Democratic Republic of Congo’s sexual violence epidemic is not only a weapon of ongoing violent conflict but an expression of entrenched systemic problems. Indeed, sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) is most commonly perpetrated by the security services in place to protect civilians. In Quartier Panzi in South Kivu province, innovative processes of security sector reform and strengthened police-civilian channels of communication may be providing an opportunity for change.   

Quartier Panzi—the populous, restive neighborhood of Bukavu, South Kivu province—is renowned in international development circles as the ground zero of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s sexual violence epidemic. Rape as a weapon of war is not so much perpetrated by enemy forces but, most often, by the very parties sent by Kinshasa to protect and serve civilians. Much as Selma, Alabama was to the American civil rights movement, Panzi’s ongoing tragedy has transformed the area into a vibrant arena for grassroots opposition and international solidarity in the fight to restore women’s bodies and lives. Women’s organizations have formed to denounce continued abuses and government denial, to reverse cultural stigmas around female culpability in rape, and to demand trial for Congolese security forces suspected of sexual abuses.

The courage and commitment of Dr. Denis Mukwege, chief gynecologist at Panzi Hospital and twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, is emblematic of this resilience. International networks like V-Day and Women for Women International support these local actions and fund sanctuaries for survivors, such as the City of Joy. These innovations aim to be restorative and empowering for survivors, focusing on the crisis as experienced by women and girls, offering healing and vocational training options otherwise non-existent. However, the causes of this specific form of cruelty and degradation, rooted in violent masculinities and impunity among security actors, remain unaddressed.

Rewiring the security sector

Like any deep malaise, Congo’s rape crisis is but one expression of entrenched, systemic problems. Local witnesses, security analysts and medical professionals who treat survivors present overwhelming evidence that the primary perpetrators are uniformed Congolese security actors. A weak justice system may be responsible for the failure to discipline or punish perpetrators, but the sources of this behavior lie within the security sector itself. Accessing the security elite, Congo’s infamous ‘black box’, is notoriously difficult. As a result, very little analysis exists of the problem from the perpetrators’ perspective: analysis and evidence that deciphers the institutional culture and internal organization of the security sector, or that maps relations between senior officers, politicians and economic actors. By design, opacity reigns supreme.

A variety of international donors support the national army and police with numerous ‘train and equip’ initiatives, an international cooperation model unchanged since the Cold War.These ‘security development’ partnerships aim to strengthen national capacity through field and classroom training and equipment upgrades; behavior change and public accountability are not part of the approach. Within the security services, there is typically an absence of civilian oversight, and widespread rent-seeking and illicit trade in protected flora, fauna and minerals, but no questions are asked by international partners, as diplomacy and formality dominate.

Supply-side approaches such as these long pre-date the advent of ‘security sector reform’ among development actors, which does seek behavior change and greater accountability. The older aid modality remains popular with the Congolese leadership because it expressly avoids any calling to account or inculcation of security as a public service and legal right.

There is state and donor complicity in all of this. Strength without constraint or accountability defines the DRC’s security sector today. Its predatory practices range from unchecked rape and pillage in the East to the repression of free speech and public inquiry, as witnessed by the 2010 murder in Kinshasa of prominent human rights activist, Floribert Chebeya. To placate critics, a military tribunal mounted a kangaroo court in the wake of the murder; the film documenting and exposing its empty theatrics, L’Affaire Chebeya, Un Crime d’Etat, remains banned in Congo.

Such officially sanctioned practices and attitudes are salient features of the Congolese state since independence, and well known to all Congolese. In the early 1970s, President Mobutu Sese Seko began encouraging civil servants and security forces to ‘feed on the population’ (“Population baza bilanga ya bino”). Anecdotes such as these are more than flippant asides; they explain the persistent appeal of this patrimonial compact (across four chapters of Congolese leadership: Mobutu, Kabila père, transitional government, Kabila fils) as a declaration of complicity between political elites and the entire public sector. In its truncated audacity, this single utterance reconfigures and reduces the entire means and ends of the state to elite enrichment and group impunity.

In Panzi, armed crime and physical/sexual assault reached unprecedented levels in the aftermath of the primary war in South Kivu province. State security had long colluded with local armed gangs, and popular recourse options ranged from individual vengeance to military tribunals, as civil courts are unreliable. Mob justice is also widely practiced. The formation of neighborhood watch groups raised local hopes for improved safety (e.g. SAJECEK–Forces Vives). Despite their initial popularity, they soon joined local police and armed gangs in perpetrating the very crimes they first sought to oppose.

How urban police understand this license to extort and harass the population, and the higher interests these practices serve, has been well captured and analyzed by Maria Eriksson Baaz and Ola Olsson. Transforming Congo’s security sector from inside is an elusive challenge, and donors are struggling to develop the programmatic savvy, influence and access to inspire the necessary political will.

Demand for reform

The UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) has experimented with alternative supply-and-demand models of public sector reform, and is applying these to the Congolese National Police (PNC). According to this strategy, supply-side ‘train and equip’ assistance targets weak service areas, including the prevention of and response to sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV). This is complemented by efforts to mobilize popular demand for more responsive policing at the community level.

A particular understanding of the partner institution, the PNC, informed this theory of change. This included the hypothesis that payment of regular salaries would not end extortion and rent-seeking (’tracasseries’) by the PNC, given the scale of these rackets and the enormous sums they generate. With no compelling alternative on offer, and as long as ‘reform’ is understood to involve replacing tracasseries with ‘protecting and serving’, change will elude would-be reformers. Given that such arrangements will not change in the forseeable future, the more nuanced strategy accommodates the reality of low, irregular salaries and uniformed extortion for the foreseeable future, and seeks behavior change through increased public-police interaction. Faster paced improvements in human security and responsive policing began emerging on the demand side of the pilot sites, including Bukavu and Quartier Panzi in particular.

