. The Anthropocene is seen as a new geologic epoch in which humankind has emerged as a globally significant force capable of reshaping the face of the planet. The underlying human-environment interactions raise fundamental questions for global governance: Can nature be controlled and shaped on a global scale? Are human interventions a disturbing or regulating global force, avoiding or creating disasters? What are the limits of human expansion in the Anthropocene?

Human growth and complex crises

In the course of its history, the human population has been growing by increasing birth rates and lowering death rates, leading to the expansion of the human sphere in terms of capital, investments, income, technology, energy and resource flows, political power and violent forces of destruction. Despite Malthusian concerns about population growth causing scarcity of natural resources, intolerable pollution, mass starvation and other catastrophes, humans were able to overcome resource constraints and expand into new spaces through problem-solving capabilities, technical and social innovations that generated more wealth on a shrinking natural resource base. Continued pressure on natural resources and ecosystems challenge planetary boundaries in the Anthropocene, raising the question of whether a balance will be established by increased death rates or the reduction of birth rates. While the first pathway implies crisis, disaster and death, the second path may be associated with a sustainability transformation in demographic, economic and societal conditions within natural boundaries.

These pathways are part of the “complexity turn” in the Anthropocene which is characterized by globalized networks among people, markets and institutions, accelerated processes and flows in transportation and communication, and manifold micro-macro interactions between natural and social systems. While complex systems are often robust against disturbances in the core region of stability, on the edge of critical thresholds between stability and instability, small variations and uncertainties can make a big difference and decide whether systems break down or create new ones, as symbolized by the famous “butterfly effect” in chaos theory.

Beyond thresholds and tipping points chain reactions and risk cascades may be triggered which propagate in space and time and induce qualitative system changes. These include complex events such as natural disasters, stock market crashes, revolutions, mass exodus or violent conflicts. A world of ever growing complexity where responsibilities and solutions of crises are hidden behind smokescreens, may provoke over-simplifications, religious, populist and nationalist fundamentalisms, rhetoric against science and intellectuals, or resistance against globalized structures.

With the chaotic breakdown of the East-West conflict in 1989, actions of individuals and groups triggered a chain reaction that within weeks led to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the breakup of the Eastern Block. A new world (dis-)order emerged in which multiple crises interacted in fractal and fragile international landscapes that continue to be unstable and full of surprises (see van Creveld 1991, Kaldor 1998, Münkler 2005, Scheffran 2008). Numerous factors and actors are interrelated, involving national, subnational and transnational actors in complex networks, crises and conflicts. Tight couplings lead to cascading crises that spiral out of control, including September 11, global economic crises, the Arab Spring, the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria, the civil war in Ukraine, the Greek debt crisis, the European refugee crisis and terror attacks in many countries. These events are interconnected through multiple channels that are often invisible.

Climate change as a risk multiplier

In this complex chain of crises, environmental change is connected with other problem areas through multiple linkages from local to global levels. More tipping points may emerge in the nexus of environmental degradation, climate change, poverty, and hunger which affect the living conditions in many parts of the world and could turn into severe security threats. Climate change is considered a risk multiplier, which disturbs the balance between natural and social systems and amplifies the consequences through complex impact chains. Among key pathways, climate change can affect the functioning of critical infrastructures and supply networks; intensify the nexus of water, energy and food; lead to production losses, price increases and financial crises in other regions through global markets; undermine human security, social living conditions and political stability; and induce or aggravate migration movements and conflict situations.

In the most affected regions the erosion of social order and state failure may trigger a spiral of corruption, crime and violence. Particularly critical is the situation in fragile and failing states with social fragmentation, weak governance structures and inadequate management capacities. Human insecurity and personal instability interacts with social and political instability. The impact of environmental change could undermine the ability to solve problems and further dissolve state structures, possibly leading to their collapse.

The Darfur conflict in Sudan has served as a prominent case where climate change is suggested as a threat multiplier in the complex nexus of population pressure, exploitation of land and forests, declining agricultural productivity, food insecurity, and the spread of diseases. While in some studies drought and desertification exacerbate the competition for resources between herders and sedentary farmers, others point to the long-term political roots of instability and violent conflicts, reinforced by national power games, regional struggles and global geopolitics that marginalized the Darfur region and fueled a spiral of violence.

