Routledge Handbook of Conflict Response and Leadership in Africa

Alpaslan Özerdem, Sinem Akgül-Açıkmeşe, Ian Liebenberg, Alpaslan Özerdem, Sinem Akgül-Açıkmeşe, Ian Liebenberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000432053
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Peace & Global Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This handbook explores the challenges and opportunities for leadership and conflict response in the context of Africa at several levels.

Leadership plays a vital role in affecting conflict response but is frequently only examined at the macro level of state, government, and international organizations. This handbook addresses the need to explore challenges and opportunities for leadership at several levels: macro (global, regional, national), meso (NGOs, religious groups, academics), and micro (civil society organizations, youth groups, women's organizations). Analysis from multiple levels provides a broader explanation of conflict dynamics and helps to fit localized conflict transformation approaches into wider national or regional structures. The multidisciplinary essays presented in this volume encompass the psychological, political, and structural dimensions of conflict response and demonstrate how its success is fundamentally linked to the style of effectiveness of leadership, among other factors.

The volume is divided into four thematic sections:

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• Part I: The theory and dynamics of conflict response and leadership

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• Part II: Macro-level leadership experiences in conflict response

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• Part III: Meso-/micro-level leadership experiences in conflict response

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• Part IV: Recommendations for improved leadership in conflict response

This book will be of much interest to students of conflict resolution, peace studies, African politics, security studies, and international relations, in general.

PART I
The theory and dynamics of conflict response and leadership

1
THE EVOLUTION OF CONFLICT RESPONSE

Management, resolution, and transformation

Alpaslan Özerdem

DOI: 10.4324/9780429318603-3

Introduction

With the end of the Cold War, civil war became the most common form of armed conflict, and liberal notions of peace have been actively adopted in major international peace-supporting activities since the 1990s. Although international peacebuilding activities rapidly increased in terms of their number, size, and forms, the activities were primarily initiated and led by international organizations and nation states from the global North (mainly European and North American). They were, therefore, firmly underpinned by the liberal notions of peace. As a result, the liberal prescriptions for peace were embedded in the conflict response programmes, whether they are peacemaking, peacekeeping, or peacebuilding operations.

Therefore, this chapter explores the conceptual understanding of those key phrases and responses to explain the conflict response’s evolution since the early 1990s. Starting with a brief historical review on how conflict response has evolved in modern times, the chapter will focus on the three main types of conflict response: management, resolution, and transformation. In the following section, the purpose will be to link how these responses have been shaped and implemented in peacemaking, peacekeeping, and peacebuilding operations. Finally, the chapter focuses on different types of actors in the evolution of conflict response.

Conflict response evolution in modern times

Historical evidence shows that it is never easy to mitigate armed conflicts and promote consolidated peace. Since the first modern forms of international peace-supporting activities appeared in the mid-19th century, peace processes have evolved in various ways seeking more effective methods of achieving their goals. Hence, while there is general agreement upon the broad definition of a peace process – a wide range of international, national, and local efforts to stop, minimize, eliminate, and transform violent conflicts – the detailed characteristics of peace processes vary according to the contexts in which the programmes are implemented. Although they may present similar features, each of these programmes has distinctive conceptual foundations and operation principles. Nevertheless, some key terms that identify such different forms of the peace process are either being used interchangeably or without drawing clear distinctions between them. Such conceptual ambiguity occasionally causes misunderstanding among field practitioners as well as academics.

The modern concept of conflict response and peace-supporting operations by the international community emerged in the 19th century, the ‘balance of power’ era. Besides mutual treaties, European states established common security codifications, institutions, and trade regimes to discourage slavery and piracy at sea, control their waterways, and promote postal and telecommunications services. As seen in the Ottoman Empire’s collapse, some European countries participated in external humanitarian intervention forms in the Balkans. However, their chief aim was to secure the order and stability of the international system. In the late 19th century, non-governmental organizations such as the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) began to participate in humanitarian assistance to war victims and promote international humanitarian operations norms. In its aftermath, although no military action was conducted, the establishment of the League of Nations in 1919 extended the scope of cooperation in the international community.

With the establishment of the United Nations on 24 October 1945, a new era began. The 1945 UN Charter states that the UN is entitled to use “a set of techniques which it can use to secure the peaceful settlement of disputes, including fact-finding, good offices, conciliation, mediation and negotiation” and to use coercion and armed force “if necessary to maintain or restore international peace and security” (Miall et al. 1999: p. 34). The Korean War (1950–1953), in which armies from 16 nations participated, was a striking example of the UN’s collective security role.

