John Burton Centenary Lecture 14 September
2015 CRS Conference University of Kent at Canterbury
“ Tools from the past for a problematic
present: How relevant is Burtonian Theory and Practice for 21st
century conflict transformation?”
Kevin P Clements National Centre for Peace and
Conflict Studies University of Otago Dunedin, New Zealand
It gives me very great pleasure to be giving the John
Burton Memorial lecture on the 100th anniversary of his birth. We
are honouring a complex man who made many important contributions to the
formation of an independent identity for Australia and the independent identity
of peace and conflict studies. It’s impossible in the space of 40 minutes to do
justice to either contribution so I am going to be very selective in my
comments.
Biographical Background
John’s life began in war and ended in war. He was born on March
2 1915 and died in 2010. 1915 is a
memorable year for Australians and New Zealanders because, a month later, on
the 25th April many Australian, New Zealand and other Imperial
troops were slaughtered at the battle of Gallipoli in Turkey. A New Zealand historian, Ormond Burton, (no
relation, incidentally, although also a staunch Pacifist as well as a much
decorated soldier in the First World War) stated that “New Zealand’s national
identity was formed somewhere between the battle of Gallipoli and the Battle of
the Somme”. (O. E. Burton, 1935).
I don't buy the idea that nations are formed out of
military battles and defeats-they are much more complex than that- but this is
the myth and this is what Australians and New Zealanders commemorate on ANZAC
day every year. I often wonder whether
these two moments – a military defeat turned into foundational myth and John’s
birth in the same year- were relevant to John’s own life time preoccupation
with identity as a central organising principle in his work.
Burton was the son of a Methodist Minister, which
undoubtedly shaped many of his fundamental values. He grew up during the great
depression, which fuelled his desire for equality and socialism. And his
political inclinations remained on the left all his life even if he often found
himself in deep conflict with the Australian Labour Party at different stages
of his career. After his Ph.D., he was employed by the Australian Federal
Government and experienced rapid promotion.
As a very young man, for example, he was at the heart of Australian
responses to the Second World War and was on the Australian delegation to the
Charter meeting of the United Nations. He could, therefore, and did talk about
war and violence from an elite insider’s perspective.
In 1941, he became the Private Secretary to the Australian
Foreign Minister “Doc” Evatt. In this post he was often compelled to articulate
where Australian and British interests converged and diverged during the Second
World War. This gave John a profound appreciation of the differences between interests and values and
a deep ambivalence towards hegemonic power. He was a radical from the beginning and his ideas were
often at odds with the Australian Department of Defence as he pushed for
greater independence from Britain in combination with more engagement with
Asia.
He had numerous stories of how he and Evatt challenged the
British High Command about the best strategy for the defence of Australia
against Japanese and German threats. In one instance John, in the absence of
Evatt, personally ordered a convoy of Australian troops to drop anchor and turn
back half way across the Indian Ocean because he and Evatt disagreed with
British requests to send Australian troops to North Africa instead of defending
Australia against the much more pressing threat from Japan. John was in his late twenties then so this
gives you some sense of his precocity and hutzpah!
This wartime experience and his meteoric promotion to
Secretary of the Department of External Affairs (at the age of 32) in 1947 gave
John a deep appreciation of power and decision-making. He stood unsuccessfully
for parliament in 1954, which was probably a good thing for John, the
Parliament and Peace Research!! It is
interesting though that the man who later was so uncomfortable with power
politics was deeply imbedded in and profoundly tempted by them at the beginning
of his career!
By the late 1950s and after some bruising
personal political experiences,
[he was charged with being the Australian Labour Party’s
“Pink Eminence” in relation to the Petrov spy affair] John developed deep
scepticism about government, governance processes and the negative consequences of much national
statecraft.
This scepticism emerged also in response to the Korean War
and as he tried to make sense of post war developments in Asia and the rest of
the world. Having been in San Francisco
for the Charter conference of the United Nations. John was appalled at
the way in which its idealistic aspirations fell victim to the Cold war. But he
was also challenged by the Chinese Revolution, the Korean War and all the
regional and global independence struggles of the 1950s and 60s. It was in
response to these dynamics that John really started wondering about the motivators
of political behaviour and why decision makers lapsed into military responses
to political challenge.
This concern fed John’s interest in understanding the relationships between personal
behaviour, wider domestic dynamics and national and international
conflict. He was particularly interested
in how and why elite decision makers
were constantly being trapped by top down desires to control and coerce
citizens and protagonists. He felt that the dominant political science, power
political frames ignored the significance of emotions, human needs and the
multiple diverse domestic processes that drove government decision makers. Having been in a position of power he could
see its limitations in terms of representing and doing justice to the interests
of multiple individuals and groups and he grew progressively disenchanted at
the inability of modern state systems
(founded as they were on a monopoly of force) to engage the sources of
domestic and global violence creatively and nonviolently. He saw no future or utility in perpetuating
violent and vicious cycles in response to violence so when he was freed of
official constraints he developed both a radical critique of realism and
embarked on a life long quest to understand the deeper sociobiological sources
of violence and how to respond to these effectively and nonviolently.
