Introduction
Victims have an absent-presence in post-conflict societies. This rather odd term is used deliberately to capture the ambiguous and contradictory status victims have in peace processes. They are talked about a great deal in popular culture, in the media and by politicians â they have a presence â but rarely are they heard directly. Their voice is absent; they are silenced. This absent-presence renders victims passive, for they are talked about aplenty but rarely heard from directly. This silence is despite the fact that victims are central to the success of any peace process.
The first verse of William Blakeâs poem A Poison Tree, penned in 1794, reflects on some of the difficulties victims have in reconciling themselves with their former enemies: âI was angry with my friend/I told my wrath/my wrath did end/I was angry with my foe/I told it not/my wrath did grow.â The poem goes on to elaborate what can happen when enmity is left unmanaged, reflecting in the last stanza how glad the person was to see his foe dead, outstretched beneath the tree. The title of the poem is significant. Such enmity is poisonous, and Blake sought to identify the importance of reconciliation between protagonists.
In the spirit of Blakeâs poem, this book proposes what it calls a victim-centred approach to peacebuilding, which recognises the pivotal role victims play in conflict transformation . Rather than being perceived as a problem in peace processes, whether to progress, to âmoving onâ or to the development of a shared future, it emphasises victims as key agents in social transformation, whose agency is critical to the process of learning to live together. This approach disputes the view of victims as passive, frozen in the moment of their victimhood and largely resistant to progress, sensitivity towards whom represents the main political brake on a shared future. It stresses instead, how victimsâ agency as survivors is often used by victims to promote, support and practise everyday life peacebuilding. In this way many victims are âmoral beaconsâ to the rest of society (for earlier arguments of ours on this see Brewer and Hayes 2011; Brewer et al. 2017). The book seeks to correct, in other words, victimsâ absent-presence in order to give them a real voice.
The book focuses on three cases, Northern Ireland , South Africa and Sri Lanka , and arises from a six-year, ÂŁ1.26 million Leverhulme Trust funded project entitled Compromise after Conflict that focused on first-generation victims in all three societies, with Brewer as Principal Investigator, Hayes and Teeney as co-investigators, and the remaining co-authors of this volume as key researchers (of the original research team only Corinne Caumartin has been unable to participate in this volume, but her contribution to the programme should be acknowledged). This volume, however, has been written solely by Brewer, the Principal Investigator, in order to give it a single authorial voice, but with the help, support and comments of the co-authors. Dudgeon assisted in writing Chap. 3 and Mueller-Hirth assisted in writing Chap. 4; Natascha largely wrote the section on victim mainstreaming in Chap. 6. Otherwise the single authorial voice is that of Brewer.
It is necessary to note some important caveats to our research. Ours was a study of first generation victims, those directly caught up in the violence, and neglected the separate issue of inter-generation victimhood in the second and third generations. In focusing on first generation victims we do not wish to suggest that subsequent generations are not also affected by the violence as a legacy, but we chose deliberately to focus on those who formed the war generation in order to give voice to their experiences of the transition from war to peace in three societies newly emerging out of conflict. These cases were selected because they represent different kinds of conflict resolution and their peace processes had occurred at different times, permitting a cross-national comparison of types of conflict transformation that also introduced a longitudinal element. The research sought to capture the voices of first generation victims in these three countries as a counterweight to the isolation and silence they tend to experience. In conducting in-depth interviews with first generation victims in each country, as well as questionnaire research (which is not reported on here), victims were put centre place and allowed to give voice to the range of issues that dominated their victimhood experience and its emotional packaging and management thereafter.
This âvoiceâ highlights the ambivalence of the victimhood experience, as they oscillate between moments of progress and defeat, and the challenges they faced as agents in their everyday peacebuilding while dealing with the legacy of their victimhood. An important feature of the book is thus a sensitive understanding of the conditions under which they perform agency as everyday peacebuilders and rise above these challenges. Contrast is made with those victims who retain a strong âvictim identityâ, which locks them in the moment of their victimhood and in which the victim status becomes the master status to explain all other of lifeâs travails. Emphasis is laid on a whole series of mediating factors that predispose a victim versus survivor identity. The book explores the negative impact of a victim identity on victimsâ agency as everyday life peacebuilders and the factors that sustain or undercut the transition to a survivor identity.
The book concludes with a challenge to the growing literature on everyday life peacebuilding. By developing a victim centred approach that emphasises victimsâ agency, everyday life peacebuilding is shown to be more than just an arena or stage in which peacebuilding is done. Everyday life peacebuilding must also be conceptualised as a process of reasoning. To illustrate the bookâs new approach to everyday life peacebuilding, examples will be used from the data where victimsâ processes of reasoning in everyday life reproduce everyday life peacebuilding as a social practice. The book reports on qualitative interview data from these three cases to support its arguments.
