ULI451U-CONFLICT RESOLUTION
Chapter 7: Local Actors and Peacebuilding
Introduction
Since the end of the Cold War, peacebuilding has gained a broader meaning and area of implementation. While peacebuilding had been earlier understood as “ keeping warring parties from returning to the conflict” in a limited sense, it is now seen as “addressing the root causes of conflict including promoting development” Now the following interrelated principles are followed by the practitioners:
1. 1.participation, 2. inclusion, 3. 3.empowerment, 4. 4.cultural sensitivity, and 5. 4.equity
Participation and inclusion, in general terms, refer to bringing and deciding who to elect as stakeholders for the most effective negotiation and decision-making processes for active engagement.
Empowerment indicates the balancing of the conflicting sides and eradicating asymmetries among them by contributing to their technical capacity and facilitating their access to resources to maximize the effectiveness of all parties and the proceeding of negotiations.
Cultural sensitivity refers to showing respect to existing local methods since culturally familiar and appropriate practices and solutions will more likely guarantee sustainable peace.
Equity, which is different from equality, signifies the equal and just treatment to all parties with respect, time and attention regardless of their capacities.
All conflicts, whether intrastate or interstate, are ultimately ended locally, and the establishment of sustainable peace depends on the local actors’ will, desire, and capability. The determination and capacity of the local actors ultimately establish a sustainable peace since they remain and reside in post-conflict areas.
The effectiveness of external forces and aids, including “donor states and international organizations, such as the United Nations [UN] and its agencies, the World Trade Organization, and the World Bank” will always be limited to and determined by the participation, inclusion, and empowerment of local actors.
Local ownership emerges as a key feature of post-conflict reconstruction and peacebuilding processes. The participation and inclusion of local actors along with equity and cultural sensitivity make peace projects and their implementation more legitimate and sustainable. The most idealistic and common tenets of local ownership are the promotion of bottom-up strategies and the civilization of conflict management by strengthening, fostering, and encouraging local actors even though the implementation of these doctrines remains limited in practice in most cases.
Local Ownership of Peacebuilding
Post-conflict reconstruction and peacebuilding refer to a process that is under high risk for several reasons:
the number of actors with conflicting interests and policies is higher during the post-conflict peacebuilding process, compared to those involved in the ongoing conflict phases. The effectiveness of sustainable peace depends, first and foremost, on the participation and inclusion of various actors, both domestic and transnational.
1. the disintegration of states and their institutions may elicit threats to post-conflict peacebuilding. The exclusion of ethnic diasporas might jeopardize post-conflict reconstruction while their collaboration during peacebuilding also contributes to the establishment of a sustainable order. 2. the conflict might weaken not only the capacity of the state structures but also local communities. Post-conflict reconstruction and peacebuilding processes give both domestic actors and the international community the opportunity for the just (re-)distribution of resources and societal development. 3. some beneficiary groups with specific interests, including subnational and transnational non- governmental communities and institutions that have access and control over the local and international resources, might impede the delivery of post-conflict reconstruction implementations and favor political deadlocks that would buttress their interests during post- conflict processes. 4. the legitimacy of foreign actors’ presence in post- conflict countries is always perceived skeptically and questioned by local actors.
What is Local Ownership?
Despite its importance in peacebuilding, local ownership has remained a vague and ambiguous concept. Some scholars define local ownership as a mere practical strategy for action. In contrast, others see it as a principle directed against the domination by external partners in foreign-funded development cooperation and peacebuilding activities in an attempt to shift the balance of power in favor of local actors. In short, local ownership should be seen as a power transferring to the local actors, which would grant them the final decision concerning peacebuilding processes, including planning, management, and implementation, rather than bestowing a participatory role or consulting them.