For those of you who knew John you will appreciate that his
public peaceful and collaborative aspirations were always somewhat problematic
at the personal level. He was a very strong,
opinionated and conflict creating personality. It took some fortitude to live
with John. He was married thrice and had a most astonishing ability to generate
conflicts with people who were his natural allies. In fact I sometimes wonder
whether it was the force of his personality and prolific writing – rather than
his theoretical or analytical depth -that ensured we were all Burtonians while
in his presence. In any event, whether John was endeavouring to understand his
own complex personality as well as the
conflictual world around him, from the 1960s onwards his life was directed
towards exploring and identifying the
origins of individual and collective unpeacefulness and how best to respond to
it.
Theoretical Contributions
No matter what we think of Burton as a person there was no
doubt that he was one of the first
significant critics of IR theory and a major contributor to the fledgling field
of peace and conflict research. He had the public intellectual’s knack of
bringing insights, and theory from one discourse and applying it somewhere
else. John was multidisciplinary in his
background and orientation. He was not a political scientist or an international
relations specialist but a social psychologist.
A lot of his critical insight flowed from transferring the wisdom and
knowledge of psychology or sociology into politics and international
relations.
When IR was bound tightly to the nation state as the major
unit of analysis, for example, Burton argued convincingly that we needed to
think in terms of a world society (John Wear Burton, 1972). This was very
prescient for 1972[1]. Today’s world is a vindication of this orientation. We do indeed live in a multi-layered,
networked and interlinked world society. Space has been annihilated through
time via the Internet and there are many non-state actors that are as important
if not more important than most of the world’s state actors. Burton’s arguments on world society,
therefore, prefigured and shaped a lot of
later work on the role of civil society and transnational economic
actors at the national and global levels.
Thinking in terms of world society rather than anarchic nation states
focused our attention on all the diverse exchanges and relationships that bind
us together as opposed to those that tear us apart. It was typical Burton to reframe the old
nation state frame in terms of trans-national relationships and transactions.
This focus certainly helped shape a more positive and pro-active view of the
role of civil society in relation to the promotion of sustainable peace and has
been incorporated into the work of all those who are interested in the ways
individuals, groups and organisations play a role in relation to norm and institutional
building at national, regional and global levels. Elise Boulding’s work on Building a Global Civic Culture (E. Boulding, 1990)
and Mary Kaldor’s work on Global Civil
Society as an answer to War certainly stand in this Burtonian
tradition, (Kaldor, 2003)
In addition to seeking alternative perspectives to a state
centric view of the world Burton also sought to understand the deeper drivers of social and political
behaviour. Because of his psychological
training Burton understood that men and
women were not just motivated by power or wealth. He knew that there were some
deeper values, emotions and physiological drivers that were equally
important. Here again John’s focus on
these individual motivators have been vindicated by a lot of recent work in
neuroscience which establish very clearly that we are not hard wired for
competitive individualism but for social bonding. This new work demonstrates
that one of the most crucial elements in the determination of a peaceful person
is not fear but close maternal attachment in the first 5 years of life. We become peaceful as a result of the learned
recognition of the ways in which our individuality flows out of successful
bonding and interdependence (McGilchrist, 2009)
Unfortunately John did not have these recent discoveries to guide him but he was
very taken by Paul Sites book on Control:
The basis of Social Order (Sites, 1973) . It was after reading Sites that
Burton “discovered “ Basic Human Needs”
and saw their frustration as the primary explanation for political anger,
aggression and conflict. This gave rise to his book. Deviance, Terrorism and War: The process of
Solving Unsolved,
Social and Political Problems (John Wear Burton, 1979). P101 In this book,
John focused on the origins of conflict, problem solving solutions to such
conflict and the articulation of a paradigm shift that would shake the
foundations of realist international
relations theory. With typical Burtonian
zeal, John saw Basic Human Needs as the best framework for challenging all the
dominant realist assumptions of the time.
Because these were needs rarely figured in IR discourse at the time-
Burton believed that their application would generate the paradigm shift that
would reorientate both the academic
field of IR and the realist world of diplomacy.
In retrospect this needs based focus
doesn't seem that innovative.
Needs have been written about in Psychology, Sociology and
Anthropology for many years and have always featured in counselling and therapy
literature. John’s unique contribution, however, was to apply the concepts to
the field of politics and international relations where they were considered
unusual and inappropriate. In applying
them to politics John was very concerned to develop a new understanding of
power, which did not depend on dominance but capacitation. Other peace
researchers were also trying to problematize power. In the 1980s, Kenneth Boulding, for example,
(K. E. Boulding, 1989), also felt that
social and political order owed
more to integrative power than threat based or exchange power
although he also
acknowledged the
significance of the latter for economic well being and order more narrowly conceived.
Few IR specialists in the 1970s and 80s, however, thought
that identity, recognition, participation and security, for example, were all
that important to global peace and stability. Nor could they see how to
operationalize these concepts for either analytical or political purposes. This was before all the “new” identity based
conflicts, and civil wars of the 1990s. (Kaldor, 2006) John did have an uncanny ability to
anticipate what would be important,
however, and he directed the rest of his academic life to articulating the ways
in which individuals, groups and nations were consciously or unconsciously
motivated by the satisfaction of these fundamental drivers of human behaviour.