In a further development, the UN began to intervene in several areas lying within the scope of the nation state’s domestic jurisdiction that was traditionally regarded as areas of strict noninterference. In such military interventions, three primary methods are used: peacekeeping-type activities (for example, in the Balkans, the Middle East, and the Indian subcontinent), peace enforcement action (Korea and Congo), and management of transition (Congo and Dutch West New Guinea) (Bellamy et al. 2004: p. 71). The UN (and other international organizations) could intervene only with the conflicting parties’ consent.

The first UN peacekeeping mission, involving military observers’ deployment to the Middle East to monitor the Armistice Agreement between Israel and its Arab neighbours, was authorized in 1948. Since then, the UN Security Council has approved peacekeeping missions in more than a hundred countries, with varying degrees of success. The form of the UN’s early interventions is frequently categorized as First-Generation Peacekeeping. Unarmed or lightly armed military forces conducted the UN’s early operations. Their main purposes were monitoring the implementation of a truce or creating a buffer zone between warring parties while peace negotiations took place. In this period, the UN peacekeeping missions strictly followed three guiding principles: involvement only with all parties’ consent at war, strict impartiality, and the use of force only for self-defence.

Nevertheless, the UN’s military interventions rarely achieved UN Security Council consensus due to the intense rivalry between the bipolar bloc coalitions. Moreover, many countries regarded the UN as an agency of the United States and did not consider it a neutral mediator. While the rivalry between the two global camps served to limit the number and the scope of collective actions conducted under the UN’s name, individual states such as the US and the UK played diverse roles in various international tensions in this period. As a result, UN officials, including former secretary-generals such as Dag Hammarskjöld and U Thant, opted to use ‘quiet diplomacy’ to encourage conflicting parties to join the negotiating table. For instance, the UN played a significant role as a mediator in cases such as the Cyprus conflicts (1967 and 1974), the war between Iraq and Iran, and the withdrawal of the Soviet Union from Afghanistan.

Regional organizations also began to get involved in attempts to resolve regional conflicts. For example, the Organisation for African Unity (OAU), which was established in 1963, played a significant role in African conflicts in both positive and negative ways. Sometimes the OAU provided military aid to rebels (e.g. independence movements against colonialism or anti-apartheid groups in South Africa) and actively promoted several projects helping the refugees of conflicts and natural disasters. Nevertheless, its failure to gain unilateral consent from member states to intervene in conflicting states hampered its ability to mediate in the region’s internal conflicts. In some cases, high-profile individuals contributed to the peaceful resolution of conflicts. Some of these figures include Tanzanian President Nyerere in Burundi, former US President Jimmy Carter in the Middle East conflicts and the Emperor of Ethiopia in the Sudanese civil war. Another good example is the Commonwealth Eminent Persons Group’s political pressure on the South African government regarding its policy of apartheid.

The collapse of the Cold War system brought considerable changes to the international security arena: the disappearance of bipolar constraints (a new system), the emergence of NGOs (new actors), renewed interest in the mediation (a new motive), and international norms recognizing the need for international intervention (new norms) (Crocker et al. 1999). These changes led to the significant expansion of global peace operations – quantitatively, qualitatively, and normatively – and to a new conception of peacebuilding in the early 1990s.

In terms of quantity, peace interventions have increased in number in the post–Cold War period. The UN has conducted more peacekeeping operations in the five years from 1989 to 1994 than in the previous 40 years. In addition, the number of civil war cases being terminated through negotiation has increased. Concerning actors, the UN began to play a more active role from the early 1990s. An Agenda for Peace (UNSG 1992), which was announced by the UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali in 1992, insisted that third-party intervention by the UN should change direction and shift its focus towards peacebuilding. The establishment of the Peacebuilding Commission at the UN in 2005 is, in this sense, a significant development. The Commission, which aims to coordinate post-conflict peace-supporting activities, clearly demonstrates the UN’s more decisive commitment to peacebuilding.

In the post–Cold War period, the scope of peacekeeping has expanded to include second-generation operations engaged in “various police and civilian tasks, the goal of which is a long-term settlement of the underlying conflict” (Doyle 1996: p. 484). Furthermore, the scope of third-generation peacekeeping operations, which are also called “peace-enforcing” operations, has been extended “from low-level military operations to protect the delivery of humanitarian assistance to the enforcement of ceasefires and, when necessary, assistance in the rebuilding of so-called failed states” (Doyle 1996: p. 484). Third-generation operations are conducted under the mandate of Chapter 7 of the UN charter (collective security) and sometimes without the UN’s consent.

UN peace intervention methods were also diversified during the 1990s. In addition to military forces’ recruitment for peacekeeping operations, human resources were drawn from civilian police forces, diplomatic actors, and non-governmental professionals (Ramsbotham et al. 2005). Military interventions were supplemented by a range of projects such as emergency relief, institution (re)building programmes, economic rehabilitation, and community building.