The status and quality of this extensive data set needs to be emphasised. The data was collected as part of the ÂŁ1.26 million Leverhulme Trust-funded research programme between 2009 and 2015 called âCompromise after Conflictâ. It was our belief that compromise is thrown into particularly vivid relief in post-conflict societies, where the processes and resources that underpin compromise operate in extremis (for other publications arising from this programme see Brewer et al. 2018a, b). It is when feelings of compromise are most difficult to garner and sustain, when stress is at its height, that we get a better handle on how compromise works. We had two main objectives in the research programme â one conceptual, the other empirical â enabling us to theorise the nature of compromise after conflict, and to study it empirically in three post-conflict societies. These twin concerns have enabled us to develop subsequent arguments in two different directions: theorisation of the concept and practice of compromise, and empirical studies of victims. The first route culminated in the compendium on the sociology of compromise (see Brewer et al. 2018a); the second direction brings us to this volume. To contextualise this volumeâs arguments, however, some background is needed on the original research programme on compromise after conflict.
The Compromise After Conflict Research Programme
Empirically, our research programme addressed the processes and resources that develop and sustain feelings of compromise amongst victims of communal conflict in Northern Ireland, Sri Lanka and South Africa. These countries were deliberately chosen because they represented what the sociologist Max Weber called a ânaturally occurring experimentâ, in that they had different kinds of peace process and their conflict transformation had occurred in different time periods. Sri Lanka is a victorâs peace that involved a military defeat for one side (this term is used with respect to Sri Lanka also by Hoglund and Orjuela 2011), which occurred in the final 2009 massacre of the Tamil Tigers; South Africaâs is the colonial model of elite change at the top with little changing at the bottom, culminating in regime change in the first non-racial elections of 1994; and Northern Ireland represents the classical model of a mutually-agreed second-preference negotiated political settlement in which parties give up on their first preference, a deal known as the Good Friday or Belfast Agreement, signed in 1998 but implemented in practice only with the St Andrewâs Agreement in 2007. This research design allowed us to establish whether the type of peace impacts on victimsâ capacity for compromise, and it allowed us to introduce a longitudinal element in our research to establish whether time really does heal.
Our research design was purposely cross national and mixed in methods. We conducted sample surveys in two of the three countries and in-depth qualitative interviews in all. In Northern Ireland the statistical sample is a nationally representative one of the adult population; in Sri Lanka it is a non-representative quota sample stratified by region. As such, because of its limited statistical value, the Sri Lankan survey data is non-comparable to Northern Ireland, which is why the quantitative data as a whole is not being discussed in this book (a lot has been published already on the Northern Ireland quantitative data, see Brewer and Hayes 2011, 2015a, b, 2016; Brewer 2015). The emphasis in this book on giving voice to absent-present victims justifies the reliance on victimsâ narratives and stories, which are best captured by qualitative research.
The qualitative interviews were conducted with a cross section of victims, garnered through victim support groups, personal contacts and the snowball technique. Interviewees thus do not represent statistical national samples, as with our quantitative research, but are what is commonly called purposive or judgemental samples, where people are approached according to their fit with the theoretical ideas of the research; in this case that they had experienced conflict-related harm and that they represented one or more of the groups involved in the conflict in each society. Over the period 2011â14, in all 60 victims were interviewed from across Northern Ireland, 80 across Sri Lanka and 51 across South Africa. Interviews in Sri Lanka were conducted by our research partner in indigenous languages and the translations back into English checked by fluent speakers. A standard interview schedule appropriately acculturated was used in all three cases to ensure comparability of the data.
Empirically we defined first generation victims as those who have experienced conflict-related harm. Harm was understood in its broadest sense to cover medical, emotional, relational, and cultural hurts. Hurts can be real or imagined. They can also be direct (to the individuals themselves and their immediate family), indirect (to others whom they know personally), or collective (to whole social groups). Where group membership is important to the individual victimâs sense of identity, people will experience harm to the group(s) with which they identify and develop a sense of groups as victims. This is different from âcollective hurtsâ, since this term describes the scale of the experience (that it affected everyone). To describe groups as victims encapsulates that individual victims feel they belong to particular groups that suffered specific harm.
If victims are defined by the experience of harm, âvictimhoodâ is different. It is the process initiated by the (real or imagined) experience of harm and describes the course over time that the harm and its consequences take and the procedures by which they are managed. Victimhood is a developmental process, involving change in how the experience is packaged and handled over time (captured in the phrase that victims âmove onâ) and varies with time according to all sorts of cognitive, relational, political, social and cultural factors. Developmental processes, however, do not necessarily go only in the forward direction; âmoving onâ is matched, in colloquial terms, by âhanging onâ or âgoing backâ. Clearly not all victim...