Basic Human Needs, in one form or other, while not
prominent in 20th century mainstream International Relations Theory
certainly did shape the field of peace research and the emergent field of
conflict resolutions/transformation and it remains one of Burton’s enduring
legacies to the field. It gave rise to many robust debates in the
1990s and beyond [e.g. (K. Avruch,
2013)] about how to conceptualise and
satisfy needs without generating additional conflicts and whether they are indeed universal or not
but there is no doubt that this perspective has persisted in different ways
to inform much theory and practice
within the field of peace and conflict studies.
(Sandole, 2013 ).
Johan Galtung’s extension and typology of basic human
needs, as security, welfare, freedom and identity, for example, has shaped much
of our thinking about the ways in which
agents and structures seeking to satisfy these needs have or have not
contributed to peace or violence.
(See Galtung, “International Development in Human
Perspective” Chapter 15 pp. 301-336. (John W. Burton, 1990a).
While the framework has been critiqued as culturally blind,
methodologically individualistic and unable to bridge the gap between micro and
macro [see the famous debate between Burton
and Sandole /Avruch and Black (J. W.
Burton, Sandole, J.D., 1986) (K. Avruch, Black,Peter. W, 1987)] it is
interesting that some variants of Basic Human Needs continue to shape most of
the ways we think about the root causes
of violence and the social, economic and political conditions necessary to guarantee their satisfaction.
Certainly most conflict transformation practitioners utilise some variant of
Basic Human Needs in their conflict diagnoses and prescriptions.
The final theoretical contribution that I want to tag was
John’s concept of “Provention.” (John W. Burton, 1990b). This was a clumsy
word, which has never really caught on in the literature or in the real world,
but it was John’s attempt to describe pro-active as opposed to re-active
intervention in violence. It was also
his effort to try and grapple with some of the root causes of violence; like
poverty, inequality ethno nationalism, overpopulation, institutional domination
and militarism. Burton developed “Provention” to link social psychology to
wider concepts of peaceful social and economic change. Like Maslow (Maslow, 1954) Burton understood
well that individuals could not develop or realise their full potential if there basic survival needs were not met.
So he needed to develop a link between the individual motivators of peaceful
and unpeaceful behaviour and wider development policies aimed at feeding,
housing, clothing and educating populations. To some extent the basic idea
(largely unacknowledged to Burton) was elaborated in the work done in the 1990s
and 2000s on “conflict sensitive development strategies”. For John, however,
the idea of provention was his way of scaling micro concerns up to general
social systems thinking and, in the last few years of his life, it became his
rationale for developing a whole new political philosophy. This new political
philosophy was not based on the pursuit of power but on a quest for human
fulfilment and the creation of institutional arrangements that were neither
dominatory nor adversarial. [2] When we lived close to each other in Canberra
in the 1990s, for example, I had many discussions with John about what
non-adversarial educational, judicial and political systems would look like.
While many of these ideas were utopian they were absolutely right in terms of
trying to imagine a more peaceful, less competitive and less dog eat dog world.
Although he didn't frame these arguments in terms of a rejection of the
Weberian state the logic certainly moved in this direction.
I could talk at more length about all of these conceptual
and theoretical contributions but in
the cool hard light of conceptual day I don't think that this is where John
made his most useful contribution. On the contrary, despite his prolific
written output I think he made his most
significant contribution as a scholar practitioner and it is to this that I want to turn now.
The
Scholar-Practitioner and Conflict Transformation Practice
Academics don’t normally like to venture too far from the
ivory tower. John came to the academy,
however from a career as a bureaucratic decision maker and he never lost his
desire to make a practical political difference wherever he found himself. He
wanted his theory to challenge the academic and political establishments. This is what gave his work its radical edge
and resulted in him being labelled an academic stirrer and troublemaker. From
his time in the Australian public service, however, he understood the strengths
and weaknesses of operating as a state
representative and the ethical challenges of representing national interests. When John moved into the academy he realised that the University was viewed somewhat
differently. It was seen as a legitimate (moderately neutral) space for the
free flow of ideas and behaviour. Burton decided to take advantage of this
neutrality to develop academically based “political” processes that would
enable participants to discuss a wide range of issues in an academic
environment. To some extent these small group processes were an
interesting example of non-conventional
politics. They were, to some extent
Burtonian anti-politics. He
started at University College London
and then here at the University of Kent by developing social psychological
processes for social and political problem solving. He started off by discussing a wide range of
political problems using “controlled communication” techniques and then these gradually morphed into what we now
call “problem solving” workshops aimed at addressing a range of violent conflicts.
In the beginning he utilised his old diplomatic connections
to bring together a group on the
Indonesia- Malaysia confrontation of the early 1960s. This was followed by interventions on Cyprus,
working with Trade Unions and Paramilitaries in Northern Ireland, in the late
1980s with Ed Azar, civil wars in Lebanon finishing off with Sri Lanka and the
Falklands/Malvinas to name a few. [3]
The controlled communication workshop was a technique used
initially in social work and was aimed at bringing parties in conflict together, under the care
of a neutral third party panel. The aim of this process was to clarify misperceptions, share goals,
agree on the nature of the problems dividing them and generate options for
addressing them. (John Wear Burton,
1969). Burton brought his old diplomatic convening roles to this process as
well as his acute listening skills
(whenever he wasn't involved in dispute with anyone!). Once again I think that this Burtonian
technique was innovative in its application not in its design.