In normative terms, the concept of liberal-democratic peace had been widely accepted as the post-war system standard (Carment and Rowlands 1998). Still, as the cultural issues involved in intervention attracted greater attention and came under greater scrutiny, new intervention types began to be considered. For instance, many external interveners began to adopt interactive conflict resolution methods, which employ “small group, problem-solving discussions between unofficial representatives of identity groups or states engaged in destructive conflict that are facilitated by an impartial third party of social scientist-practitioners” (Fisher 1997: p. 239).

The collapse of the Cold War system widened the scope for cooperation between major powers. The Gulf War in 1991, in which the UN’s collective security force was deployed, was a notable example of this increased cooperation. In the process of consent building, the Soviet Union supported the US resolution authorizing force against Iraq. Moreover, in addition to the involvement of relatively neutral developed countries in Europe and North America in peace-supporting operations (including the Republic of Ireland and the Scandinavian nations), many Asian countries (Bangladesh, Pakistan, South Korea, India) and African nations (Nigeria, Ethiopia, Ghana) have actively participated in international peacebuilding since the mid-1990s.

The roles of regional organizations such as the African Union (AU, the successor of OAU), the Organisation of American States (OAS), and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) became much more prominent in conflict intervention. In Africa, for instance, the AU has made great efforts to mediate conflicting parties by sending envoys to countries such as the Central African Republic (2003) and Zimbabwe (2005) in addition to peacekeeping operations in Burundi and Sudan. In Europe, while NATO has played significant roles in various military operations, from peacekeeping (e.g. operations in the former Yugoslavia in 1994) to direct military action (e.g. the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1995), the EU’s activities have focused on preventive diplomacy and post-war assistance.

In the context of the post–Arab Spring and recent civil wars in such contexts as Libya, Syria, and Yemen, the role of international and regional organizations and nation states and civil society actors have become even more complicated. The foundational premises of different conflict response types have now reached a significant stalemate because the overall international conjuncture is such that traditional conflict management and resolution tools have become defunct. The rise of new actors such as non-state-armed groups and private security companies in recent conflict zones, as well as the isolationism by such key actors as the US and the rising of populist politics across the world, has played a role in the emergence of different types of engagements between key conflict response actors.

Conflict management, conflict resolution, and conflict transformation

Conflict management

Conflict management is a conservative approach to peace operations. It refers to a set of strategies undertaken by third-party interveners to end a conflict and minimize its negative impact on people or the environment. As a response strategy, conflict management is often based on the assumption that human beings are by nature aggressive, and conflict will be an inevitable feature of society as long as people interact (Miall 2004). This realist view assumes that disagreements and violent conflicts are complicated, if not impossible to resolve. Hence, conflict management’s core aim is often limited to suppressing the outbreak and/or escalation of violence rather than addressing the underlying factors responsible for the conflict.

Several strategies are available for managing international and intrastate-armed conflicts. Each strategy is guided by one core principle: containing the violence and disruptive behaviour of the hostile parties in the conflict to a minimum. Since containment is a critical factor in conflict management, it is safe to conclude that such strategies should aim to separate fighting parties to reduce hostilities, provide safe corridors for humanitarian aid delivery, and initiate peace talks to end the conflict. Critical methods of peace-supporting activities until the late 1980s, such as mediation and traditional peacekeeping, are based on conflict management ideas.

Conflict resolution

Conflict resolution is a higher level of response than conflict management and is concerned with addressing the causes of conflict and building stronger, lasting relationships between competing groups. This approach is based on the assumption that a conflict typically comes out of contradictory views and/or interests of different actors and that such sources of conflict can be addressed. Hence, the approach includes conflict resolution operations endeavour to mediate the competing interests of warring parties by facilitating peace negotiation or de-escalating the risk of conflicts by alleviating extreme poverty or antagonism (Ramsbotham et al. 2005: p. 29).

A variety of coercive and non-coercive methods are employed for conflict resolution. Frequently used non-coercive methods include providing good offices for negotiation, rule-building for inter-party interaction, suggesting feasible common targets for competing parties, and transmitting information and diplomatic persuasion. When non-coercive methods do not bring about the expected outcomes, external interveners sometimes apply coercive economic and military incentives/pressure, which are more coercive.

Conflict transformation

The conflict transformation model adopts a more nuanced approach to the emergence and t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I The theory and dynamics of conflict response and leadership
• Part II Macro-level leadership experiences in conflict response
• Part III Meso-/micro-level leadership experiences in conflict response
• Part IV Recommendations for improved leadership in conflict response
• Index