Similarly, several authors found devastating droughts in the years before the Syrian rebellion that hit the main growing areas of the country and forced many people to move to the cities. These changes combined with many other conflict drivers rooted in the country’s economic, social and demographic conditions, political failures of the Assad regime as well as the events following the US invasion of 2003, the Arab Spring of 2011 and the emergence of the Islamic State which question the role of climate change as a dominant factor.

Limits to the Anthropocene

In this complex nexus of overlapping crises and interconnected problem areas, the world may continue on a slippery slope of escalation, running full speed into natural boundaries and their forces. The challenge is to anticipate and avoid risky pathways by counteracting forces that slow down and change course towards a more sustainable, peaceful and viable world which avoids dangerous pathways and interventions (such as risky climate engineering),  allowing for a timely and self-organized system transformation that takes the limits of the Anthropocene into consideration. These include finite natural resources and limits to growth; ethical, social, political and legal constraints; limits of scientific knowledge and uncertainty. In an increasingly interconnected world, stabilization of human–environment interactions under conditions of climate change needs an integrative and interdisciplinary understanding of human–environment interaction to assess destabilizing developments that threaten survival and adapt to changing circumstances to ensure their viability.

Social systems are not determined to aggravate crises situations but also have the ability to cope with problems like climate change and develop alternative pathways. To succeed, human responses and actions need to be timely and adequate compared to the speed, intensity and complexity of change. Concepts of anticipative and adaptive governance are needed to influence critical decision points and adjust actions along multiple causal chains to protect human security, strengthen societal resilience and sustainable livelihoods, and to develop collective adaptive strategies driving the planet through the complex and foggy landscapes of the future where information is limited and uncertain, but continuously updated. A lack of agreement on the underlying causes, on the risks to be expected and on the actions required is impeding progress.

Governing transformations to sustainable peace

Concepts of resilience, security, viability and sustainable peace can strengthen people’s social and economic capabilities in their effective, creative and collective efforts to handle the challenges of the Anthropocene. In a resilient social environment, actors are able to cope with and withstand the disturbances caused by climate change in a dynamic way that will enable them to preserve, rebuild, or transform their livelihood.

Sustainable development seeks to balance economic, social and ecological issues for present and future generations and integrate the human sphere (socio-sphere) into the boundaries of the natural environment (eco-sphere), making conflicting objectives compatible:

1. Sustain refers to preservation and upholding of natural resources as the life-enabling base of society and precondition for human existence.
2. Development means the unfolding of opportunities and abilities to improve human well-being and promote societal progress.

Peace rests on similar principles regarding the existence and development of human rights:

1. Preservation and protection of the existence, integrity and identity of each individual by excluding violence.
2. Self-fulfillment and unfolding of the individual through equal distribution of development opportunities.

Thus, upholding and unfolding of humans and nature are common principles of sustainable peace, which addresses both the negative interactions between armed conflict, environmental destruction and low levels of development (vicious cycle) as well as positive linkages between human development, environmental protection and peace-building (virtuous cycle).

In addition to preservation and development (upholding and unfolding), a third task includes the shaping of a viable world, aiming for its “conformation” to fit the current state into  a  proper  shape,  form  or  design,  creating a balanced relationship between the real and the desired world, between human society and nature. In the triangular relationship between sustainability, development and peace, upholding current abilities serves as a basis for unfolding enabling opportunities to facilitate the conformation of human–environment interaction pathways towards a viable world. This approach is compatible with the multi-level-perspective of socio-technical transformations that describe micro-macro transitions between regimes, niches and landscapes.

Key viability strategies, supporting a “new climate for peace”, include climate mitigation and adaptation; the building of networks, the cultivation of diversity, flexibility and justice; migrant networks that facilitate the exchange of knowledge, income and other resources; new capabilities to manage disasters; arms control, non-proliferation and disarmament; regional security concepts, crisis prevention, conflict resolution and confidence-building; as well as innovative institutional frameworks and legal mechanisms.

The 2015 Paris Agreement offers a first framework of opportunities through setting boundaries of global warming and national commitments of emission reductions as well as instruments for financial and technology transfer between industrial and developing countries. While the scope and effectiveness of these measures may not yet be sufficient to prevent dangerous climate change, they could lay the foundations and attract political support from local to global levels for a sustainable and peaceful transformation towards governing the Anthropocene.

