Over the last two decades, scholars and analysts have pointed to a shift in the nature of organized violence, from more commonly recognizable armed threats in conflict situations to more fragmented political actors and more diffuse and complex threat environments. While some argue war in the twenty-first century is on the decline, others point out that it merely has taken on new forms.1See for example, John Mueller, The Remnants of War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004); Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Viking, 2011); and Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era, 3rd ed. (Redwood City: CA, Stanford University Press, 2012). Increasingly, conflict environments feature not only state armies but non-state armed groups, criminal gangs, drug-traffickers, and terrorists, where civilians may be both victim and perpetrator. These actors employ new communications and weapons technologies and frequently operate across national borders and regions, even when local allegiances are a critical dynamic of violence. In today’s globalized world, it is more difficult to distinguish between ideologically inspired violence and violence with no overt political or economic agendas. Violence is on the rise while conventional war is on the decline.
“This greater complexity in the production of violence has hampered efforts to respond to conflict around the world.”This greater complexity in the production of violence has hampered efforts to respond to conflict around the world. As we look at the many seemingly intractable conflicts around the world today—for example, Syria, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Somalia, Yemen, the Central African Republic (CAR), and Libya—it is reasonable to question the persistence of violence despite massive international investments in peace efforts. If the renewed emphasis in many capitals on conflict prevention, or the recent critical reviews of United Nations (UN) and African Union (AU) peace operations in 2015–2016 are any indication,2→High Level Independent Panel on UN Peace Operations (HIPPO), Uniting Our Strengths for Peace—Politics, Partnerships, and People (UN, 2015).
→Advisory Group of Experts on Peacebuilding (AGE), The Challenge of Sustaining Peace (UN, 2015).
→Radhika Coomaraswamy, Global Study on the Implementation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 (UN, 2015).
→Mulugeta Gebrehiwot and Alex de Waal, African Politics, African Peace Report (The Word Peace Foundation, 2016).
All these reports emphasize the need for a greater investment in the prevention of conflict. there is a growing recognition that the international community’s conflict response toolbox is inadequate in the face of new empirical realities, and that expensive, international interventions to stop the violence are simply not working.
Networks, complexity, and international interventions
Contemporary conflicts are violent struggles among a growing number and type of non-state actors—such as warlords,3An early and broadly accepted definition of “warlord” is Reno’s. These are rulers who “reject the pursuit of a broader project of creating a state that serves a collective good or even of creating institutions that are capable of developing independent perspectives and acting on behalf of interests distinct from the rulers’ personal exercise of power.” See William Reno, Warlord Politics and African States (London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1999), 1. armed groups, insurgents, and various private commercial interests—for control over valuable resources in so-called failed states4The literature uses “state failure” synonymously with “state collapse,” “state weakness,” and “state decay.” Rarely does it define the concept beyond the general understanding that these all describe states along a wide spectrum of institutional—political and economic—weakness. See, for example, Saskia Van Hoywheghen, Theodore Trefon Saskia, and Stefaan Smis, “State Failure in the Congo: Perceptions & Realities,” Review of African Political Economy 29, no. 93/94 (2007): 379-388; Michael T. Klare, Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2001); Kaldor, New and Old Wars; Reno, Warlord Politics and African States; and William Zartman, Collapsed States: The Disintegration and Restoration of Legitimate Authority (London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1995). where the systematic targeting of civilians has itself become an instrument of war,5→Joanne Csete, Juliane Kippenberg, and Tony Tate, The War Within the War: Sexual Violence Against Women and Girls in the Eastern Congo (Human Rights Watch, 2002).
→Simon Chesterman, Just War or Just Peace?: Humanitarian Intervention and International Law (Oxford University Press, 2001). and where the distinction between combatants and civilians is blurred. Not only is violence aimed at challenging the state increasingly in private hands, the means of violence is often in young hands. New lightweight, automatic weapons and the growing global trade in small arms make it possible to recruit expendable “child soldiers” in both regular and irregular armed forces.6→UN General Assembly, Impact of Armed Conflict on Children: Note by the Secretary-General (General Assembly document A/51/306, August 26, 1996).
