Is there a role for traditional actors and institutions in peacebuilding? Research from the Australian Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies assesses traditional approaches to conflict transformation in the context of contemporary violent conflicts in the South. The hybrid nature of contemporary conflicts needs to be taken into account for conflict prevention and peacebuilding. Attention must be given to non-state traditional actors and methods and their combination with modern forms of conflict transformation. The analysis of conflict and approaches to the control of violence must overcome a state-centric perspective.
Many contemporary large-scale violent conflicts are hybrid socio-political exchanges in which modern state-centric as well as pre-modern traditional and post-modern factors mix and overlap. The state has lost its central position in violent conflicts of this kind, both as an actor and as the framework of reference.
Traditional social entities such as extended families, lineages, clans, religious brotherhoods and ethnolinguistic groups become parties to the conflict, introducing their own agendas into the overall conflict setting. These agendas cannot be reduced to modern political aims such as political power or economic considerations but include concepts such as honour and revenge.
Given the disintegration of traditional societal structures in many regions, the potential of traditional approaches for conflict prevention and peacebuilding is limited. Nevertheless, traditional approaches might give wider insights for conflict transformation processes.
Traditional approaches have a number of strengths and weakness. These include the following:
- They fit situations of state fragility and failure. They are not state-centric and hence credited with legitimacy. They take the time factor into account and are process-oriented.
- They provide for comprehensive inclusion and participation. They focus on the psycho-social and spiritual dimension of conflict transformation.
- They do not terminate violence in the long term. They often contradict universal standards of human rights.
- They have a limited sphere of applicability. They are geared towards the preservation of the ‘good old’ order. They are open to abuse.
The way forward for conflict transformation should include a mutual positive accommodation of traditional approaches with western state-based and civil society approaches. In order for this to happen it is important to:
- Think not in terms of fragile states, but hybrid political orders in which pre-modern, modern and post-modern elements mix and overlap.
- Take the weakness of state structures as a given. States in the Global South are of recent origin and delivered from the outside, not generated in endogenous historical processes as in Europe.
- Challenge the thinking that assumes that all societies have to progress through Western stages of state and society development and that weak incomplete states have to be developed into ‘proper’ western-style states.
- Analyse existing states in terms of hybridity of political order. Recognising hybridity is the starting point for endeavours that aim to control violence, conflict transformation and peacebuilding.
- Make use of hybridity through positive mutual accommodation of state and non-state, traditional (and civil society) mechanisms and institutions.
- Search for new forms of statehood and political community that transcend the conventional concepts of the Western state. These forms of governance beyond the state will draw on traditional actors and institutions.