Further readings by the author

Brauch, H.G., Scheffran, J. (2012) Climate Change, Human Security, and Violent Conflict in the Anthropocene. In: J. Scheffran, M. Brzoska, H.G. Brauch, P. M. Link, J. Schilling (Eds.) Climate Change, Human Security and Violent Conflict, Springer, 3-40.

Lüthje, C., Schäfer, M., Scheffran, J. (2011) Limits to the Anthropocene. What are the challenges and boundaries of science for the post-normal age? Geophysical Research Abstracts, 13, EGU2011-11795.

Maas, A., Scheffran, J. (2012) Climate Conflicts 2.0? Climate Engineering as Challenge for International Peace and Security, Special Issue, Security and Peace, 30(4): 193-200.

Scheffran, J. (2008) The complexity of security. Complexity 14(1): 13-21.

Scheffran, J., Brzoska, M., Kominek, J., Link, P.M., Schilling, J. (2012) Disentangling the Climate-conflict Nexus: Empirical and Theoretical Assessment of Vulnerabilities and Pathways, Review of European Studies, 4(5): 1-13.

Scheffran, J., Ide, T., Schilling, J. (2014) Violent climate or climate of violence? Concepts and relations with focus on Kenya and Sudan, The International Journal of Human Rights, 18 (3): 369-390.

Scheffran, J. (2015) Complexity and Stability in Human-Environment Interaction: The Transformation from Climate Risk Cascades to Viable Adaptive Networks. In: Kavalski (ed.), World Politics at the Edge of Chaos, 229-252.

Scheffran, J. (2016a): Der Vertrag von Paris: Klima am Wendepunkt?, WeltTrends, Nr. 112, 24(2): 4-9.

Scheffran J. (2016b) From a Climate of Complexity to Sustainable Peace: Viability Transformations and Adaptive Governance in the Anthropocene, in: Brauch et al. (ed.) Handbook on Sustainability Transition and Sustainable Peace, Springer, 305-346.

Jürgen Scheffran is professor in the Institute of Geography at the University of Hamburg and head of the Research Group Climate Change and Security (CLISEC) which is part of the Excellence Cluster Integrated Climate System Analysis and Prediction (CliSAP) and the Center for Earth System Research and Sustainability (CEN). After his PhD at Marburg University he worked in interdisciplinary research and teaching at Technical University Darmstadt, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, and the University of Illinois. His fields of interest include: climate change, resource conflicts and human migration; energy security and water-energy-food nexus; land use, rural-urban interactions and river-coastal regions under sea-level change; governance in the Anthropocene (mitigation, adaptation, climate engineering, sustainability transition); technology assessment, arms control and international security; mixed methods in complex systems research (agent-based modelling, social network analysis, field research). He was a Visiting Professor at the University of Paris (Sorbonne), consultant to the United Nations, the Technology Assessment Office of the German Parliament, the Federal Environmental Agency, and the German delegation to the climate negotiations.

The European Union (EU) has recently emerged as an international peace meditator, but emerging challenges, including the potential exit of the UK from the EU, may prevent it from strengthening its ability to mediate conflicts.  

Mediation is an instrument of international conflict management through which third parties seek to contribute to a peaceful resolution of (violent) conflicts. While states are the dominant and most frequent providers of mediation, international organizations are not far behind. Recently, the European Union (EU) has emerged as a relatively new player in the field, acting both as a mediator itself and as a member of collective coordination mechanisms to support peace processes such as UN Contact Groups and Groups of Friends. Current initiatives such as the EU-facilitated dialogue between Belgrade and Pristina have demonstrated the EU’s potential as peace mediator.

However, external and internal crises may prevent the EU from further strengthening its institutional capacities and resources for mediation. Externally, challenges to European security such as the civil war in Syria, the threat posed by the so-called Islamic State and the armed conflict in Eastern Ukraine in the context of rising tensions between NATO and Russia could lead to a shift in the EU’s foreign and security policy back towards a more traditional, “hard security” approach that focuses on the development of military instruments and defence cooperation. Internally, the results of the UK referendum on 23 June 2016 and a potential exit of the UK would certainly open up a debate on the future of EU foreign and security policy without one of its most influential member states. The fact that the EU’s long-awaited Global Strategy on Foreign and Security Policy will be published a week or two after the UK referendum suggests that the EU is well prepared to take the potential effects of a ‘Leave’ vote on this policy field swiftly into account. However, it is nevertheless plausible to assume that a ‘Brexit’ would push the EU towards a decisive crossroads as regards to the future development of its foreign and security policy, also potentially affecting its engagement in the field of peace mediation.