→Rachel Brett and Irma Specht, Young Soldiers: Why They Choose to Fight (Geneva, Switzerland: International Labour Organization, 2004). Finally, the ready accessibility of relatively inexpensive electronic and mobile communications technology has also fueled the growth of non-state violence,7Kaldor, New and Old Wars, 8. as it gives belligerents instant media access, the ability to launch devastating disinformation campaigns, and facilitates long-distance transactions with arms dealers and commercial networks. The wars of the future are happening now.
If we can draw one overarching policy implication from these conflicts, it is the growing disconnect between the tools used for conflict response and the complexity of violence on the ground. The current struggle for power over people, territory, and resources in large parts of the globe is networked and violent. And the outcomes of these struggles are increasingly unpredictable. The overwhelming yet under-addressed need to manage conflict complexity, including transnational dynamics and the proliferation of non-state actors, is at the core of current policy and academic debates about types and range of interventions by international and regional organizations. Increasingly, there is a growing realization that if interventions in Congo, South Sudan, Afghanistan, and Syria have failed to end violence it is not because of their failure to engage with local contexts sufficiently, but rather due to the inability of interventions to respond to and engage at various scales of violence.
The problem with the local
Over the last decade, social science work on governance and how political authority is shaped in war zones8
Cambridge University Press, 2014More Info → has led to the recognition of the need to better understand so-called local contexts and local drivers of conflict. Many have argued that research and policy interventions have too long ignored local dynamics.9Roger Mac Ginty and Oliver P. Richmond, “The Local Turn in Peace Building: A Critical Agenda for Peace,” Third World Quarterly 34, no. 5 (2013): 763-783. Ignoring or misunderstanding the “local,” it is argued, is what largely accounts for the failure of international peacebuilding efforts.10→Séverine Autesserre, The Trouble with the Congo: Local Violence and the Failure of International Peacebuilding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
→Cedric de Coning, “Understanding Peacebuilding as Essentially Local,” Stability: International Journal of Security and Development 2, no. 1 (2013): 1-6. This shift to the local, while a welcome corrective to a body of literature with a poor evidence base and overly focused on international dynamics and systems without understanding the realities of affected communities,11Tatiana Carayannis et al., “Practice Without Evidence: Interrogating Conflict Resolution Approaches and Assumptions,” (Justice and Security Research Programme Paper 11, London School of Economics, London, 2014). See also the other JSRP evidence papers at http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/jsrp/evidence-papers/. has brought with it its own challenges.
The privileging of the local grew out of critiques of liberal peacebuilding theory and practice that see international interventions as imbued with ostensibly universal principles that do not apply to all societies or are imposed through an imbalance of power relations.12Caroline Hughes, Joakim Öjendal, and Isabell Schierenbeck, “The Struggle Versus the Song—The Local Turn in Peacebuilding: An Introduction,” Third World Quarterly 36, no. 5 (2015): 817-824. On the one hand, this reflects the recognition that political authority is exercised and contested by a variety of actors below the state, who are rarely considered or consulted when development or peace interventions are planned. As such, the “local” has a symbolic function: it reminds us that as interveners we make decisions for and about people whom we do not know and do not speak for. On the other hand, there are risks with romanticizing the local, as emphasizing local or cultural primacy—which implies that the local is somehow more progressive—can be the excuse for exclusion and ethnonationalism. Local actors can be as corrupt or intolerant as national actors. The local can be as contested and violent as any other context.
Moreover, as Somalia or the Congo wars illustrate, many local actors who compete for power locally think globally. They have links outside their own communities all while being embedded in local society. As Arjun Appadurai notes, with the cross-border flows and cultural influences of globalization, the local might not be very local at all.13Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” Theory, Culture and Society 7, no. 2/3 (1990): 295-310. While we need a more granular understanding of local contexts, many of these conflicts also have significant transnational dimensions, even in the most local manifestation of violence. Local actors are networked and often linked to national dynamics and elites in odd and interesting ways. Struggles over public authority may take place in concrete local arenas, but they are linked to local, provincial, national, and even global politics and capital flows. Identifying territorial forms of the local can thus be a challenge. What is needed is to understand how various scales of violence—through state and non-state actors—are linked.
