Violence and Conflict

Conflict studies, says our professor, is a bit of a mongrel field.

It's traditionally focused on war and violence, and so the theories it's generated have been anchored in military and strategic studies. But that's not entirely the case anymore. A range of different theories are considered in the master's program at Saint Paul, including identity, ethnicity, socio-political factors, structural factors, oppression and others.

But more than that, conflict studies is about how societies are structured long before conflicts break out.

This means folks wanting to understand conflict need to look at different disciplines: sociology, military-strategic studies, philosophy, economics and more. We also need to step beyond looking only at armed conflicts. Our professor is particularly interested in power structures. She says that you can analyze, say, the 2020 California wildfires (and the social conflicts surrounding them) in the context of how power works in the United States. Or how, if looking at legacies of violence in Africa, we should keep colonialism in mind, or how economic extraction works.

Looking at state structures is also important. If a state is a conflict party, is the government involved a dictatorship, a royal family, a democracy, a 'functioning' democracy, a religious hierarchy, a state that extracts money to bolster its wealth, a government that is proportionally representative of its citizens?

Then there are terms like weak states, frail states and failed states, but reality is hardly clean and simple. Somalia is typically considered a failed state, but some parts of the territory it claims has unique and functional governing infrastructure. South Africa has solid governance but also deeply-rooted corruption issues. The same could be said about Brazil. How can these factors impact conflict?

Then there's religion. What happens when religious leaders interpret their spiritual tradition in a way that justifies oppression or violence? Or when members of a different religious tradition are portrayed as an existential threat to one's own? Our professor draws attention to the patriarchal nature of many classical religions, which can often lead to unequal treatment of the sexes and in particular the oppression of women and sexual minorities. This forms the basis for conflict when some groups in a given society push back against these dynamics.

You can also take a look at how a society's economy is organized, what resources it has, how these are distributed, what happens when resources are extracted and exported, and analyze how these contribute to conflicts or peace processes. International bodies, like the International Monetary Fund (IFM) and the World Bank, create regulations that don't serve all parties equally. They can also form the basis for populist grievances or conspiracy theories.

Conflict scholars and practitioners like John Burton and Edward Azar focus on unmet needs as a conflict driver. These become a basis for mass mobilization when a particular group's needs are seen as unmet, or when large-group inequalities (known as "horizontal inequalities") develop in one society .

Identity became a huge area of study, with many conflicts in the second half of the 20th century being classified as identity-based. Saint Paul has an entire course dedicated to the topic. People, the research goes, often feel deeply destabilized when their identities are threatened. Conflict-condusive identities can be based on culture, ideology, religion, gender, race, ethnicity and more. Understanding which identities are "activated" in a person, and under what circumstances they are threatened or form the basis for mobilization, are major goals.

Generally speaking, identity-based conflicts are group conflicts but they can be exacerbated by individuals. Bosnia and Rwanda are two examples of identity/ethnic conflicts where groups were mobilized by belligerent leaders. These leaders are often public figures (politicians or otherwise) who can wake conflicts that are otherwise dormant. When criticisms are directed against contemporary populism, they often highlight a particular leader who has the ability to mobilize a large group.

Analyzing these conflicts means looking at the values that are at state. Take a "culture war" issue like reproduction. What conflicting values inform the different sides? Ones that immediately come to mind are choice, life, control (and who has control). Values that can motivate violent conflict can include liberation, democratization, justice, revenge, honour and more. Places, like a church in Nagorno-Karabakh, or a mosque in Jerusalem, can hold intense value for religious and cultural groups to the point where disrespecting or attacking a site can spark an uprising. These values might not be immediately obvious to outside observers, and so understanding them is key if you want to work towards peace.

Then there's also the issue of human rights, and conflicts that can rise from those. Think of whether human rights are violated, or if there are competing visions of human rights, or who decides which rights are more important. The course was held online during the pandemic, and social conflicts over which rights were more important – the right of the immunocompromised to life and safety, or civic rights such as movement and assembly – sparked major conflicts worldwide, and the Freedom Convoy protests in Ottawa, the city where we studied.