 The EU’s track record in peace mediation

Although the number of EU mediation efforts is still relatively marginal compared to UN mediation involvement, the EU has nevertheless established a considerable track record as mediator in the past ten to fifteen years. During High Representative (HR) Javier Solana’s terms of office, mediation became an increasingly important element of the EU’s foreign and security policy toolbox. For example, in August 2001 the EU together with the US managed to broker the Ohrid Framework Agreement settling the conflict between the Macedonian government and the Albanian minority in 2001. A few months later, the High Representative and his team became involved in a mediation process between Serbia and Montenegro, which led to the Belgrade Agreement on the formation of a state union in March 2002. While the Western Balkans certainly remained one of HR Solana’s key priorities, the EU also played an important role in the multilateral effort to mediate the political crisis in Ukraine in the context of the country’s ‘Orange Revolution’ in 2003 and was a key supporter of the efforts by the Finnish NGO Crisis Management Initiative (CMI) to broker a peace agreement to the conflict in Aceh, Indonesia in 2004-5.

While the EU had already been very active in the field of mediation when Javier Solana served as High Representative (1999-2009), it sustained its mediation activities during HR Catherine Ashton’s term of office (2009-2014) and continues to be involved in mediation processes since HR Federica Mogherini has taken over. In particular, the EU-facilitated dialogue between Belgrade and Pristina stands out as the most prominent example of EU mediation. Less publicly recognized are the EU’s efforts as co-mediator in the Geneva International Discussions (GID) on Georgia’s Territorial Conflicts that were initiated in October 2008 following the EU Special Representative for the South Caucasus and Crisis in Georgia together with OSCE and UN Special Representatives/Envoys  serving as co-chair in the talks between representatives of Georgia, South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Russia and the US. Apart from its direct involvement as mediator, EU actors have been engaged in a number of mediation support initiatives, often been less visible to a wider public. Examples include the EEAS Mediation Support Team’s efforts to assist Myanmar democratic transition and the EU Delegation’s organizational and financial support to the National Dialogue Conference in Yemen.

The EU’s institutional framework for mediation

The increase in EU mediation activities has been accompanied by the evolution of a more strategic and systematic EU approach to mediation, particularly in terms of policy development and capacity-building. A key development in this regard has been the adoption of the Concept on Strengthening EU Mediation and Dialogue Capacities. In this document, the EU formulated the plan to systematically enhance its existing mediation capacities and to strengthen its overall ability to engage in non-military conflict prevention and crisis management missions. It also spells out different roles and guiding principles of EU mediation, thereby addressing the need for greater internal coherence and closer cooperation with its international partners. A major role in mediation is ascribed to the EU Special Representatives, whose mandates often include mediation-related activities and which are often the key EU actors on the ground in the conflict region.

To implement the Concept and to promote a more systematic approach to mediation, the Mediation Support Team (MST) within the EEAS was established in 2011 and has become a key hub of mediation knowledge and expertise. However, the MST is not the only institutional innovation that followed-up on the 2009 Concept. The establishment of the European Parliament Mediation Support Service to assist mediation initiatives undertaken by Members of the European Parliament and the creation of the European Institute of Peace illustrate that mediation remains a vibrant field of EU foreign policy.

Is the EU an effective mediator?