It was assumed by IR specialists, for example, that
decision makers and influentials knew how to handle themselves in
negotiations. Burton knew (from
personal experience), however, how misplaced this assumption was. Controlled
communication, therefore, was his first attempt to get participants to
acknowledge the deeper drivers of their behaviour, to communicate in ways which
did justice to their own values and those of the opposition and to think in
terms of superordinate goals. Most of these early initiatives were dyadic
conflicts with relatively few major issues.
This is an interesting contrast with the conflicts that we are confronting
in the 21st century which tend to be multi-party and complex. I will return to this later.
Once Burton identified Basic Human Needs, however, as a
major element in the causation of
conflict he grafted this perspective into the controlled communication
processes. Joining forces with people like Chris Mitchell, Tony De Reuck and
others Burton started thinking in terms of what
he described as “analytical
problem solving facilitated conflict resolution”. (Burton J.W, 1990)p 328. This
was a bit of a mouthful and these workshops
are now thought of simply as Problem Solving Workshops or to use Herb
Kelman’s formulation, Interactive Problem Solving workshops. These workshops
brought together techniques from controlled communication workshops with Basic Human Needs. The main point of the
workshops was to get parties in conflict to talk about the ways in which their
needs for identity, recognition, security, welfare and participation were or were not being met
and how and why these frustrated needs were generating the incompatibilities
that lay at the heart of different types of violence. The driving idea was to get participants to
acknowledge their needs and fears and then to direct their attention to needs satisfiers
rather than self interests. (John W. Burton, 1990a) It was assumed that if conflicting parties
could acknowledge each other’s needs then they could discuss mutually agreed
satisfiers that would enable non zero sum collaborative solutions to their
problems.
To do this effectively Burton argued, required a paradigm
shift from coercive power politics with zero sum outcomes to collaborative and
negotiated anti-politics with non zero sum solutions. Burton argued that the only way that this
would happen was under the watchful eye of a panel of skilled facilitators who
would help participants see negative stereotypes, identify prejudiced behaviour
and, negative misperceptions of the other and
get them all to focus on their shared and irreducible “sociobiological”
basic human needs. [4] The important point about
Problem Solving Workshops, however, was that they provided ways in which
academics could bring parties in violent conflict together for what we now
think of as “Transformative Conversations”.
When I was Secretary General of International Alert I asked
my Great Lakes Programme Manager, Bill Yates, what theory he employed in his
work in Burundi and Rwanda. He laughed and said that he didn’t have any guiding
theory. His role was to bring awkward and difficult people from awkward and
challenging places to relatively safe spaces, where he and IA could catalyse
awkward and difficult conversations, which might result in warring parties
figuring out how to stop fighting and build or rebuild sustainable peaceful
relationships.
To some extent this is exactly what collaborative problem
solving is all about, namely bringing people out of violent conflict environments to safe places for facilitated
conversations about how each one can help the other to meet their basic human
needs. Identifying the right people to
convene, however, is a critical part of this workshop and healing process.
John would probably not be happy with my characterisation
of PSW’s. On the contrary as with most things he felt impelled to write an entire book
mapping out 56 process rules to guide the facilitation panels. (John W. Burton,
1987) . The major point of these facilitation techniques, however, was to
create an environment within which individuals could (i) change their perceptions of those they
were in conflict with; (ii) recognise the centrality of frustrated human needs
in the conflict; (iii) start thinking about positive relationships and (iv)
begin the challenging process of option generation to enable the actors to
transform their relationships in a more peaceable direction. These workshops
were very deliberately not negotiations but elicitive processes aimed at
getting shared agreement about the nature of the problems each was dealing with
and some sense of how to resolve them.
An important part of the PSW process was getting parties to
cost the consequences of their
actions. Burton felt that if you could
get participants to cost, honestly, the emotional, material and personal
consequences of the conflict the search for solutions would become an
imperative. After costing the conflict or in Zartman’s terms after reaching some “mutually hurting
stalemate” (Zartman, 2000) conflicting
parties would then be prepared to look
at their
needs (especially frustrated
identity needs) and work out how they could treat each other with dignity and respect. Only by doing this
would they begin to recognize their collaborative power and capacity and their
joint ability to do something about
their incompatibilities. These two
elements of the PSW model (costing the
conflict and satisfying identity needs) remain important practice tools for any
third party intervener and still guide much of our practice in relation to
conflict transformation.
The challenge facing those of us working in this field
today is whether or not John’s overarching concern with satisfying basic human
needs at the inter personal, intergroup and national levels are all that
helpful in relationship to current challenges to peacefulness?