Launched in Bukavu, Matadi and Kananga in 2009, the Security Sector Accountability and Police Reform Programme (SSAPR) is distinct for coupling its community policing approach with regular neighborhood meetings (forums du quartier) where locally appointed representatives voice their security concerns, identify emerging threats and suspects. It is common for community policing programs to seek a more responsive, service-oriented local police, but SSAPR is distinguished by its effort to cultivate citizen networks at the most local level to identify and articulate their fears, threats and suspicions forward to the actors most able to respond. Police officers, urban administrators, local community and neighborhood leaders then meet regularly in informal, local security councils to discuss proposals for containing a threat or resolving a violent dispute, as equipment and manpower are often lacking. Initiated entirely informally, these experiments in public relations gradually began to change expectations, reinforce collaboration and gain momentum.

Concurrently, the National Parliament submitted a motion to formalize the Conseils Locaux pour la Sécurité de Proximité(or CLSP, finally passed in late 2013), which recognizes the right of civilian representatives to participate in official security discussions at the municipal level. Over three years, SSAPR legal advisers worked with national parliamentarians to build support and draft a bill. Given the long-standing animosity between politicians and civil society, this new décret was a highly significant opening. The platform has since been incorporated into other police reform efforts (such as the European Union’s EUPOL) that also understand SSR in the Congolese context as primarily a governance challenge requiring civilian involvement.

Raising security problems through the CLSP increased dialog between communities and security officials, but who would represent the civilian side? In rough urban neighborhoods like Panzi, citizens experience a host of threats, not all of them equally or in the same way. The SSAPR helped Panzi neighborhood chiefs and community leaders coordinate an informal system whereby youth, women and men would alternately represent their community concerns first to a forum de quartier, then directly on to the CLSP. This neighborhood dynamic continues today across Bukavu’s three communes.

Making Progress?

These are small steps toward a more accountable security sector and restored public trust, but has sexual assault around Panzi declined as a result? Recently the SSAPR helped a women’s NGO organize a nocturnal walk through several Bukavu neighborhoods, including Panzi, to record their own safety concerns as well as those of women and girls met along the way. In a recent meeting, NGO members insisted they would never before have visited these neighborhoods, particularly at night, but that the chance to report their findings to a receptive and interested police commisariat justified the risk.

In response, new light fixtures are planned in darkened alleys where assaults have occurred, and patrols redirected to suspicious areas noted by the NGO delegation. In another pilot city, Kananga (Kasai Occidental), assaults on women and girls who were walking long distances to fetch water, often at night, decreased dramatically after local women lobbied for regular police patrols in these areas. This, in itself, was indicative of a greater local confidence in the police as protectors.

Community police units are involved in implementing these changes, but they represent a small minority of the PNC. It is unknown if these lower rates of sexual violence are attributable to behavior change among uniformed security or if the increased patrols and better lighting are deterring other possible assailants. Retrospective studies have been conducted, but no consensus exists on the total quantitative extent of SGBV in DRC, where just one in twenty cases is thought to be reported to authorities. Nor are cases raised with the police guaranteed to be registered or pursued. Impunity persists due to a weak national justice system, as well.

Other insights emerge from this experience, particularly around ‘bottom-up’ approaches to renewed legitimacy in fragile states. In the DRC, where central government continues to stall on commitments to decentralization and provincial institutions exploit this limbo (enrichment via parallel markets; legal and financial opacity) leaving communities in the breach, these small successes show that by investing at the periphery—that most-local interface where citizens and public service providers meet in person—bridges of trust and respect can be built through participatory problem solving. Communities can show resilience and security services can prove they are responsive and effective.

Edward Rackley is a Security and Governance consultant for the World Bank, based in Washington DC. He provides periodic technical and strategic advice to the SSAPR program via DAI Europe, one of the program’s managing agents. (The views expressed in this article are not necessarily those of these institutions.)

With nearly 870 million people chronically undernourished, and progress towards the Hunger Millennium Development Goal ebbing since 2008, feeding the world will continue to be a major global challenge. The limitations of arable land availability, water accessibility, and humanity’s increasing population trajectory further compound the problem. Addressing the challenges to global food security while ensuring the sustainability of the planet will require changes to the way we interact with agriculture and a clear understanding of the driving factors behind it.

Food and Energy Price Volatility

The industrialisation of agriculture over the last five decades has contributed to massive gains in productivity, but it has also made food increasingly susceptible to energy supply and price fluctuations. Energy in the form of oil and gas is needed to run industrial farm equipment and to ship food around the world. Fertilizers, the driving factor behind most yield increases, are intimately tied to energy and therefore price volatility. Nitrogen fertilizers are particularly significant and are created through a process that combines natural gas and inert nitrogen from the atmosphere in a high-energy reaction to create ammonia. Fertilizer production is estimated to account for more than 50 per cent of total energy use in commercial agriculture (Woods, et al 2010). While shale gas has had a significant impact on the US natural gas market, globally, energy prices are expected to rise in the long term and become increasingly volatile, as shown by the graph to the right. Fertilizer costs will follow a similar trend, leading to variability in cost and availability. This can be especially difficult for small farmers in developing countries, whose resilience to price fluctuations is low.

Locking Ourselves In to Volatility

Natural means of increasing agricultural yields are possible through recycling manures and planting crops that add nutrients to the soil. However, barring a radical change in agricultural practices, globally we are locked into chemical fertilizer use, especially nitrogen fertilizers in the short and medium term. Approximately 45 per cent of the world’s food supply is grown using chemical fertilizers, and that number is growing. Meat consumption, which requires large amounts of grain for animal feed, is on the rise. Consumption of animal protein in Europe and the United states together is double the world average (FAO 2006), and is expected to grow 10 per cent between 2005 and 2030. However, demand in developing countries for animal proteins is projected to increase 60 per cent in the same period (Reay 2011). Pressure from biofuel legislation in Europe and the United States puts further pressure on land and drives up global food prices.

Global land deals have increased dramatically in the last ten years, with an area of land eight times the size of the UK sold off globally in that time (Geary 2012). In addition to causing landlessness and poverty for local communities, the land is often used to grow large areas of single-species crops such as soy or eucalyptus, which use industrial agricultural methods requiring a high amount of chemical fertilizer, thus increasing dependence on global energy markets and locking new land into fertilizer dependence. Furthermore, nutrients and pesticides can make their way into local water supplies, degrading the environment upon which local communities depend. For example, water contamination from agricultural runoff can force communities to buy bottled or trucked water at higher prices, reducing their resilience to price fluctuations even further.