To what extent the EU is effective in its mediation efforts is an issue which still has to be comprehensively addressed in peace and conflict studies research. The answer to the question of EU effectiveness also depends on how one conceptualizes effectiveness and success in international mediation. A brief comparison of the EU-facilitated dialogue between Kosovo and Serbia with the EU’s role as co-chair in the Geneva International Discussions on the conflicts over South Ossetia and Abkhazia may illustrate this. In terms of conflict settlement, the EU-facilitated dialogue between Kosovo and Serbia has been relatively effective, given that it has led to several agreements between the parties, including compromises on previously heavily contested issues such as Kosovo’s participation in regional fora, freedom of movement and trade, and the governance of Northern Kosovo. Most importantly, the EU brokered the First Agreement of Principles Governing the Normalization of Relations in April 2013 that has been widely applauded as ground-breaking and historic. Although the parties are lagging behind when it comes to the implementation of some agreements, the Belgrade-Pristina dialogue still is a success story which can, at least partly, be attributed to the EU’s leverage vis-à-vis with the conflict parties due to their aspirations for EU accession and its mediation strategy that draws on this leverage to move parties toward agreement through the use of positive incentives.

In case of the Geneva International Discussions, the EUSR and his team have been considerably less effective in brokering agreements between the parties compared to the Kosovo-Serbia case. Apart from the establishment of Incident Prevention and Response Mechanisms to facilitate exchange of information on security incidents at the administrative boundary line (ABL) between South Ossetia/Abkhazia and Georgia proper, the discussions have not resulted in any tangible results yet. However, a focus on conflict settlement alone would not be sufficient to make a comprehensive judgement on the EU’s effectiveness as a co-mediator in this case. The fact that the EU has managed to keep the parties at the negotiation table and stay committed to the mediation process is in itself an achievement, given the fact that the space for compromise between the parties seems to be very limited. In addition to the EU’s effort to stabilize the security situation on the ground through the EU Monitoring Mission (EUMM), the EU’s leading role in the GID has contributed to a stabilization of a conflict which was prone to escalation not that many years ago.

What can we learn from this comparison about EU effectiveness in mediation? There are at least two lessons that could be drawn here. First, the Kosovo-Serbia case illustrates the great potential of the EU as a mediator in contexts where EU memberships serves as a huge incentive for compromise solutions. Second, the EU’s involvement in the Geneva International Discussions demonstrates that in less favourable contexts – due to a lack of EU leverage or a limited willingness to compromise from the conflict parties – the EU may not be able to achieve more than preserving the status quo and committing the parties to confront one another peacefully in negotiations rather than through violent means. Thus, there may be certain limits to what the EU is able to achieve, but this does not mean automatically that the EU is ineffective. Rather, the main task for the EU will be to fully exploit the potential it has, given the specific circumstances and context of the conflict in which it decides to engage.

If the EU is able to further strengthen its profile as an international mediator, it will depend on the political will of the Member States. Although EU mediators such as EU Special Representatives enjoy a certain degree of leeway, it is the EU member states who decide on their mandates and the EU’s approach towards a particular conflict more generally. Moreover, individual Member States may provide EU mediation efforts with additional weight. In the Kosovo-Serbia case, for example, the UK and Germany have played a key role in moving Belgrade to compromise in the dialogue with Pristina by making it a condition for further progress on its path towards EU accession. While Germany has been the key driver behind the efforts of putting more pressure on Serbia to move forward in the implementation of agreements reached in the context of the EU-facilitated dialogue at different levels, the UK has played a key role in backing this policy publicly and through diplomatic channels. Given that the UK has been a firm supporter of the EU’s further enlargement, one potential effect of a ‘Brexit’ could be that in cases where enlargement is the key ‘carrot’ the EU can offer to conflict parties, there might be more reluctance to draw on this leverage due to a change to the EU’s internal balance between enlargement supporters and skeptics among the Member States. Thus, although a potential ‘Brexit’ may not inevitably affect and change the EU’s approach to mediation, it may have a long-term negative impact on the EU’s ability to use both pressure and political/economic incentives to spur agreement between conflict parties.

Julian Bergmann is a research fellow with the Chair of International Politics at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, working on a PhD thesis on the EU’s effectiveness as a peace mediator in secessionist conflicts. Together with Arne Niemann, he is also conducting a research project entitled “A Peacemaker in the Making? The European Union as an Actor in International Mediation”, funded by the German Foundation for Peace Research. Recent publications include Mediating International Conflicts: the European Union as an Effective Peacemaker? (Journal of Common Market Studies 2015, with Arne Niemann) and Reputation, Credibility and Manipulative Negotiation Style – Attributes of Successful Peacemakers? (Zeitschrift für Friedens- und Konfliktforschung 2014; in German).