From when John began his work in the 1960s there are now
many individuals and organisations
engaged in what can loosely be described as non violent transformation of
violent relationships coupled with short and long term peacebuilding and non
violent social change. [5]
In fact even before Burton, there were many other
individuals and organisations engaged in somewhat similar processes. The
Quakers, for example were convening conferences for diplomats across the cold
war divide and also engaging in quietly facilitated discussions with warring
parties in Geneva, New York and London as well as in conflict zones such as
Biafra, India-Pakistan, and the Middle East.(Yarrow, 1978) (A. Curle, 1971)
(Adam Curle, 1986). Since the 1970s and 80s there has been a nonviolent
explosion of individuals and groups who are engaged in somewhat similar
processes to those that John devised in the 1960s. In addition to the Quakers,
there are organisations like Conciliation
Resources, International Alert, Search for Common Ground,
Mercy Corps and the Mennonite Central Committee to name a few who have
committed themselves to working with small groups of actors in conflict zones
interested in nonviolent solutions to their violent problems.
If John were here now he would probably acknowledge some of
these initiatives and dismiss the rest because of straying from his own
techniques. There are, however, many
practitioners who still use some variant of the PSW [6]
to bring warring parties together for collaborative and analytical problem
solving although some many would frame their work as conflict transformation
rather than interactive problem solving. There are many others, who have built
on, designed and developed their own processes for dealing with deep rooted and
intractable conflict. Although they would not necessarily label themselves as
problem solving facilitators in Burtonian terms. There is enough commonality,
between what John did from the 1960s to
1980s and what many of us continue to do today for there to be some
intellectual and practical link back to John and those who developed his ideas
like Chris Mitchell, Tony De Reuck, Herb Kelman. Nadim Rouhana, and Eileen Babbitt to name a
few. Others like Adam Curle, John Paul Lederach, Paula Green, Paula Gutlove,
Lisa Schirch et al take what they will from Burton but have developed their own
distinctive conflict transformation and peacebuilding processes. [7]
The questions we have to ask, however, are what successes
can we point to from problem solving workshops and all the other efforts to
bring small groups together to deal with both the presenting problems and
underlying sources of direct and indirect violence? What are the strengths and weaknesses of these
initiatives and how do they help us deal creatively and nonviolently with the very
particular challenges of the 21st century?
I want to try and answer some of these questions in
relation to some past problem solving workshops and a variety of other peace
initiatives, which are arguably in a Burtonian tradition even though they have
no direct lineage to Burton himself. I will finish by asking whether we need to
revisit John’s desire for a completely new political philosophy and orientation
to power, since it is becoming increasingly clear that levels of political
dissatisfaction with established political processes in all parts of the world
are rising. [8]
One person who stands very directly in John’s lineage of
Burtonian problem solvers is Herb Kelman. I want to focus some attention on his
initiatives, because, unlike Burton, he has been actively concerned to quantify
and evaluate whether or not these workshops do or do not make a
difference.
In a recent article in Political
Psychology, Herb acknowledges the Damascene experience he had observing
John’s facilitation of a Cyprus workshop in 1966. (H. C. Kelman, 2015) It was
exactly what he was looking for in relation to his work on the Arab-Israeli
conflict. He absorbed the process and
went back to Harvard to adapt, modify and initiate his own interactive problem
solving initiatives. After directly
facilitating 80 such workshops, Kelman now thinks of himself as a
“Multipartial” facilitator, which is quite different from John’s Olympian
assumption of strictly neutral facilitators. [9] Kelman has over the years also acquired
formidable knowledge about the Middle East both in terms of context and the
parties. This too is something of a
departure from John’s model. Burton thought that regional expertise was
unnecessary to run a successful workshop and used to argue that if the process
was right the facilitator simply had to hold it and the local expertise would
be expressed by the participants themselves.
Both Kelman and Burton, however, were and are committed to direct
communication between adversaries, the centrality of the Human Needs framework
and the scholar practitioner model.
Both of them see Problem Solving Workshops as academically
based unofficial, third party approaches to conflict resolution. (Neither would
use the term transformation although I think that this is a more accurate
description of what each does in a PSW).
They are both concerned to utilize these processes to promote changes in
individuals as well as the larger conflict system. [10]
This is what most of us who think of ourselves as scholar practitioners want to
do. The question is how and what
successes can we point to. One attempt
to do this was Mary Anderson’s Reflecting on Peace Practice Project, which
generated some important learnings for
all of us working in this field. In this project she identified a central
challenge for all micro level processes, namely, how to ensure that what
happens at this level gets translated into what is now thought of as “Peace
writ large”. This is the biggest challenge for all of us who try and do good
where we can, with whoever will join us, with limited time frames.11
One way facilitators try and ensure “peace writ large” is by ensuring that
participants in the workshops are “influentials”, that is people close to power
or able to influence those who are. The second way is by
26 (Herbert C. Kelman, 2008)The first ground rule is the
principle of privacy and confidentiality which is very crucial if you are
working with adversaries locked in violent conflict. Second, the process is not political it is
analytical and problem solving. Third there is no expectation that parties will
reach an agreement but there is interest in reaching common ground. Fourth
there is equality of the two parties within the workshop setting. This has
raised all sorts of comments and criticisms about whether facilitators can
really `generate this kind of equality even in a workshop
setting but it is a guiding aspiration
and in my experience this normally happens parties who are assymetrical in the
conflict find themselves on an even
playing field within the workshop.