Fertilizer as a Means of Reducing Poverty

But fertilizers are not evil. Increasing yields (either through better access to fertilizers or implementing natural yield improvement practices) can greatly impact poverty and inequality. There are many regions of the world in which more nutrients are urgently needed in order to ensure the land is not degraded. When fertilizer is introduced to degraded soils, it can have enormous trickle down effects for poverty reduction, health, and education. In the early stages of development, when a country is primarily agrarian, the most consistently effective methods to reduce poverty and improve equality involve the agriculture sector, particularly through methods that raise small farm productivity (Berry 2010, Deininger and Byerlee 2011). For example, a recent review of coffee grower data from Mexico and Peru, published in the World Development journal, found that increasing yields are most important for growers (Barham and Weber 2011).

Nitrogen: The Missing Link

So where does that leave us? The very thing that reduces poverty and hunger through increasing yields can cause insecurity through energy price volatility. Add increasing pressure from consumption choices, land degradation, population pressure and climate change and we have a situation of increasing food insecurity globally.

There is no silver bullet answer to this conundrum. However, the solution will likely be a combination of improving the efficiency of chemical fertilizer use and increasing the productivity and adoption of natural methods. Cross-cutting all of these solutions is the main driver of yields: nitrogen. Phosphorous and potash are also important elements of fertilizer, but nitrogen is the nutrient needed in the largest quantities. Just as a basic knowledge of how CO₂ impacts climate change is important for developing solutions to the problem, so is knowledge of nitrogen important for developing solutions to food security.

Nitrogen is critical for all plants and animals to grow. Some plants build it naturally into the soil through a symbiotic process between bacteria and their roots called ‘biological nitrogen fixation’ (beans and clover, for example), but the majority comes from chemical fertilizers and as a by-product of burning fossil fuels.

For those that remember the nitrogen cycle from science class, we know that 78.1% of the atmosphere is inert nitrogen (N₂). In the 20^th century, we developed a way to convert this inert, atmospheric nitrogen into a form of nitrogen accessible to plants and animals (known as “reactive nitrogen”). This has enabled food production to roughly keep pace with the explosion of population growth over the last fifty years. Whether through fertilizers or biological fixation, nitrogen will play a key role in meeting the food needs of the future.

When there is not enough nitrogen in the soil, loss of soil productivity and degradation occur. Because it is small farmers that often lack access to nitrogen, their yields decline year over year, reducing their annual income and thus exacerbating inequality within the global food system. This pushes them further into poverty, and in many cases can force them to purchase food when they cannot grow enough. Degraded land forces them to go in search of new, more fertile land, breaking apart families and communities.

However, the solution is not as easy as simply adding more nitrogen in areas where there is not enough. Too much nitrogen can cause serious problems for human health and the environment. While nitrogen is required by plants in order to grow, there is a limit to how much any plant can use. Beyond this “critical load”, nutrients that cannot be absorbed by plants will leach into the water and air. Once in the environment, nitrogen can change forms over an extremely long life (average of 120 years) and detrimentally affect many different systems before finally becoming denitrified back into atmosphere. Nitrogen exacerbates climate change, depletes the ozone layer and drives biodiversity loss. It causes low-oxygen zones in water systems that weaken or kill fish and marine habitats (known as eutrophication or hypoxia). Reactive nitrogen can also be very detrimental to human health through air and water contamination. It is a major contributor to smog, which is estimated to take six months off the life expectancy of over half the population in Europe (Sutton et al 2011). It is even worse in areas like China, where the density of air particulates have registered at twice the level considered “dangerous” in metropolitan centres like Beijing. Ingesting high levels of water-borne nitrates has been associated with cancer, diabetes and adverse reproductive outcomes (Ward et al. 2005).

The graph below shows nitrogen fertilizer application globally. In the red areas of the graph, many of the main water bodies suffer the detrimental effects of too much nitrogen, and the people that live in those areas suffer as a result of nitrogen pollution. Many of the green areas could benefit from more nitrogen to increase soil productivity.

The key is balance. On the one hand, improving the efficiency of fertilizer use will maintain crop yields while protecting the ecosystems humans and animals depend upon. On the other hand, developing biological nitrogen fixation methods or pro-poor fertilizer programmes to increase yields for small farmers will improve their situation economically and strengthen their resilience to price shocks and weather events. In both cases, proper nitrogen management will be a crucial part of solving our global hunger crisis while ensuring sustainability for future generations.

Lisa Dittmar is the CEO and founder of NitrogenWise,  a website that brings together research and straightforward communication to explain the complexities of nitrogen in a meaningful and relevant way.

Citations

Barham, B. L., & Weber, J. G. (2011). The Economic Sustainability of Certified Coffee: Recent Evidence from Mexico and Peru. World Development, 1269-1279.

Berry, A. (2010). What type of global governance would best lower world poverty and inequality? In J. Clapp, & R. Wilkinson, Global Governance, Poverty and Inequality (pp. 46-68). London: Routledge.

Deininger, K., & Byerlee, D. (2011). Rising global interest in farmland. Washington DC: World Bank. Retrieved November 30, 2012, from http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTARD/Resources/ESW_Sept7_final_final.pdf

FAO. (2006). Livestock Report 2006. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

Geary, K. (2012). Our Land, Our Lives: Time out on the global land rush. Oxford: Oxfam. Retrieved November 2, 2012, from http://www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/bn-land-lives-freeze-041012-en_1.pdf

Reay, D. S. (2011). Societal choice and communicating the European nitrogen challenge. In M. Sutton, The European Nitrogen Assessment (pp. 585-602). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sutton, M. (2011). Too much of a good thing. Nature, 472, 159-161

Ward, M. (2005). Workgroup report: Drinking-water nitrate and health-recent findings and research needs. Environmental Health Perspectives, 113, 1607-1614

Woods, J., Williams, A., Hughes, J. K., Black, M., & Murphy, R. (2010). Energy and the food system. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 2991-3006

Front page image source: Organic Fertiliser for sugar cane – Shell

Another year has confronted us with yet another tragedy in another European Capital – Madrid in 2004, London in 2007, Paris last year – and, most recently, Brussels. The litany of such incidents, augmented by countless other atrocities further afield and perpetrated originally by those claiming connections to Al Qaeda but now eclipsed by similarly asserted affiliations to ISIS, seems set to continue. Accordingly, it makes sense for a publication called Sustainable Security to ask what, if anything, has been sustainable about responses to terrorism worldwide since 9/11?

