19.2: From Peace Treaties to Peace Processes - Conflict and Peace in Historical Perspective

Here we will focus on the idea that peace in interstate or international relations was, for most of western history from the Roman empire to World War I, understood as the outcome of armed conflict in which one side conceded to the other’s superior force or coercive capacity. This resulted in asymmetrical peace agreements or treaties, where actual concessions were made by the party that surrendered to the will of the victor. The result was, with grievances unreconciled, the losing party had every motive to mobilize for a future conflict that might lead to a victorious or “different” outcome. Of course in cases where the asymmetry of power between the victorious and submissive party was so great that no future overturning of the outcome seems possible, the result was simply to institutionalize oppression, which creates its own set of problems while not setting the stage for a future armed conflict.

War was a social practice in a society of western, bureaucratic states. Peace treaties were agreements based on surrender and asymmetry. Where possible, losing parties often mobilized for future armed conflict (war) in order to renegotiate an outcome more favorable to their interests and objectives.

World War II changed that. For one thing, of course, unprecedented atrocities perpetrated against civilians who were primary targets, not collateral damage in both the Holocaust and the use of nuclear weapons by the US against civilian population centers in Japan. These atrocities no doubt also contributed to the other thing that changed the way western and western-style states handled the terms of peace that ended the armed conflict. For the first time, they made justice in the form of a judicial process a part of the peace process. Yes, it was a judicial process predicated on retributive and punitive norms, but it was not entirely a set of terms dictated to the losing parties by the winning parties, although it was also mostly that. Peace agreements ‘end’ conflicts without necessarily resolving them and definitely without transforming them. A peace process that includes provisions for participation, for utilizing a judicial process to assign responsibility, for public witnessing of accusations, evidence, convictions, and punishments, this was all new. And the provisions also allowed for continuing the judicial process through domestic courts even after the international tribunals were disbanded.

This does not in itself constitute conflict resolution, management, or transformation, but it did usher in a new approach to the settlement of violent conflict by adding justice to the process. As a contemporary field of study and practice, conflict resolution applied principles of negotiation more widely practiced in labor relations to international and interstate relations. You know the names of the conflict resolution pioneers: John Burton’s human needs theory and his two-track diplomacy (Burton, 1990a, 1990b, 1993, 1997); Louis Kriesberg’s Constructive Conflicts (1998, 2011); Lewis Richardson’s early models of arms races aimed at achieving an intervention to de-escalate before reaching the outbreak of armed conflict (1960), Anatol Rappaport’s application of mathematical biology to questions of conflict, Ted Gurr’s theory of revolution and civil violence, Rudolph Rummel’s quantitative analysis of conflict, the Causes of War project at the University of Michigan and others (Singer & Small, 1982).

Conflict resolution is a rather broad term that, at least initially, meant negotiated peace in which all parties to a conflict came away feeling that their grievances had been addressed. Conflict management is more concerned with channeling, as Kriesberg puts it, constructive conflict. Conflict is a normal feature of social life, so the challenge is to channel or manage conflict without resort to violence.

But what do we mean by conflict transformation? One of the most prolific contemporary conflict theorists, John Paul Lederach had this to say in 2003:

I have been using the phrase “conflict transformation” since the late 1980s. I remember that timeframe because it came on the heels of intensive experience in Central America. When I arrived there my teaching vocabulary was filled with the terminology of conflict resolution and management. But I soon found that many of my Latin colleagues had questions, concerns, even suspicions about what such concepts meant.

Their worry was that quick solutions to deep social-political problems would not change things in any significant way. “Conflicts happen for a reason,” they would say. “Is this resolution idea just another way to cover up the changes that are really needed?” Their concerns were consistent with my own experience.

The ideas that inform much of my work emphasizes peace as embedded in justice, the building of right relationships and social structures through a radical respect for human rights, and nonviolence as way of life. (Lederach, 2003, n.p.).

Owen Frazer, Center for Security Studies in Zurich and Lakhdar Ghettas of the Cordoba Foundation of Geneva put it this way:

Conflict transformation is about transforming the way that societies deal with moving them from violent to nonviolent means. Its goal is to build just, sustainable societies that resolve differences non–violently. To achieve this it must address the direct and structural causes of conflict. It assumes that conflict is inevitable aspect of social change same time it assumes that the way with conflict need not be violent reason violent conflict emerges or because parties do not have agreed mechanisms for resolving conflict non-violently. (Frazer & Ghettas, 2013, p. 6)