Finally the facilitation team does not take part in the substantive discussion
it simply creates the conditions for the parties themselves to seek common ground. The agenda’s
normally follow a common format.
(a) An exchange of information between
the parties about the situation under discussion (b) a needs analysis –concerns
and existential fears- and (c) working towards some common solutions.
11 There have
been numerous efforts to assess the positive and negative impacts of this kind of work. I was involved in one such initiative, namely the Reflecting on Peace Practice Project of Mary Andreson (Anderson,
Chigas, Olson, & Woodrow, 2004).
The issues that Mary, Diana and
Lara raised at the end of their study are
pretty much the same as the ones that I will raise from an analysis of university based initiatives.
--------------
trying to create learning experiences within the workshops,
which can be transferred back to the contexts from which participants come.
(Herbert C. Kelman, 2008)p 33. The third
way is by ensuring that our micro processes are at the right “entry point” for
different phases of official negotiation processes. (Pre-negotiation,
para-negotiations, breakdown of negotiations or post negotiations). P249 Kelman (H. C. Kelman, 2015). Or alternatively by making sure that the
central topics of the workshop are addressing fundamental existential dilemmas
being faced by individuals under economic, political, military duress.
In my experience, however, most of these workshops are
never that closely connected to official negotiating processes, they either run
in parallel or in sequential phase. They thus often appear to be related but are actually disconnected to
more official processes.
Recently I have been facilitating a series of problem
solving workshops in Northeast Asia. These emerged in response to the inability of the Japanese government to
initiate summit meetings or even high level officials meetings with Korea and
Japan because of Prime Minister Abe’s right wing revisionist position on war
history and the Senkaku /Dokdo island disputes with both Korea and China.
There were, therefore, no on going negotiations, just a
concern to work out how to create a political environment that was conducive to
convening high-level summit meetings. I think that my experience is fairly
common for many other such initiatives. Third parties are asked to convene
meetings to deal with very specific crises or dilemmas in order to prevent
violence or develop paths back from violence.
They are normally requested by moderates seeking alternatives to
violence and by people who are shocked at the ways in which simple
incompatibilities become sources of deep division and polarization.
While they might not pull countries or warring parties back
from the brink the workshops do, however, play an important role in identifying
the problems, combatting stereotypes, developing de-escalatory language,
building relational empathy and a shared hopeful vision for the future but the
meso and macro effects are often quite elusive even if participants have
identified specific conciliatory gestures that can be made on the way. In that
regard check out Chris Mitchell’s excellent book on this subject. (C. R.
Mitchell, 1991) .
Kelman has always been much more explicit than
Burton about the two goals of interactive problem solving workshops. As Nadim
Rouhana eloquently argued in his critique of such workshops (Rouhana,
2000)clarity about goals is critical to workshop success. The operational goals
for Kelman’s workshops have been first “
producing change in the particular individuals participating in a workshop” and
second “transferring these changes to
the policy process” (H. C. Kelman, 2015)p 244.
The challenge with these goals is that the requirements for maximizing
individual change might contradict the requirements for maximizing transfer,
which is what Kelman refers to as the “dialectics of problem solving
workshops”.
This dilemma and dialectic, however, is at the heart of
what we all do as track two civil society actors in conflict transformation and
peacebuilding. We all need to ask what
sorts of changes we are trying to induce in the participants and what sorts of
policy changes we would like them to propose.
The big challenge is how to do this in a nondirective, non-didactic
fashion? How can we create a space for
agonistic discussion, for example, which doesn’t result in us imposing our own values, aspirations and
norms on the participants? How do we do
this in a way that embraces the complexities of the situation while
avoiding simplistic dualisms? How do we live with all the questions and
ambiguities that conflicting parties bring to the table? And how do we avoid
rushing to premature integration or unity when it is clear that the conflicting parties remain stuck in
victim–perpetrator narratives? How can
we do this when most western democracies are deliberately and systematically
attacking civil society actors and privileging the national security state as
the arbiter of what will or will not produce peace and order?
In relation to the three workshops I facilitated between
China, Japan and Korea (2013-2014) for example, there was no doubt that we
changed the attitudes, perspectives of and relationships between all the participants.
The participants told us in evaluations that the discussions had been useful
for giving them a deeper appreciation of the other side and for critiquing
simplistic stereotypes. Our aims,
however, had been relatively modest. We wanted to get the Japanese participants
to understand the diverse ways in which their government’s actions were
activating painful traumatic memories in Korea and China and we were wanting
the Korean and Chinese participants to understand Japanese fears and anxieties
and why they might be wanting to renegotiate post war peace agreements,
remilitarize and become a “normal” nation again. At the end of the workshops,
there was no doubt that all
participants were more convivial towards each other than at the
beginning. There was equally no doubt that they had a deeper appreciation of
the issues that divided them and the traumatic memories that were impeding
peaceful coexistence in Northeast Asia.