After Brussels, many of the usual suspects with connections to the world of security have been wheeled out as usual to offer advice on the need for ever greater scrutiny at airports. But, having made air-side a challenge to reach through a panoply of checks and scanners, it seemed inevitable to those who understood displacement that attacks would simply migrate to the less scrutinised entrance spaces. We could turn these into fortified complexes too – only for the locus of atrocities to move on again – or we could begin to ask more challenging questions of our authorities.

Of course, none of us wishes to sit next to a deluded individual about to detonate their device on a plane or Metro train. In that regard, security and intelligence gathering are absolutely necessary. But they are clearly not sufficient as, despite the billions spent in hardening private facilities and civic spaces, including transport hubs since 2001, the evidence still serves to remind us that determined individuals – and even a few chancers – will get through. It is simply not possible to secure all of society, all of the time. Prevention – in this sense at least – is far too limited a goal.

What’s more it has often been the authorities who have ended up ‘doing the terrorists’ job for them’. To call for three days of national mourning after the latest disasters may seem sensitive to those who lost a loved one – but it flies in the face of the rhetoric of resilience and those who claim the need for a rapid return to normalcy. In that respect, the public often display considerably greater courage by determinedly meeting together for vigils in open spaces, whilst the authorities advise against collective gatherings and look to cancel concerts and sporting events.

There can never be security solutions to social problems. At best, these conceal the underlying challenges that lie ahead. Worse, operational fixations allow those in charge to evade articulating a broader vision for their societies. This latter aspect shapes both the perpetrators – who appear sometimes to almost drift into becoming radicalised through their being disengaged from a world that offers them (and others) little by way of vision or ambition – and the respondents – who are lulled into a phoney sense of knowing what they are doing and why, when in fact they have little appreciation for, or understanding of, the dynamic they seek to redress.

In such a situation, it may indeed only be the public who can maintain a modicum of humanity through their determination – albeit unavoidable in most instances – to get on with life. They are also apparently not so readily fooled by the rhetoric of the self-styled ‘jihadists’ who represent no-one and whose actions in the name of Islam most Muslims deplore, nor by the actions of the authorities who, by securitising the world, hope to make their task easier whilst providing themselves with a flimsy – if largely unconscious – sense of purpose in an age when they seem to lack any other.

But there are others, critical of the authorities, whose narrative and interpretative framework we should be just as critical of and interrogate too. If, as we are often told, alienated individuals in corroded communities in run-down districts have a supposedly understandable sense of grievance – at the racist hostility they encounter, as well as with regards to Western foreign policy – then why is it that not all brought up under such conditions respond the same way, or that the terrorists target civilians, including children as in Lahore, rather than government ministries?

In the aftermath of the Cold War, security increasingly became represented through the prism of human security whereby the referent for security shifted from the state to the individual and, in particular, the latter’s assumed existential sense of vulnerability. This, in turn, opened the door to securitisation – the possibility that the state and other actors might transform specific problems into security-related concerns in the pursuit of their agendas. Foremost among these have been the securitisation of health and the securitisation of development. So might there now be a securitisation of education too?

Securitisation allows challenges to be ‘constructed as a matter of national security’, encouraging a demands for perpetual preparedness, constant surveillance and eternal vigilance. It offers unfocused authorities clear actions to engage in, thereby making ‘an uncertain future available to intervention in the present’. This coincides with the rise of risk management that also readily become an organising framework in periods lacking clear direction. Worse, by promoting an emphasis on procedural management through expert knowledge these both disenfranchise people from the possibility of solving their own problems and allows the authorities ‘to become fixated on external threats rather than examining their own internal confusions’.

Another critical factor here appears to be the race to the bottom that best describes identity politics today. The end of the Cold War, and with it the gradual erosion of the politics of Left and Right that had defined it, left a big gap where collective social discourse, debate and deliberation ought to be. It is this hole in values and vision that the use of identity as a claim on resources – particularly through attempts to define particular groups as being the most oppressed or victimised – has sought to fill. Many campaigners have now learnt to play this game. There is evidence to suggest that today’s terrorists do so too.

But, rather than challenge such approaches, governments the world over have often indulged the claims and patronised the claimants accordingly. Far better to deal with individuals and groups prostrating themselves to you and making claims for remedy or therapy than having to confront those who are being Bolshie and demanding more. In an age when the authorities are not so sure of whom they are themselves – having sought to disown aspects of their imperialist past to the point of self-loathing and confusion – as well as sensing themselves isolated, it makes for a perfect match.

While campaigners understandably concern themselves with government moves to introduce a Communications Data Bill – the so-called ‘Snoopers’ Charter’, now renamed the Investigatory Powers Bill – what many fail to recognise is the extent to which such a push from above has been facilitated by erosions to absolute freedom of expression down below. The notion, for instance, that students are vulnerable and need to be protected by the authorities, whilst appearing in the new Prevent Duty, first emerged as the gradual extension of various campaigns for ‘no platform’, ‘safe space’ and ‘trigger warnings’ promoted by Students’ Unions across the UK and US.

Prevent is an affront to liberty, not least in its infringements on academic freedom, but the notion that everyday social relations are ‘toxic’ and ought to be scrutinised by the powers-that-be is entirely mainstream. This latter has served as a mechanism whereby febrile individuals and institutions, as well as directionless authorities have been able to catch up with the popular mood that fears active engagement and robust exchanges of opinion by playing the ‘victim card’ and looking for protection. Notably, the language is one that presumes a passive, innocent and sponge-like public – young people and others are (it would seem) simply ‘drawn into terrorism’ by those who groom them, thereby diminishing their agency and, inadvertently, absolving them of accountability for their actions.

At a recent dissemination session I attended relating to the Prevent Duty at which an eager regional coordinator presented upon its trajectory and implications, I was particularly struck by this use of the language of protection. Authorities are merely implementing a ‘duty of care’ we were advised, for people who might be ‘influenced by’ ideology. The notion that it might be the specific role of Higher Education to influence young people, or of the state to inspire us all with ideas, was not countenanced. And, ironically for institutions now driven by the need for so-called evidence-based policies, the positivist ‘what is’ question was replaced by a speculative ‘what if’?

