Cultures of governance and peace: A comparison of EU and Indian theoretical and policy approaches 9781526117588

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Cultures of governance and peace

Cultures of governance and peace A comparison of EU and Indian theoretical and policy approaches Edited by J. Peter Burgess, Oliver P. Richmond and Ranabir Samaddar

MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2016 While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN  978 07190 9955 7  hardback First published 2016 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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Contents

List of contributors List of abbreviations

page vii xiii

Introduction: Cultures of governance and conflict resolution in the EU and India J. Peter Burgess, Oliver P. Richmond and Ranabir Samaddar 1  Investigating the relationship between governance and conflict resolution in India and the EU Sandra Pogodda, Oliver P. Richmond and Roger Mac Ginty 2  Government of peace and resistive subjectivities: autonomy, ethnicity and gender in North-East India and Bosnia-Herzegovina Atig Ghosh and Elena B. Stavrevska 3  Political economy of conflict and peace: governmentality of participation and strategic veto in Bihar and Jharkhand, India Amit Prakash 4  Agency, autonomy and compliance in (post-)conflict situations: perspectives from Jammu and Kashmir, Cyprus and Bosnia-Herzegovina Elena B. Stavrevska, Sumona DasGupta, Birte Vogel and Navnita Chadha Behera 5  Peace via social justice and/or security Roger Mac Ginty and Paula Banerjee 6  The local is everywhere: a post-colonial reassessment of cultural sensitivity in conflict governance Kristoffer Lidén and Elida K. U. Jacobsen

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7  Everyday resistance to conflict resolution measures and opportunities for systemic conflict transformation Janel B. Galvanek and Hans J. Giessmann

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8   Peacebuilding in India: Meghalaya’s experience Priyankar Upadhyaya and Anjoo Sharan Upadhyaya

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Index

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Contributors

Paula Banerjee specialises in issues of conflict, peace and displacement in South Asia. She has published extensively on issues of borders in South Asia. She has written and edited fourteen books and multiple articles including a special volume in Journal of Borderlands Studies entitled Women in Indian Borderlands. Her book Borders, Histories, Existences: Gender and Beyond (2010) has been widely quoted. Paula Banerjee is an international editorial board member of a number of journals including the Oxford Journal of Refugee Studies, and editor of Refugee Watch. She is the current President of the International Association of Studies in Forced Migration and the Calcutta Research Group. She presently teaches at the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies, University of Calcutta. Navnita Chadha Behera is Professor at the Department of Political Science, University of Delhi. She has more than fifteen years’ research experience on Kashmir, and has authored two books: State, Identity and Violence: Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh (2002); Demystifying Kashmir (2007), which have been rated among the top non-fiction books in India. Her other research interests include IR of South Asia, in particular, issues of war, conflict and political violence and international security. J. Peter Burgess is Professor and Chair in Geopolitics of Risk, École Normale Supérieure, Paris and Adjunct Professor, Centre for Advanced Security Theory, University of Copenhagen. His research and publications concern the meeting place between culture and politics in particular in Europe, focusing most recently on the theory and ethics of security and insecurity. His most recent book is The Ethical Subject of Security: Geopolitical Risk and the Threat against Europe (2011). Sumona DasGupta is a political scientist based in New Delhi who writes on democracy, governance, peace and conflict issues in South Asia and India.  Jammu and Kashmir on which she has conducted extensive

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research for fifteen years have been her longstanding area of interest. She is currently visiting Senior Fellow with Participatory Research in Asia (PRIA), and is chair of the international advisory group of International Conflict Research Institute, University of Ulster, UK. Dr DasGupta was the lead PRIA researcher for the project on cultures of governance and conflict resolution in Europe and India (2011–13); and in 2014 was Visiting Fellow with the South Asia programme of S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore where she continued to work on issues related to Kashmir. Publications include: Citizen Initiatives and Democratic Engagements: Experiences from India (2013). She is currently working on a book on Kashmir. Janel B. Galvanek is Project Manager at the Berghof Foundation. She is currently working on a research project on traditional and nontraditional forms of conflict resolution in Liberia, Colombia and NorthEast India and is managing the dialogue project involving the High Peace Council of Afghanistan. Previously, she was a researcher for the EU-funded CORE project, and also has research experience in Liberia on the reintegration of child soldiers. Her other topics of interest include the interaction between state and non-state actors during conflict; engaging local actors in conflict transformation; and the global phenomenon of child soldiers, with a regional focus on sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. She holds a master’s degree in peace research and security policy from Hamburg University, and an MA in German studies from Georgetown University in Washington, DC. Atig Ghosh is a member of the Calcutta Research Group and teaches history at Visva-Bharati University, India. He has published variously on the political economy and culture of nineteenth-century Bengal, statelessness in South Asia, accumulation under post-colonial capitalism, and surveillance technologies of the post-colonial Indian state. Hans J. Giessmann is an executive director of the Berghof Foundation, prior to which he was Deputy Director of the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg, where he still has an affiliation as a professor and is a member of the social science faculty. He is also on the Board of Directors for the European master’s programme in human rights and democratisation. Since 2009 he has been a member of both the Global Agenda Council on ‘Terrorism’ at the World Economic Forum and of the European Expert Network on Terrorism. He is also a member of the Advisory Board for Civilian Crisis Prevention at the German Federal Foreign Office. Professor Giessmann



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is co-editor of Security and Peace and Connections. He has published, edited or co-edited over twenty books and numerous articles. He graduated from the Humboldt-University in Berlin and holds doctorates in both philosophy and political science. Elida K. U. Jacobsen is a Senior Researcher at the Peace Research Institute Oslo. Her research is situated in critical security studies, postcolonial studies, gender studies and peace and development research. She is also the academic manager of the undergraduate course in Peace and Conflict Studies by Oslo and Akershus University College, which takes place in Pondicherry, India. Recent publications include: ‘Unique identification: Inclusion and surveillance in the Indian biometric assemblage’, Security Dialogue, 43:5 (2012); ‘The plurality of peace, nonviolence and peace works in India’, co-authored with Samrat S. Kumar, in Upadhyaya et al. (eds), Peace and Conflict: The South Asian Experience (2014); and ‘The cross-colonization of finance and security through lists: Banking policing in the UK and India’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 34(1) co-authored with Anthony Amicelle (2016). Kristoffer Lidén is a Senior Researcher at the Peace Research Institute Oslo, working on the ethics of peacebuilding, security and humanitarianism within the disciplines of philosophy and IR. His publications include: ‘Building peace between global and local politics: On the cosmopolitical ethics of liberal peacebuilding’, International Peacekeeping, 16:5 (2009); ‘Peace, self-governance and international engagement: From neocolonial to post-colonial peacebuilding’, in Shahrbanou Tadjsbakhsh (ed.), Rethinking the Liberal Peace: External Models and Local Alternatives (2011); ‘In love with a lie? On the social and political preconditions for global peacebuilding governance’, Peacebuilding, 1:1 (2013) and ‘EU support to civil society organizations in conflictridden countries: A governance perspective from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cyprus and Georgia’, International Peacekeeping, 23:2, 274–301 (2016) (with Nona Mikhelidze, Elena B. Stavrevska and Birte Vogel). Roger Mac Ginty is Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute, and in the Department of Politics, University of Manchester. Recent books include: the edited volume Handbook on Peacebuilding (2013); International Peacebuilding and Local Resistance: Hybrid Forms of Peace (2011). He co-edits Peacebuilding and edits the Palgrave book series, ‘Rethinking Political Violence’.

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Sandra Pogodda is Lecturer in Peace and Conflict Studies in the Department of Politics at the University of Manchester. Sandra completed her PhD in International Relations at the University of Cambridge as a Marie Curie Fellow before joining the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, the United States Institute of Peace and the University of St Andrews as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow. Her research focuses on state formation processes in the revolutionary societies of the Arab region; resistance movements; revolutionary challenges to peace and conflict studies; and critical development studies. Among her publications are two edited volumes: Post-Liberal Peace Transitions (2016) and the Palgrave Handbook of Disciplinary and Regional Approaches to Peace (2016), both co-edited with Oliver Richmond. Amit Prakash is Professor and Chairperson at the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Amit Prakash holds a Ph.D. from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. His areas of research and publications include: politics of development and identity; critical governance studies (including governance indicators); conflict, governance and the state; democratic political process in India; policing in India; global governance. Publications include: Jharkhand: Politics of Development of Identity (2001); Politics and Internal Security (2004); Local Governance in India: Decentralisation and Beyond (co-edited with Niraja Gopal Jayal and Pradeep K Sharma, 2006). Oliver P. Richmond is Research Professor of IR, Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Manchester, UK. He is also International Professor, College of International Studies, Kyung Hee University, Korea and a Visiting Professor at the University of Tromso. Publications include: Failed Statebuilding: Intervention and the Dynamics of Peace Formation (2014); A Post-Liberal Peace (2011); Liberal Peace Transitions (with Jason Franks, 2009); Peace in IR (2008); The Transformation of Peace (2005/7). He is editor of the Palgrave book series, ‘Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies’, and co-editor of Peacebuilding. Ranabir Samaddar belongs to the critical school of thinking and is considered as one of the foremost theorists in the field of forced migration studies. He has worked extensively on issues of forced migration, the theory and practices of dialogue, nationalism and postcolonial statehood in South Asia, and new regimes of technological restructuring and labour control. The much-acclaimed The Politics of Dialogue was a culmination of his long work on justice, rights and peace. Publications include: The Materiality of Politics (two vols,



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2007) and The Emergence of the Political Subject (2009), which challenged some of the prevailing accounts of the birth of nationalism and the nation state, and signalled a new turn in critical post-colonial thinking. His co-authored work on new town and new forms of accumulation Beyond Kolkata: Rajarhat and the Dystopia of Urban Imagination (2013) takes forward urban studies in the context of post-colonial capitalism. He is currently the Distinguished Chair in Migration and Forced Migration Studies at the Calcutta Research Group. Elena B. Stavrevska holds a PhD in Political Science from the Central European University in Hungary. Her research and publications primarily focus on agency, temporality, intersubjectivity, and the space–class nexus in (post-)conflict societies. Empirically, her work has zeroed in on the peacebuilding initiatives in the Balkans. In addition, she has done extensive ethnographic research at multiple sites in Bosnia and Herzegovina and in Macedonia and has published on interpretive methodologies used in researching conflict-ridden societies. Elena has also contributed various op-ed pieces to outlets such as OpenDemocracy, Radio Free Europe and Eurozine. Beyond her academic work, she is involved in a number of activist groups. Anjoo Sharan Upadhyaya is a professor of political science at the Banaras Hindu University. In her forty-year career, she has served as Dean, Faculty of Social Sciences, Chair Department of Political Science and Director Centre for the Study of Nepal and also an adjunct professor at Malaviya Centre for Peace Research. She has carried out postdoctoral research at London School of Economics and Politics and Brown University and obtained an international diploma from Uppsala University. Professor Upadhyaya has also served as Scholar in Residence at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, DC, and Director (Research) at the Institute of Conflict Resolution and Ethnicity, UU/United Nations University, NI, UK. More recently she served as the foundational ICCR Chair at Tribhuvan University, Kathmandu. She has lectured and published extensively on issues of ethnicity, conflict resolution, gender and development. Priyankar Upadhyaya is Professor of Peace Studies and Chairholder of UNESCO Chair for Peace and Intercultural Understanding at Banaras Hindu University. He has carried out postdoctoral research at London University and holds a Ph.D. and M. Phil. from Jawaharlal Nehru University. He has gained many international awards/fellowships including the Guest Scholar Award of Woodrow Wilson Centre of International

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Scholars, Faculty Research Award, Canadian Government, Fulbright Award and Australia–India Council Senior Fellowship; he has served as adjunct/visiting professor at many North American and European universities. He also lectures at Indian academies including the National Defence College, Foreign Service Institute, Naval War Academy. His Peace and Conflict: South Asian Experience (2014) has been widely acclaimed. Birte Vogel is a postdoctoral researcher at the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute, University of Manchester, UK. She is managing editor of Peacebuilding and currently an executive member of the International Studies Association’s Peace Studies section. Birte’s research focuses on the interplay between international actors and local peace initiatives, and investigates the political space(s) available for non-state actors. She is particularly interested in spatial dimensions of peace and conflict, and the isolation of local peace communities. She is also interested in the connection between peace and economics on the micro-level.

Abbreviations

AFSPA AHC AJKPC APDP BiH COPPS CORE

Armed Forces Special Powers Act Autonomous Hill Councils All Jammu and Kashmir Panchayat Conference Association for Parents of Disappeared Persons Bosnia-Herzegovina Coordinating Office for Palestinian Police Support FP7 project Cultures of Governance and Conflict Resolution in Europe and India DDR Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration EIDHR European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights ENP European Neighbourhood Policy ERP European Recovery Programme EUMM European Union Monitoring Mission FBiH Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina IR International Relations J&K Jammu and Kashmir JLT Jharkhand Liberation Tigers JPC Jharkhand Prastuti Committee MCC Maoist Communist Centre NNC Naga National Council OBZM Occupy Buffer Zone Movement OHR Office of the High Representative PAM 2014 Peace Accords Matrix PRIs Panchayati Raj Institutions RCC Revolutionary Communist Centre RS Republika Srpska TPC-I Tritiya Prastuti Committee-I TPC-II Tritiya Prastuti Committee-II TRNC Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus

Introduction Cultures of governance and conflict resolution in the EU and India J. Peter Burgess, Oliver P. Richmond and Ranabir Samaddar

This volume is made up of chapters reflecting results from a European Union Framework project entitled ‘Cultures of Governance and Conflict Resolution in the EU and India’. In it the authors examine the intersection of governance, culture, and conflict resolution in two very different but connected epistemic, cultural, and institutional political settings: the world’s largest democracy and the world’s most ambitious regional organisation, the former resistant to the echoes of British colonialism and eurocentrism, and the latter strongly influenced by British and American thinking on the liberal peace.1 These two entities have been divided by distance, colonialism, and culture, and yet have recently been brought closer together by the ideas and practices of what is known as liberal peace, new technologies and opportunities for travel, collaboration, and exchange in a neo-liberal context, and by cooperation over development projects. The differences between India and the EU are obvious in terms of geography, culture, language, the nature and shape of institutions, and historical forces: and yet the commonalities between the two are surprising. The depth of cultural variation and scale as well as very significant institutional differences are obvious. Yet, there have not been many attempts to make such a comparison in the context of the post-colonial world order, at least. However, what has emerged from the research project that this book summarises – and what is more unexpected – are the similarities between the cases in terms of their critiques of neo-liberalism and of governance and its conceptual relationship with governmentality, their turn to decentralised institutions, local forms of peace agency, the escalatory tendencies of territoriality, nationalism, capitalism, and borders, the urgency of equitable development, and the pressure for autonomy and self-determination. A further common dynamic relates to the way

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in which both governance frameworks do not seem to be conditioned to deal with conflict according to recent scientific approaches and modes of understanding, but instead are locked into a version of statehood and regional relations perhaps more appropriate to the post-war world. This volume examines these dynamics in the context of broader philosophical and political questions about conflict, peace, security, nationalism, identity, development, and not least justice.2 It is based on detailed case studies and rigorous analysis and examines these issues in the context of the practices of conflict resolution in India and Europe, representing very different institutional frameworks, but throwing up surprisingly similar lessons about the relationship between governmentality and peacemaking. Opening new research venues on peace and governance: the EU as ‘postmodern’, India as ‘post-colonial’? While casting light on several issues relating to governance, conflict, and peace, the research behind the contributions to this book, as with any good research, has raised some fresh general issues which now demand our attention. They revolve around the dynamics of post-colonialism, post-Westphalianism (i.e. integration), and neo-liberalism in governance in conflict-affected areas. Indeed the new enquiries are interlaced with our research findings. These issues might be formulated as follows. The first is of course related to the concept of governance. Does this term mean the institution of government and the complex of its activities? Does it mean the field of governing, and thus the relation between the rulers and the ruled? Does it indicate democratic participation of the subjects of government? Or, does it mean, as the World Bank suggested more than two decades ago, a particular orientation or slant of relations of administration and participation in democracy?3 From the last point of view governance is a modern idea and reality, not more than 50 years old. There was little talk of governance in the nineteenth century. Others will dispute this claim and say that the fundamentals were put in place in the course of last two centuries. The authors of these contributions do not engage with the question of definitions and the exact relation between the two concepts of democracy and governance. Instead, they take the elasticity and the imprecision of the term as given, as an asset, and a particular kind of terrain in which to situate the analysis. While this has produced rich results, it has further queried the study of contemporary governance – global, liberal, or post-colonial.4



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Second, in the course of this research, participants and audiences alike sometimes mistook the rationale of comparing the lessons of EU and India as a purely comparative exercise, and thus had misgivings and criticisms about the scope, findings, and approach. They said basically that these studies were not (and perhaps could not ever be) exhaustive enough for a sufficient comparative exercise. But the point is that, while the case studies are rich, and they speak of the focused approach of the research informed by the same anxieties, concerns, questions, and to a large extent methods, the main purpose was not taxonomic but rather heuristic. In other words, the researchers sought to interrogate the global governance model of peacebuilding, the classic liberal model, and the post-colonial model to identify its structures, tendencies, actors, and compositions. One of the inquiries further suggested by this research is, namely, while theoretically they may be ideal types, in practice do they overlap? More significantly, can one find the post-colonial within the European–liberal and its supposed post-Westphalian modes of governance? From this point, the case studies assume significance. Indeed, some of the studies raise the question, what is post-colonial? In what specific ways do the post-colonial methods of peacebuilding move away from the liberal and the global methods? Do they mean the continuity of the colonial mode in certain respects and discontinuities in others? Do they signify the ascendancy of the local or continuity of old power structures, governmental of colonial in nature? Do they mean different forms and kinds of subjectivation? Do they signify also the plurality of the subjects of peace – women, ex-combatants, peace-yearning groups, lower orders of society, etc.? Or, do they signal all of these, the mixture always being contingent and historically predicated? The case studies that this volume covers also suggests a necessary methodological pluralism in the study of governance and peace, therefore the research always moves between the fields of generalisation and particularisation. Third, if these are the globally relevant lessons from post-colonial experiences of governance, conflict resolution, and peacebuilding, what are the lessons that a post-colonial country, or a post-Westphalian regional polity, like India and the EU draw for themselves? When we look at the Indian experiences chronicled in this book, we may point out few possible areas of further enquiry, such as: is peace in the NorthEast (or Kashmir) possible without breaking the jinx of the nation-state? The continuity of the colonial policy of pacification and a fundamental lack of understanding among governing classes of how autonomy constitutes the core of claim-makings today in post-colonial societies make the question inevitable. We have to see how the framework of sovereignty is being re-conceptualised in a post-colonial country like India

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with the notion of shared sovereignty, popular autonomy, and justice. Similarly, in the EU context, we can point to the contradictions of processes such as integration, normative projection, and the multiple dynamics of external boundaries, centralisation and decentralisation, all in the light of increasingly globalised capital in order to understand the EU’s evolving position on peace. This raises the issue of how in a postcolonial world can the post-Westphalian integration project avoid becoming a neo-liberal project whereby the rights desired by integration, previously maintained by the liberal state, are then lost through globalised capital? This may be innocuous in the advanced polities or economies of much of the EU, but may be conflict inducing as a response to the conflicts in Eastern Europe, the Balkans, or in Kashmir or with Maoist conflicts as in Bihar. Similarly, one may ask against the background of state-Maoist conflict in Jharkhand–Bihar and the caste conflicts, is a peace that is defined by a broad range of liberal rights possible through or together with neo-liberal development? The latter may focus more on opportunities and resilience than rights, and require the dismantling of the large state. The neo-liberal economy marks the expanding grid of elite capital accumulation, particularly on the basis of the extractive sectors of economy such as mining, and it combines with the growing obsession with state security. After 9/11, the field of governance and conflict resolution has been overwhelmed with the discourses of terror, failed states, and statebuilding. The discourse of terror has overshadowed or displaced all discussions of governance and popular demands for justice from the state or from regional or international actors. If governance is not a military mode of conduct of rule but a civilian one, we have to ask now how securitisation modifies governance. Foucault once said that the model of war had given modern society the model of governance.5 Securitisation of regional conflicts takes the form of a governmentality that approaches the use of war methods without declaring war. Logistics occupy an important place in this metamorphosis. India and the EU are affected by these dynamics, both in similar and different ways.6 A further issue arises from the post-colonial angle: given the particular spatial configurations marking the history of governance and conflicts, how does the parallel existence of the three levels – the local, national, and the global – have an impact on peacebuilding? For instance, in the Mughal imperial age rebels hailed the emperor as great while revolting against local despots, and now it is the other way round. Local rulers say7 they do not want to tax the indigenous but it is the centre, which goads them. The game goes on with the centre saying to the people that we want welfare, we provide money, but it is the local rulers



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who eat up everything and do not protect you. Therefore, in the light of the existence of parallel levels, it may be necessary to move away from an extended debate on peacebuilding and focus on concrete practices of power to see how certain norms of governance are produced; how and under what specific historical circumstances the actors shape their conduct; how conflict is not a question of some original residence of power, but an expression of a relation that produces power. Fourth, in the light of an overwhelming presence of the theme of governance in restorative peace studies, this volume has an important lesson for peace researchers, namely, that it is necessary to investigate whether the subjects of conflict and governance are passive subjects bowing incessantly to the apparatus of governance, or conducting themselves in a way that ensures their relative (always contingent) freedom from the governing apparatus and the laws of conflict. Therefore this book explores how other norms such as those of justice, dignity, peace, social coexistence, or development become historically active elements in the process of producing a culture of governance. In short, the culture of governance is not something metaphysical, but a material reality. Through this research we have attempted to analyse the mode of subjectivity particular to our time if we characterise our time as conflict epoch or post-conflict epoch. The subjectivity we are speaking of is marked by desire for dialogues, justice, peace, and popular politics, which always combine illegalities and legalities. This is certainly distinct from the liberal subjectivity of constitutionalism, law and order, legality, access to wealth and resources, and market-based rules of development. All these mean a particular way of historicising: (1) the contentious present, including contemporary ways of governing, resisting, and negotiating; (2) the subjects of conflict governance, such as women, migrants, other subalterns, peace campaigners, warriors, humanitarians, humanists, members of the human rights community, dialogists, and all those who occupy the middle space, also those subjects of illegalities who manage to find a bypass to enter the peace arena – in short all those who represent certain relations with respect to conflict; (3) the rules and practices of dialogue. Finally, the research represented by this volume has reinvestigated the classic question of politics, namely the question of the relation between war, peace, and governance. As long as conflict continues in acute form,8 that is to say in the form of war – civil or international – there is little chance for governance, because the scope of politics is small. However as soon as conflict enters the phase of peace, that is the post-conflict stage, politics returns. The resumption of governance is one of the forms in which politics returns. Yet the fact remains that in this phase too,