As one participant from Korea said:
“Recognition is an extremely important issue in Northeast
Asia. Japan wants to be recognized as a “normal state,” and this is the reason
why it wants to revise its constitution and build up its military. Rising China
wants to be recognized as a normal “great power.” South Korea wants to be recognized
as a “middle power.
This was an unprompted comment on Burton’s
recognition need.
The participants
were also able to grasp competitive victimhood dynamics and why
different kinds of Japanese apology never seemed to completely satisfy China or
Korea. But there is very little I can
point to in Japan, Korea and China which indicates that the initiative as a
whole or the changed attitudes and behavior of the individual participants
towards each other has altered the views of the Shinzo Abe, Xi Jinping, or Park
Geun Lee governments or even senior officials underneath them.
At the level of individual workshop participant, however,
even though the transfer effect was not obvious, friendships were formed,
stereotypes challenged and some of the conversations reported back to
Ministries of Defense and Foreign Affairs. What was noticeable, however, was
a major change in the atmospherics of
the group. The first workshop started
stiffly with participants holding strong national positions and physically locating
themselves in national groups. Over the
course of all three workshops, however, this frostiness was replaced by genuine
warmth and a new sense of optimism and possibility. This kind of change should not be sneered at.
The challenge is to work out what these changed atmospherics mean outside of
the group and how they might be reproduced
across societies as large and as complex as China, Japan and Korea.
Thus in terms of effectiveness I think we can argue that
these meetings are important at the micro level but the re-entry problem and
the transfer problem remain important challenges to those of us who believe in the power of small transforming
circles to change what happens at the meso and macro levels.
Kelman’s workshops have lasted much longer than my small
initiatives so he is able to argue that the workshops he organized on the
PalestineIsraeli conflict-along with other unofficial efforts;
“…
helped to lay the groundwork for the
Oslo agreement of
September 1993. They contributed by developing cadres prepared to carry out productive negotiations; by creating
opportunities to share information and formulate new ideas that provided substantive
inputs into the negotiations and by fostering a political atmosphere that made
the parties open to a new relationship” (Herbert C. Kelman, 2008) p 32
But even this modest contribution was wiped out with the
failure of Camp David and the second ‘Intifada.’ Much to Kelman’s regret many
of the personal relationships that he helped create in his workshops were
stressed and strained by these events.
Mistrust replaced the trust that had been built up over the years and
the whole process had to begin again.
I wonder, how many other scholar practitioners, however,
are willing to dedicate 45 years of their careers to creating safe spaces for
building and rebuilding stressed, torn and broken relationships across deep
boundaries of difference. Certainly John
Burton did not have this sort of patience. He moved from conflict to conflict
without leaving behind alumni of the sort that Kelman can point to.
There have been many analyses of the costs and benefits
of problem solving workshops running
from how to engage questions of power without being sucked back into a coercive
power politics frame;(K. Avruch, 2013)dealing with cultural differences and
different understandings of needs and
how to satisfy them. (K. Avruch, Black,Peter. W, 1987) There have been
explorations into whether women are better participants and facilitators of
these workshops than men; (d'Estrée & Babbitt, 1998) and whether any of
this work can be done effectively without a clear commitment to nonviolent and
pacifist solutions to violence. But enough has been said to demonstrate that
even though this is not a perfect process it can have transformative
consequences for individuals and in favourable circumstances can result in
creative non-violent options for elite level decision makers. The major point is that conflict
transformation processes of this kind are good examples of cumulative acts of
small goodness aimed at building relational empathy and virtuous non-violent
dynamics to replace the vicious ones.
Meeting 21st century challenges
Are these examples of small “goodnesses “capable of dealing
with the challenges we are confronting in the 21st century? In the absence of anything else they clearly
have their place and concerned scholars and others have to do what we can where
we can to help generate cultures and
structures of peace rather than violence.
But are they up to the challenges of the 21st century?
To take violence alone, this year the Uppsala Conflict Data
Program recorded 40 armed conflicts with a minimum of 25 battle deaths, which
is up by six from 2013. This is the highest number of conflicts recorded since
1999 and 11 of these conflicts are recorded as wars, with 1,000 or more battle
deaths. Uppsala’s best guess for battle related deaths last year was 101,400
most from the Syrian conflict but increasing numbers from the four separate
conflicts in the Ukraine.(Petterson, 2015) .
The direct battle deaths, however, are just the tip of a
vast iceberg of human misery. 59.5
million individual human beings have been forcibly displaced by war by the end
of 2014. That number has increased in 2015 but we do not have good data on this
yet. An estimated 13.9 million people were newly displaced by conflict in
2014, including 2.9 million new
refugees. In 2014 the country hosting the
largest numbers of refugees was Turkey with 1.59 million refugees. Syria
is the world’s top source country for refugees, overtaking Afghanistan which
had held that title for 3 years. There
are 38.2 million people who are internally displaced by war including 7.6
million in Syria alone. 32.3 million of these IDPs are under the protection
of UNHCR.
(UNHCR, 2015).
While the basic
Human Needs of these millions are not being met
its hard to think of problem solving workshops, capacity building projects,
or even large scale development and peacebuilding projects making much of a dent in these figures. And this is the rub, how useful are the well intentioned
interventions of liberally minded academics in privileged parts of the world in
relation to cataclysms of these proportions?