As I have also noted elsewhere, we were advised that Prevent had now shifted ‘from a moral duty to a legal duty’. In that regards, the presenter, who described themselves (and us) as a practitioner (as opposed to a planner maybe) was at least refreshingly honest. But that we now invoke the law to attempt to prevent terror should alert us more significantly to the failure of the authorities to win the moral argument or to engage their own public. Free speech and privacy are messy matters of course, as is real life. But attempts to shy away from this are worse for us all.

That is the real challenge ahead – one that no amount of legislation or intelligence and security can by-pass. Academics will continue to debate what the real causes of terrorism today are, as well as how best to address these. In the meantime, the authorities, following the cue of a nervous culture and lacking any coherent vision for society of their own have assumed that they know what to do and are acting accordingly through their enthusiastic practitioners.

It is what we want for society beyond the terror and our responses to it that really needs debating.

Professor Bill Durodie is Chair of International Relations and Head of the Department of Politics, Languages and International Studies at the University of Bath. His most recent journal article was ‘Securitising Education to Prevent Terrorism or Losing Direction?’ published in the British Journal of Educational Studies in March 2016. His work focuses on risk, resilience, radicalisation and the politics of fear.

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.

In March 2016, Jaelyn Young, a 20-year-old student at Mississippi State University was accused of attempting to leave the United States and join the Islamic State (ISIS). She attempted to board a flight with Muhammed Dakhlalla and fly to Turkey with the intent to cross into Syria and join the terrorist group. Young, who pleaded guilty, was posting messages on Twitter about her desire to join the jihadist group, catching the attention of the FBI in May 2015. An agent posing as an Islamic State recruiter began corresponding with her and Dakhlalla. Young and Dakhlalla told the supposed recruiter they would help Islamic State “correct the falsehoods” about it in U.S. news media, such as reports that the group trades young girls as sex slaves. They also asked the recruiter whether ISIS would offer Koran classes in English, how they would be required to prove that they were Sunni Muslims, and what kind of military training Dakhlalla would receive.

Young and Dakhlalla are just two of many cases of the new trend of terrorists using the newest online platforms, commonly known as the “new media” or “social media.” As several reports on online terrorism reveal, today 90 percent of terrorist activity on the Internet takes place using social networking tools. The growing attraction of social media for modern terrorists relies on the combined impact of several trends: the expansion of online social media and their advantages for terrorists, the virtual interactivity that terrorist propaganda and recruitment are using especially with the targeting of specific audiences (“narrowcasting”) and the emergence of “Lone Wolf” terrorist whose virtual pack is found in the terrorist social media. ISIS managed to recruit thousands of foreign fighters, many of them from Western societies. Many of them were radicalized and recruited on Western online social media. Modern terrorism is turning social media into a powerful anti-social platform of hate, destruction, suicide and mass murder.

Terrorist Migration to Social Media

Terrorist use of online platforms is not new. After the events of 9/11 and the antiterrorism campaign that followed, a large number of terrorist groups moved to cyberspace, establishing thousands of websites that promoted their messages and activities.  Many terrorist sites were targeted by intelligence and law enforcement agencies, counterterrorism services, and activists, who monitored the sites, attacked some of them, and forced their operators to seek new online alternatives. The relocation to social media followed. The main motivation to use Facebook and other social media was properly outlined by the terrorist themselves in a Jihadi online forum calling for “Facebook Invasion”:

This [Facebook] is a great idea, and better than the forums. Instead of waiting for people to [come to you so you can] inform them, you go to them and teach them! …[I] mean, if you have a group of 5,000 people, with the press of a button you [can] send them a standardized message. I entreat you, by God, to begin registering for Facebook as soon as you [finish] reading this post”.

Social media differentiates from traditional/conventional media in many aspects such as interactivity, reach, frequency, usability, immediacy, and permanence. They are comparatively inexpensive and easily accessible. They enable anyone to upload, download, share and access information. Social media depend on new communication technologies such as mobile and web-based networks to create highly interactive platforms. The global spread of cellular phone with online access to social media made these platforms so widely accessed and used, even in the poorest places in the world. There are 3.42 billion internet users, equaling 46% global penetration, 2.31 billion social media users, delivering 31% global penetration, 3.79 billion unique mobile users, representing 51% global penetration and 1.97 billion mobile social media users.

These trends were noticed also by Internet-savvy terrorists who quickly learned how to harness the new social media for their purposes. Increasingly, terrorist groups and their sympathizers are shifting their online presence from websites, chatrooms and forums to the newer platforms, the social media.

Today, all terrorist groups are present on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Telegram and other online platforms. Terrorists are encouraging their audiences, followers and operatives to join social media and use them. Maybe most successful is the Sunni terrorist group ISIS, which launched a multi-platform online campaign, covering the entire range of social media. ISIS is using social media to seduce, radicalize and recruit. Since the summer of 2014, ISIS has opened numerous social media accounts for distributing its videos, audios and images via various channels and in many languages, thereby avoiding online censorship. As part of these intensive propaganda efforts, it has launched Al-Hayat Media, a new media branch specifically targeting Western and non-Arabic speaking audiences. ISIS has developed an effective online propaganda machinery. On various social media platforms, ISIS has released numerous videos, photos, texts and music promoting different sides of the militant group. On the one hand is its face of cruel, bloody terror such as of beheadings and burnings of hostages; on the other are more humane and friendly videos of ISIS fighters posing with Nutella jars and kittens. Some of propaganda items on social media are about ISIS providing governance, social justice, and new construction.

Going Dark: the Move to the Dark Web

Social media, useful and beneficiary as they may be for terrorists, also involve risks for them: they could be monitored, traced and found. Many of the terrorist websites and social media on the so-called Surface Web are monitored by counter-terrorism agencies and are often shut down or hacked. That led to a recent terrorist migration to the Dark Web. One can describe the Internet as composed of layers: the “upper” layer, or the Surface Web, can easily be accessed by regular searches. However, “deeper” layers, the content of the Deep Web, are not indexed by traditional search engines such as Google. The deepest layers of the Deep Web, a segment known as the Dark Web, contain content that has been intentionally concealed. The Dark Web serves as Internet users for whom anonymity is essential, since they not only provide protection from unauthorized users, but also usually include encryption to prevent monitoring.