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politics continues in the war model in many ways (levies, tributes, military logic of mobilisation, extraordinary laws, impunity of officers, and many other things), which impacts on the dynamics and patterns of governance. This is an important investigation. Yet the fact that the post-conflict model of governance is a mix of the civilian and the military mode is not a new discovery. What is salient at least from the post-colonial experiences is the particular way in which the main concern of governance becomes a reconstruction of society. Such experience tells us how the question of the economy regains its primacy, the way politics returns, but does so only in the form of the economic. In other words, to invoke a Derridean phrase, politics never returns, but makes a return. Governance becomes the umbrella concept to understand the ways in which political economy reappears as the main concern in the return of the social. The contemporary researches on conflict economy have barely begun this inquiry. Foucault’s critique of governing logic/s has been of extreme importance in this research project for two reasons: first, studies of governmental exercises in conflict situations at least within India show the eternal dilemma of the rulers as to how much to govern and how much to concede to what Foucault called the subjugated histories. Second, this critique also tells us to read the science of governing in a new light – in the light of what Foucault said in Discipline and Punish about modern governmentality practising civilian ways of ruling in the mirror of warlike exercises, such as specific ways of planning, deployment, requisition, various aspects of logistics, etc. Of course, this analysis may be even more relevant to the EU and its systems for engaging with external conflict.9 More important however is the imperative to study the genealogy of governmental logic in coping with conflicts. Field studies compelled us to raise the questions: what does peace mean to government? Unhindered accumulation of capital? Unhindered development of society in the way government desires? A particular version of democracy, that is as a regime, as a framework of rules? By the same token, what does peacebuilding mean to government? Eliminating various stakeholders, parties, etc.? Do rules of war apply to peacebuilding as well, its strategies and tactics? The research supporting this book also highlighted how the issues of social justice, on one hand, and norms of governance, on the other, are mutually predicated. Some of the case studies covered in this book demonstrate how a macro-structure of security coexists with what might be called micro-insecurities or molecular insecurity. This is where the argument for pluralising dialogues has to be posited. One must ask then: who is the subject, the ethical and the political subject of



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security?10 What kind of subjectification as well as subjectivation occurs under the compelling structure of macro-security provided by governance of peacebuilding – one that spawns only micro-insecurities? In this sense we are speaking here of physical security, security of the body – that is sought to be provided by this macro-structure yet precisely because this security is built along the fault lines of conflict (ethnic, etc.) it only increases the micro-insecurity – the insecurity of life and the body. Security is an essential part of governance of conflict and that is where we must turn our probing eyes. Yet the fact is that while the security arm of the government subjects the conflict-ridden people to its norms and protocols, its other arm consisting of the details of social governance allows the same people to assume subjecthood for peace. Governmental expansion in post-conflict time has an impact on peace movements. This book points to the need for more research on the impact of neo-liberal governmentality on peace movements to properly analyse the relation between governance, conflict, and peace. For instance, we may find a functioning gender-specific strategy built on neo-liberal developmentalism, which may be based on extraction of resources, destroying in some cases the hitherto communityoriented, household-based labour form. The question will be: what will be the impact of the neo-liberal extractive economy overwhelming conflict regions on the prospect of peace there? The present volume is an exercise towards such genealogical inquiry. These chapters also show how the meaning of sovereignty is interpreted in specific situations; how governmental practices render these different meanings; how democracy is contingent on these hermeneutic exercises; and thus (1) how various democratic institutions such as elections, representative organs, media, etc., are overdetermined by these conflictive relations; and (2) how norms of war that are scripted into norms of governance influence and impact on conflict-resolution or management practices. The EU as a project of peace The ambition of conceptualising, then investigating the similarities and differences between India and the EU on the matter of governance and peace is riddled with complex challenges from several perspectives. Most prominently, the vast geographical, cultural, political, historical differences are challenging enough to beg the very question of comparison. Only at the most elementary, material, level is a straightforward comparison meaningful. To raise such a comparison to a conceptual level immediately requires that one engages the vast field of cultural

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codes, historical references, discourses, and symbols that support and even generate the history of peace and conflict. The European Union, a multilevel, intergovernmental organisation with hints of sovereignty and sometimes lingering notions of national chauvinism, has an approach to peace and peacebuilding unlike any other. Out of a history of territorial nationalism Europe has fashioned a hugely successful (both in historical and contemporary contexts) project of liberalisation, demilitarisation, anti-nationalism, and deterritorialisation (to a degree), development, and integrated governance structures and standards. Witness its embrace of concepts such as ‘normative power’, as a basis for its legitimate authority.11 Such late European hubris has been nicely punctured, however, as simply another form of governmentality, and it probably deflects attention away from the EU’s hegemonic regional positionality and historical success, and the limited engagement it has for the good of others.12 Although European peacebuilding most often makes its appearance in refined diplomatic settings where care for conceptual hygiene is at its most sophisticated, its origins are, like the Indian ones, far more concrete. Conventional histories of the European Union coalesce around a narrative of European unity built around the divisions inflicted after the Second World War, and an attempt to institutionalise that unity by uniting the heavy French and German coal and steel industries leading to ever closer union across a full range of political, social, and economic matters.13 The European Community, the predecessor of the European Union, was early on branded as a project of peace, one in which the history of two world wars, combined with the deep Enlightenment legacy of human rights, fused to form the political foundation for the twentieth-century world-view in which a region power, equipped with rich mythology of peace becomes a normative power, one whose intellectual history spills over into its ambitions as a coherent foreign power, or more precisely, a political, economic, and social governance exemplar for the development of the rest of the world. The EU’s Enlightenment normative project was however fundamentally reinterpreted, particularly in the years starting with the Delors Commissions (1985–88 and 1992–95) as a project of neo-liberal freedoms in parallel to the understanding of it as a European project of peace.14 The ideology of the free flow of goods, services, and capital, which has marked like no other set of ideas, the subsequent evolution of the EU, is understood by most as a coherent reinterpretation of the fundamental Enlightenment principles of freedom with which the European project is said to have begun and in reference to which it carries



Introduction

9

on today. It also provides, as an extension, the dominant framework in which notions of human rights, democracy, and rule of law are deployed, either in Europe or elsewhere. This principle of freedom – one among several possible principles – remains a guiding light for the European approaches to governance, conflict resolution, and peacebuilding. However, the neo-liberal interpretations of these ideas are widely viewed in the West as the essential components for dealing with conflicts.15 As the chapters in this volume attest, this means there are many internal contradictions in the EU’s understanding and project of peace, drawing on its own experience, foreign policy interests, centralising tendency, simultaneous partial decentralisation and deterritorialisation, liberal norms, liberal politics, and neo-liberal economics. The Indian critique and engagement with peacebuilding The notion of peace as a product of a certain version of modernity also has a distinct role in Indian intellectual and political history. As in Europe, the path to the concept of peace was through processes of liberalisation of a theoretically relatively centralised and very fragile post-colonial state, through which the principles and practices of market liberalism imposed themselves after flirtations with socialism in the 1970s. Here the path swerves however, from the unfolding of the natural consequences of neo-liberal ecumenical theories of the midtwentieth century, to imposition, mutation, then abandonment of colonial power. While one or another type of European colonisation of India has taken place since antiquity, colonial India as key component in a global economic system, dominated by British, Dutch, Danish, and French colonists grew in parallel with the modernisation of European national economies from the seventeenth century. European economic modernisation was dependent on the reverse modernisation of colonialism, its eventual collapse in the early twentieth century, and its reverberations in the form of the reverse effects of globalisation.16 The liberalisation of Western political economics in the mid- twentieth century has inevitably brought with it a long-distance liberalisation of the rest of the world. With economic liberalisation the intellectual slogans that are used to underwrite it in the West (freedom, ‘democracy’, humanism, etc.) find themselves on a decontextualised path among the liberalisation processes in the India, among other places. As a consequence, the discourse of peacebuilding and the liberal peace are transplanted to India and many other places, but with certain cultural, social, economic, and political mutations.17

10

Cultures of governance and peace

Thus, on the one hand, the central concepts of peacebuilding and the liberal peace have currency in both the European and Indian contexts. There is a certain legacy of the concepts of liberal peacebuilding. On the other hand, exactly because of this legacy and the secondary conceptual and political effect it provokes (revolt, reversal, protest, etc.) the ‘legacy effect’ of the political concepts both reflects and recreates a new political setting. At least three discourses of peace, largely independent of the predominant Western discourses, also shape Indian modernity. First is the legacy of non-violence, inspired by Gandhi and his followers from the early twentieth century. While non-violence is far from being the dominant form for political action in India, it has national currency and an enduring appeal and influence beyond India’s borders. It remains a primary global reference. Second, there is the commitment to development and social justice, which is a consistent theme across many sectors of political activism; third, a commitment to addressing the challenge of accommodating ethnic and cultural diversity is a necessity in Indian domestic politics to a degree that surpasses comparable regions. It is never far from the political discourse of peacebuilding. These three discourses set to some degree the premises for the implementation of liberal peacebulding practices in the particular way they are implemented in India with its international or state-centred controls. The obvious inadequacy of top-down peacebuilding, despite an insistence on centralised national politics shifts the real peacebuilding practices to a more or less local level, empowers low-grade NGOs and makes peacebuilding more specifically oriented, punctual, and culturally aligned. This naturally enhances the role of civil society and strengthens the need for a dialogue, a more profound recognition of the role of diversity and a real possibility for power sharing. Peacebuilding and social justice From the link to recognition, central to an Indian perspective on peacethrough-social justice an important reference point for comparison and contrast of peacebuilding emerges. It is also connected to the social democratic state framework that dominated post-war European reconstruction as states in Europe recovered from the war.18 Thus, a strong concept of social justice, in one form or another, is shared in both Europe and India. Yet here too, the comparative differences in both concept and the practices have a political effect that can be traced back to the difficult logic of inheritance: the political ideas at the heart passed from Europe through Enlightened imperialism and colonisation, as well



Introduction

11

as systemic war in international relations, and were re-contextualised, re-conceptualised, and retooled to form the basis for a critique, reversal, or rejection of its Europe sources.19 This was a dynamic that arose both within Europe (with the turn away from social democracy) and in former European colonies (with the turn away from post-colonial paternalism). This effect spans the range of concepts that form the core of the notion of social justice, concepts like the social, the individual, integrity, dignity, personhood, personal identity, privacy, property, as well as rights and recognition. These core notions of Enlightenment rationality are repeated in Indian thought, but with an important variation or reversals, as the case may be. By the same token, the very notion of diversity – so intellectually important for European notions of mutual recognition as well as in any number of treaties, charters, and directives and strongly enforced by the European Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights – takes a different form in the extreme heterogeneity of the Indian human landscape. We also find important variations in the applicability of social justice in different cultural contexts. Of course, in the European context, such matters are also debated, even if they are already enshrined in law and policy, especially as the nature of the European state has shifted away from social democracy towards neo-liberal democracy, and this has been quietly built into its external policies, including peacebuilding and development strategies. The comparison between European and Indian traditions of the politics of social justice and peacebuilding is also instructive as a test of the overall compatibility of these ideas. On the one hand, when one interprets them across the principles and concepts of market liberalism they seem to oppose each other. Market liberalism, so one might argue, either excludes justice all together or recasts it as equal access to markets (a notion itself rather marred by hypocrisy). Indeed in some cases, such as the UK–US notion of legal personality for corporations, it is directly opposed by the principles of liberalism. On the other hand, when interpreted in the direction of tolerance and freedom of expression, as components of a well-functioning public sphere, they seem to be compatible. In the perspective of democratic theory, the concept of ‘liberalism’, understood as free access to the public sphere, to public dialogue, provides a foundation for liberal thought, free speech, free exchange. Assuming that the social sphere is implicitly just or can be made actually just, then democratic liberalism and the freedom of movement it provides is a support, even a driver of peace, but clearly this position is complicated in context, when different forms of identity are at play, and

12

Cultures of governance and peace

when historical forms of legitimate authority are present. Unresolved historical injustices, and imbalances in terms of global capital distribution complicate the picture still further. Outline of chapters In Chapter 1, Pogodda, Richmond, and Mac Ginty discuss the relationship between governance and conflict resolution in India and the EU. They find several similarities between the two entities especially in terms of their concern for democratic credentials and institutional design, increasingly based on neo-liberal principles. Both India and the EU give primacy to statebuilding in their conflict resolution strategies and emphasise the importance of development and bureaucracy in the process. The authors find that one of the main differences between the two entities is in the security measures they undertake. While the EU has a more relaxed approach to security policy, India puts emphasis on the use of hard security measures, seeing itself as a unitary sovereign actor rather than a quasi-federal entity (as with the EU). This is also one of the most common critiques of India’s efforts in producing conflict resolution, along with the inefficiency of its governance and the corruption that surrounds it. The EU can be partly criticised for its selective approach to conditionalities in accession/association process which in some cases even resembles the colonial past of some of the most prominent members of the EU. The authors conclude that the two entities achieve a certain level of governmentality while their success in producing conflict resolution in a purer form of reconciliation and social justice is relatively limited. In Chapter 2, Gosh and Stavrevska discuss the notion of ‘government of peace’ and elements which constitute resistance in North-East India and Bosnia-Herzegovina. They focus on the role of identity as seen through the glasses of ethnicity and gender, relying on Samaddar’s definition of ‘government of peace’ which in essence constitutes the marketdriven reorientation of governance. This reorientation ties security to development and produces resistive subjectivities, according to the authors of this chapter. They claim that North India and BosniaHerzegovina were no exception in this regard and they discuss resistance dynamics in the two case studies. Their findings confirm the conclusion of the chapter that ‘government of peace’ has to adhere to the principle of heterogeneity due to the fact that it has to deal with different subjects. Prakash analyses dynamics of conflict in Bihar and Jharkhand in Chapter 3, and explores patterns that shape governance policies,



Introduction

13

especially in terms of political economy. He argues that all actors involved in the conflict have the power to exercise a strategic veto, but they cannot structure the outcomes. Naxals on the one hand, and state actors on the other, can exercise a strategic veto on each other’s operational activities and at the same time they limit each other in terms of policies pursued. However, the state can exercise more power in this case, as it sets terms of engagement. Prakash highlights the importance of the distribution of developmental benefits and claims that they play a central role in protracting the Naxal conflict. In order to break out of this perpetuation of the conflict, local institutions have to be strengthened, especially in terms of their ability to prioritise issues that they deem important, argues Prakash. In Chapter 4, Stavrevska, DasGupta, Vogel, and Behara look into ways in which agency is exercised within civil society with particular focus on manifestations of compliance and resistance. They argue that despite the power imbalances, the agency still manages to find its way in both active and post-conflict zones, identifying different ways in which this agency is manifested in the three settings that they discuss: Jammu and Kashmir, Cyprus, and Bosnia-Herzegovina. In Jammu and Kashmir they give examples of youth protesting against the police, and parents’ associations that use constitutional rights to introduce the change. In the Cyprus case, they discuss non-compliance with the EU trade regulations that were meant to foster interdependence on a divided island. In the case of Bosnia, they examine acts of everyday resistance to ethnic segregation that was imposed by the peace accord. The authors stress the important role that power politics play in such settings and conclude that it is necessary to analyse how power is shaped and perceived through interactions of various actors in the setting. Chapter 5 by Mac Ginty and Banerjee examines the relationship between social justice, security, and peace. The authors note significant internal heterogeneity in India and Europe, despite the statebuilding efforts in India and standardisation processes in Europe, giving an overview of five sets of ideas which have linked social justice and peace. These ideas suggest that if social justice is taken seriously then social harmony will be preserved and at the same time tensions will be reduced, together with chances for conflict. They find nonetheless that peace accords have a tendency to emphasise security rather than welfare. This is because international interventions are usually led by leading actors from the global north who are guided by neo-liberal agenda, and who usually underplay social aspects of the state and emphasise its security aspect. This is one of the reasons why priority is given to security over social justice when sequencing of activities in the intervention. The

14

Cultures of governance and peace

authors give an example of reforms in Georgia which led to drastic undermining of the state in terms of social provision. They conclude that international attempts which focus on social justice are much fewer in number than those that address security issues. In Chapter 6, Lidén and Jacobsen discuss the notion of ‘the local’ through the history of governance in colonial and post-colonial India, focusing on the ability of liberal governance to adapt to local culture. They discuss Ilan Kapoor’s integration of post-colonial theory with debates on development, and use this to identify what could make liberal peacebuilders more open towards the idea of greater inclusion of local voices. The authors suggest that emphasis should be put on sociocultural sensitivity. This entails that the international organisations involved in intervention activities should familiarise themselves with the context as much as possible. They invite critical analysis of the main issues at stake, which would be aimed against relevant theoretical debates. The authors also call for attention to the distribution of resources that are usually limited in conflict settings. They conclude that as long as subjective norms and interests of the peacebuilders are harmonised with local culture and practices, avoiding the creation of tensions, they can be legitimately promoted. Galvanek and Giessmann examine alternative perspectives on conflict resolution in Chapter 7. They attempt to broaden the debates beyond the liberal peace and examine the issues which could shape responses to conflict in a different way. They focus on experience, traditions, and culture, as well as interaction between actors in a given setting. The authors look at different types of resistance and analyse how and which of those are manifested in Jharkhand–Bihar, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Cyprus. They conclude that everyday resistance can be manifested in a violent, non-violent, short or long-term, sporadic and constant forms, proactive and offensive; it can come as a result of social dissatisfaction; directed and intentional, but also undirected and unintentional. Upadhyaya and Upadhyaya conclude this volume with discussion on the experience of peacebuilding in the north-eastern Indian state of Meghalaya. The authors analyse the potential of Indian democratic governance in dealing with conflict in this part of the country. Their findings come as a result of fieldwork undertaken in Khasi, Garo, and Jaintia Hills which aimed at scrutinising the claims on the ‘peacefulness’ of this state. The chapter finds the main fault line in peacebuilding in Meghalaya in the lack of consideration of various patterns of ethnicity issues, and in putting too strong emphasis on underdevelopment and political economy. The authors claim that a comprehensive, long-term approach is needed to successfully rehabilitate former



Introduction

15

insurgents which should be followed by adjusted development policies, replacing short-term monetary compensations which only foster insurgency. Notes   1  Richmond, Post-liberal Peace; Sweet, ‘Cosmopolitan legal order’; Zaum, ‘Beyond the “liberal peace”’; Mac Ginty and Richmond, Liberal Peace and Post-war Reconstruction; Sabaratnam, ‘Avatars of eurocentrism in the critique of the liberal peace’; Gartzke and Weisiger, ‘Under construction’; Rosamond, ‘Three ways of speaking Europe to the world’. From a theoretical point of view, Michel Foucault’s writings offer a good survey and critique of the global and the liberal views on governance: Security, Territory, Population; Birth of Biopolitics. For a general perspective on the post-colonial scenario, see Samaddar and Suhit, Political Transition and Development Imperatives in India; Samaddar and Sen, New Subjects and New Governance in India. See also Richmond et al., ‘Emerging EU peacebuilding framework’; Mazower, Governing the World.   2  A broad view of this hybrid field might include among many other works: Foot et al., Order and Justice in International Relations; Hayden, Cosmopolitan Global Politics; Krause and Juttersonke, ‘Peace, security and development in post-conflict environments’; Sriram, ‘Justice as peace?’; Swain et al., Globalization and Challenges to Building Peace; Devin, Making Peace; James, Religion, Identity, and Global Governance; Korostelina, Forming a Culture of Peace; Sriram et al., Transitional Justice and Peacebuilding on the Ground Victims and Ex-combatants; Aggestam and BjjkaAam, Rethinking Peacebuilding; Shearing and Johnston, Governing Security.   3  ‘Among many other works, the mechanism of the perfect army, of the disciplined mass, of the docile useful troop, of the regiment in the camp and in the field, on manoeuvres and on exercises politics–war series that passes through strategy, there is an army–politics series that passes through tactics. It is strategy that makes it possible to understand warfare as a way of conducting politics between states; it is tactics that makes it possible to understand the army as a principle for maintaining the absence of warfare in civil society. The classical age saw the birth of the great political and military strategy by which nations confronted each other’s economic and demographic forces; but it also saw the birth of meticulous military and political tactics by which the control of bodies and individual forces was exercised within states’ (Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 168).   4  Again in Discipline and Punish, Foucault commented that the modern rulers within the order of war began a fantasy of a society that was like a body-machine, not an industrial machine, but a socio-military machine, which would cover the whole territory of the nation and to which each

16

  5    6    7    8    9  10  11  12  13  14  15  16  17  18  19 

Cultures of governance and peace individual would be occupied without interruption but in a different way: ‘Disciplinary power as its correlative an individuality that is not only analytical and “cellular”, but also natural and “organic”’ (156). Foucault, ‘Society Must Be Defended’, 23. Derrida in Other Heading speaks on the turns in form of re-turns (in history) to the language available; see also McDaniel, ‘Impossible inventions’. Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 129–57. On the theme of ethical subject of security, see, Burgess, Ethical Subject of Security. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 168. Burgess, Ethical Subject of Security, 29–31. Manners, ‘Normative ethics of the European Union’. Haahr and Walters, Governing Europe. European Community, Schuman Declaration nean Integra. Booth, ‘Steps towards stable peace in Europe’; Evera, ‘Primed for peace’; Hettne, ‘Security and peace in post-Cold War Europe’; Betts, ‘Systems for peace or causes of war?’; Richmond, ‘Problem of peace’. For example, see Richmond, Failed Statebuilding. Davies et al., India and Europe in the Global Eighteenth Century; Boyce, Decolonisation and the British Empire; Agnani, Hating Empire Properly. Basu, ‘Neo-liberalism and democracy in South Asia’, 75. Paterson and Ian Campbell, Social Democracy in Post-war Europe. Davies et al., India and Europe in the Global Eighteenth Century.

References Aggestam, K. and A. BjjkaAam, Rethinking Peacebuilding: The Quest for Just Peace in the Middle East and the Western Balkans (Abingdon, Oxon.: Routledge, 2013). Agnani, S. M., Hating Empire Properly: The Two Indies and the Limits of Enlightenment Anticolonialism (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013). Basu, G. K., ‘Neo-liberalism and democracy in South Asia’, in Ranabir Samaddar (ed.), Peace Studies: An Introduction to the Concept, Scope, and Themes (New Delhi: Sage, 2004). Betts, R. K., ‘Systems for peace or causes of war? Collective security, arms control, and the new Europe’, International Security, 17:1 (1992), 5–43. Booth, K., ‘Steps towards stable peace in Europe: A theory and practice of coexistence’, International Affairs, 6:1 (1990), 17–45. Boyce, D. G., Decolonisation and the British Empire, 1775–1997 (New York/ London: Macmillan, 1999). Burgess, P. J., The Ethical Subject of Security: Geopolitical Rationality and the Threat against Europe (London: Routledge, 2011).



Introduction

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Davies, S., G. S. Espinosa, and D. S. Roberts, India and Europe in the Global Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Derrida, J. in The Other Heading (New York: Wiley, 1992). Devin, G., Making Peace: The Contribution of International Institutions (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Eraly, A., Emperors of the Peacock Throne (New Delhi: Penguin, 1997). European Community, The Schuman Declaration nean Integra, http://europa.eu/ about-eu/basic-information/symbols/europe-day/schuman-declaration/ index_en.htm; European Community, Treaty of Rome, 1957, accessed 29 April 2015. Evera, S. V., ‘Primed for peace: Europe after the Cold War’, International Security, 15:3 (1990), 5–56. Foot, R., J. L. Gaddis, and A. Hurrell, Order and Justice in International Relations (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). Foucault, M., Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin, 1991). Foucault, M., ‘Society Must Be Defended’: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–1976, trans. Davidy Macey (New York: Picador, 2003). Foucault, M., Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–78 (New York: Picador, 2007). Foucault, M., The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79 (New York: Picador, 2010). Gartzke, E. and A. Weisiger, ‘Under construction: Development, democracy, and difference as determinants of systemic liberal peace’, International Studies Quarterly, 58:1 (2014), 130–45. Haahr, J. H. and W. Walters, Governing Europe: Discourse, Governmentality and European Integration (London: Routledge, 2005). Hayden, P., Cosmopolitan Global Politics (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005). Hettne, B., ‘Security and peace in post-Cold War Europe’, Journal of Peace Research, 28:3 (1991), 279–94. James, P., Religion, Identity, and Global Governance: Ideas, Evidence and Practice (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011). Korostelina, K. V., Forming a Culture of Peace: Reframing Narratives of Intergroup Relations, Equity, and Justice (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Krause, K. and O. Juttersonke, ‘Peace, security and development in post-conflict environments’, Security Dialogue, 36:4 (2005), 447–62. McDaniel, J. P., ‘Impossible inventions: A review of Jacques Derrida’s The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe’, http://ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/ viewcontent.cgi?article=1156&context=ijcs; accessed 1 February 2015. Mac Ginty, R. and O. P. Richmond, The Liberal Peace and Post-war Reconstruction: Myth or Reality? (Abingdon, Oxon.: Routledge, 2013). Manners, I., ‘The normative ethics of the European Union’, International Affairs, 84:1 (2008), 46–60. Mazower, M., Governing the World: The History of an Idea, 1815 to the Present (London: Penguin, 2012).