Public authority and the role of the state
“In the DRC and many other contexts, armed groups often employ a discourse of stateness and exercise taxation and provide justice and security for legitimacy.”As scholars pay more attention to the role of non-state actors in producing local political orders and carrying out governance functions traditionally located with states, we find the state not only is present despite its weakness, but its relationship with local communities helps shape actors’ political struggles. Five years of research out of the Justice and Security Research Programme and the SSRC found that reference to statehood is crucial in claims to public authority in conflict-affected settings.14Tatiana Carayannis and Koen Vlassenroot, “Justice and Security in the DRC: Findings from the JSRP, 2011-2016” (Justice and Security Research Programme Paper, London School of Economics, London, forthcoming 2017). In the DRC and many other contexts, armed groups often employ a discourse of stateness and exercise taxation and provide justice and security for legitimacy. This is because the state—or the idea of the state—still resonates strongly in popular perceptions of public order.15Koen Vlassenroot, “Identity and Insecurity: The Building of Ethnic Agendas in South Kivu,” in Politics of Identity and Economics of Conflict in the Great Lakes Region, eds., Ruddy Doom and Jan Gorus (Brussels: VUB Press, 2000), 263–288. So, paradoxically, failed states are not so failed. They are instead a hive of competing authorities that provide public goods while they appeal to stateness, or to symbols of the state, for legitimacy. Groups do not take up arms to reject the state but rather to demand a greater and better state presence and better governance.
As Kasper Hoffman and Tom Kirk argue, the nature of public authority in transitioning and conflict-affected regions is better understood by observing how public authority actually works—how power is legitimated and practiced—rather than beginning with a theory of what the state ought to be. This growing body of scholarship on public authority, pioneered by the JSRP, is a corrective to the failed-state literature and to simplistic notions of hybridity—where authority is seen as a hybrid combination of state and non-state actors rather than a constant competition between and among a variety of actors in which the private/public distinction no longer holds.
Challenges for research on violent conflict
The changing postwar order raises a number of challenges for social scientists. The first challenge is analytical. Today’s conflicts and widespread violence have complex socio-cultural, economic, and political dimensions that operate through power networks that transcend conventional conceptual boundaries (public vs. private or local vs. national vs. regional vs. international). Moreover, these power networks have political projects. They are used to assert new claims on resources and political authority. They are both the locus of activity of contentious politics and the means to bring about political change. “Networks are alternative governance structures in particular settings where other forms of governance are weak.”16Mats Utas, ed., African Conflicts and Informal Power: Big Men and Networks (London: Zed Books; Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 2012), 14.
A key characteristic of these networks is that they are “unstable, changing, and constantly adaptable.”17Utas, African Conflicts and Informal Power, 13. A focus on social networks, therefore, allows us not only to map out patronage relations but also how they change over time. While the existence of power networks is well known, we still do not know nearly enough about them, how they overlap, how they are mobilized, and how they may condition actors’ behavior. Documenting these networks is not in and of itself useful unless we can understand how they emerge, operate, and adapt. General Stanley McChrystal’s comment, “When we understand this slide we’ll have won the war” in response to the famous PowerPoint slide of the United States’ strategy in Afghanistan illustrates this point. This is where contextual knowledge, or “area studies” matters. Today, however, the “area” may itself cross multiple regions. Not only does the analysis of multidimensional violent conflict require an interdisciplinary approach to get the full picture, it also points to the need to strengthen our capacity for transregional studies.
“Interveners need an integrated approach that guides their engagement at local, national, and regional levels, yet there is little in the literature about how to do this.”A second challenge is operational: How can social science research help practitioners operationalize the conflict analysis? As the Congo wars demonstrate, it is almost impossible to find a dividing line between the external and internal dimensions of contemporary violence18→Tatiana Carayannis, “Webs of War in the Congo: Hybrid Wars and Multilateral Responses, 1996-2003” (PhD diss., The City University of New York, 2017).