This power shift does not also mean a complete abandoning of outsider actors during the post-conflict reconstruction and peacebuilding process. The definition of local ownership has been shaped by the documents of OECD, the World Bank, and the UN. Local ownership refers to home-grown solutions to conflicts and for the
partnership to be locally driven. Local ownership is essential in post-conflict reconstruction and peacebuilding processes for several reasons. First, settlements do not guarantee the end of violence among conflict sides, and both hostile reactions and collaborative gestures emerge in the post-conflict process. The sustainability of peace depends on the participation and inclusion of formerly conflicting parties. These principles are an indication of local actors’ commitment, responsibility, and consent. Second, the states, central authorities, state-actors in provincial, municipal and village levels, non- governmental organizations, and also local communities could be debilitated during conflicts. In this case, the role and involvement of the international community and foreign actors are inevitable. Third, the external intervention, which aims at empowering local actors for peacebuilding and sustainable peace, is always questioned by the host country’s citizens and institutions as an imposition and limitation to self-determination. Fourth, local ownership poses two other dilemmas before the international community and foreign forces. On the one hand, legitimacy requires not only approval and permission by the central authority of the host country but also the inclusion and consent of wider layers of society. On the other hand, giving priority to concrete outcomes and rapid reconstruction of the order, and also considering local actors as prone to corruption, partisan politics and violent means, external actors show a tendency to install normative priorities and standards of the international community in the shortest time possible, at the expense of cultural sensitivity and equity. This process would eventually be regarded as an imposition by the host country and local actors, and jeopardize the peacebuilding process in the long run. Fifth, the most ideal and practical projects for post-conflict recovery and peacebuilding are the prioritization of home-grown solutions and bottom-up strategies while empowering local actors’ capacities and nurturing civil society.
Local Involvement in Peacebuilding
Local Capacity-Building and the Involvement of Local Actors in Peacebuilding
Local involvement and peacebuilding strategies are highly interrelated processes. First and foremost, local peacebuilding strategies are formulated by local actors’ capacity, desire, and will to get involved in peacebuilding projects. In this respect, reaching, empowering, and convincing local actors for participation and inclusion becomes an essential strategy. Once the stakeholders, beneficiaries, collaborators, and partners are defined, the international community and the host state can design peacebuilding strategies. Since these projects are dependent on the empowerment of local actors, the international community can delineate specific strategies, including the reconstruction of the state capacity and its institutions to provide the distribution of essential needs such as security, justice, health, education, and infrastructure. It also involves local actors’ empowerment,
including the state actors, so that they have sufficient capacity to engage in peacebuilding processes and maintain a peaceful order to prevent further conflicts.
Operational Challenges and Priorities for the Local Involvement
It should be remembered that the underlying objective of local capacity building is to establish a self-sustainable state mechanism and developed society capable of maintaining a peaceful order to which outsider actors could shift power for maintaining it. Most common strategies applied by the international actors to build local capacity and local actors’ involvement in post-conflict peacebuilding encompass aid donation; consolidation of security and judicial bodies; re-building of physical infrastructure; training and equipping of security, judicial, medical and educator personnel; and giving technical consultancy services and assistance. On the other hand, these top-down strategies should be incorporated with bottom-up strategies that encompass local dynamics, values, and efforts. Hence, a sense of ownership and legitimacy, which directly contribute to the sustainability of peace, could be ensured.
The Role of Civil Society and NGOs in Conflict Resolution and Peacebuilding
Civil society is a political, social, cultural, and economic plane on which every individual and group can freely organize and pursue their interests and goals. Civil society is expected to encourage local actors to take responsibility for home-grown solutions to conflicts and grass-roots peace projects. During these processes, local actors with shared values, interests, and purposes are encouraged to participate in the institutional design of peace. For local actors, institutionalization should be a primary goal for inclusion in peacebuilding processes. Civil society’s inclusion in peacebuilding processes can be measured through the establishment and involvement of NGOs with specific objectives. The activities of NGOs are considered legitimate, given their normative and practical roles as well as their perceived distance from the interests of a specific state. The involvement of NGOs in peacebuilding processes is essential because of their ability to administer provisions from inside the conflict zone. NGOs’ roles in peacebuilding can be delineated through service delivery and advocacy.
Bottom-Up Peacebuilding Strategies
Bottom-up strategies and mechanisms constitute key components for sustainable peace. Both international and domestic policy makers usually tend to treat societies as uniform and homogeneous structures and ignore local dynamics that potentially strengthen or transform political, economic, and social relations that determine peoples’ lives.
Numerous scholars, who carry on researches and analyses on post-conflict peacebuilding, agree that local-level and bottom-up strategies contribute to further peace projects.
One of the most prominent issues that local-level bottom- up strategies have proved successful is truth-finding. In this juncture, local-level bottom-up mechanisms become more vital to measure post-conflict societies’ situation and experience of conflict while offering essential precursors or provisions for national and international peace projects. Bottom-up post-conflict reconstruction and peacebuilding strategies also facilitate involving more local community members, promote local-agency, and also diminish patronage and corruption.
