Peace (44 page)

Global Trends in Armed Conflict, 1946–2006

Monty Marshall and his colleagues at the Center for Systemic Peace have been conducting quantitative-qualitative studies with some startling, some reinforcing and some inspiring results. Using extensive data from 126 countries, they have found that since 1991, the levels of both intra- and international warfare have declined dramatically, falling from their peaks at the end of the Cold War by over 60 percent, as the graph shows above. According to their studies, one in every three countries was
engaged in armed conflict in 1991, dropping to less than 15 percent in 2006.
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In terms of the onset of new warfare, intra-national conflicts have outnumbered international ones in the same period, fluctuating between one and thirteen. Rates of intra-national onsets are near unchanged, while international rates have been cut in half. As of 2007, 24 states are directly affected by ongoing wars, half of which have lasted more than ten years. The three longest are Myanamr (60 years), India (56) and Israel (43). The studies also show that while poor
er
countries are more likely to be at war, the highest levels of warfare are not in the poor
est
countries, but those in the quintile just above because they have more means to engage in it. The researchers also note that the increase in displaced persons since the onset of the Cold War is due to the inability of countries in protracted wars to meet basic needs and a breakdown in distinction between combatants and civilians. However, one could add that in countries like the US, being
at
war is experientially dissociated from being
in
war for the vast majority of its residents, who are thereby made more complacent.

Another study, the Global Peace Index by the British financial journal
The Economist'
s Intelligence Unit and a large international team of peace researchers and statisticians, is the first to rank countries worldwide according to their peacefulness and its drivers. Using data from 121 states, the Index considers both internal factors such as crime, homicide and imprisonment rates and respect for human rights, and external ones such as arms sales and production and troop deployment. Norway, New Zealand, Denamrk, Ireland and Japan are the top five most peaceful states according to the study; Nigeria, Russia, Israel, Sudan and Iraq are at the bottom. Striking features are that both Japan and Russia are in the G-8, and that states with unquestionable twentieth-century war credentials like Ireland and Germany are near the top of the list. The US ranks 96
^{th –}
just above Iran. The Index found that peace is correlated to high levels of incomes, schooling, regional integration and government transparency. Its President says the aim is to provide a “quantitative measure of peacefulness that is comparable over time,” hoping it “will inspire and influence world leaders and governments to further action.”
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What the Index depicts but does not sufficiently account for are violence, peace and peacemaking internal to new and established states that have been the result or cause of democratic-capitalist systems. Three emerging areas of peace research and practice that do are the management and resolution of ethnic, secessionist and post-autocratic conflicts, which are in most cases intertwined, but can be split for heuristic purposes and to expose a lack of foresight that has cost millions of lives.

While some academics have gone so far as to call battles on the scale of the world wars things of the past, few disagree that small-scale armed
conflicts are and will be the norm. Since 1989, among the most prevalent of these have been ethnic, which have proven hard to resolve in part because they have such a diversity of causes. Racial, kinship, linguistic, religious, lifestyle and location characteristics have all been linked to ethnic conflicts from Rwanda and Burundi to Georgia and Azerbaijan. Common denominators include ascriptive and exclusivist, subjective and objective cultural traits defined or magnified at the whims of war leaders who manipulate them to mobilize sometimes already peaceful populations. Two dominant ways to deal with such conflicts by national and international bodies have been reducing or eliminating differences by forced migration, new borders, assimilation, genocide, etc., and/or by managing them through arbitration, third-party intervention such as the UN, reconciliation, incentives, etc.
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Obviously, some of these methods are as far from peaceful as possible, which underscores the urgent need for more creative thinking, critical dialogue and concerted action in this still gladiatorial arena.

The aims and bases of secessionist movements are usually clearer: the separation from one nation and the formation of another, based on predefined cultural, historical, ideological and/or geographic characteristics. In some cases, notably Czechoslovakia's “Velvet Revolution” from the USSR and its “Velvet Divorce” into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, democratic and diplomatic reform through intra- and international systems has successfully met the needs of the parties involved with little violence. Václav Havel, the playwright and President of the unified state between these two events as well as the Czechs afterwards, asserted:

Without free, self-respecting, and autonomous citizens there can be no free and independent nations. Without internal peace, that is, peace among citizens and between the citizens and the state, there can be no guarantee of external peace.
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Another example is the Quiet Revolution in the French-languagedominated Canadian province of Quebec, which has unsuccessfully held two referendums on separation without resorting to state-sponsored violence, with intermittent talks on reconfiguring the confederation. However, there has also been no shortage of violence by secessionists and the states from which they wish to secede, particularly when population bases are split between two existing states: Kurds caught between Turkey and Iraq, and Basques between France and Spain, fit this model. Violence also erupts when existing states refuse to take the requests of the aspiring ones seriously, as between Chechens and Russia and potentially between China and Taiwan. In these cases, it is the neglect of established political processes rather than their absence, the inflexibility of participants in conjunction with their desperation, and the intricacies of
reaching multi-lateral agreements – not their impossibility – which makes peace through succession or more autonomy difficult.