These are just some examples of different factors to take into account when analyzing, defining and especially responding to conflict. There are so many more – are conflict sides being funded, and by whom? Are there merceneries involved in violent acts? Are there "structural" issues driving inequalities or unmet needs? Are there influential oligarchies? Is there an absence of armed violence but nevertheless a deeply-rooted social polarization leading to hatred and dehumanization?

Conflicts are complicated. And, unfortunately, media outlets often present them in too simplistic a light. Sometimes this is intentional, especially if there's a vested interest influencing the media group. But sometimes it's all too understandable – who was who in the early years of the Syrian civil war was incredibly hard to keep track of.

While the geopolitical dimension of conflicts often take up most of the air time, it's important to remember the human cost of armed and non-armed conflict. How to rebuild trust when it's lost? How can a country be rebuilt? Under what circumstances do people decide to return home after the worst of the violence has ended? What happens when an entire generation lost out on stable education?

When thinking about conflict, it's hard to avoid talking about violence. Sometimes people conflate conflict with violence, but the former can certainly exist without the other.

Johan Galtung, the Norwegian sociologist credited with developing peace & conflict studies as an academic field, defined conflict as when two or more parties pursue incompatible goals, or use strategies to achieve them that hinder the other, in ways that aren't immediately resolved.

But defining violence, and what groups count as violent, is a much trickier thing.

Our professor brings up the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests, which were happening concurrently with the class back in 2020. Should they be described as violent in nature? On the one hand, between 93-96% of protests were reported as peaceful. On the other, those that were violent resulted collectively in $1-2 billion in property damage, reported instances of looting, at least 19 deaths and thousands of injuries among representatives of different conflict parties. So if you want to talk about the protests as a whole, as well as the social conflicts and movements informing them, whether you'll define them as violence will depend on what metrics you use.

Important here is the idea of legitimacy. It's common to hear, in liberal systems like in Western Europe and North America, that using violence delegitimizes your cause. So if a group, movement or event is declared violent, this can prompt some to believe they don't deserve to have their claims heard or responded to.

This is deeply complex and poses questions to people seeking to analyze and understand a given conflict. To what extent does violence make someone's claims or underlying needs illegitimate? Are all forms of violence seen as equal, or equally delegitimizing? Is violence from state bodies, like police or militaries, seen as more legitimate than violence from protesters or other non-state actors? When is state violence seen as illegitimate?

Making things more complex are competing understandings of what actually counts as violence. The BLM movement continues to be a good example to discuss: many activists claim that systemic racism (referring to less visible/intentional but allegedly pervasive forms of discrimination expressed in legislative inequities, cultural norms, unconscious biases and more) is itself a form of violence. If true, then the claim exists that violence might be a legitimate response in return. Or that the violence resulting in property damage is nothing in comparison to (and preferable to) systemic racism.

Peace & conflict studies, and peacebuilding in general, was greatly influenced by Galtung's definition of violence. He promoted a model known as the Conflict Triangle. There are three different points/corners that correspond to three separate (though connected) dimensions of violence which he claims are in play at different moments in a conflict. He encouraged peace researchers and practitioners to analyze situations to see which of the three are stronger or weaker at a given time.

The first form is called direct violence. This refers to forms of violence that are visible and involved a clear victim and perpetrator. Examples include physical assault, torture, killing, verbal abuse and others. This is closest to the "classic" definition of violence that most people think of when they hear the word.

But he also says there are two other important dimensions to violence. The second is structural violence, which refers to how social dynamics or institutions can prevent people from meeting their basic needs (or, in more liberatory understanding of the term, from thriving). As compared to direct violence, this is often invisible and isn't something that one person concretely does to someone else. Take sexism. Someone can commit a sexist act towards someone else, but sexism as a social phenomenon is abstract, widespread in certain cultures and nevertheless creates negative consequences for women's health, livelihood and autonomy. Racism and classism can be described similarly.

Our professor talks about the treatment of Indigenous peoples in Canada as a form of structural violence. There are fewer and fewer examples of direct violence in recent history (not counting the Oka Crisis), but in Ontario there's, say, less education-allocated money spent per child on reservations as compared to cities. That's not to mention the history and legacy of residential schools or early white-settler/Indigenous contact.