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Paterson, W. E. and I. Campbell, Social Democracy in Post-war Europe (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1974). Richmond, O. P., ‘The problem of peace: Understanding the “liberal peace”’, Conflict, Security & Development, 6: 3 (2006), 291–314. Richmond, O. P., A Post-liberal Peace (London: Routledge, 2012). Richmond, O. P., Failed Statebuilding (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014). Richmond, O., A. Bjorkdahl, and S. Kappler, ‘The emerging EU peacebuilding framework: Confirming or transcending liberal peacebuilding?’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 24:3 (2011), 449–69. Rosamond, B., ‘Three ways of speaking Europe to the world: Markets, peace, cosmopolitan duty and the EU’s normative power’, British Journal of Politics & International Relations, 16:1 (2014), 133–48. Sabaratnam, M., ‘Avatars of eurocentrism in the critique of the liberal peace’, Security Dialogue, 44:3 (2013), 259–78. Samaddar, R. and S. Sen, Political Transition and Development Imperatives in India (New Delhi: Routledge, 2012). Samaddar, R. and S. Sen, New Subjects and New Governance in India (New Delhi/New York: Routledge, 2012). Shearing, C. D. and L. Johnston, Governing Security: Explorations of Policing and Justice (Abingdon, Oxon.: Routledge, 2013). Sriram, C. L., ‘Justice as peace? Liberal peacebuilding and strategies of transitional justice’, Global Society, 21:4 (2007), 579–91. Sriram, C. L., J. Garcia-Godos, J. Herman, and O. Martin-Ortega (eds), Transitional Justice and Peacebuilding on the Ground Victims and Ex-combatants (Hoboken, NY: Taylor & Francis, 2012). Swain, A., Amer R., and J. Ojendal, Globalization and Challenges to Building Peace (London/New York: Anthem Press, 2008). Sweet, A. S., ‘A cosmopolitan legal order: Constitutional pluralism and rights adjudication in Europe’, Global Constitutionalism, 1:1 (2012), 53–90. Zaum, D., ‘Beyond the “liberal peace”’, Global Governance, 18:1 (2012), 121–32.

1

Investigating the relationship between governance and conflict resolution in India and the EU Sandra Pogodda, Oliver P. Richmond and Roger Mac Ginty

Introduction With the rise of India’s economic and political power there has emerged a growing interest among analysts, political leaders and civil society organisations in the implications of India’s international footprint. On the one hand, it is the world’s largest democracy, and has followed many Western policies on development, peacebuilding and democratic consolidation. On the other hand, it is a state with a colonial past that takes pride in creating its autonomous political path, shaped by its ethnic, socio-economic and cultural diversity. At present India is dogged by a range of internal and border conflicts, some state-centric, some ethno-religious, and some arising from socio-economic discrepancies and land or resource distribution problems. Yet, how does the state balance its aspirations as an exemplar in global, regional and local conflict resolution and peacebuilding, given that it is both a donor and recipient?1 Does India’s policy profile in peacebuilding, statebuilding and development challenge or complement the Western consensus on the liberal peace or neo-liberal state? The EU has been trying to refine and reinforce its international profile through consecutive treaty revisions, the deployment of twenty-six Common Security and Defence missions in crisis or post-conflict areas and more recently with the establishment of the External Action Service. The EU has a long-standing, though ill-defined interest in peacebuilding and conflict resolution. Its peacebuilding strategy is shaped by its historical experience as an integration-as-peace model, based on which it tries to project its ‘normative’ power through a range of association, integration and donor practices. The EU intends to maintain and induce peace by reinforcing its domestic state and regional

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Cultures of governance and peace

architecture, as can be seen from Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH) to Georgia among many others.2 This chapter examines whether distinct cultures of governance in conflict environments have emerged in India and the EU and whether the practice of conflict resolution or peacebuilding adds up to a strategy that strives for more than conflict management or ‘governmentality’.3 A direct comparison between these two major international players helps to highlight the particularities as well as the common features of their approaches. More in detail, the chapter elaborates on whether there is sufficient consistency in either actor’s peacebuilding practices in different conflict contexts to even speak of a distinct ‘strategy’ or ‘governance culture’.4 In order to operationalise the Indian and EU governance strategy we examine their practices in development policies, statebuilding and their attempts to use political institutions5 for peacebuilding. Conceivably, this tripartite analytical framework could be expanded to include other categories for comparison, such as diplomacy or negotiations, but these categories remain outside of the scope of this chapter. The focus of the chapter is on the use of governance tools as a peacebuilding strategy, and its effectiveness in achieving pacification, containment, or something more ambitious such as conflict transformation. Unpacking and comparing the intricacies of negotiation processes in India and the EU as required for the analysis of diplomatic approaches would amount to a different research project. Instead our focus is on governance cultures in the EU and India in relation to conflict. Empirically, we refer to the Indian engagement in Bihar, North-East India and Jammu and Kashmir and the EU’s involvement in cases such as Cyprus, Georgia and Bosnia. Rather than presenting in-depth case studies, this chapter uses empirical findings from a multinational research consortium working on governance and conflict resolution approaches of the EU and India.6 This chapter proceeds as follows: first, it discusses the problems and opportunities of comparing India and the EU. It then compares the two entities’ approaches to development policies, statebuilding and political institutions. Moreover, the comparative sections analyse whether distinctive governance cultures have emerged in each area and how far these contribute to conflict resolution as opposed to merely conflict management or pacification of ‘unruly’ populations. We argue that both India and the EU are similar in that their governance strategies achieve a certain level of governmentality rather than conflict resolution. So while they represent functional governance systems – albeit according to a different hybrid system, rationality and culture – their effectiveness in terms of conflict resolution has so far been extremely limited.



Governance and conflict resolution: India and the EU

21

Comparing peacebuilding in India and the European Union Any comparison between India and the European Union with regard to their cultures of governance and conflict resolution must be swathed in caveats. Both entities have developed vastly different institutional set-ups as a consequence of divergent political and socio-economic path dependencies and contain a good deal of heterogeneity. One is a massive unitary state with a geographically differentiated approach to decentralisation, the other a large federation in which competences have been transferred upwards and unevenly across policy fields. Interesting nuances are thrown up by their respective differences – size, internal architecture (state or regional organisation plus state), development, histories, types of conflicts they host or engage with – as well as their similarities, relating mainly to their involvement in the liberal peace architecture (in particular democracy and human rights), their embrace of neo-liberalism, identification of internal and external threats, concern about development and civil society, and their widely perceived diverse and different mixes of cultures and social systems. EU conflict responses range from military interventions to long-term conflict transformation strategies in the areas of development policy, statebuilding and the creation of political institutions. Different aspects of those policies involve the cooperation of different institutions. While security measures are the responsibility of the Council of the European Union, long-term development approaches are often part and parcel of regional strategies, in which the European Commission has some scope in the allocation of funds and thus shapes policies in their implementation stage.7 Hence, the formation of EU conflict resolution strategies is primarily a member state’s prerogative dispersed with supranational components. Within this overarching institutional framework policies have been created, which differ in their geographical range, resource commitment and the policy tools deployed. The parameters for EU interventions in the pre-accession country BiH, for instance, have been laid down in the Stabilisation and Association Agreement8 and the Interim Agreement on Trade and Trade-related Issues.9 EU engagement in Georgia is regulated by the Partnership and Cooperation Agreement10 and the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) with the National Indicative Programme11 and the ENP Action Plan12 as their main documents; the Republic of Cyprus is a full member state in contrast to the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, which lacks international recognition and thus does not have official ties to the EU. Institutionally, the EU maintains delegations on the ground, whose monitoring of local policy implementation feeds back into decision-making processes in

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Cultures of governance and peace

Brussels. If EU High Representatives are deployed – like in Bosnia and Palestine – they can be endowed with decision-making authorities or act purely in diplomatic capacity. India’s responses to conflict defy easy categorisation. The statemaking process involved the violent secession of Pakistan and Bangladesh, a border war with China, and a Cold War context. This has resulted in bursts of military spending and domestic political pressure to maintain military prowess. Beyond maintaining territorial integrity, the state has also faced serious dissent from within. Groups in Kashmir and in the North-East have never felt properly part of the state. Insurgencies have been ongoing since the 1950s and have been further fuelled by what some see as the increasing economic marginalisation of the North-East.13 Responses from the state have involved a mix of security, negotiation and development responses, with security usually being prioritised. Complicating matters is the shared responsibility between the central government and individual states, Pakistani interference in Kashmir, a divergence in conflicts’ root causes and a large and complex security apparatus. Such complexity means that it is difficult to identify consistency in Indian conflict resolution policy. Given this diversity in institutions, historical preconditions and sources of political pressure, attempts to develop neat linear genealogies of the Indian or the European Union’s governance frameworks might conceal the very differences that explain the divergence in approaches. Despite these limitations there are good reasons for comparing the two entities: both are confections containing significant ethnic diversity and are facing conflicts within and alongside their borders. Many of these conflicts share similarities in their focus on identity, territory and resources, although all conflicts have their own peculiarities. As relatively young entities, both have been attempting to find suitable methods to deal with conflict. In particular, both entities have used development policies, security-focused statebuilding strategies and the building of political institutions to promote conflict resolution (hence the analytical framework deployed in this chapter). These categories are by no means discrete, with both the EU and India developing multi-pronged strategies that simultaneously utilise a mixture of methods. Both represent a certain level of conformity with the liberal peace system as well as the neo-liberal economic order; both engage with the need for a social contract, resource redistribution and a basic level of public services. Yet both are shaped by historical perceptions and geographic location, as well as tensions between different levels of governance. In other words both are examples of hybrid political, social and economic rationalities of modernity. An integral part of those



Governance and conflict resolution: India and the EU

23

rationalities is a consensus on the nature of the state, security, economy and development and state–society relations. It is worth unpacking the ‘actorness’ of both the EU and India. The EU is a young organisation, whose foreign policy competence has evolved over time but remains subordinated to policy-making at the national level. Its foreign policy stances must consequently be gauged in the context of those of its member states, and the matrix of other multinational organisations that operate alongside it. The actorness of India is also worth bearing in mind: it is a massive state containing immense ethnic, geographic and economic diversity. Its claims to be the largest democracy in the world must be measured against a political system dominated by castes and the constant invocation of the security dilemma by political elites (especially the threat from Pakistan and home-grown ‘terrorism’). Yet, it has no fall-back option as European states have: the Indian state must cohere domestically and internationally upon its own capacity. There can be no expectation of consistency from the EU and India: both entities have undergone significant change since their origins. Development This section examines the development-oriented conflict response strategies deployed by the EU and India. In the case of the EU, emphasis has been placed on harmonisation and accession, together with grantgiving in conflict-affected areas. Given India’s tradition of state-planned development, the centrality of the state’s economic interventions in the national conflict response strategy comes as no surprise. Indian governments have placed much emphasis on employment, social inclusion and land reform. Theoretically, these strategies have the capacity to connect with large numbers of people and address some of the grievances thought to inflame violent conflict. Both the Indian and EU examples reveal how development policies are often designed at a distance and rely on a hope that trickle-down economics actually works. Among the many hats that it wears, the EU is a development organisation. Its inception was driven by the belief that economic union would lead to interstate harmony, redressing the historic enmities and state formation problems of the continent. In a sense, the belief in development as a conflict response strategy is an existential core of the EU and has become manifest in how it approaches conflict both within and without its boundaries. Illustrating the lack of consistency alluded to above, the EU is simultaneously a champion of trade liberalisation and a Keynesian distributor of cash and promoter of economic regulation.

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Redistribution is at its highest within the EU. Poorer regions where inequality has been deemed a conflict root or where it is seen as producing social exclusion benefit disproportionately from cohesion and regional funding. In Northern Ireland and the border counties of the Republic of Ireland, for example, a series of EU peacebuilding support schemes (PEACE I, II and III) were Keynesian in the sense that they involved the disbursement of almost €2bn in EU grants in the 1997– 2013 period.14 Much of this money supported public sector spending.15 Large-scale EU investment in this case was a technocratic fix for the EU’s inability and unwillingness to take a more explicitly political role on Northern Ireland’s constitutional issue since two of its member states were intimately involved in the conflict. The Occupied Palestinian Territories (subsequently referred to as Palestine in this chapter) are another case in which the EU favours technocratic interventions over overt political interference. Currently, the EU sponsors initiatives to create a coherent regulatory framework for private businesses, to modernise Palestinian customs equipment and restore Palestinian tourism infrastructure,16 when even development agencies such as the World Bank have recognised that Israel’s military occupation holds the key to significant growth in Palestine.17 Rather than leaning on Israel to allow the inflow of tourists and allow the free flow of goods, the EU prefers to sponsor mainly technical assistance. In other cases, such as BiH, the EU makes aid contingent upon structural adjustment-type reforms.18 Total EU assistance to the Western Balkans has been in excess of €6.8bn but it has been based on strict conditionalities for governance and constitutional reform, as well as potential accession, the latter measure not available for Palestine.19 Alongside this mixed approach to subvention, there is also strong support for trade integration as a conflict resolution tool. The EU sees economic harmonisation and – where appropriate – accession to the EU as important measures for retrenching post-conflict stability as the centrality of the free-trade agreements in the Stabilisation and Association Pacts with the Balkans shows. Trading privileges have been extended to most of the Balkans, Mediterranean and Eastern European countries. Using trade integration in peacebuilding follows two distinct rationalities depending on the location of the conflict: interstate wars could be avoided if strong trade links ensured the interdependence of two nations’ wealth. Internal conflict by contrast would be prevented if trade expansion provided a growth potential that equally benefits all segments of society. The underlying assumption of trade creation as wealth creation needs to be revisited in the light of the severe economic crises in southern Europe and Ireland, which suggests that economic cohesion has even failed to occur in the EU’s highly subsidised periphery.20



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Moreover, this seemingly non-political process of conflict resolution through economic integration is subject to a range of political obstacles and implies political consequences. EU attempts to sponsor free-trade agreement across the green line in Cyprus have been controversial and ultimately led to Greek Cypriot attempts to curtail it. Despite the EU’s attempt to mitigate the harsher aspects of sovereignty and nationalism, its governance-related conflict resolution efforts are often blocked by both. Illustrating a lack of consistency in EU policy, it is worth noting that the EU’s process of economic harmonisation with trading partners is perhaps the largest regulatory exercise in human history.21 While the EU encourages the removal of trade barriers, it insists on a raft of regulation ensuring consumer, workers and environmental protection. The closer a country’s economic ties with the EU, the larger the share of the European acquis communautaire, the partner country is expected to adopt. Georgia’s integration process with the EU illustrates this issue. The Georgian government has introduced some of the most far-reaching free-market reforms in the world.22 This means that Georgia has virtually no labour or food regulations.23 Yet if Georgia wants to join the EU it will have to fulfil three pre-accession targets: the introduction of regulation on monopolies, food safety and labour standards.24 Hence, even if the EU’s assumptions on the wealth-creating impact of trade are questionable, at least its trade policy is not causing new social conflict through the spread of cut-throat capitalism. The Indian government has consistently made the link between socioeconomic factors and conflict since its independence. The state has recognised the conflict causation and maintenance potential of a development deficit in relation to religious/ethnic/nationalist disputes in Jammu and Kashmir, and Naxalite violence in Bihar as well as Jharkhand in the North-East. In all cases, economic development strategies have been deployed alongside security strategies. The sequencing suggests that consecutive Indian governments have privileged security responses over development strategies though. In Kashmir, the government of India primarily regarded the 1990s uprising as a state security issue and as a proxy conflict with Pakistan. Once the armed rebellion had been effectively crushed, economic responses to the conflict became more prominent. Kashmir and the North-East have been recipients of special economic packages designed to deal with the perceived development deficit. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh told the Indian Parliament in 2011 that ‘where the Indian industry commits itself to employ Kashmiri youth and if we can create jobs for a lakh [one hundred thousand] of students from the valley and other parts of Kashmir, I dare say it will change the mental make-up or the mindset of the Kashmiri people’.25

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This statement encapsulates the essence of governmentality’s pacification rationality, which can be observed in Indian and EU governance approaches in conflict regions. Pacification indicates the creation of a negative peace where an improvement of socio-economic conditions appeases a conflict-ridden society rather than resolving the conflict. This rationality underpins job creation efforts for Kashmiri youth as much as special economic packages in BiH. Both in their own way represent governmentality. In Kashmir’s case the central state expects Kashmiri subjects to conform to state law and national identity. The EU expects BiH to conform to its economic and institutional standards in order to advance to the next stage of the accession process conditioned upon the end of secessionist movements. Despite those similarities, however, both governance strategies are different in their use of force versus inducements: one is a mixture of immediate force and concurrent development, the other constitutes a mixture of privilege and a promise of prosperity in the future. Both require their subjects to change their behaviour and allegiances, as well as identity to some degree, in return for material improvements. If sustained growth is already difficult to achieve as the European experience shows, promoting the type of development that fosters conflict resolution is even harder (i.e. including DDR, providing for welfare and public services with the aim of reducing hardship in the short-term and ironing out inequalities in a short enough timespan to enable immediate coexistence). Recent rapid economic growth in India for instance may have intensified and further politicised perceptions of inequality rather than mitigated them.26 Economic analysis shows a striking effect of recent GDP growth on income disparities: in the 1990s, the top 1 per cent of income earners increased their income threefold in real terms, while agricultural wages grew by only 2.5 per cent in the same period.27 There was no improvement in the subsequent decade, with India’s Gini coefficient rising from 0.32 to 0.38 in the 1990–2010 period.28 But does this growing income disparity predict conflict? Certainly perceptions of relative income are important as well as absolute income, and a study of the impact of economic growth on Hindu– Muslim riots in the 1985–92 period asserts that economic growth reduces the likelihood of rioting within states.29 A study on the NorthEast based on more recent data showed ‘a vicious circle where unequal distribution of development generates communal conflicts, which in turn hampers any further development’.30 Micro-analysis of 362 districts across India finds that while the incomes of lower castes and tribal communities have an impact on the number of Maoist incidents, they do not predict the probability of conflict.31



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This ambivalence poses a dilemma for the government of India: to create new jobs for the economically marginalised and buy out the politically alienated without lowering the overall level of wealth, it needs GDP growth and trade creation. Neo-liberal growth policies such as the prevalent growth paradigm would require a simultaneous slimming down of the state and awarding the private sector more scope to evolve. In the Indian case this could fuel existing social tensions if growth only benefits certain regions or particular social strata. Hence, consecutive Indian governments have opted to combine general growth policies with targeted development strategies. A comparative analysis of the Five Year Plans32 reflects governments’ shifting take on the links between development, conflict, and conflict resolution and management. The early Plans were in keeping with the modernisation and technology transfer strategies that were popular in development strategies at the time and placed most emphasis on developing infrastructure and industry.33 The ‘Welfare of Backward Classes’ was only dealt with in Chapter 37 of the first Five Year Plan in 1951 and tended to see the issue as one of extending modernisation to tribes living in and on the margins.34 Over the decades, however, more sophisticated views of the interconnectedness between conflict and development have become internalised by the government machinery. Gradually issues of inclusion became more prominent in the documents, with the Tenth Plan (2002– 7) noting ‘the precipitous pauperisation, exploitation and disintegration of tribal communities’.35 Among the remedies mentioned was ‘the strengthening of grassroots democratic institutions’, specifically the Panchayati Raj Institutions (PRIs).36 Local-level political institutions were seen as a means through which developmental conflicts could be addressed. The latest iteration of the Five Year Plans (2007–12) is the most explicit in making the linkage between development and conflict. First, it recognises that the removal of economic controls has allowed Naxalites (mentioned for the first time in any of the Five Year Plans) to exploit popular anti-government grievances. Second, it recognises the role of the state in managing the exploitation and sharing of natural resources in order to minimise tension. Third, it recognises that dealing with Naxalite threats and violence requires a developmental approach: Naxalism … is not merely a law and order problem but also a developmental challenge, and the affected states require a combination of political, developmental and perception management responses as part of a holistic strategy. Some of these could be in the field of education and health.37

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The Eleventh Plan also places an emphasis on the PRIs.38 This is in keeping with the institutionalist outlook that runs through many Indian policy responses: the existence or creation of an institution is a way of assuaging protest and indicating that government takes the problem seriously. Yet, Plan after Plan is testament to the fact that the mere creation of a commission or institution does not make the resolution or transformation of the issue more likely. Furthermore this raises an ideological question about what sort of developmental approach is most suited to respond to violence perpetrated by Maoist-influenced actors, given that the Indian state practises both neoliberal and more redistribution-oriented or welfarist approaches to development. Land inequality offers the most robust statistical explanation of conflict,39 and consecutive Five Year Plans have called for the reform of land tenancy, the abolition of intermediaries40 and the implementation of ceilings on landholdings in order to mitigate poverty in rural areas. Since the Indian Constitution had transferred the authority of land reforms to the states, efforts to mitigate land inequality are dependent on the political will of states’ political elites. Despite this will being lacking in places where the political elites belong to the landlord class, statistical analysis suggests that land reforms have reduced countrywide poverty by 1 per cent between 1958 and 1992.41 Hitherto implemented land reforms have been criticised for their limited effect on the rural poor. Chatterjee claims the reforms benefited medium-sized landholdings rather than subsistence farmers and lacked essential complementary reform efforts in the fields of education and the credit market.42 To address the grievances of the socio-economically marginalised and thus to quell inequality-induced conflict, the Indian government has introduced a tribal sub-plan and joint forest management,43 the garibihatao (eradicate poverty) and the 20-point welfare programme44 and increased its development spending significantly over the past decade.45 The 2006 Forest Rights Act extended protections to tribal groups and forest inhabitants but has experienced persistent implementation difficulties.46 Forest rights, along with resource protection in the face of corporate land-grabs, have become major issues for popular mobilisation and bring into relief the disjunction between bottom-up groups and central and state government.47 The current Indian approach to the development–security nexus is best summed up by the Ministry of Home Affairs: ‘a multi-pronged strategy … of sustained and effective police action coupled with accelerated socio-economic development and management of public perception … to effectively tackle the naxalite menace’.48 Development issues