Post-autocratic violence, peace and peacemaking are very delicate topics because they are either ongoing or in the works, and they stir up deep-seated beliefs. Two recent cases, the former Yugoslavia and Iraq, are the most debated today, and the closest historical parallels in peace terms are ancient Sparta and Athens. The six federated republics of Yugoslavia, formed with the support of both the communist and capitalist blocs after the Second World War, were ruled with an iron fist by strongman Tito until his death in 1980. His oppressive peace – still the most liberal of any communist country during the Cold War – defines the term in modern times, stifling dissent and repressing rebels in the republics while providing for them. His contributions to the Non-Aligned Movement and strategic alliances outside NATO and the WPO run alongside these efforts. Tito's twenty-two chosen replacements proved unable to do what he did. Many observers held that this inability was nonetheless a positive change, even when ethnic nationalists in the republics began “cleansing” (i.e., massacring) themselves of each other in the early 1990s under the direction of elected officials. In less than a decade, Tito's unitive oppressive peace had disintegrated through democracy into divisive war, after which six new states emerged, aided by UN mediators and sanctions as well as NATO bombs, and Yugoslavia is no more. In this case, unpeaceful forces internal to the state were at work, in others it has also been those from outside.

Saddam Hussein's regime began in 1979 when he assumed control of the Iraqi Ba'ath party. Once supported by Soviets, Iraq now received US aid against Iran's new Islamic regime. Hussein used it to boost oil production as well as the army, which he used to contain Kurdish and Shiite rebels after UN-brokered peace with Iran, making his rule more oppressive than peaceful. After invading Kuwait in 1991, he rejected UN calls for withdrawal. A coalition led by the US quickly forced him to. He was not removed from power and continued to contain the internal revolts while refusing to adhere to peace terms like UN arms inspection, which led to more US bombings. After September 11, 2001, President George Bush declared war on terror, discussed below. Within a year this was extended to depose with NATO forces the elected Islamic Taliban party in Afghanistan, which the US supported against the USSR, and another to eliminate weapons of mass destruction never found, brushing aside UN and international opposition. The 2003 “Summer of Protest” included millions around the world, to no avail. Hussein was captured and killed, but the invading, predominantly Anglo-American forces have remained as haphazard occupiers. Conflicts between Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds that Hussein was able to contain have become a civil war protracted by outside
interference. “The invaders came with a minutely detailed war plan,” which has since been changed several times, “but without a peace plan other than protecting oil and other critical facilities.”
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How the war in Iraq will ultimately be resolved will undoubtedly be a defining moment in the twenty-first-century history of peace.

As the peace metrics above show, the UN has made great strides towards the reduction of international conflicts, as its Charter mandates. But the sovereignty and veto issues discussed in
Chapter 10
, compounded by tactical non-payment of dues, has rendered UN performance in the face of intra-national conflicts poor, to be polite, and impotent in stopping or preventing non-sanctioned wars by the Big Five and their allied organizations. Declaring the year 2000 as one of a “Culture of Peace” was more a public relations measure than a practical act aimed at creating one. The fact that the number of UN peacekeeping missions since 1989, many geared towards intra-national peace though by invitation only, out numbers the total of the fifty years before is an indication both of its willingness to meet these challenges and their enormities. The UN Peace-Building Commission, established in 2005, was a year later invested with a Peace-Building Fund aimed solely at “reconstruction, institution-building and sustainable development, in countries emerging from conflict” – in an advisory role.
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That NATO has taken up more peacekeeping than war-making missions in the same period also suggests that international bodies, even strictly military ones, have begun to realize that in incremental steps: conflict management leads to conflict resolution leads to peacemaking leads to peace-enforcement leads to peacekeeping leads to peace-building leads to peace.

Threatening Opportunities: Terrorism, Technology, New Media and Peace

Can peace be made or maintained with terrorists and rogue states? This is a pressing and in some circles unpopular question facing the world today – but it is far from the only one. Terrorism, like globalization, is not something new but which has in correlation with it increased and intensified. Maybe even more than ethnic conflicts, a diversity of causes and effects have made individual, group and state-sponsored terrorism and rogue states difficult to understand, let alone non-violently transform into peace. Indeed, terrorists and rogue states challenge principles and practices of peace in ways few occurrences in history have. One of many general definitions of terrorism serves our purpose here, which is to note some perils to and imperatives for peace and peacemaking that terrorism
in some of its current forms presents: “the threat or use of violence, often against the civilian population, to achieve political or social ends, to intimidate opponents, or to publicize grievances.”
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That acts of terror have not yet triggered a third world war is a clear indication of how far world peace has come, but that they still occur and can still be a trigger is an equally clear indication of how far there is to go.

The highly problematic axiom “one man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter” can be extended to peacemakers insofar as Nobel Peace Prize laureates such as Nelson Mandela, to name one, have at different points in their careers labelled both. But the axiom's underscoring of perspectives in determining who is what is universally valid. Teenagers toting machineguns in high schools or refugee camps may or may not be terrorists, but they are as great a danger to micro-level peace as atomic bombs are to macro. Idiosyncrasies of individual terrorists not directly motivated by an affiliation with a group or common cause make their acts of violence hard to prevent, deter or diffuse because they are hard to predict. Peacemaking with them is equally impractical because their acts of violence tend to start and end quickly, even if planned a long time in advance, and often their aims preclude the possibility. With theories and practices of pacific violence prevention still in their infancy, it may be fruitful along with personal causes and situational determinants that have been identified as manipulatable to investigate metrics of inner peace and how it can be monitored and enhanced as a means of removing motives of individual terrorists. Otherwise, it may be that “the militant is the one who best expresses the life of the multitude: the agent of biopolitical production and resistance” because some continue to hold that “militancy today is a positive, constructive, and innovative activity.”
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