Conflict through politics: A lesson

The holy grail for peacebuilders is finding means by which conflict can be managed without the use of violence, and the answer to that is some form of politics. Therefore the discipline is essentially one of political science, with our actions guided by a thorough analysis of what is going on in what are always multi layered and complex situations.

Those factors are likely to be local, national and often regional with factors not respecting borders or sovereignty. Increasingly they are also global with the obvious example being the economic slowdown which started with the crash of 2008, or perhaps the changing role of China in Africa.

So what does this actually look like, day to day? Have a watch of this very fiery exchange from the Irish Dail between Mary Lou Mcdonald of Sinn Fein and Eamon Gilmour, the Deputy Prime Minister in the coalition government between Labour and Fine Gael. I would embed it here but Youtube seems not to have the right embed code.

It draws all of the conflict factors relating to Ireland into one exchange and does so in increasingly brutal exchanges. The situation in the North of Ireland, the euro crisis which presaged the loss of Irish economic sovereignty for a generation, the cuts to the living standards of the vulnerable that are taking place as a result and the national political merry go round.

And it does so involving a representative of what is now a democratic political party rather than an armed group pursuing violence as its primary means of advancing its goals, who wants to debate every aspect of social policy rather than solely the question of Irish unity.

For political anoraks like me, it's entertaining just as a piece of political theatre but the more serious point is that it also represents how robust the political forum is there. Frankly in the search for peace what we're really after is a forum in which politicians can tear bits off each other. And then go home afterwards.

Sort that, in theory, and economic growth follows.

There is a lesson in here for the New Deal, which is currently experiencing difficulties in many of the pilot countries as a result of different political forces contesting the single shared "vision" that that process is supposed to be developing for each country's future, for governments and civil society to work together harmoniously towards.

The reason that is unlikely to happen is that it forgets the role of politics. There will never be a single vision to which everyone subscribes and it is unrealistic to expect there to be.

While there is a very legitimate concern that countries who do not have the sort of robust forum to manage those contested visions as Ireland does may spill into violence as a result, surely a better approach might be to invest in the development of the capacity to disagree as much as deliver services and economic growth. In other words invest in political capacity as much as economic or social capacity.

The standard answer to that is usually one that involves free and fair elections, which is also important, but what about in between? It's what happens after the election observers and the world media have gone home that is usually more important than the outcome for the long term future.

The disagreement you see raging in the video takes place between elections and its purpose is at least partly to relieve tension. Rude things get said in a very direct way, things that some people feel need to be said. And while the Government dismisses the attacks, it's likely to have at least some effect on policy. The point being that happens in a democratic chamber and not through street protests or other disorder.

The New Deal was signed up to by Governments of the G7+ and it is a remarkable step forward that deserves all of our support in the post 2015 debate, if the new framework is effectively to tackle the bottom billion that have been left behind by the MDGs. But there was never any political incentive for those Governments developing the New Deal to invest in the capacity of their oppositions to engage in, well, opposition.

That, to me at least, is a missing part of the picture, and it's one that might be worth putting right. 

Bullets and mulled wine: Europe’s journey

Stadtwald forest: Germany

A sharp tip glinted out of the tree, having travelled through from the other side. Chopping the wood open revealed the small bullet to be as shiny as the day it had been fired, as Allied troops pressed into Germany in the closing months of World War II.

And there were more. This time a dull, blunt and rounded chunk of metal embedded deep into another tree: the remnant of a heavy machine gun and a reminder of the hell that had been unleashed here.  We were told it is common to find bullets and shrapnel embedded in these trees. 

We had come to the forest to cut a Christmas tree in the late days of December; an ancient tradition in this part of western Germany. The families we were the privileged guests of showed us around these quiet hills which, cloaked in freezing mist and joined by warm mulled wine with even warmer company, were a memorable part of this year’s Christmas for us. 

The contrast, for me, was profound and at once a reminder of how far Europe has travelled away from its blood soaked past but also of the risks that never really go away. 

After all there we were: a family from England who had met a family from Germany on holiday – in France. Standing in beautiful countryside and sharing traditions. That was the progress part.

But there we also were, in the same forest where our grandfathers had slaughtered one another; as a result of a political elite’s collective failure to address the rise of extremism which itself had been made possible by their failure to manage the global economy.

Sadly that last bit about the failure of elites and the rise of extremism is an increasingly accurate description of the countries of Southern Europe. When I was in Liberia earlier this year I met a Greek guy about the same age as me, in his mid thirties. He’d never been to Africa before and ended up in a fairly random job in West Africa simply because he had been so desperate to get out. He gave accounts of elderly people being wheeled out of care homes and left on the streets because their families could no longer afford the fees. That was terrible enough.

