Introduction
The United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 16 is Peace, Justice and Strong Institutionsâ:
Without peace, human rights and effective government, based on the rule of law we cannot hope for sustainable development. We are living in a world that is increasingly divided. Some regions enjoy sustained levels of peace, security and prosperity, while others fall into seemingly endless cycles of conflict and violence. This is by no means inevitable and must be addressed. High levels of armed violence and insecurity have a destructive impact on a countryâs development, affecting economic growth and often resulting in long standing grievances that can last for generations. Sexual violence, crime, exploitation and torture are also prevalent where there is conflict and no rule of law, and countries must take measure to protect those at risk. (https://âwww.âun.âorg/âsustainabledevelâopment/âsustainable-development-goals/â)
The world is plagued by violent conflict. Often those involved in disagreements and conflicts of interest seek to resolve them through the use of violence rather than through peaceful forms of conflict resolution via discussion and negotiation. Too often âwar, warâ comes before âjaw, jawâ, as Winston Churchill would have put it. UNESCO, in its important study of education and armed conflict (2011: 161â162), notes that armed conflict is more likely to occur and persist where the state is weak and where state institutions are unable, or unwilling, to respond to grievances or mediate in disputes. They note that such state fragility is often associated with low per capita income levels, with poverty, conflict and institutional failure creating self-reinforcing cycles. UNESCO also summarises an extensive body of literature that seeks to identify the underlying causes of violent conflict and suggests that this broadly divides into four approaches
- 1.Economic where the likelihood of people joining an armed group is inversely related to their employment and income-generating prospects, with low income creating an incentive to join groups engaged in armed conflict.
- 2.The stateâs weak administrative capacity and lack of control over territory and resources, including high-value minerals. Because the state is weak, rebels can gain control over these âlootableâ resources, which finance war while providing a powerful economic motivation for engaging in rebellion.
- 3.Ethnic composition, as some commentators have drawn a link between the extent of ethnic diversity in a country and violent conflict. The rise of intra-state violence based on appeals to ethnic identity, from Bosnia and Herzegovina to Iraq, Rwanda and Sri Lanka would be examples and there is evidence that societies characterised by high levels of social and economic polarisation between ethnic groups (as distinct from ethnic diversity or fragmentation) are more prone to conflict.
- 4.Grievance and injustice where some commentators have identified grievances associated with political, economic, social and cultural inequality as a primary motivating force for political violence. This is where continuing inequality makes certain groups feel unfairly excluded and marginalised (UNESCO 2011: 161â162).
Such causes often occur in âdeveloping countriesâ and indeed UNESCO also notes that âWar has been described as development in reverseâ (UNESCO 2011: 131). Thus, in this book the main concern is with such countries. This is a controversial but often used term that has been discussed in detail elsewhere (Harber 2014; McGrath and Gu 2016). However, this book understands the term according to its use by the UNDP in its annual UNDP Human Development Report. The 2016 report, for example, ranks all the countries of the world from 1 to 185 according to a wide range of economic, social and political variables but special emphasis is laid on what they term the âHuman Development Indexâ. This is a composite index of what they consider to be the three key indicators of human development. These are life expectancy at birth, years of enrolment in schooling and gross national income per capita. In this book, we are primarily concerned with countries in the bottom half of the UNDPâs Human Development Index. This corresponds closely with, for example, Smithâs classification of about 100 states in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Latin America and the Caribbean with a combined population of over 4.8 billion, accounting for 75% of the worldâs total and nearly 58% of the worldâs land area (Smith 2009: 1).
What Are Post-conflict Societies?
The main concern in this book is also with conflicted affected and, in particular, post-conflict societies. Thus, it is necessary to consider what is meant by the term âpost-conflict societyâ.
UNESCO notes the difficulty of defining a conflict and thus a post-conflict society, calling it an âinexact scienceâ (2011: 138). However, they argue that armed conflict has to entail âcontested incompatibilityâ over government and/or territory where the use of armed force is involved, and where one of the parties to the conflict is the state. This definition is an attempt to differentiate between organised, politically motivated violence and generalised violence linked to criminal activity. They put forward a list of 35 countries affected by armed conflict between 1999 and 2008 of which 30 were low-income countries. Of these 35 countries, ten were considered post-conflict in that they had been at peace for less than ten years but could still be considered as being at risk of a relapse back into violence. Quaynor (2011: 34) adds that political scientists working with databases that analyse conflict categorise an ongoing conflict as one which results in more than 25 deaths per year. However, Davies (2016: 182) questions whether any state can be truly seen as post-conflict, given that, while there may be a cessation of violence, the roots of the conflict may not have been addressed. It is also important to note that the presence of ongoing, full-scale armed conflict, such as is the case in Syria and Yemen at the time of writing, would make any educational reconstruction impossible.
The 30 countries low-income countries cited by UNESCO above and of relevance to this study were: Afghanistan, Angola, Burundi, Central African Republic, Chad, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Cote dâIvoire, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Georgia, Guinea, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Liberia, Myanmar, Nepal, Nigeria, Pakistan, Occupied Palestinian Territories, Philippines, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Thailand, Timor-Leste, Uganda and Yemen (2011: 138). It is also the case that in other countries which have experienced violent conflict some time ago the aftermath is still of considerable significance and education still needs to play a role in sustaining peace. A convincing case has, for example, been made for Lebanon as a post-conflict society where civil war took place between 1975 and 1990 (Van Ommering 2015). As Van Ommering says,
Civil war legacies continue to haunt the present as up to 17,000 persons remain missing, bullet-scarred structures are ubiquitous, mine fields are yet to be cleared and countless people put up with its mental and physical scars. Many of todayâs politicians are former warlords who retained their positions of power as a result of a general amnesty that pardoned their war crimes. (2015: 201)
Others have argued for the inclusion of other countries as conflict affected or post-conflict such as
- Bangladesh (Uddin 2015)
- Cambodia (Kheang et al. 2018)
- Colombia (Rodriguez-Gomez et al. 2016; Quaynor 2011 and references in Chapter 4)
- Guatemala (Quaynor 2011; Poppema 2009; Bellino 2016; Dougherty and Rubin 2016; Dupuy 2008; Rubin 2016; Oglesby 2007)
- Kenya (Barakat et al. 2013; Mendenhall and Chopra 2016; Lauritzen 2016; Lauritzen and Nodeland 2017)
- Lebanon (Van Ommering 2015; Fontana 2016, 2017; Zakharia 2017)
- the Dominican republic (Bajaj and Acosta 2009)
- El Salvador (Poppema 2015; UNESCO 2011: 247)
- Peru (Paulson 2011; Frisancho and Reategui 2009)
- South Africa (Christie 2009, 2016; Quaynor 2011).
As Quaynor (2011: 35) notes, post-conflict countries differ from countries actively experiencing violent conflict, as the task of reconstruction can be more seriously undertaken once the threat of immediate violence has passed.
Moreover, many developing countries affected by internal conflict or in a post-conflict context are often described as âfragile statesâ, i.e. where the state and government are not seen as providing the functions and services that would be expected of a ânormalâ or more developed state. While as Bengtsson (2011) points out, this can be a rather nebulous term, DFID nevertheless define a fragile state as one where the government cannot, or will not, deliver core functions to the majority of its people, including the poor (Kirk 2011: 160). Barakat et al. (2008: 3) provide a list of factors associated with fragility and these include low state capacity resulting from lack of financial, physical, a...