The Dark Web is quite appealing for terrorist groups: While they may lose a broad audience that is available on the Surface Web, they can exploit the obscurity of the Dark Web to further their goals. Following the attacks in Paris (November 2015), ISIS has turned to the Dark Web to spread news and propaganda in an apparent attempt to protect the identities of the group’s supporters and safeguard its content from hacktivists. The move comes after hundreds of websites associated with ISIS were taken down as part of the campaign launched by the amorphous hacker collective Anonymous. ISIS’ media outlet, Al- Hayat Media Center, posted a link and explanations on how to get to their new Dark Web site on a forum associated with ISIS. The announcement was also distributed on ISIS’ Telegram channel, the encrypted communication application. The messages shared links to a Tor service with a “.onion” address, more commonly known as a website on the Dark Web. The ISIS site in the Dark Web contains an archive of the group’s propaganda materials, including its documentary-style film, The Flames of War. The site also includes a link to the terrorist group’s private messaging portal on Telegram. Telegram offers encrypted messaging, a slick, intuitive interface, and a big userbase: it hit 100 million active monthly users in February 2016.

At this stage, terrorist presence in the Dark Web is rather modest: when propaganda, radicalization and recruitment are the chief goals of terror groups, the reach of Dark Web is limited. Yet, terrorists are already applying the newest privacy-preserving mobile applications like Telegram and are using the Tor browser to hide what they are browsing on the open web from prying eyes. This growing sophistication of terrorist’s use of the Dark Web presents a tough challenge for governments, counter-terrorism agencies and security services. DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, believes the answer can be found in MEMEX, a software that allows for better cataloguing of Deep Web sites. Envisioned as an analog computer to supplement human memory, the MEMEX (a combination of “memory” and “index”) would poke around the Dark Web and also tune its knowledge to specific domains of interest. MEMEX was originally developed for monitoring human trafficking on the Deep Web, but the same principles can be applied to almost any illicit Deep Web activity. In 2014, an investigation of the source code in one NSA program called XKeyscore, (revealed by the Edward Snowden’s leaks), showed that any user simply attempting to download Tor was automatically fingerprinted, essentially enabling the NSA to know the identity of millions of Tor users. The NSA source code also revealed some of the behavior which users exhibit can immediately be tagged or “fingerprinted” for so-called deep packet inspection, an investigation into the content of data packages sent across the Internet, such as emails, web searches and browsing history.

However,  there is another side to counter measures in the Dark Web which can serve terrorist communications and activities but also serves journalists, civil rights and democracy activists – all of which may be under threat of censorship or imprisonment.  Thus, the alarming infiltration of Internet-savvy terrorists to the “virtual caves” of the Dark Web should trigger an international search for a solution, but one that should not impair legitimate, lawful freedom of expression.

Dr. Gabriel Weimann is a Full Professor of Communication at the University of Haifa, Israel. His research interests include the study of persuasion and propaganda, political campaigns, terrorism and the media, online terrorism and cyber-war. He is the author of nine books and over 180 scientific articles. His recent book, Terrorism in Cyberspace: The Next Generation, was published in 2015 by Columbia University Press.

Music and dance can be useful means to engage youth in a dialogue for peace.  Music and dance can also provide many unique insights into transforming conflicts and achieving change.

 

“As a musician who works for peace, “unity” holds less interest for me than “harmony.” Unity is when we all sing the same note. Harmony is when we sing different notes, and they are beautiful together.”

– David Lamotte, musician and peace activist

At the same time, as David goes on to say in his book World Changing 101, “Harmony is not homogeneity.” Moreover, he says, “Of course, it is also true that many notes playing together may clearly not be in harmony with one another. Creating that confluence takes attention, patience, and work. It is a beautiful thing when we achieve it, though. And it is not achieved by eliminating difference, but instead by finding ways to work together that are mutually nourishing, that honor and reveal each other’s gifts.” (LaMotte 2014: 113).

In these ways, artistic approaches to building peace like music and dance can offer us the means to embrace pluralism through working together to co-create knowledge rather than attempting to determine one ‘right’ way upheld by those a particular society may deem to be experts.

On Music and Peacebuilding

In the research for my first book, Youth Peacebuilding: Music, Gender and Change I used qualitative case comparison to explore the use of music as a tool for engaging youth in reducing and preventing violence.  More specifically, the research for that book included participant observation and semi-structured interviews with young people involved in musical peacebuilding programs in Australia and Northern Ireland, providing a uniquely deep look at young people’s experiences of everyday violence and how they approached peacebuilding in their local cultural contexts.

In Australia this involved a peace program in a major city engaging Indigenous, non-Indigenous, and migrant and refugee background young people in a collaborative process of music making in order to build understanding across difference, challenge racism, and create safe spaces for recovering from violence already experienced. Similarly, the program in Northern Ireland shared similar goals around addressing both racism and sectarianism in its efforts at peacebuilding through participatory music practice.

This project contributed to theoretical and practical debates and discussions around: youth political participation, the gendered landscape of conflict environments, and creative approaches to pursuing peace. In particular, I explored how music could foster peacebuilding through offering an alternative means for dialogue, helping people create and recreate identities of themselves and others, and offering a tool that could help create safe spaces for such dialogue and identity work, often in challenging circumstances.

While my research has taken me in many directions in the decade since I began the study that underpinned that first book, I always feel drawn to return to reflections on creative approaches to peace, especially the ways they can engage youth. At present, this has taken the form of working to further analyse and share the findings from my research on dance and peacebuilding. While my earlier work dealt with dance to a degree as part of a broader range of musical practices for peacebuilding, since then I have taken up opportunities to explore dance more specifically.

Researching Dance and Peacebuilding

 As Nicole Krauss writes in her latest book,

“More and more it seems to me…that when I write, what I am really trying to do is dance, and because it is impossible, because dancing is free of language, I am never satisfied with writing…to dance is to make oneself available  (for pleasure, for an explosion, for stillness)…The abstract connections it provokes in its audience, of emotion with form, and the excitement from one’s world of feelings and imagination—all of this derives from its vanishing…But writing, whose goal is to achieve a timeless meaning, has to tell itself a lie about time; in essence, it has to believe in some form of immutability…” (Krauss 2017: 136).