Golden Dawn rally: Greece

But then he mentioned something, in passing, which was even more troubling. Before he left he’d voted for the fascist Golden Dawn party, who now occupy seats in the Greek Parliament. When I asked him why he told me he wasn’t a fascist, he’d moved to Africa after all, but the political system “needed a shock”. It could have been straight out of the mouth of a suddenly impoverished 1930s worker in Weimar Germany, casting their vote for the Nazis, to "send a message".

While in India the appeal of Hitler seems to lie in a perception that he was a firm leader who "got things done". Many businesses now appear to be cashing in on the Nazi brand, and sales of Mein Kampf are described as "brisk". Those Indians who seem to admire Nazi Germany do not do so because they are filled with hate or are anti semitic, they appear to be responding to the appeal of charismatic leadership, which they describe feeling India lacks.

And therein lies the problem. If it is possible for the passage of time to sanitise a period even as blood drenched and cataclysmic as the Third Reich, then can we really be so complacent as to imagine it could never happen again?

That night in Germany, over more drinks and by the warmth of a fire, our hosts and I reflected on how our own generation’s world view had been shaped by the Cold War but how the fall of the Berlin Wall was now but a chapter in our children’s textbooks. To them the idea that they could be at war with each other was a bizarre notion. And yet one of our hosts as a girl had been taught how to use a rifle by her grandfather, fearful of a future return to the carnage and mass rape that accompanied the Russian advance into Germany from the East which he had experienced first-hand.

Stuff of textbooks

As Europeans it is tempting sometimes to focus only on the progress we’ve made, and the EU's role in that was recently recognised. But the unfolding political chaos in Greece, with the prospect of more countries to follow, surely means we have no room for complacency at all. And in the beautiful forests of western Germany trees bearing hidden bullets stand silently testament to that.

Nationalism: modern, or primeval?

Discuss. Well, only if you want to. I ask the question because it is the topic that has taken me away from this blog for longer than I would have liked, along with getting back into the swing of things post-Liberia and of course the approach of Christmas. Back now though.

I am completing an M.S.c. at BirkbeckCollege, University of London, at the moment, and have been studying a fascinating set of debates around nationalism and ethnic identity. What makes a nation, and do we all have the same idea of what that means? Where do our ethnic and other identities come from and how do they shape what we do?

Big philosophical debates but the question I have been researching this month has been the extent to which nationalism can be understood using different analytical lenses. Specifically, the lenses adopted by 'ethno-symbolists', such as Anthony Smith, or 'modernists' such as Birkbeck's own Eric Hobsbawm, who sadly died recently.

I am not about to repeat the depth of the research here, save to say that ethno-symbolist perspectives view nationalism as being the latest expression of a set of factors that have roots going back many centuries, drawing primarily on religious and cultural developments for each social group. Modernists, on the other hand, take their starting point as more related to the growth of the modern nation state emerging out of the period of industrialisation in the 1700 and 1800s. 

They both have a valid perspective, of course. Without nations, or the idea of what that would mean, you can't by definition have nationalism. But to discount all historic factors which have moulded societies simply because they occurred under a different governance system, generally monarchies drawing their legitimacy from religion, seems to me dangerously close to trying to fit a complex situation into the straightjacket of a pre-cooked theory.

Either way, the collection of thoughts and research on these questions are not simply academic hot air. They have very real relevance to how we can understand the world we are in, and nowhere is this more pressing than in regions of armed conflict, where the narrative on both sides is usually framed in nationalist or quasi-nationalist terms. Yet what struck me recently was a comment by the person leading this course, a newly qualified PhD who clearly has huge enthusiasm for the subject, which was that until recently these questions had largely been neglected by the mainstream of academic debate.

I would add to that the mainstream of policy making, which at best has limited the likelihood of success for peacebuilding efforts in some of the most intractable conflicts in the world. At worse it may have resulted in real harm, as projects have been set up and implemented in ignorance of the subtle nuances of the situation they were intended to improve.

How do we effectively connect the reflective academic with the time pressured policy maker and make it work? Now there's a question.  

Making the New Deal work: a view from the ground

Fishtown, Southern Liberia

"they carry the graves in their stomachs" said a Liberian Congressman recently, travelling around that small West African country with a civil society leader and trying to get across the depth of the wounds still carried by his fellow Liberians from the years of war. It was relayed to us in a meeting in Monrovia one evening last week, which went well into the late hours, as we pored over 'indicators' being developed for Liberia as part of the New Deal for Engagement in Fragile States, unveiled earlier this year in Busan, South Korea.

The New Deal is the opportunity of a generation for the 1.5 billion people who live in the shadow of armed violence, and for whom the years of the Millennium Development Goals have delivered comparatively little. For the first time a genuine and equal partnership between donor countries and 19 developing nations affected by conflict, calling themselves the 'G7+', has formed, and together tried to act on the insight that in order to achieve anything meaningful on a journey away from conflict and towards prosperity you have to address the politics: the relationship ordinary people have with those that govern their lives at every level.