The third point to the triangle is cultural violence, which refers to aspects of culture that justify or legitimize structural or direct violence. Cultural violence normalizes certain kinds of violence, sometimes to the point that it becomes hard to notice. Slave cultures are a dramatic example, where beliefs of natural superiority over the enslaved justified their ill treatment. Religious or cultural justifications of violence or oppression of others also count. But cultural violence is also thought to be more subtle and can express itself in art, jokes, films or advertisements that justify a violent status quo.

Looking at things through this lens, our professor says, malnutrition can be seen as a form of violence in societies where people can't afford food because of extractive economic systems. Building peace, in this case, involves addressing all forms of violence to create a deeper form of peace.

Galtung popularized the term negative peace to refer to the absence of direct, structural and cultural violence. Positive peace refers to the presence of factors that lead to mutual thriving.

Another trio of categories helps us think about the stages of an armed conflict. The first is the pre-conflict stage, during which tension bubbles to the surface in a society that's not caught up in an armed conflict (yet). Interventions often start too late, as the roots go deep and only start being visible when things are already hard to turn back. The main task at this level is prevention.

Societies within a conflict stage are hard to theorize about because we don't have enough distance or data to draw conclusions from. In an armed conflict there's the "fog of war" to contend with, which makes it hard to understand realities on the ground. Plus, different sides (or factions within a coalition) fiercely promote their own propaganda and delegitimize the other side's claims and needs. We find out much of what we know about a conflict long after. For example, the accepted number of deaths in the Bosnian war was thought to be 200,000, but this was reduced to about 100,000 after careful research. Nevertheless, there's often a need to act during a conflict, and this is done with the help of imperfect analytics.

The third, the post-conflict stage, involves most of what is refered to as peacebuilding. Hundreds, often thousands of different projects all work with a space recovering from violence in order to make violence less likely in the future. But when we include structural and cultural violence, it's harder to say when violence is truly stopped or a conflict resolved. Perhaps a ceasefire leads to transformation in the societies involved, but sometimes it leads to hostilities conducted by other means.

Interventions at different levels can themselves involve violence. In the case of the NATO interventions in the former Yugoslavia, military strikes against Belgrade were claimed to be a necessary step to defend vulnerable Bosnians and Kosovar Albanians and lead to lasting peace. Some activists justified the instances of violence at BLM protests as a way to pressure institutions to respond to claims of systemic racism.

Some practitioners claim that violent strategies can be used alongside nonviolent ones, like mediation, dialogue, negotiations and diplomacy. Others choose an exclusively nonviolent path, with the classic examples being Gandhi's resistance against the British Raj or Martin Luther King's struggle for civil rights in mid-century America. Debates over the justification of violence in the name of peace continue today.

No matter the type of intervention, they're typically thought to occur at one of three levels, or "tracks":

These interventions can be aimed at a number of very differnet goals:

Conflict cessation: stopping a conflict, sometimes violently or abruptly. Examples include ceasefires and frozen conflicts. If the underlying issues are not addressed in time, the conflict can erupt once more at a later date. Practitioners emphasize de-escalation and reducing the immediate loss of life.

Conflict management: not necessarily stopping it so much as trying to maximize the positives while minimizing the negatives. This is often the case in protracted (long-lasting, hard-to-solve) conflicts, like Israel-Palestine, Cyprus, Kashmir or Transnistria, where incremental improvements may occur without resolving the conflict itself. Practitioners may not believe that resolution is possible and instead emphasize minimizing a conflict's destructiveness.

Conflict resolution: trying to solve the underlying issues of a conflict. Conflicts are often subject to deep analysis to find deep-rooted issues that have to be considered during the negotiation process. The focus is on striking a deal that would address the needs of all sides and reduce the chance of the conflict erupting again. The emphasis is on understanding interests and needs while finding creative solutions that avoid compromise.