→Kristof Titeca and Koen Vlassenroot, “Rebels Without Borders in the Rwenzori Borderland? A Biography of the Allied Democratic Forces,” in “Uganda from the Margins,” special issue, Journal of Eastern African Studies 6, no. 1 (2012): 154-176.
→Phil Clark, “Ethnicity, Leadership and Conflict Mediation in Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo: The Case of the Barza Inter-Communautaire,” Journal of Eastern African Studies 2, no. 1 (2008): 1-17.; yet international responses remain state-centric and flat-footed. Political-military networks, financial flows, criminal syndicates, and ideas all cross borders.19Tatiana Carayannis, “The Complex Wars of the Congo: Towards a New Analytic Approach,” Journal of Asian and African Studies 38, no. 2/3 (2003): 232-255. Interveners need an integrated approach that guides their engagement at local, national, and regional levels, yet there is little in the literature about how to do this.
The third challenge is methodological. Fieldwork in places of conflict is forced to rely on a number of techniques that may inhibit or distort findings or that may raise ethical questions20These concern remote data gathering, local research partners, embedded fieldwork, etc. as access to the field is increasingly restricted. Methodological challenges also include the risk of privileging some methods over others regardless of the research question. For example, in recognizing the need for context-based evidence, international relations scholars increasingly make use of ethnographic methods but lack the training offered by fieldwork-heavy disciplines, like social anthropology, so fieldwork practice is often based on infrequent, brief visits rather than a long-term engagement. Moreover, as the demand for context-rich evidence grows, how do researchers manage the risk of working in insecure, violent places without securitizing research? What responsibility do researchers have to cooperate with international justice mechanisms like the International Criminal Court if they have collected data on local atrocities and human rights violations?
Introducing a new program on violent conflict
A new program at the SSRC, titled Understanding Violent Conflict (UVC), aims to catalyze and facilitate new thinking on these emerging issues and challenges. To this end, the program aims to strengthen the evidence base for international conflict through interdisciplinary approaches; deliver context-rich findings from hard-to-access research sites; prepare new research on the political economies of war, emerging conflict actors and war technologies, forced displacement and return, justice and security, and public authority; further innovate and refine methods of field research in conflict-affected settings through trainings and international and national research networks as well as local beneficiaries; and develop an international fellowship competition on conflict research.
Violent conflicts today present formidable challenges to international institutions and agencies. The UVC program is rooted in the belief that better research-based tools and resources—and the better-informed responses these resources can foster—will help global institutions adapt to new and emerging threats, making them more effective in preventing and responding to violent conflicts.
References:
→Advisory Group of Experts on Peacebuilding (AGE), The Challenge of Sustaining Peace (UN, 2015).
→Radhika Coomaraswamy, Global Study on the Implementation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 (UN, 2015).
→Mulugeta Gebrehiwot and Alex de Waal, African Politics, African Peace Report (The Word Peace Foundation, 2016).
All these reports emphasize the need for a greater investment in the prevention of conflict.
→Simon Chesterman, Just War or Just Peace?: Humanitarian Intervention and International Law (Oxford University Press, 2001).
→Rachel Brett and Irma Specht, Young Soldiers: Why They Choose to Fight (Geneva, Switzerland: International Labour Organization, 2004).
→Cedric de Coning, “Understanding Peacebuilding as Essentially Local,” Stability: International Journal of Security and Development 2, no. 1 (2013): 1-6.
→Kristof Titeca and Koen Vlassenroot, “Rebels Without Borders in the Rwenzori Borderland? A Biography of the Allied Democratic Forces,” in “Uganda from the Margins,” special issue, Journal of Eastern African Studies 6, no. 1 (2012): 154-176.
→Phil Clark, “Ethnicity, Leadership and Conflict Mediation in Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo: The Case of the Barza Inter-Communautaire,” Journal of Eastern African Studies 2, no. 1 (2008): 1-17.
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