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are recognised as contributing to conflict, but conflict responses also include, and often prioritise, security measures. Statebuilding and security Both the EU and India have placed statebuilding at the heart of their approach to conflict. Both agree on the importance of democracy built into state institutions and recognise property and human rights as vital components of the rule of law. They perceive security as both for the state from external and internal threats, as well as for the citizen. Both have contributed to UN and donor policy on statebuilding, working with donors and international financial institutions on developing these strategies as well as state fragility indicators. Importantly, statebuilding cannot be merely reduced to institutionbuilding. While this is a crucial element of statebuilding, it is important to flag up the normative and ideological dynamics that lie behind statebuilding. It is capable of penetrating the perceptions, relationships and norms that govern how society operates. In the case of India, this meant the promotion of the centralised Indian state and other governing apparatus – often to the exclusion of diversity. For many in the North-East, Jammu and Kashmir, and naxalite-affected areas, the state was seen as remote and alien. In cases of divided societies, like Cyprus, Georgia or BiH, the EU recognition of one entity or grouping constituted a highly political act that went far beyond building or reinforcing institutions. The EU, as a multilateral organisation composed of member states, is an advertisement for the positive potential of harmoniously aligned states to cooperate for mutual gain. Despite awarding significant power to Brussels, the state has remained the principal unit of political organisation in EU foreign policy49 and a European identity has failed to supplant national identities. Hence, the EU promotes statebuilding abroad as a form of isomorphism with the aim of facilitating bilateral interaction through the reinforcement of similar organisational structures in partner countries. The EU’s emerging foreign policy infrastructure is primarily oriented towards bilateral engagement. Thus, for example, EU delegations overseas are geared towards dealing with their host states’ government institutions.50 Even in places without a democratically elected national government, EU delegations tend to respond to partner countries’ central authorities rather than local governments or civil society. In post-revolutionary Libya, for instance, the EU maintains an additional office in Benghazi for diplomatic reasons but focuses in its policy formation on the demands of the National Transitional Council in Tripoli.51 A representative of the EU delegation in Georgia

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noted in relation to engagements with civil society, ‘The EU can’t sit in every chair’.52 As a result, many tasks, especially implementation tasks, are delegated to partner organisations such as the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) or NGOs.53 The state-centricity of the EU limits the organisation’s on-the-ground understanding of conflict areas. Many of its overseas initiatives suggest that EU-sponsored reform processes seek to foster the convergence of other partner countries with the particular organisational and technocratic shape of its member states. Just as member states have undergone processes of harmonisation, the EU, through its Neighbourhood Programmes and pre-accession rules encourages conformity: states on its fringes are urged to reform so that they have an interface that the EU can more easily engage with. This has been most obvious in the newly formed state of BiH where the EU was particularly interventionist and prescriptive.54 Governance interventions, often funded by the EU but implemented by the UNDP and others, have had a significant impact in shaping states and institutions in the Middle East, North Africa and Eastern Europe.55 Statebuilding interventions tend to focus initially on the security apparatus. In this field, EU interventions in conflict countries have focused on what can be termed the softer side of security. Scholars have diagnosed a greater emphasis on coercive instruments to complement existing soft-power tools matched by a growing institutional infrastructure to facilitate military cooperation:56 a Crisis Management and Planning Directorate has been established by the European Council to reinforce civil–military planning capacity; the External Action Service has been created to assist member states’ coordination of foreign policies more generally and a series of key documents are trying to foster strategic convergence between the member states. Despite these efforts only seven out of the hitherto twenty-six Common Security and Defence Policy operations have been military in nature. This emphasis on civilian – rather than military – operations can be explained by the persistent divergence between the two contending strategic cultures in Europe:57 some member states favour the current limitation of EU military ambitions to regionally oriented crisis management and block efforts to develop the capacity for full-spectrum missions. Others are in favour of more robust intervention. Given the unanimity requirement of foreign policy decisions, the unwillingness of the few to award the EU serious security ‘teeth’ suffices to preserve the civilian character of EU conflict resolution policies. In terms of military threats third countries thus tend to look to other organisations (such as NATO or regional hegemons) to provide external security.



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EU interventions in Bosnia, Palestine and Afghanistan suggest, however, that the Union has specialised in soft security, namely police reform and rule-of-law missions. The European Police Mission in BiH, which began in 2003, was the first mission launched under the auspices of the Common Security and Defence Policy. Focused mainly on training and capacity-building, its mandate was extended to cover corruption and ‘terrorism’ until the operation came to an end in 2012.58 Police reforms constitute an important element in the Bosnian conflict resolution process due to allegations of police involvement in war crimes and the immediate post-war structuring of police forces along ethnic lines. The EU High Representatives’ imposition of a centralised reform strategy, which lacked domestic support, has left the reform in implementation limbo though.59 Arguably the EU’s most innovative intervention in the security sector has been its post-2008 Monitoring Mission in Georgia (EUMM). An unarmed, civilian mission, it was able to have monitors on the ground within thirty days. The Mission only operates in Georgia and not beyond the Administrative Boundary Lines, and has to deal with the strategic fact of Russian influence in the region and in South Ossetia and Abkhazia in particular. The EUMM is essentially a conflictprevention mission and has had considerable success in enhancing stability and providing some degree of security to those living in disputed territory.60 The presence of the monitors has given confidence to residents in the disputed territories that a major resumption of conflict is not imminent. There have been very limited attempts to expand upon EUMM’s original mandate so there is a danger that the conflict prevention role helps to freeze division.61 In sum, EU conflict resolution activities can be placed comfortably in the soft security category as harder security measures are conducted by individual member states or through NATO. India, as a relatively new and heterogeneous state in an insecure region, has had to combine hard security reactions with other more development-oriented measures. The Indian state has been unequivocal on its territorial integrity and that it alone has a monopoly of violence within its boundaries. Historically, the Army has largely (though not exclusively) focused on frontier security, leaving counterinsurgency to the police and a large number of paramilitary forces.62 Yet by 1998, 44 per cent of infantry battalions were engaged in counterinsurgency campaigns, mainly in Jammu and Kashmir.63 A series of paramilitary forces (twelve in total) have been raised to insulate the military from direct intervention in domestic disorder, and to ‘stiffen the backbone of local police forces’.64 These have been created by both states and the central government. In 1980 there were an estimated 300,000 paramilitaries,

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while a 2007 estimate puts the figure at 1.5 million.65 These included the Central Reserve Police Force, Border Security Force, Central Industrial Security Force, Indo-Tibetan Border Police, National Security Guard and the National Railway Protection Force.66 In recent decades the state’s policing apparatus has been modernised through the Security Related Expenditure Scheme, the Police Modernisation Scheme and the raising of the Indian Reserve Battalions. Expansions to the police force can also be seen as a pacification measure through the creation of employment, while simultaneously enhancing the state’s ability to exercise coercion. In a number of cases, the government has specifically raised reserve battalions in order to provide security for development schemes.67 India possesses ‘a gargantuan paramilitary apparatus’ (at the national, state and local levels) and a large arsenal of coercive legal mechanisms.68 The Constitution mandates states to maintain law and order, yet the central government retains a keen interest in the issue resulting in problems of coordination and responsibility.69 With such a large security apparatus, and a plethora of security-oriented laws, Indian security responses tend to follow their own standard operating procedures. The Disturbed Areas Act, for example, is renewed by the Ministry of Home Affairs every six months, while parliamentary debates extending security legislation are usually poorly attended.70 Do these strategies offer a social contract, which may enable governance and peace after the security situation has stabilised within or between states according to the strategies? The EU certainly tries to do this in a variety of ways, and India too, but are the states they ‘build’ or that become governmentalised according to their statebuilding strategies, elite-driven and neo-liberal, or representative and redistributary? Statebuilding initiatives can represent both: measures of appeasement or conflict resolution. The security focus of police missions in both approaches, Indian and EU, constitutes a short-term pacification strategy rather than a deeper engagement with the roots of internal conflicts. By re-establishing law and order in conflict-ridden areas, citizens are supposed to be swayed by the importance of state structures for rule enforcement. A sound engagement with the root causes of conflict as needed for the resolution of conflicts, by contrast, requires long-term intervention in favour of the rule of law and constitutional solutions that represent a fair compromise between opposing segments of the population. Hence, the strengthening of accountability through justice reforms and measures to combat corruption, patronage and discrimination is needed to get from mere peace enforcement to the establishment of a state that serves as a conflict resolution tool.



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In post-revolutionary Georgia the EU supported reforms of the judiciary with the aim of promoting accountability.71 In Palestine the EU has shifted the focus of its Coordinating Office for Palestinian Police Support (EUPOL COPPS) over time from ensuring basic policing capacity to reinforcing the rule of law and accountability. The EU’s failure to push Israel to surrender greater authorities to Palestine results in the continued undermining of the rule of law by Israeli Defense Forces and settlers, who operate outside of Palestinian law. Regarding constitutional solutions to conflicts over domination and oppression, the EU tends to favour multi-ethnic federations (with the notable exception of Kosovo) with varying levels of state autonomy. Those models range from high levels of sovereignty in Cyprus, a model of presumed multi-ethnic equality stitched together through ethnic quotas and the Bonn Powers in BiH72 to a state of continued domination of one entity over another, such as the two-state solution in Palestine or EU support for Georgia’s territorial integrity over secessionist claims of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. It is notable though that the EU has often shied away from throwing its weight behind diplomatic attempts to reduce the power asymmetry between conflict parties. This avoidance strategy – often due to bowing to geopolitical pressure exerted by external forces – means that the EU allows conflicts to continue to smoulder under a pacified surface. The lack of accountability and access to justice characterises the securitised Indian governance strategy in Jammu and Kashmir as a conflict management strategy with no prospect of furthering conflict resolution. By turning Kashmir into the ‘most militarized place in the world’, while denying the Kashmiri population access to criminal justice, the government in Delhi has instilled a culture of impunity in the armed forces operating in the area.73 Emergency laws, in particular the Disturbed Areas Act, the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) and the Public Safety Act have granted security personnel unlimited power in their operations and protect them from criminal prosecution. Hence, the population of Jammu and Kashmir has no recourse to justice for human rights abuses and atrocities carried out by security forces or paramilitary, fuelling the conflict between an occupied people and the Indian state. In the post-9/11 period the government of India has sought to use the label ‘terrorist’ in relation to armed groups within its borders, and some protestors. The Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act was reformed in 2008 as part of India’s commitment to the War on Terror, and resulted in anti-terrorist legislation being deployed against human rights activists.74 According to Chasie and Hazarika, the AFSPA ‘asserted New Delhi’s reluctance to deal with armed rebels through dialogue’.75

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A governance strategy that prioritises territorial integrity, lacks accountability of state institutions for their security operations and demonstrates unwillingness to engage with armed resistance may be geared towards peace enforcement, but forgoes any opportunity of resolving India’s internal conflicts. Institutions In terms of institutional responses to conflict, both the EU and India stress their democratic convictions and how their conflict-related interventions should be seen within a wider lacuna of democratic processes and popular legitimation. Both the EU and India have sought to develop and reform institutions in ways that can assist with the prevention and management of conflict. While the EU trumpets the example of its regional integration and redistribution processes, India focuses on the devolution of its authorities to regional and local institutions, using the PRI as its most important conflict resolution strategy. In its strategy documents the EU tends to stress the link between democratisation and conflict resolution.76 This typically translates into EU sponsorship for post-conflict elections and civil society organisation. With the European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights (EIDHR) the EU has created a funding tool for fostering local agency in favour of democratisation, human rights and the rule of law through a bottom-up approach. Moreover, the EU inserts human rights clauses in trade agreements and investment contracts to foster partner governments’ democratic behaviour in a top-down approach. In case of violation, those clauses can be revoked to suspend trade relations or halt investments in authoritarian partner countries. In addition the Council of the European Union has on rare occasions imposed sanctions on countries to target political or economic elites who are assumed to violate human rights or rule-of-law standards.77 In terms of institutions, the EU’s governance-as-conflict resolution approach suffers from two major flaws: normative inconsistency and ineffectiveness. Despite its rhetorical and normative stance that democratisation promotes conflict resolution, the EU often refrains from throwing its weight behind the democratisation process in conflict countries. Sponsoring isolated programmes of governance reform does not add up to effective democracy promotion if EU budget support simultaneously helps to keep unelected or authoritarian elites in power like Mahmoud Abbas’ PA in the West Bank, or fails to coax democratic governments into reform or into accommodating each other, as in



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Bosnia or Cyprus. Conceptually, reform steps such as EU support for Georgian judicial reforms are important elements in democratisation. More crucial steps such as backing the Association process with Georgia to prevent the further centralisation of power have not been taken.78 Analysis suggests moreover that the EU has largely refrained from using EIDHR aid for societal conflict resolution in its funding practice.79 In Cyprus, where the EU focused its EIDHR support on grass-roots conflict resolution agency, it has allocated its aid to ineffective civil society movements and failed to simultaneously ensure that they would have access to political decision-making as well as sufficient grounding in local society at large. In the case of India, the government acknowledged that ‘naxalites typically operate in a vacuum created by the inadequacy of administrative and political institutions’.80 The response has been a number of initiatives designed to improve local accountability. The 1992 seventythird amendment to the Constitution aimed to give renewed authority to the PRIs and was launched alongside further decentralisation measures. At the local level there is some evidence that the PRIs are effectively promoting dispute resolution.81 The PRIs should be seen in a much broader context of the further evolution of Indian democracy, and the devolution of power towards more inclusive, and people-centric, institutions. Certainly the PRIs have been awarded prominent roles in development initiatives such as the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Development Guarantee Act and the National Rural Health Mission. The former is perhaps the largest public works scheme in the world, guaranteeing households a minimum of 100 days’ work per year. Evidence is mounting, however, that PRIs lack the skills and capacities to administer such an ambitious scheme.82 The result is a democratic deficit whereby expectations are raised but not always met. Resistance against the interference of the government in Delhi in local politics eventually also led to a devolution process in Jammu and Kashmir in 2011. Fieldwork on the effectiveness of local governance after the first ever PRI elections held the same year remains tentative at this point though. Minority protection (often part and parcel of targeted development strategies) is a crucial instrument used by the government of India to alleviate grievances over socio-economic and political marginalisation. Initial attempts to safeguard tribal identity through the Sixth Schedule of the Indian Constitution aggravated tensions between tribal and nontribal groups in the India’s North-East, resulting in the riots of 1979, 1987 and 1992 to 1993. By means of a reservation quota and attempts

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to stop illegal immigrants through a work permit system, the Indian government has refined its instruments of minority protection over time. More far-reaching attempts to alleviate socio-economic inequality between the castes have been undertaken in reforms of land tenure and minimum wages.83 These efforts to fight caste-based discrimination may be driven by the electoral majority of the lower castes, which gradually erodes the traditional domination of higher castes’ interests in Indian politics. Whether these governance initiatives will succeed in mitigating marginalisation and thus reducing ethnic tensions, however, remains to be seen. What is not in doubt is the ability of Indian institutions – at all levels – to legislate. Implementing legislation, and meeting public expectations, seems another matter. The federal and decentralised nature of India has proved to be a useful conflict management device for central government in that disputants can get ‘lost’ in layers of government, never quite sure who has responsibility for resolving a particular issue. Some local-level initiatives have been successful in managing intergroup conflicts. The Autonomous District Councils in Meghalaya, for example, have had some success in managing conflict between tribals and non-tribals by reallocating resources towards marginalised tribal groups. Concluding discussion Can we say that the EU and India have distinctive cultures of conflict resolution and governance? And, if so, can we identify similarities and dissimilarities between them? Despite the caveats about comparing the cases mentioned in the opening paragraphs, it is possible to see a number of similarities in the conflict resolution stances adopted by both entities. Both are exemplars through their very existence: the EU a story of integration-as-peace post-Second Word War; India of an ethnic mix staying reasonably united and stable. Both are very concerned with their democratic credentials, as well as their human right credentials to a lesser extent. Both operate a complex mix of neo-liberal institutional design and market access with redistribution around the EU or between Indian states to deal with the nexus between poverty and conflict. Both contribute to the international statebuilding, peacebuilding, development, and peacekeeping, UN and donor dialogues supportively rather than critically. Indeed both consciously adopt narratives of this exemplar status. When examined across the three analytical categories used in this chapter (development, statebuilding and security, and institutions) there is a striking similarity between the approaches. Both regard development as a legitimate and core tool in conflict resolution



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strategies. Both have emphasised statebuilding as a way to manage grievances and distribute resources. And both seem to have a love affair with bureaucracy and place faith in the creation of institutions to help to manage conflict. Democratic mechanisms are regarded by both as a key conflict resolution device and democracy features prominently in the central narratives each has developed for itself. A further similarity might be that both governmental systems, or cultures of governance, claim that they are representative of their citizens, but many of them claim that governance is distant and ill-suited to their identity, needs and rights, and not fully legitimate in their context. The main dissimilarity between the two lies in relation to security policy, with the Indian state more ready to use hard security measures than the EU, but this is explained, in part, by the different nature of the two entities and by the fact that EU member states tend to use force through other multilateral organisations such as NATO. As a single state, India is usually able to operate in a coherent manner on the international stage. Stakeholders in the EU coordinate differently on different issues. For example, there has been relative unity in relation to BiH and Georgia, but disunity in relation to Afghanistan. India and the EU occupy the conflict resolution and management parts of the continuum that stretches to conflict transformation. While there have been some transformatory initiatives by both, the emphasis is largely on managing conflict (sometimes through security) and hoping that pacification initiatives will appease the population. The EU has been particularly active in supporting civil society and NGOs in the expectation that this would legitimate its model of governance and the peace it pursues. But normative positions on democracy and human rights also play a role in determining the legitimacy of governance, meaning that both India and the EU are subject to very different critiques as to the efficacy of their governance in producing conflict resolution. In the case of the Indian state, such critiques revolve around its insistence on territorial sovereignty, upon the inefficiencies and corruption that creep into government on such a vast scale, and its adoption of neo-liberal forms of development, with commensurate implications for the distribution and security of property and land. For the EU this critique revolves around the arbitrary way in which lines are drawn between favoured states in the pre-accession or in association zones, the way in which conditionalities are formed around these possibilities for post-conflict states, the ways in which it has failed to act or acted in coalition with a range of other actors ineffectively in terms of humanitarian intervention, statebuilding, democratisation or supporting human rights and civil society. It is often accused of carrying echoes of

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colonialism in some of its practices of governance in post-conflict zones like BiH. It is also criticised for its distant, bureaucratic governance approaches, which often concur with the economic rationalities of statebased order as with other IFIs such as the IMF or the World Bank. Thus for very different reasons, both India and the EU project cultures of governance which represent assemblages of different structural, historical and regional issues, and identities, which when fed through quite different bureaucratic statebuilding processes, result in political institutions that follow similar rationalities. From this perspective governance should produce internal and border security, be representative, there should be a strong rule of law, development should redistribute, human rights and civil society should be promoted, and peace may be maintained through good governance according to a set of international standards determined by the liberal peace consensus and neo-liberalism. Relations with neighbours depend on these conditions too. Despite these similarities, both the EU and India also can be said to represent governmentalities designed to create liberal and neo-liberal subjects even where those subjects may have other ideological or historical identities. Because of the wide diversity of the contextual environments in which they operate, they respond in quite different ways to the great tensions they are subject to from populations themselves expecting governance to deal with development and conflict issues. Yet, both assemblages also claim that the state, as a member of a regional organisation or an international community, is the essential building block of order and peace, and represents a social contract in which rights and needs are addressed fairly for their populations. These internal and comparative tensions could be said to represent a mode of governance on both parts as being intimate yet dysfunctional as an approach to conflict resolution – a set of convergences and divergences. But they also offer the possibility of mutual learning and development about the ways in which demands for governance and conflict resolution interact in very different circumstances. Notes   1  Cammack, ‘Donors and “fragile states” agenda’.   2  Diez, ‘Europe as discursive battleground’; Diez et al., ‘EU and border conflicts’; Richmond et al., Emerging EU Peacebuilding Framework.   3  Foucault, ‘The subject and power’; Pickett, ‘Foucault and resistance’.   4  We understand strategy as an underlying plan, which is characterised by its practices (statebuilding, development and political institutions) and objectives (pacification, containment, conflict resolution or transformation),



  5    6 

  7    8    9  10  11  12  13  14  15  16  17  18  19  20  21  22  23  24  25  26 

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while a governance culture requires a strategy with a certain cultural identity that distinguishes it from other strategies. In the subsequent analysis we will distinguish between statebuilding as a toolset focused on security-building and the use of political institutions (i.e. democratisation, decentralisation and regional integration). The CORE Project – Cultures of Governance and Conflict Resolution in Europe and India – was coordinated by PRIO (Peace Research Institute Oslo) and the University of Manchester. It involved partners from the Society for Participatory Research in Asia, Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group, Malaviya Centre for Peace Research at Benares Hindu University, Jawaharial Nehru University, the University of Delhi, Berghof Conflict Research, the Central European University in Budapest and the Istituto Affari Internazionali in Rome. Hix and Hoyland, Political System of the European Union; Wallace et al., Policy-Making in the European Union. European Community, Stabilisation and Association Agreement. European Community, Interim Agreement on Trade. European Community, Partnership and Cooperation Agreement. Commission of the European Union, National Indicative Programme. Commission of the European Union, ENP Action Plan. Yardley, ‘Maoist rebels’. Mac Ginty, International Peacebuilding, 196; Byrne et al., ‘Impact of international funding’, 16–35. HM Treasury, Rebalancing the Northern Ireland Economy. Commission of the European Union Technical Assistance Office for the West Bank and Gaza Strip, PEGASE. World Bank, ‘Underpinnings of the future Palestinian state’; Kanaan, Macroeconomic and Fiscal Framework. Pugh, ‘Postwar political economy in Bosnia and Herzegovina’. Dimireva, ‘EU assistance to Bosnia’; Richmond and Franks, ‘Between partition and pluralism’. Farole et al. suggest that Europe’s economic success is based on agglomeration effects, effectively locking peripheral regions into permanent exclusion from growth (‘Cohesion policy in the European Union’). Between 1958 and April 2011 the EU’s acquis communautaire (its accumulated body of law and obligations) had grown to approximately 80,000 items (Miller, ‘The EU’s acquis communautaire’). Papava, ‘Georgia’s economy’. Author interview with academic economist, Tbilisi, 7 March 2012. Pardo Sierra, ‘Shaping the neighbourhood?’. Cited in DasGupta, ‘Pacification is not peacebuilding’, 18–24. There is currently no reliable data on the link between economic growth and social tensions but initial fieldwork carried out by our project partners in India suggests that India’s rapid GDP growth in recent years has fuelled conflict or a sense of exclusion.