Conflict transformation: restructuring society to prevent issues from emerging. While conflict resolution might result, for example, in restructuring a government so that it becomes more inclusive of all conflicting parties, conflict transformation seeks to impact social norms, cultural expressions and attitudes to make them less condusive of violence. The emphasis is on reducing structural and culturla violence in the general populace.

If we speak about researchers, most try to answer questions like why a conflict occured and what might prevent it in the future. How they approach that question will depend on what discipline the researcher hails from.

Anthropologists may look at humans as social animals that express high levels of aggression. Socio-biologists (or evolutionary biologists) may take a similar stance. Some may see war and violence as inevitable, though our professor instead claims that it is conflict, rather than violence, that is inevitable.

Psychological theories tackling issues of human violence (and whether humans are naturally violent) can look at people who engage in extreme violence as suffering from some pathology or another. They may also emphasize the cognitive triggers that lead to people feeling threatened, or that ease group mobilization. Many who study identity do so through a psychological lens, claiming that conflicts rise from group rather than individual behaviour.

Sociologists might step in when certain forms of violence become a trend. They'll ask about what the instances had in common, or what social structures made this violence possible. They may also analyze cultural violence as a social phenomenon, or compare justifications for violence in different societies.

Philosophers may analyze concepts like "social contracts," unspoken agreements between people and their governments about rights, responsibilities and relationships. They may also develop theories of the ethics of conflict, including just war theory. This involves questions of who is justified in using force and in what circumstances.

In many cases, the disciplines mentioned above will look at conflict actors: the ones doing the fighting, or the leaders, diplomats and mediators who negotiate peace. But there's also the victims to think about: what about the elderly and others who don't make the news cycle but who have to live with the consequences of violence? What about the people who are not visible? They're hard to theorize about because we don't have enough data, or we might not even notice them.

For our professor, this last group is of particular interest. For example, the Syrian kids and teens who missed out on education because of the war. How do we begin to analyze something like this?

Then there are social conflicts in North America like those orbiting the 2020 California wildfires. Some claim that they were due to poor fire suppression policies, others to climate change, others to supposed antifa arson. Different groups blame each other, while hundreds of people are left without homes or insurance, and perhaps primed to find a scapegoat. Then there's the animals affected. The cost of the incident, and the conflicts that supposidly led to or intensified it, are mind-boggling to try to analyze.

And when we do try to analyze conflicts, we want clarity and coherence. We want to build a robust theory. But the repercussions of conflict are larger or more complex than we can process at first. For example, the publicity we give an attacker can make other groups more likely to do something similar. Or how statue-toppling can be about both vandalism and resisting oppression.

A small discussion in class starts about Boko Haram, an Islamic State-aligned insurgency in northern Nigeria that has engaged in terorrism and kidnappings. It's mentioned how this case is complicated because there are economic as well as religious reasons involved – many Muslims in the north of the country feel marginalized by Christian elites in the south. There have also been some mercenaries involved as well as and suspicions of international funding (perhaps from the Islamic State or their patrons).

Many of them fight from the jungle, which has made it hard for the government to dislodge them, and they have been known to target schoolgirls due out of resistance to secular education. It can be tempting to classify this as purely religious terorrism, but there are often plenty of social and cultural reasons for something like this. Sometimes it's done merely under the guise of religion, and assuming that everything has a religious motivation may make it harder to design effective interventions. Blaming things entirely on religion, in this case Islam, also tends to flatten the regional differences of various conflict ones. Iran, Iraq and Nigeria all have different contexts and nuances.

This is just one example of why it's important for conflict specialists to resist oversimplification. There's a large temptation to find a "first cause," a factor that caused everything else to happen. But usually a conflict happens because of many factors that influence each other in complex ways. Deprivation (poverty, education, health care) can be a powerful motivation for conflict, but not every deprived region picks up arms. Imperialism (cultural, religious, linguistic) is also a tempting first cause, but not every oppressed or colonial society starts a war. This is why peace research is such a broad field: the more we understand a context, the better we can hopefully make predictions or design effective interventions.