While recognizing these challenges, I continue to find meaning in attempting to write about dance or perhaps to dance writing. As such, during my time as a McKenzie Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne I designed and embarked on a comparative study looking at the use of dance in peacebuilding programs across a range of contexts, including Colombia (now commonly deemed a post-conflict site); the US (in inner city locations in Washington, DC and Baltimore, MD where violence is commonly seen as widespread) and in the Philippines, which, despite a peace agreement being signed, continues to face conflict in Mindanao.

Using ethnographically informed methods, including participant observation, interviews, and document analysis, I designed the project and methodological approach and gathered data in the US and Colombia, while a research assistant gathered the data in the Philippines case. This type of intensive data gathering, which included participating in the full global training of the trainers for the program involved, as well as months of participant observation of the programs, offered rich insights into how dance and creative movement can and does engage young people in peacebuilding across a range of diverse contexts.

While the process of writing this into a book proposal and eventually a book is ongoing, over the past several years of working on the project some key themes have started to emerge.

The role of dance in peacebuilding

How, if at all, did dance function as a useful way for youth to take part in peacebuilding? Firstly, participant statements indicated, “that dance can be useful in engaging youth in peacebuilding but that it must be applied in sensitive, reflexive and culturally relevant ways to appeal to and include both young men and young women.” Most if not all participants articulated one or more ways dance had been useful for peacebuilding. Some noted, for example, that dance could serve as a nonviolent means of communication and a way to connect with one’s feelings in a peace education context. Moreover, dance was seen as something that is culturally relevant and familiar, thus many youth could relate to it, and it was also something that did not require lots of expensive equipment or training. At the same time, dance was also seen as a way to release and reduce stress, an important aspect of recovering from violence already witnessed or experienced.

Of course, participants also noted a variety of limitations to what dance could do and how, including pointing to how short term funding cycles, which are common across global peacebuilding initiatives, can at times mean short sighted programs. They also noted that without attention to access and inclusion, efforts to engage youth in dance and creative movement for peacebuilding might overlook the needs of people with disability or people who speak a different language from the one deployed in the dance programs. Still these limitations are not inherent to dance or always present, as seen by the work of VisAbility in Sri Lanka, a country recovering from conflict and where dance programming has been used to engage people with and without disabilities in coordination with a rights empowerment initiative.

Conclusion

Overall, it appears music and dance, when applied in thoughtful ways, can help foster peacebuilding. This is not to say they may not also be used ineffectively or to create exclusions, but when used appropriately they can have much to offer. As one facilitator in programs using dance and creative movement for peacebuilding the Washington, DC and Baltimore programs said when speaking about stepping out of one’s comfort zone to engage within a group:

“When one person takes a positive risk, it shows the rest of us that we can take a positive risk and encourages us to do that also.  So hopefully, after a while they will be able to see that if they can just do one thing that makes them uncomfortable or kind of step outside their comfort zone that it actually helps other people to do the same and get the most out of the experience.”

Surely such steps can be a useful means for reflecting on ways of finding harmony in the dissonance of conflict.

Author’s Note: The research assistant involved with the Philippines work, Erica Rose Jeffrey is a fantastic scholar and dance practitioner in her own right and will soon be awarded her PhD for her own practice-led research in Fiji and the Philippines. More on her work can be found at: http://peacemoves.org

Lesley Pruitt is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Monash University and a member of the Monash GPS (Gender, Peace and Security) Centre. Lesley’s research focuses on peace and conflict studies, especially recognising and enhancing youth participation in peacebuilding and advancing gender equity in peacekeeping. A Truman Scholar and Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar, Lesley received her Masters & PhD from the University of Queensland. Lesley’s books include The Women in Blue Helmets: Gender, Policing & the UN’s First All-Female Peacekeeping Unit and Youth Peacebuilding: Music, Gender & Change. She is also an author of Young People, Citizenship and Political Participation: Combatting Civic Deficit?

Following the 1998 peace agreement, Northern Ireland has been promoted as a model for peacemaking. Human rights discourse played a role as a cause and cure of the conflict.

Since the civil rights movement of the 1960s, the Northern Irish conflict has captivated imaginations far beyond the island. Following the 1998 peace agreement, the region has been internationally promoted as a model for peace-making. Politicians from the region have shared wisdom of the Northern Ireland peace process in far-flung countries in conflict, including the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Some of the lessons exported from Northern Ireland’s peace process are general prescriptions, such as the necessity of engaging with enemies or the need for multi-party talks to include even the smallest parties. Broader lessons promoted about Northern Ireland’s peace process are claims about the role of human rights in conflict resolution. During the peace process, a popular history emerged with rights—political, economic, and human— occupying a central role as a cause and cure of the conflict.

Human Rights as Political Narrative

The broad outlines of this narrative are: after partition in 1921, the new state in Northern Ireland systematically denied civil and economic rights to Catholics and maintained Protestant dominance. In the late 1960s, when peaceful civil rights demands were met with both loyalist and state violence and state reforms failed, the republican movement was forced into armed struggle. During the conflict, the British state engaged in human rights violations, further compromising the legitimacy of UK governance. In the late 1990s, republicans, unionists, and the British state settled the conflict by agreeing to new political institutions that ensured equal rights for all.

However, human rights lessons from Northern Ireland’s peace process are not quite as tidy as this narrative suggests. My longstanding ethnographic and historical research in the region suggests caution about the comforting certainties of this causal account. In the 1960s, grassroots advocates protested that nationalists’ civil rights were systematically undermined since partition, and throughout the conflict, “first generation” rights to speech and association, or freedom from torture, were violated and remain deeply contentious. At the same time, human rights were absorbed into the conflict, and became another arena for ethnopolitical contest. In the Good Friday Agreement (GFA), an explicit commitment to human rights was envisioned for the new political arrangements. Yet as the agreement was implemented, rights politics have often been vehicles for the claims of nationalists and unionists, rather than universal human subjects.