A first step envisaged by the New Deal was the inclusive development of "fragility assessments" – an analysis of the key factors driving conflict in each unique country taking part. And another, which is what we were doing that night, was the design of "indicators" to measure progress or the lack of it towards the overall vision of sustainable peace that would be produced for every state, guiding donors and governments alike.

But the devil is in the detail, and that detail is frequently to be found in what might seem like semantics. Several of our debates were over single words. Could you have an indicator that said 'factors of conflict addressed'? 'Addressed' surely implies 'resolved' and that might be open to box-ticking on the part of governments who want to skate over politically difficult problems. Many other words or phrases were hotly discussed too.

And that’s what took us so long. The clock ticked as food arrived to keep us going. What was the right word here, the right phrase there? And the reason why those Liberian civil society leaders stuck at it, passionately arguing back and forth, was because there was so much riding on it. If the New Deal works, and I mean *really* works, then it will have implications not just for those fragile and conflict affected countries it was designed for but for development as a whole.

Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf meeting us last week

For a start it will mean that without the active involvement of ordinary people, on the ground, no inter-governmental approach alone is ever going to really work. That’s a radically different approach to the top-down MDGs.

But for those countries scarred by violence, and taking hazardous steps on the journey towards long term peace, that path is strewn with pitfalls; and amid what can sometimes seem abstract debates couched in development jargon it’s sometimes easy to lose sight of the fact that this is ultimately about people, with strengths and weaknesses and in many cases who have been deeply traumatised by war.

The conflict in Liberia only ended a decade or so ago. And those who survived, according to that Congressman, still carry the "graves in their stomachs". They are the people, bearing that legacy, who will need convincing that any new development framework is worth the paper it is written on.

Which might be why later that week, during a United Nations Global Thematic Consultation on how to address conflict in the development framework that replaces the MDGs, the first thing Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf asked us was where the New Deal stood in all of this post-2015 debate.

And that, in turn, might mean the days of top-down-one-size-fits-all has finally had its’ day. And not a day too soon.

Congratulations Malcolm Bruce!

Malcolm Bruce, the Chair of the International Development Select Committee in the UK Parliament is to receive his knighthood from the Queen today. The award was given in recognition of his service to the country both as a parliamentarian as well as his substantial charity work over several decades.

I have known Malcolm for over 10 years, having worked in the deafness charity sector prior to joining a peacebuilding NGO. One of Malcolm’s daughters was born profoundly deaf, so he had personal experience of the many dilemmas faced by parents of children with a very low incidence disability. The fact that there are not many other profoundly deaf children around you means that families are often left isolated, lacking in any real support and offered completely contradictory information from both “professionals” and campaigners, each with their own ideas of “whats for the best”.

Sign language or lip reading? Special school or mainstream? Cochlear implant, hearing aids or nothing? In each case the choice parents make have far reaching consequences and to be faced with advice that is often politicised – with campaigners on both sides warning of making the “wrong” or even “immoral” choice is less than helpful.

Malcolm was a Trustee of both RNID and the National Deaf Children’s Society/Deaf Child Worldwide during my time there and in both cases provided a lot of sage and wise advice as those organisations sought to navigate those difficult waters.

I remember one occasion when Malcolm popped up at Prime Minister's Questions, during a particularly difficult session for Gordon Brown. He bowled him a soft question about the importance of deaf kids education, and suggested a meeting. The Prime Minister, seeing a friendly question for once grasped it with both hands and said yes. I dont think he realised it was going to be a meeting with most of the deafness sector, and which ended up with a series of Ministerial committments on ensuring choice for parents

He has also been a forensic examiner of the UK’s international development policies as Chair of the Select Committee, which is the main scrutiny forum for parliamentarians in the UK. He played a key role in examining and challenging the approaches of the last and present Government, and despite his committee welcoming a lot of the positive moves this Government has made towards addressing conflict and fragility they have also not shied away from asking very awkward questions, such as how much money was being spent on consultants. The latter question led to the coining of the phrase “poverty barons” by the right wing press opposed to aid on principle, but they were valid questions nonetheless.

And as with the deafness charity sector at home, international NGOs are just as politicised in many ways as different advocates of approaches to deaf kids are. I’ve always felt deaf politics was a good preparation for international development debates.

I gave evidence to his committee earlier this year on the extent to which DFID was effective in its operations in the central African Great Lakes Region, including the Democratic Republic of Congo. Some tough questioning ensued and you certainly had to be on top of your detail to answer them, but recent events in and around Goma illustrate just why those questions are even more valid now than they ever were.