So our professor tells us to open our minds to as many factors as possible. For example, there's the issue of where we get our information from. From statistics, from cultural narratives? When we talk about narratives, we're often talking about how a group experiences the conflict and then talks about it. Looking at truth and reconciliation issues, this is an important thing. What's the story people tell themselves about what happened? How do their values get reproduced or challenged in these stories? Are these narratives influenced by leaders, by cohesive value systems, by revolutionaries?

We also need to pay attention to the way groups work or encourage acts of violence. Recently there was news of two deputies getting shot in the United States; nearby protesters stood outside the hospital and shouted how they hoped the men had died. If a young person who has sympathies with the crowd sees this, they may think the violence should be repeated. Or how an American terrorist killed an abortion procurer and was able to escape through a crowd, possibly one that was sympathetic to his cause (even if not his methods). Boko Haram might also be protected by certain, less-radical northern communities who feel marginalized by the south.

Then there's the question of whose stories are told. History is told by the victors, the cliche goes. But how is a conflict experienced by the people? By the perpetrators? By the victims? By the people who will never be at the table during peace talks? Rwanda did an interesting experiment of bringing perpetrators and victims together, trying to find modalities of forgiveness, modalities of reconciliation, listening to each other.

This was an attempt to get people to hear each other in spite of atrocity, and often dialogue practices are used to achieve this. It also helps to resist a single side of the story being told, and this is helpful because conflicts have many perspectives. It's hard, however, not to make a judgement.

Our professor says this is something that's difficult for everyone, herself included. There's a constant tension between using one's own values to make sense of a situation but also getting critical distance. While being both a researcher and a practitioner can give you great insight, it also brings bias. Theorists like Galtung are also activists and have their own value-based agenda that makes its way into their work.

Even when multiple stories are brought together, it doesn't mean that they will be memorialized together. Truth and reconciliation commissions try to keep memory in the public eye, and often use memorials to that effect, and in some places (like South Africa or El Salvador) the names of different victim groups are placed together or separately.

Then there's the issue of memory (along with narratives and storytelling) being politicized or used for gain. Rwanda has seen issues like these, as has the former Yugoslavia and USSR. The political use of memory is something to keep watch for.

Often questions of morality and ethics (especially through idealization or demonization of particular actors) get tied up with stories and storytelling, with some groups being romanticized and others villainized. This is another way that complex situations become simplified, and if it's our communities producing moral judgements, it can be hard to gain the distance necessary to weigh them critically.

Competing moral systems are also something to factor into peace work. Well-intentioned practitioners who desire peace can nonetheless fight with each other about what vision of peace they think is moral or not. Groups like Boko Haram or the Taliban have a moral compass far different than most liberal nation-states. Even within the western liberal system, progressive and traditional moralities offer very different answers to how societies should be built and what leads to lasting peace. Our professor frames the idea of objective morality as problematic (not everyone in the class agrees with her), but nevertheless says that we have a moral impulse as humans that we can start with.

To close, she returns to the word "violence."

We use the word in different ways: it escalates, it comes in cycles, it can be memetic, we can mirror it, it's on a continuum. It can be non-linear, destructive, occasionally productive or a social tool. Some say structural violence will beget physical violence, often along lines of race, glass, gender, ethnicity, land allocation (often itself ideological) or along some other societal fault line that people accept as normal. And, because it's normalized, it's remains invisible. Working with structural violence requires training ourselves to see it. She claims that this is often harder when we're a member of a privileged group.

They say that violence spawns fear, and that fear can spark the capacity or potential for violence. Many people fear violence, along with the death and destruction it can bring. Violent patterns can be encouraged by symbols, ideologies and belief systems. Violence is claimed to be legitimate or illegitimate, and those who use it can be called rebels, freedom fighters, rogues, patriots or belligerents. Violence can be deemed necessary, unnecessary, visible, gratuitous, senseless, planned, strategic. And each of these words has its own connotation and we need to be aware of how people perceive them.

And for our professor, there's also the category of everyday violence, a kind that expresses itself in malnutrition, poverty, diseases that could be eradicated, maternal death rates, systemic economic oppression, humiliation, invisible or cultural genocide. Extending definitions of violence to include these is controversial, but for her they allow us to look at these issues in a new light. And, hopefully, to find resources creative solutions to deal with them.