Ethnopolitics and Human Rights

Since the GFA, the tendency to argue ethnopolitical conflicts in terms of human rights has intensified, to the detriment of both wronged parties and broader understandings of human rights. A compelling example of how human rights were an incomplete solution to the conflict emerged early in the post-GFA era, in 2001, when a dispute in Ardoyne, north Belfast, resulted in shocking, violent loyalist protests at the Holy Cross Primary school (a Catholic girls’school). In June 2001, loyalists from the Glenbryn estate began picketing Holy Cross Primary School in nationalist Ardoyne, north Belfast. The school entrance was located just on the Glenbryn side of a famous “peace line.” Police in riot gear were deployed to protect small girls as they walked to school past lines of enraged adults. The dispute continued for four months, with violent conflicts during the summer break and a resumption of the pickets when the new term began in the autumn. Riots spread throughout north Belfast that autumn and winter, along with attacks on children travelling to other schools.

Families of the distressed children eventually backed an unsuccessful challenge of police conduct under the Police (Northern Ireland) Act 2000, and under Articles 3, 8, 13, and 14 of the European Convention. That case, P.F. and E.F. v. the United Kingdom (Application no. 28326/09), was eventually ruled inadmissible by the European Court of Human Rights. Its long legal journey ended in 2010, when the European declared that, horrific as the protests were, there was no evidence of European convention breach.

The dispute and legal proceedings very nearly derailed the new Human Rights Commission formed under the GFA.  In 2002-3, six members resigned or withdrew from the commission, citing multiple reasons related to the commission’s lack of authority and resources, its approach to drafting a Bill of Rights, and, most notably, its approach to handling the Holy Cross protests. Although the commission as a whole voted not to become involved, its casework committee committed the commission to supporting the families’ lawsuit. Individual commissioners took contradictory public positions and became increasingly divided. Meanwhile, the commission was perceived as part of an ethnopolitical conflict rather than as public advocates for either the protection of vulnerable people or fundamental rights.

The Holy Cross protest was not resolved by human rights institutions or advocacy; some might argue that it has never been resolved. The situation revealed several problematic dimensions of treating human rights as a cure for conflict. One difficulty is that human rights laws concern the conduct of state actors. Paramilitary organizations, neighborhood associations, and transnational corporations do not sign human rights treaties.

Human Rights in the Good Friday Agreement

Another issue making it difficult for human rights law or advocacy to provide a resolution to conflict was how the GFA itself situates human rights principles in relation to power-sharing as a means to manage conflict. One innovation of the GFA is that it makes human rights central to the settlement, with the entirety of section 6 devoted to “Rights, Safeguards and Equality of Opportunity.” However, the GFA is more strongly oriented by political scientist Arend Lijphart’s consociational model. This model prescribes the management of conflict through power sharing among parties defined in ethnic or communal terms. Thus, the GFA situates human rights within a broader logic that privileges collective political rights. This conceptual maneuver mirrors the way political rhetoric and everyday life absorb human rights claims into regional ethnopolitics, rather than creating a transformative alternative to ethnopolitics.

In the Holy Cross conflict, protagonists framed the dispute in terms of collective rights and alleged that these rights were being differentially allocated by the state. Families of the girls argued that the protests subjected them to inhuman and degrading treatment—violations of their human rights. Furthermore, they said, police did not use force to stop the protests because the girls were Catholic, but they would have ended any such protest by nationalists. Loyalists claimed that free assembly was an unconditional right, irrespective of sectarian content or whether violence might be a consequence.

Unfortunately, the kinds of conflicts and challenges for human rights politics raised in the Holy Cross conflict are neither unusual nor uncommon in Northern Ireland. For example, in Donaldson v. the United Kingdom (Application no. 56975/09) the European Court of Human Rights refused to hear the complaint of a republican prisoner that his human rights were violated when the prison service did not allow him to wear a lily (a symbol of the republican struggle for a unified Ireland) outside his cell. Disputes over rights to display emblems may appear frivolous outside the region, but they are part of a broader process, in which human rights laws and institutions have been insufficient to resolve the disputes that emerge from Northern Ireland’s longstanding political conflict.

Enduring Lessons and the Everyday Life of Rights

In my 2014 monograph, I explore at length how rights politics have often functioned war by other means over time, rather than providing a comprehensive resolution to conflict. I conclude that advocacy such as the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) equality movement have been more transformative in human rights terms than attempts to balance ethnopolitical rights. This cautionary point about how human rights politics have been received, reinterpreted, and transformed in the Northern Ireland context is not intended to dismiss the peace process’ significant achievements, including the profound diminution of political violence, paramilitary demobilizations, and decommissioning.

Nevertheless, the successes of the process also require recognition that throughout the fitful implementation of the GFA, political polarization intensified, past violence and political symbols have been repeatedly contested, and riots surrounding parades and symbolic matters like flags have become dangerous and costly recurrent events, intimating, for some, a return to conflict. Violence casts a long shadow across the present peace; prosecutions and re-investigations of past murders and atrocities continue, recent killings like the murder of Kevin McQuigan last summer destabilize power-sharing institutions, and ministers continue to warn of resurgent paramilitary activity – such as a recent upsurge in bomb attacks.

Understanding the role of human rights in everyday politics in both the past and present is necessary for making nuanced claims for human rights advocacy and law in conflict resolution. Northern Ireland’s tremendous reduction in violence must not be dismissed, but it is important to recognize that the settlement also sustains a form of ethnopolitics that is not always congruent with the goals of human rights advocacy. As the politics of the conflict continue to structure the settlement, it is fair to ask how transformative human rights politics have been. Such an approach can make us conscious of perilous conditions that constrain the present fragile peace, and highlight achievements that are durable and transferrable for the future.

Dr. Jennifer Curtis is Honorary Fellow in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of Human Rights As War By Other Means:  Peace Politics in Northern Ireland, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. Her work focuses on how grassroots social movements appropriate and alter rights advocacy and law. She has conducted long-term ethnographic research in Belfast, Northern Ireland and in the United States.  She is currently completing an ethnographic monograph on race, sexuality, and civil rights in red state America, based on fieldwork in Missouri. The book explores the local and national significance of #BlackLivesMatter, movements for LGBT equality, and anti-equality movements, within the broader historical context of racialized violence, slavery, and inequality in the American South.