This is particularly problematic when we think of the ways
in which the world has been afflicted by 14 years of deliberately
manufactured political fear post
9/11. The world’s conflicts have become
nasty and entrenched because of
pathological hegemonic
initiative. Instead of an expansion of
rational problem solving initiatives we have been exposed to 14 years of wars,
military interventions, assassinations, torture, kidnappings and the growth
of paranoid national security states
everywhere. This has precipitated the emergence of reactive Islamic extremism
across the Middle East. The state, which Burton rightly feared, has imposed
secrecy on almost everything and there
has been a systematic infantilisation and demobilisation of civil society
actors everywhere. So what role is there
for the academy and concerned citizens in this dystopian world?
How can we talk
while Syria literally burns? But how can we not talk when the only
alternative being mentioned by our leaders in the West are extra judicial
executions by drone, renewed bombing raids and
more military interventions on top of all the military interventions
that have generated these cataclysms in
the first place ? The other challenge in all of these conflicts is who do we
talk to? Most of these conflicts are
wars that are networked and
deterritorialised; there are multiple parties with multiple issues making them
structurally complex and problematic. The time for conflict preventing processes
of a small or big kind have past so we are confronted by some extraordinary ethical , theoretical
and practical challenges.
In the first place how do we in the West begin getting
a clear moral compass on the problems that confront us? In particular how might we replace the
politics of fear with the politics of
compassion? This is the subject of my
study leave. How do we ensure
that our security is seen in relational
rather than agentic terms ? How do we
let our political leaders know that we wish to guarantee our security in the company of others rather
than in opposition to others? And in
relation to the current issue of the
day, namely, the pressure of war torn refugees on Europe and any safe haven.
How do we practice an ethics of hospitality so that these millions of human
beings have a safe space to live and satisfy
their other identity and welfare needs? What kinds of tools do we
have in our theoretical and practice toolboxes to deal with these cosmic and
complex tragedies?
In the first place it seems to me that as human beings have to rediscover some sense of our common
humanity. This is no easy task but there
is no point in catalysing positive micro
processes if there is no general disposition to build transnational
cosmopolitan community.
Second, everyone has a human obligation to provide
immediate humanitarian assistance to all those in need and this is a global
responsibility not just the responsibility of Turkey, Lebanon or Western
Europe.
Third, taking my cues from my old friend and mentor Adam
Curle we need to begin a global process
of conscientisation/consciousness raising
about which actors and which states are responsible for our current
tragedies. It's a bit rich arguing that Europe has diminished responsibility
for Syrian, Afghani, Iraqi and Libyan refugees when the West generated the
conditions for their displacement in the first place.
Fourth, how do we persuade these hegemons and the networked
groups of violent actors that they have spawned to assume responsibility for
their actions and to figure out
diplomatic and other strategies for
stopping the violence rather than adding to it? What sorts of conversations with what sorts
of people might short, medium and long term strategies for restoring
peace and stability to all those
places that know nothing but chaos at the moment?
Fifth, and this is the difficult bit, how do we in the
global North join forces with those in the Global South in recognition of our
common humanity to begin devising global solutions to these global problems. In
addition to war, violence and forced displacement, we are all confronted with
the negative consequences of climate change, accelerating youth
populations, and growing global
inequality.
Even if we could create thousands of problem solving
processes and create small analytical
groups on every continent to engage in problem solving it is unlikely
that we would have much impact on the tectonic shifts that are occurring at the
present moment. And here is the opportunity for Burton’s second coming. The challenge it seems to me remains what
John Burton was so prescient about 20
years ago. We need a new politics for a post colonial, post
industrial, and post violent world. If this does not happen fast I fear for the
future of the planet. Burton always said that the promise of Conflict
Resolution (I prefer conflict transformation) was to devise a way of being
political that did not involve hierarchical, hegemonic and dominatory
individuals and institutions. It's a
politics that is decentralised, networked, global in reach and it's a politics
that does not depend on possessing a
monopoly of force. It's a politics that depends on human will, hopefulness, and
a realisation of collaborative capacity.
It is grass roots and top down politics. Its a politics that is profoundly contextual,
aimed at building emancipatory relationships and transforming institutions so
that they are relatively equal and participatory.
It's a politics in which the arms trade and the global financial sector are
brought under effective global control.
It's a politics where everyone is valued for who they are not who we
would like them to be and it's a politics with the satisfaction of basic human
needs at its heart. And, it must be a politics that has conflict transformation
at its heart. As John Paul Lederach
says,
Conflict transformation is to envision and respond to the
ebb and flow of social conflict as life giving opportunities for creating
constructive change processes that reduce violence, increase justice in direct
interaction and social structures and respond to real life problems in human
relationships.(John Paul Lederach,
2003) p .14
You can summarise this in John Paul’s mantra:
Reach
out to those you fear
Touch the heart of complexity
Imagine beyond what is seen
Risk vulnerability one step at a time
Even though it's a long way from interactive problem
solving and sounds a tad utopian. I think it's a vision that John and all the
other Burtonians and neo Burtonians would be proud of.
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