What do war and peace have in common, and how can understanding this help in understanding transitions between the two? This article from International Peacekeeping suggests that the conventional model of war as ‘a fight to win’ is often misleading; warring parties may in fact profit from ongoing conflict. Peacebuilding interventions therefore need to influence the cost-benefit calculations of conflict parties so that peace becomes the more attractive option.
War is often presented as a conflict involving two sides, both of whom wish to ‘win’. However, many wars deviate from this conventional model. War may in fact offer a promising environment for the pursuit of aims that are also prominent in peacetime. Among the most important aims in contemporary conflicts are:
- Accumulating resources: This can lead to militarily counter-productive activities and can also involve corruption and collusion between combatant groups, united in exploiting civilians.
- Limiting exposure (of fighters, not civilians) to violence: This may involve manipulation of civilian militias, use of child soldiers, cooperation between armed groups, or use of proxies.
- Weakening or eliminating political opposition: Armed conflict can be a useful way of dividing opposition.
The misleading portrayal of conflict as about ‘us and them’ has been extremely useful to elites protecting their own privileges:
- International confusion allows protagonists to carry out human rights abuses with minimal international condemnation.
- Opponents can be labelled as supporters of ‘the enemy’, weakening their credibility: ‘if you are not with us, you are against us’.
- The image of an enemy may assist those benefiting from the political economy of a conflict – for example through trade in arms, drugs, or minerals.
- The creation of one-dimensional ethnic identities is often an important part of maintaining the image of war as bipolar, and masking class dimensions of conflict.
Understanding the transition from war to peace requires understanding who orchestrates and engages in violence – both from the top and from the bottom – and how to make peace seem more attractive than war for both groups. The art of facilitating transition from war to peace lies in ensuring that some of those benefiting from war are in a position to benefit to a greater extent from peace. One important implication is that there may be dangers in a rigid policy of punishing human rights abuses, contrary to the common assumption that justice and peace are indivisible.
Peacebuilding interventions need to ask ‘whose peace’ is being built – in whose interests, and on whose terms? Rather than simply concentrating on negotiations between ‘two sides’ in a war, peacebuilders should map the costs and benefits of violence for a variety of parties, and seek to influence the calculations they make. Coherence of interventions is essential:
- Since fighters often have common needs (for money, security, status, a sense of belonging) conflict resolution is not just a compromise between two opposing positions but instead the simultaneous provision of what both sides need. This means that education, employment and ensuring the rule of law are fundamental.
- Conflict resolution policies (such as demobilisation) must be supported by wider development policies (such as macroeconomic support).
- As well as short-term emergency aid, substantial long-term financial support is required for reconstruction and rehabilitation.
