Conflict, Peace and Development - Rights and Human Security in Africa
Connections between conflicts in Africa and its lack of development seem to speak for themselves. The 1990s saw three million African people killed while 160 million lived in countries with intra-state conflict. Intra-state conflict comprised 79 of the 82 conflicts of the last decade and 90% of casualties were civilians. Average income per capita in the continent is less than the 1960s, and it has the largest proportion of the world's poor. African wars are fought with few military resources so that appropriation of natural resources is a natural form of accumulation. Resources become used for pillage, protection money, to trade for arms, labour exploitation, land, and to claims for its mineral and water resources. Conflict is obviously anti-developmental, and an arena where the civilian poor, and women in particular, are likely to be the major casualties.
Within Africa four key structural conditions lead to violent intra-state conflict: authoritarian rule, marginalisation of ethnic minorities, socio-economic deprivation and inequality, and weak states lacking capacity to manage conflict effectively. The potential for conflict is heightened when these conditions are simultaneously present. Other problems add to that potential – lack of fit between nations and states due to the imposition of the 80,000 kilometres of colonial borders, land and environmental pressures, the small arms trade in itself linked to resource-based conflict, debt, and economic imbalance and unfair trade practices.
Within the last fifteen years the inter-relation between conflict and lack of development has been overlaid by the HIV/ AIDS pandemic. Conflict has arisen in response to stabilisation programmes where Southern regimes under pressure from Northern financial institutions and growing balance of payments constraints introduced policies abandoning social services. Policy moved from fulfilling popular demand to the removal of market barriers so that state-society relations became highly confrontational.
But conflict, including violent conflict, can also drive forward development and the fight for liberation and justice, as in South Africa. It is the reaction of social elites which determines whether such conflicts become violent. Violence may also be a liberating outlet for disaffected youth with no economic future and available for clan warlords as in Somalia or for gerontocratic leaders hanging on to power in Zimbabwe. Equally, 'development' can provoke conflict over resources and/ if its benefits are inequitably distributed (arguably a contributory factor in the Rwanda genocide). Emergency aid in 1980s Somalia for the victims of war and drought subsidised clan warfare. Terrorism is not strongly linked to poverty, but more to frustration, alienation and humiliation by, for example, colonization or marginalisation. Peace (or 'negative peace' in Johan Galtung's words) may hide major fault lines and human rights abuses, as is currently happening in Zimbabwe. Often gender discrimination is the most hidden, which poses problems for those who want a quick fix in peace-making and development.
At the moment we see a number of paradoxes when analysing the link between conflict and development. Indeed, historically, those working in peace/conflict resolution and those in development (for cynics neither of them spectacularly successful) long occupied different spheres (first and second generation human rights). Rethinking started in the mid-90s after post Berlin Wall hopes of a new international order were dashed by Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Angola. Conflicts subsumed under Cold War ideologies have now become more properly understood. The conflict and development disciplines are edging closer to each other nervously bringing 'identity', 'democracy' and 'good governance' with them. Increasingly, both spheres are aware that globalisation in making the world safe for investment is simultaneously widening inequalities and provoking insecurity as it reaches into less opened up regions. In response, there have been the beginnings of a reordering of international human rights work marked by: new international institutions like the International Criminal Court and various tribunals, qualifying absolute state sovereignty in the interests of a people's right to protection ('responsible state sovereignty'), tying basic human needs (including the right to enjoy a self-ascribed identity) into conflict avoidance or management (human security) and a critical examination of humanitarian intervention and the role of the United Nations (including the Brahimi Report).
In development the technical fixes of the 1960s moved into the basic needs approach of the 1970s to the rights-based approaches we currently see. To say this in a different way, people have begun to assert their right to be the subject rather than the object of development – the poor as claimers of their rights rather than passive recipients. Conflict mediation has ceased to be merely the preserve of nations and the rich and powerful. Recognition of needing to understand and address the roots of conflict has seen the emergence of alternative or Track Two diplomacy/mediation on a people-people basis.
On the other side, mantras like sustainable or rights-based development, and governance, become neutralised and depoliticised by the multilateral agencies and international financial institutions vaunting the magic and inevitability of the impersonal hand of the market. Good governance is a long way from 'democratic governance' where non-market development could be a preferred option.
At the present time we see a preponderance of ethnic conflict plus the resurgence of religious-focused conflict with overtones of medieval Europe and Asia meeting. In fact these conflicts can be posed as being over identity in which human needs are not being met, meaning that we have to see peace and development within the new thinking around human security. Traditionally, security has been viewed as firmly rooted in the nation state, itself the source of 'identity'. It has operated through agreements between different militaries and political elites: a strongly male arena. But what happens to traditional security - and identity - when weaker nation states are less able to control their own policy as power shifts to global social formations, and markets are dominated by (Northern) transnational corporations, multilateral financial and trading institutions? Building development on more strongly felt 'ethnic' identities and diversities may be one way forward in overcoming conflict and promoting development. There is a natural link here with human security - of people not just territory, individuals not just nations, through development not arms.
Finally if we are talking genuine North-South partnership to deal with conflict and lack of development, partners have the right to demand of British-based NGOs what they are doing in relation to their own government's rush to war. It is important therefore that we and they understand what is happening, as we have attempted to do in a joint Catholic Institute for International Relations(CIIR) and Conflict, Development and Peace network (CODEP) seminar in October 2002. In disputing he was 'Bush's poodle' Tony Blair said ironically 'it's much worse than that, I would do it anyway', i.e. be prepared to engage in war with Iraq. This re-running of Gladstonian moral foreign policy is more worrying as we are being invited to be a junior global policeman on shaky international legal justification in an open-ended war without frontiers against terrorism. The challenge is for principled opposition to war against Iraq to respond in an analytical and measured way to the question 'what would you do against terrorism?' 'Attack global poverty, Western hypocrisy, and dismantle unfair global economic architecture' is a necessary but not sufficient answer. Obviously the Al-Quaeda - Iraq link demands a great deal more proof beyond the fact they both share the letter Q. The British government's linkage with the USA is based on a fallacy. London's case rests on attacking both poverty and terrorism in an attempt to link attributed cause and effect. All evidence from Washington over such disparate but developmental and conflict-related matters as Kyoto, Israel, International Criminal Court, and increased subsidies for farmers show a unilateralist approach based on dominance and firepower without regard to either cause or effect. The questions posed at a recent CIIR/ CODEP seminar - how do we use global resources equitably, how do we control weapons of mass destruction and how we deal with the imbalance between the powerful and the rest of the world still remain the key questions in the relation between violent conflict and development.
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