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27  Deaton and Drèze, ‘Poverty and inequality’, 811. 28  Times of India (editorial), ‘India’s income inequality’. 29  Bohlken and Sergenti, ‘Economic growth and ethnic violence’; Carlsson et al., ‘Keeping up with the Vaishyas?’. 30  Neogi, ‘Disparity in socio-economic development’. 31  Gomes, ‘The political economy of the Maoist conflict in India’. 32  Since 1951, Indian economic policy has been managed according to a series of Five Year Plans. 33  Leys, Rise and Fall, 8; Mac Ginty and Williams, Conflict and Development, 10. 34  Planning Commission of India, ‘1st Five Year Plan’. 35  Planning Commission of India, ‘10th Five Year Plan’, 458. 36  Ibid., 464. 37  Planning Commission of India, ‘11th Five Year Plan’. 38  Foreword by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh (ibid., v). 39  Gomes, ‘Political economy of the Maoist conflict in India’. 40  Intermediaries worked under feudal landlords and were originally tasked with the extraction of surpluses for the British colonial power (Besley and Burgess, ‘Land reform, poverty reduction and growth’, 4). 41  Ibid., 5. 42  Chatterjee, ‘Land reform in India’, 21–2. 43  Prakash, Jharkhand. 44  Prasad, ‘Agrarian unrest and economic change’; Das, ‘Landowners’ armies’; Chaitanya, ‘Social justice, Bihar style’; Prakash, Jharkhand. 45  Government of India, Annual Report 2003–4 and Annual Report 2011–12. 46  Times of India, ‘Ganjamtribals stage dharna’. 47  Times of India, ‘Tough task ahead for Orissa to convince Ramesh over Posco’. 48  Government of India, Annual Report 2011–12, 20. 49  This is not to discount the impact of supranational institutions and the dynamics of social learning engendered by CSDP missions with regard to the harmonisation of national foreign policy preferences and norms (see Meyer, ‘European strategic culture’). 50  Interview with representative of the EU delegation, Varanasi, India, 18 March 2012. 51  Interview with EU official, Brussels, 8 April 2012. 52  Interview with representative of the EU delegation, Tbilisi, 7 March 2012. 53  The EU’s strict accounting rules require administrative capacity that local NGOs often lack. Hence, the Union tends to work with INGOs which in turn initiate cooperation projects with local partners (author interview with EU official, Brussels, 8 April 2012). 54  Knaus and Martin, ‘Travails of the European Raj’. 55  Hamieh and Mac Ginty, ‘A very political reconstruction’.



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56  Cornish and Edwards, ‘The strategic culture of the European Union’; Biava et al., ‘Characterizing the European Union’s strategic culture’, 1235–7. 57  Rieker, ‘From common defence to comprehensive security’; Biava et al., ‘Characterizing the European Union’s strategic culture, 1231–2. 58  European Union Police Mission in BiH, ‘Overview’. 59  Junctos, ‘Europeanization by decree?’, 375–86. 60  Author interview with EUMM personnel 1, Tbilisi, 8 March 2012. 61  Author interview with EUMM personnel 2, Tbilisi, 8 March 2012. 62  Rajagopalan, ‘Innovations in counterinsurgency’. 63  Ibid., 26. 64  Misra, ‘Paramilitary forces in India’, 386. 65  Sharma, Paramilitary Forces in India. 66  Fair, ‘Prospects for effective internal security reforms in India’. 67  Bose, ‘Special India Reserve Battalion in Naxal areas’. 68  Rehman, India: The Next Superpower?, 26. 69  Ibid., 24. 70  Chasie and Hazarika, ‘State strikes back’, 24; Verma, ‘Police agencies and coercive power’, 131. 71  Author interview with Georgian academic, 9 March 2012. 72  Recchia, ‘Beyond international trusteeship’; Chandler, ‘State-building in Bosnia’; International Crisis Group, ‘Bosnia’s incomplete transition’. 73  India maintains over half a million military, paramilitary and Central Reserve Police forces in Kashmir (Duschinski and Hofman, ‘Everyday violence, institutional denial and struggles for justice’, 46). 74  Amnesty International, ‘Indian doctor Binayak Sen’s conviction and life term mock justice’. 75  Chasie and Hazarika, ‘State strikes back’, 15. 76  Council of the European Union, European Security Strategy; Commission of the European Union, Implementation Report. 77  These sanctions can come in the form of asset freezes, prohibition of entry to the EU or embargoes (see Kotzian et al., ‘Instruments of the EU’s external democracy promotion’). 78  At the moment, closer economic ties with the EU might not be appealing enough for the Saakashvili government to allow the application of conditionality since Georgia secured funding from the IMF in September 2008 and $4.5bn in post-war donor aid in October 2008 (author interview with Georgian economist, Tbilisi, 7 March 2012). 79  Kotzian et al., ‘Instruments of the EU’s external democracy promotion’, 1011. 80  Government of India, Annual Report 2006–7, 24. 81  Bardhan and Mookerjee, Decentralisation and Local Governance. 82  Ghose, ‘Addressing the employment challenge’; Paukaj, ‘Guaranteeing right to work in rural India’. 83  Chaitanya, ‘Social justice, Bihar style’.

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Cultures of governance and peace References

Amnesty International, ‘Indian doctor Binayak Sen’s conviction and life term mock justice’. Amnesty International News, 26 December 2010; www .amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/indian-doctor-binayak-sens-conviction-andlife-sentence-mock-justice-2010–12–25, accessed 12 October, 2012. Bardhan, P. and D. Mookerjee (eds), Decentralisation and Local Governance in Developing Countries: A Comparative Perspective (Boston, MA: MIT Press, 2007). Besley, T. and R. Burgess, ‘Land reform, poverty reduction and growth: Evidence from India’ (LSE, 1998). Biava, A., M. Drent and G. P. Herd, ‘Characterizing the European Union’s strategic culture: An analytical framework’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 49:6 (2011), 1227–48. Bohlken, A. T. and E. J. Sergenti, ‘Economic growth and ethnic violence: An empirical investigation of Hindu–Muslim riots in India’, Journal of Peace Research, 47:5 (2010), 580–600. Bose, S. S., ‘Special India Reserve Battalion in Naxal areas’, Times of India, 7 December 2011. Byrne, S., J. Arnold, K. Standish, O. Skarlato and P. Tenant, ‘The impact of international funding on reconciliation and human security in Northern Ireland’, Journal of Human Security, 6:3 (2010), 16–35. Cammack, D., D. McLeod, A. Rocha Menocal with K. Christiansen, ‘Donors and the “fragile states” agenda’, report submitted to the Japan International Cooperation Agency, March 2006. Carlsson, F., G. Gupta and O. Johansson-Stenman, ‘Keeping up with the Vaishyas? Caste and relative standing in India’, Oxford Economic Papers, 61:1 (2009), 52–73. Chaitanya, K., ‘Social justice, Bihar style’, Economic and Political Weekly, 26:46 (1991), 2612. Chandler, D., ‘State-building in Bosnia: The limits of “informal trusteeship”’, International Journal of Peace Studies, 11:1 (2006), 17–38. Chasie, C. and S. Hazarika, ‘The state strikes back: India and the Naga insurgency’, Policy Studies, 52 (Washington, DC: East–West Center, 2009) www.eastwestcenter.org/fileadmin/stored/pdfs/ps052.pdf; accessed 13 July 2012. Chatterjee, P., ‘Land reform in India – Necessary but not sufficient to fight poverty’, Development and Cooperation, 2 (March/April, 2002), 21–2. Commission of the European Union, National Indicative Programme, http:// ec.europa.eu/world/enp/pdf/country/enpi_csp_nip_georgia_en.pdf; accessed 13 June 2012. Commission of the European Union, ENP Action Plan, http://ec.europa.eu/ world/enp/pdf/action_plans/georgia_enp_ap_final_en.pdf; accessed 13 June 2012.



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Commission of the European Union, Report on the Implementation of the European Security Strategy. Brussels: Commission of the European Union, 11 December 2008, S 407/8; www.consilium.europa.eu/eeas/security-defence/ european-security-strategy?lang=en; accessed 4 July 2012. Commission of the European Union Technical Assistance Office for the West Bank and Gaza Strip, 2009. ‘PEGASE: Providing for sustainable economic growth’, www.enpi-info.eu/library/content/pegase-providing-sustainable-economicgrowth; accessed 10 July 2012. Cornish, P. and G. Edwards, ‘The strategic culture of the European Union: A progress report’, International Affairs, 81:4 (2005), 801–20. Council of the European Union, A Secure Europe in a Better World – European Security Strategy, Brussels: Council of the European Union (2003), www.consilium.europa.eu/eeas/security-defence/european-security-strategy? lang=en; accessed 4 July 2012. Das, A. N., ‘Landowners’ armies take over “law and order”’, Economic and Political Weekly, 21:1 (1986), 15–18. DasGupta, S., ‘Pacification is not peacebuilding: Why special economic packages and special legislations do not work’, in J. B. Galvanek, H.J. Giessmann and M. Mubashir (eds), Norms and Premises of Peace Governance, Berghof Occasional Paper, 32 (2011), 18–24; www.berghof-conflictresearch.org/ documents/publications/boc32e.pdf; accessed 4 July 2012. Deaton, A. and J. Drèze, ‘Poverty and Inequality in India: A re-examination’, in U. Kapila (ed.), Indian Economy since Independence (19th edn) (New Delhi: Academic Foundation, 2009), 808–34. Diez, T., ‘Europe as a discursive battleground: discourse analysis and European integration studies’, Cooperation and Conflict, 36:1 (2001), 5–38. Diez, T., S. Stetter and M. Albert, ‘The European Union and border conflicts: the transformative power of integration’, International Organization, 60:3 (2006), 563–93. Dimireva, I., ‘EU assistance to Bosnia and Herzegovina’, EU Business, 2010, www.eubusiness.com/europe/bosnia/eu-assistance; accessed 12 July 2012. Duschinski, H. and B. Hofman, ‘Everyday violence, institutional denial and struggles for justice’, Race and Class, 52:4 (2011), 44–70. European Community, Stabilisation and Association Agreement, www .official-documents.gov.uk/document/cm77/7743/7743.pdf; accessed 13 June 2012. European Community, Interim Agreement on Trade, http://eur-lex.europa .eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:2008:169:0013:0807:EN:PDF; accessed 13 June 2012. European Community, Partnership and Cooperation Agreement, http:// eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:21999A0804(01): EN:NOT; accessed 13 June 2012. European Union Police Mission in BiH (EUPM), ‘Overview’, www.eupm.org/ Overview.aspx; accessed 21 June 2012.

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Fair, C. C., ‘Prospects for effective internal security reforms in India’, paper presented at International Studies Association Annual Convention (February 2010). Farole, T., A. Rodriggues-Pose and M. Storper, ‘Cohesion policy in the European Union: Growth, geography, institutions’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 49:5 (2011), 1089–1111. Foucault, M., ‘The subject and power’, in H. L. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow (eds), Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983). Ghose, A. K. ‘Addressing the employment challenge: India’s MGNREGA’, ILO Employment Working Paper, ILO, Geneva (2012). Gomes, J. J., ‘The political economy of the Maoist conflict in India: An empirical analysis’, preliminary draft (March 2011). www.uclouvain.be/cps/ucl/ core/documents/Gomes.pdf, accessed 20 June, 2012. Government of India, Ministry of Home Affairs Annual Report 2003–4. Government of India, Ministry of Home Affairs Annual Report 2006–7. Government of India, Ministry of Home Affairs Annual Report 2011–12. Hamieh, C. S. and R. Mac Ginty, ‘A very political reconstruction: Governance and reconstruction in Lebanon after the 2006 war’, Disasters: The Journal of Disaster Studies, Policy and Management, 34 (issue supplement s1) (2009), s103–123. Hix, S. and B. Hoyland, The Political System of the European Union (3rd edn) (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011). HM Treasury, Rebalancing the Northern Ireland Economy, www.hm-treasury .gov.uk/d/rebalancing_the_northern_ireland_economy_consultation.pdf (2011); accessed 20 May 2012. International Crisis Group, ‘Bosnia’s incomplete transition: Between Dayton and Europe’, Europe Report No. 198 (2009). Junctos, A., ‘Europeanization by decree? The case of police reform in Bosnia’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 49:2 (2011), 367–89. Kanaan, O., Macroeconomic and Fiscal Framework for the West Bank and Gaza: Sixth Review of Progress (New York: IMF, 2010). Knaus, G. and F. Martin, ‘Travails of the European Raj – Lessons from BosniaHerzegovina’, Journal of Democracy, 14:3 (2003), 60–74. Kotzian, P., M. Knodt and S. Urdze, ‘Instruments of the EU’s external democracy promotion’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 49:5 (2011), 995–1018. Leys, J., The Rise and Fall of Development Theory (Oxford: James Currey 1996). Mac Ginty, R. and A. Williams, Conflict and Development (London: Routledge, 2009). Mac Ginty, R., International Peacebuilding and Local Resistance: Hybrid Forms of Peace (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011). Manners, I, ‘The normative ethics of the European Union’, International Affairs, 84:1 (2008), 45–60.



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Meyer, C., ‘Convergence towards a European strategic culture? A constructivist framework for explaining changing norms’, European Journal of International Relations, 11:4 (2005), 523–49. Miller, V., ‘The EU’s acquis communautaire’, Standard Note SN/IA/5944 (London: House of Commons London, 26 April 2011). Misra, K.P., ‘Paramilitary forces in India’, Armed Forces and Society, 6:3 (1980), 339–69. Neogi. D., ‘Disparity in socio-economic development and its implications on communal conflict’, International Journal of Human Sciences, 5:5 (2010), 303–10. Papava, V., ‘Georgia’s economy: Post-revolutionary development and post-war difficulties’, Central Asian Survey, 28:2 (2009), 199–213. Pardo Sierra, O.B., ‘Shaping the neighbourhood? The EU’S impact on Georgia’, Europe–Asia Studies, 63:8 (2011), 1377–98. Paukaj, A.K., ‘Guaranteeing right to work in rural India’, in A. K. Paukaj (ed.), Right to Work and Rural India (New Delhi: Sage, 2012). Pickett, B., 1996, ‘Foucault and the politics of resistance’, Polity, 28:4 (summer 1996), 445–66. Planning Commission of India, ‘1st Five Year Plan’, 1951, http://planningcommission .nic.in/plans/planrel/fiveyr/welcome.html; accessed 12 June 2012. Planning Commission of India, ‘10th Five Year Plan, 2002–2007, Vol. 1, Sectoral Policies and Programmes’, 2002, http://planningcommission.nic.in/ plans/planrel/fiveyr/welcome.html; accessed 26 May 2012. Prakash, A., Jharkhand: Politics of Development and Identity (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2001). Prasad, P. H., ‘Agrarian unrest and economic change in rural Bihar: Three case studies’, Economic and Political Weekly, 10:24 (1975), 931. Pugh, M., ‘Postwar political economy in Bosnia and Herzegovina: The spoils of peace’, Global Governance, 8:4 (2002), 467–82. Rajagopalan, R., ‘Innovations in counterinsurgency: The Indian army’s Rashtriya rifles’, Contemporary South Asia, 13:1 (2004), 25–37. Recchia, S., ‘Beyond international trusteeship: EU peacebuilding in Bosnia and Herzegovina’, Occasional Paper 66 (Paris: EU Institute for Security Studies, 2007). Rehman, I., India: The Next Superpower? The Military Dimensions of India’s Rise, IDEAS report (London: LSE, 2012). Richmond, O. P. and J. Franks, ‘Between partition and pluralism: The Bosnia jigsaw and an “ambivalent peace”’, Journal of Southeast Europe and Black Sea Studies, 9:1 (2009), 17–38. Richmond, O. P., A. Björkdahl and S. Kappler, ‘The emerging EU peacebuilding framework: Confirming or transcending liberal peacebuilding?’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 24:3 (2011), 449–69. Rieker, P., ‘From common defence to comprehensive security: Towards the Europeanization of French foreign and security policy?’, Security Dialogue, 34:4 (2006), 479–96.

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Sharma, M. C., Paramilitary Forces in India (New Delhi: Gyan, 2008). Times of India, ‘Tough task ahead for Orissa to convince Ramesh over Posco’ (11 March 2011). Times of India, ‘Ganjamtribals stage dharna’ (4 April 2011). Times of India (editorial), ‘India’s income inequality has doubled in 20 years’ (7 December 2011). Verma, A. ‘Police agencies and coercive power’, in S. Ganguly, L. Diamond and M. F. Plattner (eds), The State of India’s Democracy (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007). Yardley, J., ‘Maoist rebels widen deadly reach across India’, New York Times (1 November 2009). Wallace, H., M. A. Pollack and A. R. Young, Policy-Making in the European Union (6th edn) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). World Bank, ‘The underpinnings of the future Palestinian state: Sustainable growth and institutions’ (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2011).

2

Government of peace and resistive subjectivities: autonomy, ethnicity and gender in North-East India and Bosnia-Herzegovina Atig Ghosh and Elena B. Stavrevska

Introduction The apparent peace that prevails today is ‘governed’ peace, which does not completely rule out conflicts, but makes a convenient mix of war and peace – convenient to most parties and stakeholders involved in such conflicts. Thus, the predominant mode of conflict governance, advanced not solely by multilateral, but also by unilateral actors, appears to be what some scholars have labelled as ‘peace-asgovernance’. This most common form of peace, ‘applied by international actors through a methodological peacebuilding consensus in conflict zones’, entails pacification, rather than genuine conflict resolution, through governmentalism and liberal state institution-building.1 Such approach is multi-layered and targets all spheres of society. On the one hand, it zeroes in on state institutions in creating the basis for liberal peace and on the other, on non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and agencies in governing the society itself.2 Through this governmentalisation and promotion of liberal peace, the society becomes depoliticised and political agency is removed. Importantly: [t]he liberal peace has been imbued with a specific set of interests, partly through the habitual decontextualisation of classical political theory to support inherency arguments about conflict, or confirm liberal norms of market democracy, and a propensity to reshape rather than engage with non-liberal others. It denies the capacity of others, as well the significance of alternative identities, customs, cultures, patterns of governance, or economy.3

This is also the basis of the concept of government of peace, resulting from the security–development nexus, which entails making social

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conflicts become at the very least manageable, while making societal schisms opportunities for social development. The focus being on institution-building, rather than on social justice and everyday life, has produced new resistive subjectivities. Namely, the subjects that are produced through institution-building and the governmental policies of suppression do not merely repeat themselves in their conduct as in the conflict the institutions aim to govern, but in fact revise their subjectivities and advance different emancipatory claims. Two examples include locally relevant ‘identities’, such as ethnicity and gender, based on which people have claimed not solely the citizen’s rights, which the liberal state guarantees, but also the collective rights arguably stemming from their ‘identity’. In this chapter, we first outline the ‘government of peace’ approach of governance, after which we proceed by analysing the interaction of the approach with local ‘identities’ related to ethnicity and gender. In our examination, we draw on substantive fieldwork carried out in India’s North-East and in Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH). Given the multiplicity of protracted conflicts, including those between the state and the different societal groups, as well as conflicts among different ethnic communities who have lived on the same territory for centuries, India’s North-East is in some ways comparable to the Balkans.4 At the same time, the present situation in BiH and the North-East differ greatly with the former having enjoyed relative stability and period of non-violence since the signing of the Dayton Peace Accord in 1995 and also being significantly less heterogeneous in terms of population and autonomy claims than the North-East. While the two cases vary in terms of the historical, political and social contexts, and despite the units of analysis being different, the chapter shows that irrespective of the scale of the conflicts, there are important similarities in the way conflict governance has been undertaken. Government of peace and associated resistive subjectivities With neo-liberalism, which is at the core of the peace-as-governance approach, the older muscular understanding of the state has gone into decline. Privatisation and economic liberalisation have resulted in the contraction and redeployment of the state, shifting the locus of political struggles away from direct contestation for state power and opening new spaces to contestation – by new movements and old – over whether they will be controlled from above or below. The state acts increasingly as broker for global capital as it attempts to re-regulate the conditions for accumulation on a global scale. To be sure, neo-liberalism involves



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not simply a headlong retreat of the state, but a renegotiation of state– society relations. This market-driven reorientation of governance – one which makes ‘social conflicts disappear or at least manageable, contradictions a matter of imagination or at least temporary, and schisms of society a guide to or at least an occasion for social development’ – has been evocatively termed by Ranabir Samaddar as ‘government of peace’.5 This is not peace-ingeminating governance, but a mode of effecting ‘governed peace’ which is a potent cocktail of securitisation, on the one hand, and developmentalism, on the other hand. More prosaically, but no less demonstratively, Samaddar also calls this ‘social governance’.6 The market-driven reorientation of governance was already evident in Europe at the end of the Second World War with the initiation of the European Recovery Programme (ERP, April 1948–December 1951), better known as the Marshall Plan after its promulgator George Marshall, the then US Secretary of State. Marshall shared with the world the concept of the eponymous plan in a speech on 5 June 1947 at Harvard.7 The Plan, he proposed, was intended to rebuild the economies and spirits of Western Europe primarily. It was his conviction that the key to restoration of political stability lay in the revitalisation of national economies. How was this to be achieved? The road to revitalisation of national economies was through international (read US) economic aid. With administrative and technical assistance provided through the Economic Cooperation Administration, which was later succeeded by the USAID, sixteen European nations, including Germany, became part of the ERP and received nearly USD13 bn in aid.8 It has been suggested that the trade relations that the programme engendered led to the formation of the North Atlantic alliance and the subsequent economic prosperity led by coal and steel industries helped, among other factors, to shape what today we know as the European Union. However, many experts have challenged – even rejected as unreliable – such sweeping assertions.9 In any case, once fully woken up by war, the so-called giant, lulled into non-interventionist ‘sleep’ by the Monroe Doctrine, took quick steps to assume control of the emergent global economic order.10 The rules of the old game changed decisively with the Marshall Plan and the incipient globalisation it unleashed: the US would never again be a state that harboured imperial designs; it conclusively became an economic empire that behaved like a state. The developmentalist agendum of the Plan with a view to fostering political stability in Western Europe was, as Marshall unambiguously stated, a part of combating the advances of communism in that region. The other complementary part consisted in the parallel securitisation of the

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world order – the Cold War, the so-called nuclear race and, more historically specifically, the opening of the ‘ratlines’.11 The latter were a system of escape routes for Nazis and other fascists fleeing Europe at the end of the Second World War, sometimes with the active support of the US intelligence and even the Vatican. These escape routes led towards havens in South America but also to the US, Great Britain, Canada and West Asia. The US intelligence’s involvement in at least one ‘ratline’ – the Draganović ‘ratline’ – has been established by historical research.12 The point here, however, is not so much to pass value judgements about the US’s dubious role in post-war ‘recovery’, but to demonstrate the coupled nature of securitisation and developmentalism even in these early manifestations of ‘government of peace’. Noam Chomsky wrote about this security–development complex in The Umbrella of US Power. The amount of US dollars given to France and the Netherlands under the aegis of the Marshall Plan, equalled the funds these countries used to finance their military actions against their colonial subjects in South-East Asia – in French Indochina and the Dutch East Indies. Further, the Netherlands was forced into joining the Korean War in 1950 after threats that the project would end if it did not comply. Simultaneously, the Plan ‘set the stage for large amounts of private US investment in Europe, establishing the basis for modern transnational corporations’.13 However, in different geopolitical contexts, the security–development complex of social governance can produce very different consequences. Mark Duffield, for instance, engages with the discourse on human insecurity in relation to the perception of underdevelopment and ‘failed states’ as a source of insecurity.14 He argues that the human insecurity discourse seeks to universalise or globalise security problems of instability by positing the responsibilities of the West to intervene and manage insecurity at the same time as seeking to contain the risks of instability through a focus on development, in terms of the technologies of community-based self-reliance. He further argues that the West nowadays seeks to intervene ‘bio-politically’ to reconstruct ‘ineffective’ or ‘failing’ states on the basis of satisfying the unmet needs of their populations. The argument can be equally valid for other contexts as well, where the intervener is a unilateral actor, intervening within its state borders. As a result of this dominant discourse that intimately ties security to development, in (post-)conflict societies where the liberal peace is being promoted, it is considered crucial for politics to be based on security and institutions, rather than on social justice, individual agency and community in their everyday context. Such conception of politics makes