Women, Youth and Media in Conflict Resolution and Peacebuilding
Even though women’s involvement and position in peacebuilding are encouraged and strengthened discursively, these goals remain limited in practice. One of the most critical issues during and after conflicts is the vulnerability of women. However, discourses and projects concerning women’s role and participation in peacebuilding are highly marginalizing and serve to re- construct patriarchal power relations in societies. It should be noted that conflict and post-conflict phases re-distribute gender roles and power relations. Women become laborers, leaders, and activists .Taken all together, women should be allowed to express their needs freely and decide their roles instead of being imposed on tailored missions by both international and local actors in post-conflict reconstruction and peacebuilding.
Similarly, the role and involvement of youth in conflict resolution and peacebuilding remain limited. In the last decades, education and pedagogy have become one of the most primary focuses of the international community and the states since conflicts, and post-conflict peacebuilding processes reveal the importance of youth participation and interaction. Projects that promote the involvement of young populations among conflicting sides have become efficient instruments of peacebuilding. Other critical issues concerning young members of the societies are the re-integration and education of child combatants and children born of war. Last but not least, the media is expected to transmit and share impartial information while also uncovering stories of the needy groups from conflict. The media is anticipated to stay neutral to the ideologist and propagandist lenses of any actor involved in the conflicts despite the pressure, censorship, and even threats.
Case Study: Cyprus Peacebuilding Process
Cyprus is an island which has different ethnic groups, mainly Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots. The island had been ruled by different states until 1960. The late two rulers were the Ottoman Empire, which controlled the island for three centuries from 1571 to 1878, and the British colonial rule between 1878 and 1960.
During the British colonial rule, the Greek Cypriots formed a resistance group to gain independence from the
British and to unite with mainland Greece. This ideology known as enosis eventually turned into an ethnic conflict.
After London and Zurich conferences in 1960 Cyprus was granted independence for the first time in its history. But the Establishment Treaty that established the independence permitted Turkey and Greece to hold military staff on the island; and Treaty of Guarantee that forbade any attempt to unite the island with any of the motherlands.
The establishment of independence in Cyprus with these treaties is an explicit example of third-party arbitration as a conflict resolution method. Constitution, was based on the power-sharing of the two communities. With all these features, power-sharing, autonomy, proportionality, and veto right, the system was a consociational democracy. However, the externally designed and imposed system did not work in Cyprus . In the following three years, inter- communal relations deteriorated until an ethnic conflict blew out by 1963, which ended the consociational system and left the Turkish Cypriot minority outside the system, and inter-ethnic conflict continued to increase. In order to resolve the conflict, the UN was involved in 1968, and peace negotiations have been going on since then.
Turkey intervened in 1974 with two operations using its legitimate right to intervene from the Treaty of Guarantee. The current situation in Cyprus is a divided island with two ethnic communities remaining in different parts of the island, Greek Cypriots in South and Turkish Cypriots in North.
With 1977 and 1979 High-Level Agreements, both sides agreed that the peace negotiations would continue and accepted the fact that the island is bi-communal and bi- zonal. In 2004 Annan peace plan was accepted by the Turkish community, but rejected by the Greek community. The inter-communal talks are still on the process under the auspices of the UN within this framework of a bi-communal and bi-zonal federal state with consociational features.
Resolving the Conflict with the Involvement of Local Actors
The consociational system, built-in 1960, could be regarded as a suitable conflict resolution method. However, it did not last long, and ethnic conflict persisted, since the post-conflict peacebuilding projects were designed and imposed by the third-party actors.
The Greek Cypriots maintained a majoritarian view regarding the Turkish Cypriots as a minority. Hence, without any change in the perception of the people, it was difficult for the new system to survive for a long time. In the end, three years after the establishment of the consociational system, the Greek Cypriot political elites changed the constitution to a majoritarian system, erasing the equal rights of Turkish Cypriots and leaving them minority status. As a result, the relations between the
communities grew tense, and an inter-communal conflict erupted, which led to the 1974 Turkish intervention.
The Cyprus experience has proved that without any change in the perception of the people and leaders, establishing a long-lasting and stable peace is challenging. To ensure the durability and sustainability of peace, the involvement of local actors is essential. Working at the grassroots level, with the involvement of civil society, can increase the mutual trust among the communities, individuals and groups from both communities are required to contact each other through confidence-building projects. “Othering” is grown with prejudices, and they stem from not actually knowing the “other,” but creating an image of the other in the minds. To overcome these negative images, real contact among real people is needed. These can start from minimal scope projects and can spill over to more expanded areas and people. Such projects help to overcome prejudices and create a kind of collective identity like Cypriot-ness and will open up possibilities of living together in harmony.