Looking ahead to the debate on what comes after the Millenium Development Goals, the UK is lucky to have Malcolm prodding and poking away. Keep being awkward, Sir Malcolm!

Radi-Aid: Africans for Norway

This. is. hilarious!

I think it's trying to address a point often made by African civil society about their resentment at how they are often portrayed by Western NGOs, usually as part of a fundraising drive. Pictures of miserable children seem to be the order of the day, to the exclusion of any other image of Africa or Africans.

As a response, this is far better than simply getting angry about it - it's brilliant!

The battle for ideas with China

Paul Collier argues that the West, by which I assume he means liberal democracies, should concede defeat in the battle for economic power with China and instead focus on winning the war of values instead.

It’s a seductive argument, because it offers us a chance to fight a battle we feel we can win from within a comfort zone we’re comfortable with, and he makes it in the brutal context of political murders and corporate malfeasance in Guinea, a country wracked by corruption which he rightly points out is aided and abetted by corporate interests based in London, Paris and New York.

And one in which a local Treasury anti-corruption official could be gunned down in the streets when her fight for transparency presented a threat to the profit margins of these dark forces.

Aissatou Boiro: murdered anti-graft official

So what would this "battle" look like, and what sort of "weapons" would we need to fight it? And, more importantly, what would victory actually look like if we won?

The US election was dominated by increasingly hysterical descriptions of Chinese economic wrongdoing leading to car plants in Detroit standing empty. And in Africa, which is the focus of Professor Collier’s piece, we have seen that they adopt a no-questions-asked approach to trade. The new Premier, Xi Jiping, gives no indication of altering course.

Yet that contrast is where I think Professor Collier’s argument partly falls down. No liberal democratic government that wants to be re-elected is going to concede defeat to China on economic grounds. The fact is that China can manufacture goods at a fraction of the cost, and that’s not going to change. The challenge for the West, surely, is to rise to that challenge by responding with knowledge driven services that don’t involve factories as the chief means of production. It might be an idea to turn that Detroit car factory into a business school.

Robin Cook

But that doesn’t mean we can’t open a second front and launch an all-out offensive on values. One of my favourite politicians of the last century was the much maligned Robin Cook who, as Foreign Secretary, announced his pursuit of an “ethical foreign policy”. The idea was that the driving aims of foreign policy would be normative as much as power-politics. It didn’t work out, but that might have been because he didn’t seem to get much support even from within his own Government for the idea.

The battle ground for the second offensive on values would almost certainly be Africa, for the reason Professor Collier gives: home to vast natural resources but also home to violence, poverty and corruption on a similarly vast scale. Yet also home to people, like Aissatou Boiro, willing to put their lives on the line to fight for a better world for themselves and their fellow citizens. They are the people who will do the fighting in this battle. The prize being economic growth, yes, but growth with peace and social justice too.

And that battle will commence *after* 2015, not before it. The current debate over the post-2015 framework is taking off, with some exciting and progressive work already having been done, such as the New Deal for engagement with fragile states, a partnership for inclusive growth, peace and justice between donors and countries affected by conflict. But the debate will need to conclude in a way that countries like China and Russia are happy with, or at least not so unhappy with that they veto it.  So there is much to fight for to shape that overall agenda, but it will only ever create an environment in which the battle for values will be contested.

So one Foreign Secretary of one Western (or African) country, however enlightened, isn’t going to cut it. What might do, however, is an institution that can act on a global scale with the resources and people who are able to support those fighting for the values of fairness, transparency and democracy effectively. Step forward, perhaps, the European External Action Service, the EEAS.

European External Action Service

As an institution it has had a rocky start, not helped by turf wars within the EU itself. But taking the long view this might be the institution that could bring some coherence to Europe’s engagement with Africa, starting by aligning trade policy with development and peacebuilding objectives, and designing its’ support effectively by well thought out interventions, designed in partnership with all those struggling for growth with peace and justice.

Their thinking was outlined by Nick Westcott, Managing Director for the Africa Division, in the wake of the Lisbon Treaty in 2011. He talked of three pillars forming a "new framework of engagement" between Europe and Africa. They being: "supporting peace, promoting prosperity, and working through partnership with African countries and others." Not a bad set of goals to marry growth with peace and justice. 

Pie in the sky? It seems so, particularly when you look at some of the ridiculous manoeuvrings that sometimes characterise the European Union. But what are the alternatives?

Syria highlights the utter inadequacy of the UN in the face of a struggle between East and West because it can be held to ransom by one side or the other; while the US is no longer that useful global hegemon that we can all rely on to do that values stuff while we Europeans get on with making consumer goods.

So if this is a battle worth fighting, do we really have any alternative means of collectively supporting, on a global scale, those in Africa fighting for a vision of a better world?

And if the answer to that question is no, it seems to me we either just give up or try to get our European acts together and make this institution work. Sharpish.