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the liberal peace subjects ‘complicit in anti-democratic and anti-selfdetermination processes’.15 These efforts, as shall be argued later in some detail, produced new restive and resistive subjectivities. Both in India and in BiH, the shift from state-orchestrated to market mechanisms of distribution overlapped with new forms of social movementbased struggles in which the old autonomy questions were merely reformulated, not abandoned. The market-mandated retraction and redeployment of the state poses a critical Foucauldian aporia: the state becomes ‘at once that which exists, but which does not yet exist enough’.16 And there is much a slip betwixt the cup and the lip. As the turn to the market leave state authorities in control of fewer resources for co-optation, newly constituted social subjects confronting neo-liberalism formulate a discourse of rights by simultaneously claiming indigenous and other collective rights that markets deny and the citizenship rights that the neo-liberal state pretends to offer equally to all.17 Simply put, the forces of globalisation and concurrent social governance that affect class relations are experienced and resisted through a variety of locally relevant ‘identities’, including ethnicity and gender.18 Let us now look at these two ‘identities’ in succession and at how social governance and the entwined peacebuilding efforts interact with them. Social governance and ethnicity It has been suggested that the neo-liberal project implies atomisation and loss of control to global market forces, posing dilemmas for movements seeking to reassert community identity and grass-roots empowerment – that is, in other words, for autonomy movements. On the one hand, what Hellman terms the ‘fetishism of autonomy’19 – eschewing affiliation or engagement with any political structure for fear that it might absorb the newly asserted identity – can be a cul-de-sac. On the other hand, negotiating a share of power with existing political institutions runs the risk of replicating dominant hierarchies, such as serving global capital, and distancing the ‘autonomous’ representatives from their social bases. In relation to this dilemma, there have been two interrelated kinds of snares, to use a stern metaphor, which will be elaborated below. Political autonomy The first snare is to grant regionally based self-governance to autonomydemanding groups that would amount to a kind of territorial decentralisation negotiated with the state. This strategy in some ways predates

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the emergence of the neo-liberal state in both cases, harking back to colonial times in the Indian case and the Ottoman times in the Bosnian case, and may be loosely termed as a containment policy. The British began administering the North-East region through a series of Acts such as the Schedules District Act of 1874 and the Frontier Tracts Regulations of 1880. In 1873, the British passed the Inner Line Regulation. According to Joysankar Hazarika, the logic behind this regulation was that the ‘unrestricted movements which existed between the British subjects in Assam and the wild tribes living across the frontier frequently led to quarrels and sometimes to serious disturbances’.20 However, an equally important reason was that the British administration also wanted to control the rubber trade that was still in the hands of the hill people and that caused frequent skirmishes between the groups. It must be understood that the inner line did not in any way give sovereignty to the hill people; rather it was a means by which administrative zones of the hills and the plains were separated ostensibly because the ‘civilised’ faced problems cohabiting with the ‘wild’. The Government of India Act, 1935, classified the hill areas of Assam into excluded and partially excluded areas. The excluded areas were not demarcated to protect regional autonomy. This was done mainly to exclude hill areas of Assam from the jurisdiction of the Reformed Provincial Government that included the Brahmaputra plains and the Barak valley. These successive administrative measures, however, had somewhat unpremeditated consequences. First, they resulted in a separate political evolution of the hills and the plains, thereby paving the way for autonomy movements. For the Nagas, for instance, identity claims consolidated into a powerful secessionist movement. The Naga National Council (NNC) was formed in 1946 under the leadership of Angami Zapu Phizo. Under its banner, the Nagas declared their independence on 14 August 1947. The Indian state, of course, quashed this claim brutally with military action, whereafter it adopted the two-track policy of securitisation by clamping on the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, on the one hand, and initiating a dialogue-based peace process, on the other. This dual process has continued to date. ‘Dialogues and wars in the Northeast with alternative regularity’, observes Ranabir Samaddar, ‘demonstrate in this way the governmental logic of treating war and peace as a continuum’21 – a series, if you will. Another consequence of the British administrative measure is evident from, and flows out of, the above discussion. Territorial demarcation/ reorganisation became a dominant template of social governance in post-independence India and more so in post-liberalisation India.22 Territorial reorganisation, grant of statehood and the introduction of



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the model of peace accords went hand in hand with military operations. Each major military operation was followed by major administrative measures of territorial reorganisation and regrouping of villages. There is the example of the creation of Nagaland in December 1963 as the sixteenth state of India; there is also the North-Eastern Areas (Reorganisation) Act of 1971.23 Sajal Nag has written about the regrouping of villages in Mizoram.24 In Tripura, too, villages were regrouped, though the formal justification in this case was economic: ‘cluster villages’ were being formed to improve the condition of the indigenous population.25 Recently, there has been the deliberate policy of introducing rural decentralisation in the form of the panchayati raj (local selfgovernment).26 More importantly, territorial autonomies along ethnic lines have been created throughout the last twenty years within the states of the region.27 Today, the autonomous arrangements have reorganised the states internally while the North-Eastern Areas (Reorganisation) Act of 1971 has externally reorganised the states. Of greater importance has been the introduction of autonomy as a result of the many successive peace accords.28 These autonomous arrangements have been part of the governance structure in the north-eastern states of Assam, Mizoram, Tripura and Meghalaya. They influence the patterns of conflict; they give an idea of the governmental resources to be available for cornering and sharing, the size of the territory to control, and the volume of population to govern. As such, they form a major dimension of the ‘government of peace’. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, the issue of regionally based selfgovernance of autonomy-demanding groups can be analysed from two perspectives. On the one hand, the autonomy of BiH as a whole vis-àvis the different empires and states it had been a part of in the course of its history, and on the other, the autonomy of the ethnic groups within the country vis-à-vis the state itself. In the first case, Bosnia was a rare example in the Balkans as an entity that was integrally incorporated in the Ottoman Empire, keeping the name and the territorial unity of the province. The integrity was also preserved in the period that BiH was under the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Importantly, the four centuries of Ottoman rule have had a significant impact on the religious and with that, on the ethnic composition of the country, traces of which are present to date and have played a role, it has been argued, in later autonomy claims. Namely, autonomy claims were at the very heart of the Bosnian War (1992–95). With Slovenia, Croatia and Macedonia having already declared independence from Yugoslavia, the majority of the Bosniacs and the Bosnian Croats supported the country’s independence too. A sweeping 99.7 per cent voted in favour independence at the

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February–March 1992 referendum.29 At the same time, and this brings in the second perspective from which the autonomy question can be analysed, the Bosnian Serbs felt they would be more secure staying together with Serbia and Montenegro in whatever was left of Yugoslavia, and consequently not only boycotted the independence referendum, but also adopted the Declaration on the Republic of Serbian People of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Constitution.30 The war was concluded with the signing of the General Framework Agreement, also known as the Dayton Agreement, in November 1995. With it, the country was divided into two entities, the majority BosniacCroat Federation of BiH (hereafter FBiH) and the majority Serb Republika Srpska (RS), and a then internationally governed Brčko District. Each of the three has independent governing structures. As part of the peace agreement, the conflict parties also adopted the Constitution of BiH – Annex 4 of the Dayton Agreement – which has not been amended to date. According to the Constitution, the country has three constituent peoples (Bosniacs, Serbs and Croats), who share the political power, have ethnic quotas and are equally represented and hold veto power at the state level on issues considered to be of ‘vital interest’ to the particular ethnicity.31 The entities enjoy a wide array of governing powers and functions, and are responsible for all areas that the Constitution does not specifically assign to the state institutions. The number of these issue areas is significant. Over the years, RS has been particularly protective of these powers, resisting strengthening of the state at the cost of the entities.32 Moreover, with the bigger degree of decentralisation in the Federation, many responsibilities have been delegated to the so-called cantonal governments, including the establishment and control of the police forces, education policy, cultural policy, etc.33 As noted, at the lower levels of government, in addition to the decentralisation established with the Dayton Agreement, the 1994 ceasefire agreement between the Bosniac and the Bosnian Croat leaders, also known as the Washington Agreement, which formed the Federation of BiH, set the basis for the decentralisation within that entity. Namely, with the agreement, FBiH was divided into ten autonomous cantons, the establishing of which was to prevent one ethnic group from dominating over the other.34 The whole territory of BiH is further divided into 142 municipalities. This decentralisation of power at all levels happened by and large along ethnic lines, the outcome of which has been an incredibly complex political structure. It is equally important to note that the implementation of the Dayton Agreement has been overseen by an internationally appointed figure with executive powers, which is the aforementioned



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High Representative. Until recently, the Office of the High Representative (OHR) was double-hatted, also acting as an EU Special Representative to the country, thus indicating the extent of EU’s involvement in the governing of the ‘no war, no peace’ country that BiH is today. Needless to say, all of these represent additional components to the ‘government of peace’. Resource autonomy The second snare that the neo-liberal state sets up for autonomy movements relates to resource allocation. The same neo-liberal ideology that ‘frees’ individuals to fend for themselves in the market can also spin off unprofitable state functions and services that used to be part of the citizenship compact. The market paradigm privatises gains while socialising costs and risks. Thus social sectors and regions may be cut loose depending on the number of autonomous regions making a claim on state resources. As a result, recognition of autonomous spaces in the polity turns out to be a new mechanism for division and co-optation. As a wider range of groups compete for scarcer state resources, they become vulnerable to clientelistic local politicians and, for that matter, to paternalistic NGOs moving into the breach. In the scramble for resources, in the North-East it has been seen that when a state government can step in, establish firm control expressed through political will, and try to guide the market forces to some extent, the territorial autonomy model works. Tripura is a case in point.35 However, where it cannot (that is to say the rest of the NorthEast) market forces wreak havoc on autonomy movements. Developed basically in recent history as what can be called an economy of ‘a market along the foothills’, which bears the characteristics of an extraction economy around coal and limestone, and a plantation economy around tea and timber, the entire scenario in the North-East represents today what Ranabir Samaddar has termed following Dietmar Rothermund as ‘an enclave economy’.36 The neo-liberal strategy is designed to pry open this ‘enclave’ and integrate it with the world market. As such, one important mode of social governance in the North-East has been to encourage what can be called at best ‘marketisation of economic relations’ and at worst ‘crony capitalism’ in the region. There are three more developments strengthening this economic thrust: first, the strategy of opening up the North-East to the greater commercial interests that connect India to South-East Asia, a strategy known as the ‘Look East’ policy;37 second, the opening of villages and far-flung areas through new institutions, namely schools, colleges, banks, offices, communications networks; and, third, the policy alluded to above of

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encouraging homelands resulting in communal strife, anti-migrant measures and ethnic policing. The neo-liberal model recognises the pluralism of ethnic identities as long as those identities do not become the basis for collective organisation around substantive rights. Paradoxically, this divisive policy has had the positive impact of ending the insularity of the North-East somewhat. However, the situation is also marked by a tense apprehension that unrest may erupt again, for, as Samaddar says, ‘while peace has returned, governance has failed to ensure justice’.38 The situation is nonetheless not unremittingly hopeless. To quote Samaddar at length: if it is true that what we face [in the North-East] is a situation of aporia, a cycle of production of nativity-linkages-marketisation-immigrationnationalism-ethnicity-violence-law-linkages-marketisation-immigrationnativity-nationalism … it is also true that it is contention [and not market forces alone] that prises open the situation again and again. Precisely the collective politics that in its moments of frenzy makes immigration the most contentious issue in the life of a nation, also exhibits factors or aspects that make the dialogic quest for justice continue.39

In other words, what Hale for a different context has termed ‘managed neoliberal multiculturalism’40 may have worked so far in the North-East – and seems to be working well too. The same state that oversees economic liberalisation and privatisation is establishing itself as the arbiter of the boundary between individual and group rights, carefully circumscribing the latter to exclude challenges to class-based inequalities. This has not been the case in BiH, which in February 2014 saw the largest social protests since the country’s independence, as a result of frustrations related to failed privatisations, poor living conditions and corrupt governing structures, led by ethno-nationalist political elites. When discussing the dichotomy between individual and group rights, it is noteworthy that in BiH the former are derived from the latter. To be specific, with the three biggest ethnic communities being defined as the basic constituents of the society, the country is in essence governed as a conglomerate of three different ethnic communities.41 Thus, not only are politicians elected as representatives of a particular ethnic community, but also the ethnic division is clearly present in the resource allocation. RS and FBiH, for instance, remain governed as separate markets, with separate legislation and separate stock exchanges. This, needless to say, has created inconveniences for the traders and the various companies in the country, who have to be registered in both entities if they want to trade across the territory of BiH in its entirety.42 In addition, in the field of foreign investments, an ‘investment apartheid’ can be



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noted with most of the Croat-populated parts of FBiH receiving many investments from Croatian companies, RS from Serbia, and the Bosniac parts of FBiH from Turkey.43 At the moment, each entity and in some cases even each canton or municipality is concerned only with its own economic needs, with the state and the entity level often being perceived as an additional obstacle in ensuring economic growth and stability through trade and investments.44 On the other hand, the international community has often conditioned funds on the cooperation of the entities or even the ethnicities. An example of the latter was the EU’s recent attempt to bring together the leaders of the biggest political parties, each of which is perceived to represent a certain ethnicity, for a constitutional reform, the failure of which resulted in a suspension of half of the Instrument for Pre-Accession Assistance funds that the country had expected.45 Additionally, in 2013 the Bosnian politicians had to work together to agree on an IMFinspired Global Fiscal Framework for 2014–16.46 With this, the neoliberal austerity measures that are at the time of writing in their fifth year will continue. The local politicians have united in imposing the austerity reforms, which have resulted in repeated public sector cuts, double external public debt and flatlined growth. This, along with the numerous failed privatisations in the country and the high unemployment rate, led to thousands of workers, students, retirees and war veterans taking to the streets of many towns across the country in the first large social protests in post-Dayton BiH. In that sense, the protests appear to be a different phase in the above-described continuum in the case of the Indian North-East. Here, too, neo-liberal governance has failed to ensure justice. To conclude, autonomy defined as mere disengagement has left autonomous communities cut off from resources and unprotected from the forces of the global market and yet, autonomy defined as simply cultural pluralism has fallen into the neo-liberal ‘multiculturalism trap’ of atomising communities, substituting formal ‘equality’ for the power to establish collective identities and demand substantive rights and in many cases engendering xenophobia. Yet, it is in this tenebrous situation that new linkages are being forged which, in Samaddar’s powerful enunciation, in time would overcome the ignominious circumstances of its birth and spearhead the ‘dialogic quest for justice’. Social governance and gender It has been argued that the forces of globalisation and concurrent social governance that affect class relations are experienced and resisted

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through at least another locally relevant ‘identity’ than ethnicity – gender. The argument here, predictably, is not that women are resplendent symbols of peace who stay away from supporting the male members of their communities when they are embroiled in violent actions. In her book Battle Cries and Lullabies, Linda Grant DePauw has powerfully depicted the various roles women play in situations of conflict. Covering millennia and spanning the globe in its scope, DePauw’s study depicts women both and equally as victims and as warriors; as nurses, spies, sex workers, and wives and mothers of soldiers; as warrior queens leading armies into battle, and as baggage carriers marching in the rear.47 However, it may be argued that such participation does not in any way diminish the marginalisation of women. In fact, often such participation is enforced by patriarchal injunction: women of the Bantuspeaking Kisii tribe in South-Western Kenya, for instance, are enjoined by patriarchal requirements to scream to announce the beginning of a war with, say, the Kipsigis, the Maasai or any other hostile Nilotic community. Failure to do this is punished by divorce by their husbands. However, the ‘double marginalisation of women’ in conflict situations, as Paula Banerjee terms it48 – first because they are willy-nilly party to the group claiming autonomy and second because they are under the cosh of the same group’s patriarchy – does not entirely extinguish their agency. Women in autonomy movements present a peculiar conundrum. On the one hand, they have to identify with the ‘autonomous’ identity that the group promotes and fights for. On the other hand, they are constantly acutely faced with the fact that ‘autonomy’ after all has long been coded as masculine and is associated with masculine ideal. This is true despite autonomy being something which women have often called for in their own rights. As Jessica Benjamin argues, while we are formally committed to equality, ‘gender polarity underlies such familiar dualisms as autonomy and dependency’.49 In claiming autonomy, therefore, female agents collapse this dubious binarism between autonomy and dependency because, as Carol Gilligan persuasively argues, ‘for women, identity has as much to do with intimacy as with separation’.50 The trajectory is thus less about individualisation and independence than towards ultimately balancing and harmonising an agent’s interests with those of others. This movement towards harmonisation is most effectively mediated by women actors. At another level, it also announces the arrival of a ‘new’ subject – whose ‘newness’ does not consist in merely having a different biological sex, but in the performance of gender roles in a way that rearticulates the standard modes of interacting with (and counteracting) the state.



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In the case of Nagaland in the North-East, appeals have been made with some degree of success to favour political, dialogic and nonmilitary solutions. In other words, the neo-liberal state has been able to enlist the support of Naga women to work for peace with some amount of success. In spite of their cooperation with the state as peacebuilders, however, women have often been able to dodge the governmental ‘snares’ that were discussed in the previous section and have paved the way for dynamic collective political action of the nonbelligerent kind. To quote at length from the work of Paula Banerjee and Ishita Dey who finished their fieldwork in Nagaland in early 2012: [W]omen … through lived experiences of conflict started working for peace [in the North-East]. In their activism for peace they acquired a legitimacy to enter the space for political decision-making that was denied to them. In their commitment for peace, they motivated their society to observe a ceasefire. The state found in them an unusual ally and could see their far-reaching influence in society. When the state decided to move away from their mode of conflict with the Naga people it reinvented its indispensability by championing the cause of women. It was around the same time that women’s activism was going through a generational change. Younger women leaders decided to innovate with new agenda for women and brought in the question of women’s rights. In this they found much of the traditional leadership allied against them. They found the state keen to ally with their cause in its role as an arbiter.51

The mutual coming together of Naga women and the government of Nagaland, Banerjee and Dey argue, is reflected in the activism for a Women’s Reservation Bill. The women used all government institutions to further the cause for peace, justice and equity.52 However, the astute authors are apprehensive in arguing that ‘[t]his coming together was timely although the alliance is bound to be fragile. Both the sides are giving lip service to this alliance to further their own interest. However, for now this alliance has proved transformative for gender roles in society, helping the cause of peace, stability and justice.’53 They conclude their collaborative study, with the following penetrating aperçu: ‘It remains to be seen whether this alliance can in any way be liberating for Naga society as a whole; otherwise it will soon become redundant.’54 The outcome of the interaction between social governance and gender in BiH appears to be similar. In Bosnia, there has been a triple burden complicating gender relations to a great extent: the strong patriarchal tradition, a number of depoliticisations that took place during the communist period and the war causing an outburst of exclusionary

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identitarianisms.55 Looking back at the communist era and the legacy thereof, the discourse relating to anything even marginally linked to gender issues was reduced to ‘women’s equality’ and ‘emancipation through the infrastructure’, which was then assumed to lead to numerous forms of ‘emancipation’ in the superstructure, without using the notion ‘gender’ in any political terms. Thus far there has been no repoliticisation of gender in BiH, as is the case with most of the former Yugoslav countries. The political discourse in the region has been ‘historically grounded in the traditional folkloristic or epic imaginaries’, with the system of ‘heroic patriarchy’ above and beyond at the core of its ‘symbolic matrices and communication models’.56 Given the ethnonational regimes of power and knowledge that constitute the presently dominant framework, not much has changed in post-war BiH. In fact, even the term ‘gender’ most people, even the well-educated ones, relate to the grammatical category. This has clearly affected the development of any gender-related activism that aims to become more political. Consequently, what we see in BiH nowadays is a certain type of activism that essentially tries to fight the regime with the regime’s own discourse, and therefore, participates in the ‘reproduction of the patriarchy-induced dichotomies by using the very same political discourse that frames them, though in a more covert way’.57 In that sense, the activities of such an agency are designed in a certain manner to meet a minimum of ‘social acceptance’ and avoid radical clashes with the dominant social edifices, in which case they would be either silent or be silenced. In other words, anticipating backlash, defined as ‘resistance of those in power to attempts to change the status quo’,58 progressive women’s organisations usually change their strategies to be less threatening and more pragmatic. To that end, several of them have worked closely with all levels of government, as well as with the international community in the country, in developing a legal and institutional framework that will ensure women’s participation in governance and in furthering the cause of justice and equity. The practical application, however, is still lagging behind. Conclusion In dealing with the phenomenon of ‘government of peace’, which has neo-liberalism at its core, we have analysed its interaction with collective local ‘identities’ shaped around ethnic belonging and gender. The role played by women, for instance, poses the issue of a certain kind of public ethics of self-government growing out of the dynamics of subjectformation through conflict governance. That is to say, conflict can be



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analysed as a historically singular mode of experience, whereby the ‘objects’ of conflict governance are transformed into ‘subjects’ through certain specific procedures, such as the procedure of building peace, or the attempts at peace at micro-levels, and through the contradictory process of securitisation. Yet, we must understand that subject-formation is not a one-sided process. Each phase of ‘conflict resolution’, so to speak, produces in turn another phase, precisely because the governmental policies of suppression not only stokes fear and loathing, but also produce a revised subjectivity that takes stock of the strengths and weaknesses of the ‘adversary’.59 Therefore, the result of the operation of new governing techniques is not one that produces passive, depoliticised subjects – Foucauldian docile bodies, if you will – although such indeed may be the original purpose of social governance. The subject of conflict is, in this sense, irreducibly obstreperous. It can only partially be made the economic subject, and it is important to bear in mind that the economic subject and the subject of rights have different relationships with political power. Their autonomies are of different, often incompatible natures. The problem of ‘government of peace’, like any other self-styled mode of good governance, is that it will have to deal with different subjects. The situation that presents itself in both India’s North-East and Bosnia-Herzegovina bears the hopeful mark of this dynamic principle of heterogeneity. Notes   1  Richmond and Franks, Liberal Peace Transitions, 6.   2  Ibid.   3  Richmond, ‘Foucault and the paradox of peace-as-governance versus everyday agency’, 200–1.   4  Project CORE, Survey Preparation Background Report, 40.   5  Samaddar, ‘Government of peace’, 1.   6  Ibid.   7  For a detailed and influential history of the Marshall Plan, see Hogan, Marshall Plan.   8  The aid would have amounted to USD148 bn at inflation-adjusted rates in 2013; www.usinflationcalculator.com; accessed 25 October 2013.   9  Werner Abelshauser, for one, in a review of West Germany’s economy from 1945 to 1951, found that ‘foreign aid was not crucial in starting the recovery or in keeping it going’ (‘West German economic recovery, 1945– 51: a reassessment’, 52). Economist Tyler Cowen found that the economic recoveries of France, Italy and Belgium also pre-dated the flow of US aid. See Cowen, ‘Marshall Plan’. Economic scholarship since the 1990s has been more hostile to the idea of foreign aid itself. See, for instance, Alesina

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18  19  20  21  22  23  24  25  26  27  28  29  30  31  32  33  34 

Cultures of governance and peace and Weder, ‘Do corrupt governments receive less foreign aid?’. This policy of promoting corrupt government can then be attributed back to the initial impetus of the Marshall Plan. See Tucker, ‘Marshall Plan myth’. Historians such as Walter LaFeber have argued that the plan was US economic imperialism and directed at gaining control over Western Europe. See, for instance, LaFeber, America, Russia and the Cold War. See, for example, Aarons and Loftus, Unholy Trinity; Simpson, Blowback; Phayer, Pius XII, the Holocaust, and the Cold War. ‘History of the Italian rat line’; see also Breitman, et al., US Intelligence and the Nazis; Loftus, America’s Nazi Secret. Chomsky, Umbrella of US Power, 9. Duffield, Development, Security and Unending War. Richmond, ‘Post-liberal peace’, 562. Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 4. The same kind of argument has been made for Mexico and Latin America by, respectively, Fox, ‘Difficult transition from clientelism to citizenship’; Eckstein and Wickham-Crowley, Struggles for Social Rights in Latin America. For experiences from other parts of the world, see Nash, Mayan Visions; Yashar, Contesting Citizenship in Latin America. Hellman, ‘Study of new social movements in Latin America and the question of autonomy’. Hazarika, Geopolitics of North-East India, 74. Samaddar, ‘Government of peace’, 10. Datta Ray and Agrawal, Reorganization of Northeast India since 1947. Ibid.; see the text of the Act at http://indiankanoon.org/doc/318384; accessed 25 October 2013. Nag, ‘Gigantic panopticon’. On the miserable condition of these ‘cluster villages’ planned by the Tripura police chief B. L. Vohra; see ‘Tripura tribal rehab plan goes awry’, The Telegraph; Prasad, ‘Forestry and tribal development’. Hazarika, ‘Conflict and development’ and ‘Examining autonomy’. Barbora, ‘Autonomy in the Northeast’; Bhaumik and Bhattacharya, ‘Autonomy in the Northeast’. For a discussion on peace accords and their sociopolitical function, see Samaddar, ‘Governing through peace accords’; Das, ‘Nobody’s communiqué’; for a brief account, see Samaddar, ‘Government of peace’, 6–11. Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, Referendum on Independence in Bosnia-Herzegovina, 19. National Assembly of the Republic of Srpska, ‘About us’. Constitution of Bosnia and Herzegovina, 14 December 1995. ‘Dodik: Neprihvatljivo “uplitanje” SDP-a BiH kada je u pitanju predsjedavajući Vijeća ministara’. Constitution of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Washington Agreement, 1 March 1994.



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35  Though pacification has been an important part of the government counterinsurgency toolkit in Tripura, the reason why the state has not gravitated towards what has been termed ‘durable disorder’ for the rest of the North-East is twofold: first, the political will of – and the decades-long, relatively corruption-free government provided by – the Communist Part of India (Marxist)-led Left Front; and, second, economic development tied to the boom in rubber plantation. Subir Bhaumik, however, appends a caveat to this interpretation. He says this Bengali-dominated state’s ‘success in economic development and in providing relatively corruption-free governance will be undermined by festering ethnic rancour that may explode into bouts of anomic violence anytime soon’ if vigorous initiative is not taken to restore ‘tribal lands and rights’ and to undo ‘the marginalisation of the indigenous peoples by some innovative socio-political engineering’ (‘Tripura’, 1). The point about the political will and good governance of the Left Front government has also been made by Bhattacharya in ‘Political will and the success of Aadhaar in Tripura’. A case for Tripura’s exceptionalism is also made by Samaddar, ‘Government of peace’, 17–18. ‘Durable disorder’ is the principal motif of Baruah’s influential work Durable Disorder. 36  Samaddar, ‘Government of peace’, 14; Rothermund, Economic History of India. 37  Baruah, ‘Between South and Southeast Asia’; Das, ‘India’s Look East policy’. 38  Samaddar, ‘Government of peace’, 13. 39  Ibid. 40  Hale, ‘Does multiculturalism menace?’. 41  Hayden, ‘“Democracy” without a demos?’, 226. 42  Field notes, Sarajevo and Doboj, November 2011 and November 2012. 43  Kivimäki et al., Dinamika konflikta u multietničkoj državi Bosni i Hercegovini Studija analize konflikta u pojedinim zemljama, 56. 44  Ibid. 45  Jukic, ‘EU to cut Bosnia funds over reform failure’. 46  Zivkovic, ‘People’s uprising’. 47  DePauw, Battle Cries and Lullabies. 48  Speaking about displaced women, Paula Banerjee writes, ‘displaced women are often doubly marginalised since state policies are weighted against them both because they are women and also because often they are members of minority ethnic, religious and linguistic groups’. This argument neatly fits the case of women in conflict too (‘Resisting erasure: Women IDPs in South Asia’, in Banerjee et al., Internal Displacement in South Asia, 305). More relevant to our present context is the following statement she makes: ‘In situations where the state is not an actor, the majority group imitates state behaviour thereby victimising women as in the massacres by Bodo militants.’ 49  Benjamin, Bonds of Love, 7.

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50  Gilligan, In a Different Voice, 98. 51  Banerjee and Dey, ‘Women, conflict and governance in Nagaland’, 23. 52  For the activism around the Bill, see: ‘SC directs Nagaland Govt. to respond on 33% women quota’, Morung Express (20 November 2012), www.morungexpress.com/frontpage/88603.html; accessed 25 October 2013. 53  Banerjee and Dey, ‘Women, conflict and governance in Nagaland’, 23. 54  Ibid., 23–4. 55  Husanović, ‘Practice with no language’, 127. 56  Ibid., 125. 57  Ibid., 127. 58  Mansbridge and Shames, ‘Toward a theory of backlash’, 625. 59  Samaddar, ‘Government of peace’, 26.

References Aarons, M. and J. Loftus, Unholy Trinity: The Vatican, the Nazis, and the Swiss Bankers (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1991, rev. edn, 1998). Abelshauser, W., ‘West German economic recovery, 1945–51: A reassessment’, Three Banks Review, 135 (1982). Alesina, A. and B. Weder, ‘Do corrupt governments receive less foreign aid?’, American Economic Review, 92:4 (September 2002), 1126–37. Banerjee, P., S. B. R. Chaudhury, S. K. Das and B. Adhikari (eds), Internal Displacement in South Asia: The Relevance of the UN’s Guiding Principles (New Delhi: Sage, 2005). Banerjee, P. and I. Dey, ‘Women, conflict and governance in Nagaland’, Policies and Practices 51 (Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group, July 2012). Barbora, S., ‘Autonomy in the Northeast: The frontiers of centralised politics’, and S. Bhaumik and J. Bhattacharya, ‘Autonomy in the Northeast: The hills of Tripura and Mizoram’, in R. Samaddar (ed.), The Politics of Autonomy: Indian Experiences (New Delhi: Sage, 2005), 196–241. Baruah, S., ‘Between South and Southeast Asia: Northeast India and the Look East policy’, CENISEAS Paper 4 (Guwahati Centre for Northeast India, South and Southeast Asia Studies, 2004). Baruah, S., Durable Disorder: Understanding the Politics of Northeast India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005). Benjamin, J., The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination (New York: Pantheon, 1988). Bhattacharya, J., ‘Political will and the success of Aadhaar in Tripura’, in Atig Ghosh (ed.), Branding the Migrant: Arguments of Rights, Welfare and Security (Kolkata: Frontpage, 2013). Bhaumik, S., ‘Tripura: Ethnic conflict, militancy and counterinsurgency’, Policies and Practices 52 (Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group, August 2012). Breitman, R., N. J. W. Goda, T. Naftali and R. Wolfe, US Intelligence and the Nazis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).



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Chomsky, N., The Umbrella of US Power: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Contradictions of US Policy (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1999). Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, The Referendum on Independence in Bosnia-Herzegovina February 29–March 1, 1992 (Washing­ ton, DC, 1992). Constitution of Bosnia and Herzegovina, 14 December 1995, www.ohr.int/dpa/ default.asp?content_id=372; accessed 18 February 2014. Constitution of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, 18 March 1994. www.unhcr.org/refworld/docid/3ae6b56e4.html; accessed 18 February 2014. Cowen, T., ‘The Marshall Plan: Myths and realities’, in D. Bandow (ed.), US Aid to the Developing World: A Free Market Agenda (Washington, DC: Heritage Foundation, 1985), 61–74. Das, S. K., ‘Nobody’s communiqué: Ethnic accords in Northeastern India’, in R. Samaddar and H. Reifeld (eds), Peace as Process: Reconciliation and Conflict Resolution in South Asia (New Delhi: Manohar, 2001), 231–52. Das, S. K., ‘India’s Look East policy: Imagining a new geography of India’s Northeast’, India Quarterly, 66: 4 (December 2010), 343–58. Datta Ray, B. and S. P. Agrawal (eds), Reorganization of Northeast India since 1947 (New Delhi: Concept Publishing, 1996). DePauw, L. G., Battle Cries and Lullabies: Women in War from Prehistory to the Present (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000). ‘Dodik: Neprihvatljivo “uplitanje” SDP-a BiH kada je u pitanju predsjedavajući Vijeća ministara’, Vijesti.ba (7 October 2010), www.vijesti.ba/vijesti/bih/ 21747-Dodik-Neprihvatljivo-uplitanje-SDP-BiH-kada-pitanju-predsjedavajuci -Vijeca-ministara.html; accessed 18 February 2014. Duffield, M., Development, Security and Unending War: Governing the World of Peoples (Cambridge: Polity, 2007). Dutta Hazarika, S., ‘Examining autonomy: The 73rd constitutional amendment in Assam’, Policies and Practices 8 (Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group, 2005). Dutta Hazarika, S., ‘Conflict and Development: Implications for democracy and governance’, in R. Samaddar and S. K. Sen (eds), New Subjects and New Governance in India (New Delhi: Routledge, 2012), 211–44. Eckstein, S. E. and T. P. Wickham-Crowley, Struggles for Social Rights in Latin America (New York: Routledge, 2003). Foucault, M., Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79, trans. G. Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Fox, J., ‘The difficult transition from clientelism to citizenship: Lessons from Mexico’, in D. A. Chalmers, C. M. Vilas, K. Hite, S. B. Martin, K. Piester and M. Segarra (eds), The New Politics of Inequality in Latin America: Rethinking Participation and Representation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). Gilligan, C., In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).

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Hale, C. R., ‘Does multiculturalism menace? Governance, cultural rights, and the politics of identity in Guatemala’, Journal of Latin American Studies, 34:3 (2002), 485–524. Hayden, R. M., ‘“Democracy” without a demos? The Bosnian constitutional experiment and the Intentional construction of nonfunctioning states’, East European Politics & Societies, 19:2 (2005) 226–59. Hazarika, J., Geopolitics of North-East India: A Strategical Study (New Delhi: Gyan Publishing House, 1996). Hellman, J. A., ‘The study of new social movements in Latin America and the question of autonomy’, in A. Escobar and S. E. Alvarez (eds), The Making of Social Movements in Latin America: Identity, Strategy and Democracy (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992), 52–61. ‘History of the Italian rat line’ (10 April 1950), document signed by ‘IB Operating Officer’, Paul E. Lyon, 430th Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC), Headquarters of the US Forces in Austria, http://archive.is/wzv2u; accessed 25 October 2013. Hogan, M. J., The Marshall Plan: America, Britain and the Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1947–52 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Husanović, J., ‘Practice with no language: a reflection of the “gender scene” in Bosnia in a Sarajevo workshop’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 3:1 (2010) 124–30. Jukic, E. M., ‘EU to cut Bosnia funds over reform failure’, BalkanInsight (14 October 2013); www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/bosnia-once-moredisappoints-brussels; accessed 10 March 2014. Kivimäki, T., M. Kramer and P. Pasch, Dinamika konflikta u multietničkoj državi Bosni i Hercegovini Studija analize konflikta u pojedinim zemljama (Sarajevo: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, December 2012). LaFeber, W. F., America, Russia and the Cold War, 1945–75 (America in Crisis) (New York: Wiley, 2nd edn, 1976). Loftus, J., America’s Nazi Secret: An Insider’s History (Waterwille: Trine Day, 2010). Mansbridge, J., and S. L. Shames, ‘Toward a theory of backlash: Dynamic resistance and the central role of power’, Politics & Gender, 4:4 (2008) 623–34. Nag, S., ‘A gigantic panopticon: Counter-insurgency and modes of disciplining and punishment in Northeast India’, Policies and Practices 46 (Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group, March 2012). Nash, J. C., Mayan Visions: The Quest for Autonomy in an Age of Globalization (New York: Routledge, 2001). National Assembly of the Republika Srpska, www.narodnaskupstinars.net/eng/ stranica/about-us; accessed 18 February 2014. Phayer, M., Pius XII, the Holocaust, and the Cold War (Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008). Prasad, A., ‘Forestry and tribal development: A background note for Tripura State Human Development Report’, 2004–5; http://planningtripura.nic.in/



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THDR/backgroundreport/Forestry%20&%20Tribal%20Development.pdf; accessed 25 October 2013. Project CORE, Survey Preparation Background Report (2011). Richmond, O. P., ‘A post-liberal peace: Eirenism and the everyday’, Review of International Studies, 35 (2009) 557–80. Richmond, O. P., ‘Foucault and the paradox of peace-as-governance versus everyday agency’, International Political Sociology, 4:2 (2010) 199–202. Richmond, O. P. and J. Franks, Liberal Peace Transitions: Between Statebuilding and Peacebuilding (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009). Rothermund, D., An Economic History of India: from Pre-colonial Times to 1991 (New York: Routledge, 1993). Samaddar, R., ‘Governing through peace accords’, in The Politics of Dialogue: Geopolitical Histories of War and Peace in South Asia (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). Samaddar, R., ‘Government of peace’, Policies and Practices 53 (Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group, October 2012). ‘SC directs Nagaland Govt. to respond on 33% women quota’, Morung Express (20 November 2012), www.morungexpress.com/frontpage/88603.html; accessed 25 October 2013. Simpson, C., Blowback: The First Full Account of America’s Recruitment of Nazis and Its Disastrous Effect on the Cold War, Our Domestic and Foreign Policy (New York: Grove/Atlantic, 1988). ‘Tripura tribal rehab plan goes awry’, The Telegraph (1 October 2005). www.telegraphindia.com/1051001/asp/northeast/story_5304499.asp; accessed 25 October 2013. Tucker, J., ‘The Marshall Plan myth’, Free Market, 15:9 (September 1997); http://mises.org/freemarket_detail.aspx?control=120; accessed 5 October 2013. Washington Agreement, 1 March 1994; www.usip.org/files/file/resources/ collections/peace_agreements/washagree_03011994.pdf; accessed 18 February 2014. Yashar, D. J., Contesting Citizenship in Latin America: The Rise of Indigenous Movements and the Post-liberal Challenge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Zivkovic, A., ‘The people’s uprising: A break with Dayton Bosnia?’, LeftEast (10 February, 2014); www.criticatac.ro/lefteast/break-with-dayton-bosnia; accessed 10 February 2014.

3

Political economy of conflict and peace: governmentality of participation and strategic veto in Bihar and Jharkhand, India Amit Prakash

Mainstream governance literature is rooted in a technocratic approach to ‘resolving’ policy conundrums and has an uneasy approach to conflict. Conflict is seen as an aberration, which can and must be ‘resolved’ by construction of adequate policy responses to conflict. Embedded within this approach is a presumption that it is possible to create a system of governance in which the policy choices are limited to merely finding the correct policy mix.1 These viewpoints ‘express a hope … that government might be conducted without politics … without partisan conflict. This hope has a certain universal appeal’2 in policy domains across the world. However, conflict and contestation is not an aberration in a political process but is an integral part of the mechanics of democracy. Contentious politics, involving ‘episodic, public, collective interaction among makers of claims and their objects’,3 has always been a central feature of democratic politics, without which there are no possibilities for emancipatory outcomes of the processes of governance, and thereby little possibility of social change. This issue attains further salience in ‘contemporary changing societies … [that] are faced with the need to undergo massive changes in the structure of the economy, social relations and hierarchy of power’.4 Such social and economic change has brought disruption, conflict and disorder in almost all contexts across the world. However, the democratic process ‘promote[s] entitlement [and] accelerates expectations and enfranchisement[,] adds political muscle to popular demands, empowerment … [and] helps mobilise opposition to policies that hurt entrenched interests’5 (emphasis in original). Contention thus is arguably a necessary (though not sufficient) variable in politics of transformation.



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Not all kinds of contentious politics have the same character and implications. Expanding upon the formulation offered by Tarrow et al.,6 myriad conflicts experienced in India may be seen as located on a continuum with the two extremes being contained contention and transgressive contention (violent conflict).7 The political process that defines and sets the parameters of the governance process delimits the location of conflicts and contestation on this continuum; besides underlining the centrality of actors, institutions and processes in an analysis of the governance processes and their role in both, determining the contours of conflict and contestation as also in their engagement with both public policy and the political processes. In light of the above, this chapter analyses the empirical patterns that define the political economy of a complex web of relationships in conflict and contestation in Bihar and Jharkhand, India.8 Detailed empirical material was collected in multiple field studies in 2011 and 2012 in five of the sixteen most Naxal-affected districts, namely, Gaya and Jamui in Bihar and Chatra, Hazaribag and Lohardaga in Jharkhand.9 The state and the discipline of policy categories The fundamental logic of governance processes in Jharkhand and Bihar and its interface with conflict – both violent and structural – is defined by the twin ideas of governmentality of participation and that of a ‘judicious’ strategic veto. Both these processes operate in the context of pre-existing societal structures and processes, which in turn defines the limits of the governance process and is also modified by the same. The analytical point of departure is the Indian state’s self-proclaimed twin role of security and social change to address conflicts in the country in general and the two states under analysis in particular. To fulfil this twin role, the state frames a series of policy responses within a defined set of objectives and goals aimed at ‘secure[ing] the welfare of its population’.10 This involves ‘techniques of governing that allow governmental intervention to be devised and conducted’11 in a way that is credible to the one who governs as well as the governed.12 Defining such a field for governmental interventions requires construction of an autonomous form of rationality based on exhaustive and detailed knowledge of the governed reality.13 While ability to construct such knowledge about the field of governance is crucial in defining (and expanding) the limits of governmental power, it also creates a hiatus between citizens (who inhabit the domain of theory and carry the ethical connotation of participation in the sovereignty of the state) and population (inhabiting the domain of policy, it is descriptive, empirical,

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classifiable and amenable to statistical techniques of census and survey). This distinction provides the government functionaries with a set of instruments that are amenable to rational structuring to reach the inhabitants as targets of their policies.14 Thus, the contemporary power regime seeks legitimacy not by the participation of citizens in the matters of state but by claiming to provide for the well-being of the population. Governance therefore became less about matter of politics and more about administrative policies.15 The state emphasises well-being and security of population using governmental technologies, independent of considerations of participation by citizens in the sovereignty of the state.16 Therein also lies the logic of ‘strategic reversibility’ wherein governmental practices are turned into a ‘focus of resistance’ by groups of human population.17 To embark on its journey to secure the twin policy objectives of security and development,18 the state constructs a series of categorisation of population as subjects of government policies – from definitions of social groups to ‘security threats’ and from subjects of ‘entitlement’ of the state’s developmental largesse in terms of categorisation of social groups as Scheduled Castes or Tribes to their participation in recently created bodies of local governance. These categories become indispensable terms of engagement between the various social groups, and their interface with the state. Little political contestation surpasses these categories, even though many of these categories acquire local meanings owing to their operational context of pre-existing social structures. Such centrality of policy categories has the effect of disciplining all actors populating the policy space – whether in a collaborative or a contesting role. In order words, all relevant political actors interpret their role and action through the lens of these policy categories constructed by the state. Such disciplining extends to violent non-state actors as well, owing to the constitutive power of such categories. For instance, the contemporary Naxal actors draw upon various caste categories (derived from the social structures but legitimised by state policies) to order their own organisational affairs which even extends to instances of Naxal participation in Panchayats bodies (whether directly or through proxies). The Indian state has a peculiar character of being marked at once by high state capacity in some respects while being quite constrained in many others – what the Rudolphs have called a ‘weak-strong state’ in a ‘rich-poor economy’.19 While this circumscribes the state’s ability to structure governance outcomes, it does not necessarily limit its ability to structure the ‘conduct of conduct’, the prime tool of which is the ability to impart a degree of definitional coherence to discipline the social world that it seeks to transform.



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Such disciplinary power of delimiting the ‘conduct of conduct’ embedded in state categories has a peculiar dual outcome. On the one hand, all actors involved in conflicts in the two states (including state agencies) have the power to exercise a strategic veto but do not have the ability to structure outcomes. For instance, Naxals may indulge in occasional violence for its demonstration value and thereby exercise a strategic veto on certain courses of action on the part of the state or other actors but may not have the ability to structure final outcomes. Similarly, the state may have the ability through both its security apparatus or its control over categories structuring engagements between various actors but does not usually have the ability to determine outcomes of the processes concerned. It is at this point that the second formulation proposed here – governmentality of participation – offers the link between the various contested actors. Participation through elected representation in Panchayats as well as engagement in various socio-economic processes in the region becomes the currency through which the strategic veto is exercised. An actor that rejects both these forms of participation will lose the ability to engage with the political process and become a ‘legitimate’ subject of the state’s security apparatus and thereby subject to all manner of coercion, including, at times, brutal repression. Besides, in the resource-contested political economy of Bihar and Jharkhand, most actors need to have access to avenues of participation in the various socio-economic processes (including various government schemes) for survival as viable political actors – be it Naxals with their ‘levy economy’ or various caste groups with their dependence on state-defined terms of access to economic avenues, or, for that matter, state actors, whose continued relevance in the conflict depends on their ability to structure categories and terms of engagement. The terms of participation are in turn structured by the policy categories – be it reservation of seats in Panchayats or the parameters of administrative control over economic activity in the two states or procedural gatekeeping by the arms of the state for dispersal of economic benefits. The impact of such structuring of participation by policy categories is a ‘governmentality of participation’, which in turn disciplines all actors involved. The central logics of the governance process is embedded in a context of and is filtered through the lens of politics of recognition, which is seen as a route to redistribution. Policy categories shape and structure the parameters of this politics by recognising some extant social categories as central while excluding many others – a process that reinforces the exercise of strategic veto as well as the governmentality of participation. It is this complex process of the intertwined rationalities of security

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and development that underlies the governance process in Bihar and Jharkhand. In terms of the conflict in Jharkhand and Bihar, the Indian state prioritises Naxalism as ‘a serious threat to internal security in the country’20 and acknowledges that ‘Naxalites typically operate in a vacuum created by inadequacy of administrative and political institutions, espouse local demands, and take advantage of the prevalent disaffection and perceived injustice among the underprivileged and remote segments of population’.21 Besides, Naxals are also seen to make ‘systematic efforts … to prevent execution and implementation of development projects, deliberately target critical infrastructure like railways, roads, power and telecommunications, and to try and create an environment, through violence and terror, where the governance structures at field levels are shown as being ineffective’.22 The policy response thus is ‘a multipronged strategy … of sustained and effective police action coupled with accelerated socio-economic development and management of public perception’.23 The cusp between ‘security’ and ‘development’ is thus created by the state’s own interpretation of the problem at hand. As a result, policy architecture to address the ‘problem’ involves policies on both these fronts. In terms of ‘security’, policy response includes myriad initiatives for police modernisation, training, and upgrading the intelligence and operational capability of state police forces; while on the ‘development’ front, policy initiatives include a wide gamut of initiatives – from rural roads to village electrification, from child welfare to forest rights and from education and health to rural drinking water. All the latter set of policies structures benefits in accordance with the policy categorisation of social groups, as discussed above. The two sets of initiatives for security as well as socio-economic transformation are increasingly being anchored in a variety of mechanisms of participation. Such mechanisms are a function of state policy and also a product of engagement with the developmental effort of the state.24 Besides, mechanisms of decentralised local government have come to be deployed for a variety of governance initiatives wherein Panchayati Raj Institutions (PRIs) are seen as mechanisms of local participative governance and also tools for a more coherent and effective public policy process, which has an important bearing on conflicts in the two states. Conflict in Bihar and Jharkhand is thus locked into a low-level equilibrium in which all actors are disciplined by the policy categories constructed by the state for pursuing its self-proclaimed objective of security and welfare. This imparts to all actors the ability to exercise a strategic veto, but also disciplines them by obliging them to the logic



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of governmentality of participation. The next section will delineate the empirical patterns that underlie the formulation propounded above. Disciplining through security The power of categories to discipline actors is exemplified in the hiatus between the varied roots and character of Naxal organisations, and in the policy response to their activities. The state defines Naxals as a challenge to security (of the state) and prioritises the twin role of policing and institutional capacity as a policy response. This categorisation by the state ignores the multifarious roots of the conflict and also imposes a homogenised response. Further, institutional capacity is premised on socio-economic categorisation of the population as beneficiaries of the policy largesse (which in turn also governmentalises the Panchayats as well). The societal roots of these categories, legitimised as policy categories, also disciplines the Naxals by inducing their fragmentation on similar basis to benefit from both, societal recognition as well as governmental policy largesse. This creates conditions for both an exercise of strategic veto by all parties and frames the governmentality of participation as the central logic of the conflictual engagement. Naxalism is not a uniform and undifferentiated phenomenon but is closely shaped by historical and contextual factors which in turn cover a wide range of mechanisms ranging from taking up the cause of the tribal and oppressed castes/classes to the exercise of brute force for economic gain. Bihar and Jharkhand accounts for 16 of the originally identified 33 Naxal-affected districts for its high intensity of violence with over 300 incidents and over 100 deaths every year for the entire first decade of the twenty-first century. The five sample districts present a wide range of patterns of Naxalism, even though classified by the state in universalising terms as ‘Naxalaffected’. Jamui lies on the fringes of the Naxal zone and its forested areas and has been populated by Naxals for the last fifteen to twenty years.25 Assisted by its poor accessibility and thereby poor police patrolling, these forests constituted a zone of refuge for Naxals, as also a safe haven for the expansion of their activities through the incorporation of criminals to expand the areas of influence for maximisation of levy,26 as is evident in the rise of Manager Rai, the local goon who is commonly identified as the person responsible for inducting people into a Naxal outfit.27 At the other end of the spectrum, the rise of Naxalism in the Lohardaga district was reported as an alternative and more accessible organisation with threat of force backing their interventions and linked

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to local political activism of ‘jal’, jungle and ‘zameen’ (‘water, forest and land’).28 In the Gaya district, on the other hand, infamous caste wars and private armies of central Bihar, imparted to the Naxals considerable influence among the poor downtrodden classes in the second half of the 1980s. However, the Naxal organisation could not remain insulated from the caste dynamics, which in turn considerably influenced its evolution by encouraging its fragmentation across caste lines29 into numerous outfits including CPI (Maoist) or Maoist Communist Centre (MCC), Tritiya Prastuti Committee-I (TPC-I), Tritiya Prastuti Committee-II (TPC-II), Jharkhand Prastuti Committee (JPC), Jharkhand Liberation Tigers (JLT), Jana Sangharsh Morcha, and Revolutionary Communist Centre (RCC). Internecine conflict between these Naxal outfits is one of the factors behind the escalation in incidences of violence in the region but also dissipates their collective influence. The rise in conflict played an important role as a strategic veto on state activity by forcing the focus of the state apparatus on a security role, thereby undermining its institutional capacity and legitimacy. This process also entangled the state’s security apparatus in the Naxal turf war over zones of influence and levy economy, encouraging the police to play one against the other. Some argue that the local police has realised that it cannot take on ‘national’ organisations like the CPI (Maoist) across jurisdictional boundaries. So the local police aligns itself with minor splinters groups to gather information about the movements and activities of the larger Naxal organisations while turning a blind eye to the splinter groups’ efforts to increase their zones of influence.30 However, such initiatives have only increased the intensity of violence and killing in the region. However, it does reflect a degree of strategic veto by the state in ignoring some forms of Naxal activities while drastically reducing the operational canvas of the rest. The rise of a ‘levy’ economy based on a protection fee, ransom and other illegal activity as an integral part of the conflict in these areas creates a complex network of intermediaries and allies. This ‘levy’ economy also leads to a despotic way of functioning of Naxal outfits with an acute difference in standard of living of the ‘commanders’ and the foot-militia members. This further paved the way for factionalism in such organisations.31 Besides, an increasing focus on maximisation of levy generation has led to a severe decline in the ideology of the members of Naxal outfits especially at the grass-roots level.32 The strategic veto exercised by the Naxals by forcing focus on the security function buttresses the state’s institutional incapacity, which in turn serves as a push factor for expanding the ranks of Naxals by posing serious problems in the construction of infrastructure such as roads,



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schools, health buildings (which are the basic prerequisites for development in the region), as well as demolishing the existing ones. Poor, illiterate and unemployed youths, once drawn into Naxal outfits out of fear, self-interest or to seek revenge, are ostracised by society and are trapped in these organisations due to fear of punitive action by their own organisation if they choose to withdraw or by the police and the legal machinery if they don’t.33 However, in the resource and revenue rich region of Hazaribagh and Gaya, the lure of ‘power flowing from the barrel of the gun’ and the potential for social mobility by tapping into the overflowing levy economy seems to be the primary factors behind the rise in the numbers of Naxal organisations and their members.34 Contemporary forms of Naxalism are therefore marked (and marred) by turf wars over levies and zones of influence; factionalism along caste lines; ideological decline; and criminalisation. The limits that their operation place on the institutional capacity of the state is further exacerbated by compelling policy categorisation by the state in narrow security terms. This generates predictable responses in terms of modernisation of policing infrastructure and increased security-related expenditure on new vehicles fitted with modern communication systems, modern weaponry and anti-land mine vehicles for their patrolling duties. The limited impact of these initiatives has been pointed out by numerous police officials35 and is characterised by one respondent as mere ‘plastic surgery’ of the security machinery.36 The second ramification of this strategic veto by Naxals is the diversion of public funds to security functions, which, if deployed in other areas, may have created greater institutional capacity. Thus, the state finds itself being disciplined by its own policy categories, in terms of limiting the range of policy options available. This also defines one dimension of ‘governmentality of participation’ proposed earlier by obliging both actors to engage in terms defined by the other, albeit mediated by pre-existing societal categories. Both sets of actors are in a sense able to exercise a strategic veto on the operational parameters of the other and are disciplined by the policy categories of the other. However, this does not mean that the two actors – Naxals and the state − are equally balanced in the ongoing conflict. Owing to the innate capacity of the state to redefine categories and thereby terms of engagements in other areas such as socio-economic transformation, in both the institutional arena as well as policy categories, a new governmentality of participation is generated with its own constitutive logic and disciplinary impact. While not in any sense autonomous of strategic veto of other actors in this arena, the state has greater

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ability to structure terms of engagement. The next section will delineate this process in the domain of democracy and development, through field data from select districts of Bihar and Jharkhand. Disciplining through participation and development The state’s repeated stress on institutional and development deficits as one of the roots causes of Naxalism at the grass-roots level lays down the fundamental policy categorisation. Besides, increasing policy initiative to anchor policy interventions in this domain at the level of new PRIs through its ‘participatory’ aam (general) and gram (village) sabhas (assemblies) defines the institutional arena for the exchange of strategic veto by various actors. The raison d’être of PRIs – facilitating the local population’s participation in local governance and ‘development’ – forms the central thread of governmentality of participation. The functioning of PRIs in both their roles is disciplined by the state’s policy categories, its classification of populations, construction of citizens as subjects of munificence of the state and functions under close gatekeeping of the state officials.37 PRIs are thus transformed from institutions of local governance to mechanisms of state control wherein the state has the ability of exercising a strategic veto as well as governmentalising the PRIs by using participation as the pivot. The implications of this process are far-reaching for all actors involved. The people are disciplined into subjects of this new governmentality of participation (the terms of which are laid down by the state’s policy categories); the elected members are the tools for the exercise of bureaucratic gatekeeping. The Naxals for their part are keen to participate in the process of ‘development’ thus generated owing to the opportunities of levy-seeking as well as in relation to the exercise of strategic veto underlined by their ability to selectively focus violence for its demonstration effect. The opportunities of corruption and rentseeking thus generated become another avenue of reinforcing this governmentality of participation – all actors must participate in this process of disciplining by policy categories to be able to access the largesse of state policy, state officials included. PRIs are tasked by both the states to select beneficiaries and finalise location of local developmental infrastructure for a variety of projects through the gram sabhas and aam sabhas for a wide range of policies including MGNREGA (Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act), IAY (Indira Awas Yojana – Indira Housing Scheme), old age and widow pension schemes, the Public Distribution System, among others. PRIs have also formed committees for education and



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health at the grass-roots level. Two issues are relevant here to underline the degree to which PRIs are subject of the discipline of policy categories and governmentality of participation. Except for a tribal Mukhiya in Kisko Panchayat, none of the other PRI members interviewed were aware about the required number of these sabhas every year. The norm followed in most of the Panchayats sampled was that such sabhas are organised on the instruction of government officials, who in turn issue such instructions on the release of annual funds for various policies’ targets, through the Panchayats and rozgaar sevak. Mostly, these sabhas restrict their functioning to choosing applicants from a pre-prepared below-poverty-line (BPL) list and projects from a similar list of projects provided by the officials for that financial year.38 Bureaucratic gatekeeping through control over funds legitimately meant for PRIs by invocation of policy categories is the obvious implication here but such gatekeeping is replicated at a lower level of PRIs officials and members, who in turn try to restrict information about such assemblies to a select group of their supporters to limit the number of applicants for the limited number of allotments of beneficiaries for each Panchayat.39 Apart from buttressing the governmentality of participation, this pattern also underlines the discipline of policy categories since PRIs are seen as an avenue to access public funds. Here enters the politics of exception and discretion that is the pivot on which the question of a strategic veto as well as the governmentality of participation is premised: the rent-seeking and corruption that is engendered owing to the premium that is placed on membership of PRIs. Participation thus becomes a pivot for the exercise of a strategic veto, in which membership is the currency. Meat served at such parties is important, as serving of non-vegetarian food on a large scale is an expensive indulgence and also carries the connotation of a degree of violation of extant societal norms (very much like serving of alcohol at a large scale); and deployment of identity or caste/tribe/religion to mobilise electoral support,40 and yet marked by continued dominance of particular families. Besides, the person who wins the PRI election generally tends to continue to dominate in subsequent elections. This view is borne out by the fact that most of the mukhiya and pramukhs interviewed were serving their second or third term.41 These together play a significant role in structuring the character of participation in the two states. The developmental funds that are being pumped into these areas are structured at the grass-roots level through a complex network of politicians, contractors/businessmen, bureaucrats and Naxal leaders/ organisations. The importance of being able to engage with these policy

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categories is of such significance in the local political economy that there is an increasing influence of the Naxal in PRIs.42 In some parts such as in Chatra, the entire PRIs set up comprise ‘three categories of representatives: Naxal and/or their blood relative; their core supporters; or, those who could not harm them and their activities in any way whatsoever’.43 Respondents from all the districts reported that the Naxal levy runs parallel to other leakages in drawing and diverting developmental funds from the system.44 Further, the rise of multiple Naxal factions have led to competing demands for levies, thereby increasing the cost of operation for contractors. Therefore, tenders, especially for roads, have been called for several times but nobody is interested due to the ongoing turf war between these Naxal groups.45 Besides, once the Naxals have been paid their levy and bureaucrats suitably propitiated, contractors are relieved of all accountability vis-à-vis the quality of the project undertaken in terms of specification and material used. Instances of corruption are fast becoming the norm in the newly constituted PRIs wherein the signature of a Mukhiya on different kind of forms for benefits under various government policies has various rates.46 Naxals thus acquire another vector for a limited strategic veto: unless suitable arrangements are made to fulfil their demands (mostly levies but occasionally direct membership and control over policy categories anchored at the PRIs), they have the ability to limit the implementation of policies and offer a limited challenge to the state’s control over local participatory mechanisms. An additional dimension of bureaucratic gatekeeping by use of policy categories is stressed by a number of members of PRIs: the devolution of functions and powers to the PRIs. Members of the PRIs stress that officials use procedural norms as a tool to control the choice of beneficiaries to a great extent – an issue that is foregrounded by the lack of experience among the new PRI members.47 This issue is of greater salience in Jharkhand, which led to a state-wide protest of representatives of the PRIs involving road and railways blockages at strategic points in their respective districts.48 However, as the chairman of the Samiti pointed out ‘Is dhare se sirf ek aur round negotiation hoga aur sarkar thodi ashwasan degi ki is mahine tak yeh ho jayega. Magar hona kuch nahi hai’ (‘this protest will only lead to another round of negotiations and government will assure us of action within this month. However, no action will follow’).49 Thus, another dimension of an exercise of strategic veto is created: unless the control over policy categories is transferred to local PRIs, the elected members of PRIs are able to embroil the state in addressing the disturbance thus created. The



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construction of the governmentality of participation has thus come full circle. The acute contest thus created for the ability to structure or control policy categories − and thereby their disciplinary impact − imparting to some actors a degree of strategic veto is embedded in the pre-existing societal categories, which have since been legitimised by the state as policy categories. These policy categories serve the dual function of disciplining all actors who seek to engage in any manner with the local policy process as well as pivots of local politics of recognition. This in turn becomes the locus of another kind of strategic control for all manner of political actors. The state once again defines the parameters of engagement in this area by stressing that continued grievances among the marginalised section of the population, especially those belonging to the Scheduled Castes and Tribes, has been the primary factor in the alienation of people. This issue is sought to be addressed by construction of these socially derived categories as an anchor for redressing all manner of marginalisation – whether related to issues of recognition, representation or redistribution. The policy tool therefore deployed is the longstanding policy of reservation to frame new subjects of public policy. These policy categories – SC, ST, OBC or BPL – are used to engage with all manner of issues of social justice, whether pertaining to redistribution, recognition or representation. To a degree, the very exercise of construction of these categories is embedded in recognition of historical injustices. However, the disciplining of the social space that follows such categorisation feeds into the governmentality of participation by providing another vector for exercise of strategic veto to the state but also to other political actors at the local level. Further, socio-economic marginalisation is addressed by prioritising social groups thus classified as prime beneficiaries of government schemes likes MGNREGA and IAY. Further, recognising the marginalisation of SC/ST communities and women in the collective decisionmaking processes of the community, their representation is sought to be ensured through reservation of seats in PRIs for women, SCs and STs. However, the impact of these initiatives on promoting social justice in any form varies drastically but the centrality of policy categories continues inviolate, albeit structured by the societal context in which they operate. For instance, tribal women PRI members have better fulfilled their roles, especially if they belong to prominent families.50 Similarly, poor SC (Scheduled Caste(s)) women too are very vocal in respective areas in demanding their right but upper-caste women were

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generally represented by their husbands.51 Nonetheless, such representation of women in the PRI system provides an opportunity to engage in public life and some, depending on the familial background and demographic context, have begun to raise their voices and assert themselves. Similar variation can be found in the working of women self-help groups, shaped as they are by the social background of their members.52 Turning attention to the redistribution to beneficiaries and their prioritisation as per the BPL population among the SC/Scheduled Tribe(s) (ST)/Other Backward Class(es) (OBC)/minorities, there continues to exist a huge gap between the requirement and the number of beneficiaries allotted. This gap creates fertile ground for the politics of redistribution, within which there is ample scope for manipulation of the process. Such manipulation plays right up the street of a local politics of recognition wherein votebank politics is deployed across caste/tribal/religious groups.53 A variety of cases were narrated about deployment of identitybased mobilisation of votes. In Serandaag Panchayats, for instance, a local respondent explained that in sav/tel-dominated Panchayats, a Rajput woman won the election because her family put up several dummy candidates from the teli group to split the votes.54 In Bihar, such identity politics has gone to the next level, explained a local respondent, since votes are counted ward-wise, the candidates can make out their votes in each ward, which structures distribution of beneficiaries by the winning candidates. Hence, as he puts it ‘apna vote bank bachana naye vote bank banabe se zyada zaroori hai’ (‘it is more important to save your votebank than to create new ones’).55 The disciplining impact of policy categories is thus once again underlined. Deprivation and marginalisation continue and create frustration among many, especially those excluded from these categories. This is especially in light of the fact that those excluded from such prioritised groups are often only marginally better off that those included. However, being neither in the BPL list nor from any of the reserved categories has led to non-redressal of their grievances of deprivation.56 Thus, the policy of reservation has allowed for better involvement of the deprived and marginalised section of rural society. All respondents agreed that owing to the impact of the politics of recognition thus generated, social atrocities have reduced considerably vis-à-vis the SC and ST communities in general. But such reduction has not led to the politico-economic empowerment of majority of the ‘really’ marginalised people within these communities or those excluded from these categories.57 All these process together form a complex political economy in which the policy categories create numerous lines for the exercise of strategic veto buttressed by the disciplinary power of such categories.



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Conclusions The empirical evidence discussed above underlines the centrality of policy categories in the complex dynamics of conflict in Bihar and Jharkhand. In its interaction with extant social structures, these categories discipline the various actors but are also affected by the social reality of everyday life, in turn delimiting the efficacy of governance initiatives on the conflict processes. Further, the close linkages drawn by these policy categories between Naxalism and development deficit fail to account for the political economy of the distribution of developmental benefits that plays a central role in sustaining the Naxal conflict. Simultaneously, the governance intervention in terms of improving the security architecture by providing more funding for policing may not address the roots of the issue at hand. The peculiar governmentality of participation generated by the Naxal’s levy economy interlinks with that of distribution of developmental benefits through Panchayats on the basis of predefined categories. Caught as all these actors are in the discipline of the state’s parameters, PRIs do not have the ability to instil a locally relevant process of engagement between various social and political actors. The governmentality of participation thus generated forms a continuously evolving politics in which the major actors are locked together at a low-level equilibrium of conflict without any of them possessing the ability to determine outcomes. The circular political economy thus generated merely reinforces various actors’ positions in the conflict. To break this cycle, a degree of autonomy to PRIs to define their parameters of prioritisation seems necessary. Notes This chapter is based on research carried out for a research project entitled ‘The Role of Governance in the Resolution of Socioeconomic and Political Conflict in India and Europe’ (CORE), funded by the Socio-economic Sciences and Humanities in the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–13) under grant agreement no. 266931. Excellent research assistance provided by Imran Amin, Rukmani and Sukanya Bharadwaj is gratefully acknowledged.   1  See for instance World Bank, World Development Report 2011, 8, which argues that ‘[t]o break cycles of insecurity and reduce the risk of their recurrence, national reformers and their international partners need to build the legitimate institutions that can provide a sustained level of citizen security, justice, and jobs – offering a stake in society to groups that may

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10  11  12  13  14  15  16  17  18  19  20  21  22  23  24 

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Cultures of governance and peace otherwise receive more respect and recognition from engaging in armed violence than in lawful activities, and punishing infractions capably and fairly’. Rudolph, ‘Consensus and conflict in Indian politics’, 385. McAdam et al., Dynamics of Contention, 5. Mitra and Singh, When Rebels Become Stakeholders, 2. Ibid. McAdam et al., Dynamics of Contention. Ibid. These thematics are not exclusive of each other but are interlinked and sometimes may also lay the basis for engagement between various actors in other thematic areas as well. One block and two Panchayats from each of the five districts of Gaya and Jamui in Bihar and Chatra, Hazaribag and Lohardaga in Jharkhand were selected on the basis of number of violent instance over the past years. Extensive semi-structured interviews and group discussions were conducted with a variety of respondents including common villagers; PRI members; government officials; political actors; Naxal activists and their ‘area commanders’; business elite; NGO workers and Women SHG members; and various police officials across the five sample districts. Foucault, ‘Governmentality’, 100. Ibid., 102. Gordon, ‘Governmental rationality’, 48. Ibid., 7–8. Chatterjee, Politics of the Governed, 34. Ibid., 34–5. Ibid., 41. Gordon, ‘Governmental rationality’, 5. An analysis of the impact of developmental policies is beyond the scope of this chapter. For a discussion of the developmental policies, see Prakash, Jharkhand. Lloyd et al., In Pursuit of Lakshmi. Government of India, Ministry of Home Affairs, Annual Report 2003–4, 40. Government of India, Ministry of Home Affairs, Annual Report 2006–7, 24; Annual Report 2008–9, 18; Annual Report 2010–11, 20 Ibid. Government of India, Ministry of Home Affairs, Annual Report 2006–7, 25; Annual Report 2008–9, 19; Annual Report 2010–11, 21. While Panchayats were created under the 73rd Amendment Act 1992 and Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act 1996, the first election to these statutory Panchayats were held in Bihar in 2001; and in Jharkhand in 2011. Interview with police and the block officials in Sikandra on 21 December 2012 and villagers of Sabbalbigha Panchayats on 23 December 2012.



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26  In Jamui, the criminals were freely inducted within the folds of Naxalism. Interview with a police official in Sikandra and local villagers at the local block office, Jamui on 6 August 2012. 27  Interview with Thana Parbhari of Sikandra. Also attested to in interviews with villagers at the block office in Sikandra on 21 December 2012. 28  Interview with a political analyst in the region on 26 July 2012 and with a tribal woman Mukhiya in Devdariya Panchayat, Kisko block on 26 December 2012. 29  A Naxal activist from Imamganj in an interview on 31 July 2012 explained how the region saw the rise of Naxalism through the elimination of nonNaxal armed organisation like the Sunlight and Ranveer Sean (private caste armies) in the late 1980s and the early 1990s. 30  Naxal sympathiser at Imamganj, on 31 July 2012; the police officials in Katkamsandi on 3 August 2012 and at Imamaganj on 4 August 2012; and the deputy commandant of CoBRA on 6 August 2012, all attested to the fact that police do share information with competing Naxal organisation. However, the police personnel conceded that such information received from various Naxal groups needs corroboration as it may well be a Maoist trap. 31  The issue of turf war over control of the ‘levy’ economy is a common explanation offered by villagers in Gaya, Hazaribag, Chatra and Jamui which was attested to by activists in Chatra. However, Naxal sympathisers interviewed in Imamganj on 31 July 2012 and in Simariya on 7 August 2012 pointed to a more caste-based division among the splinter groups. Others like the CRPF commander in Chatra interviewed on 2 August 2012, police officials in Katkamsandi and Simariya interviewed on 3 August 2012 and 7 August 2012, respectively, all stressed the split along caste lines among Naxals. 32  A political analyst from Hazaribag interviewed on 26 July 2012, and the deputy commandant of the CoBRA Battalion posted in the region interviewed on 6 August 2012 asserted that Naxals are only interested in generating levies in every government project of any substantial value (reported to be above 2 lakhs of budget). For this, Naxals are willing to ally with the rich and the powerful, as pointed out by the police officials in Imamganj on 4 August 2012 and admitted by Naxal activists interviewed on 31 July 2012. 33  Most of villagers in one of the interior villages in Kisko block agreed to this being the primary causal factor behind people joining Naxals. Interviews on 26 December 2012. 34  Every single respondent, across social categories, from the districts of Hazaribag, Chatra and Gaya reported that the potential for social mobility through appropriated ‘levies’ was the most crucial factor people joining or forming Naxal organisations. Interviews conducted in November 2011 and January 2013.

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35  Police personnel were interviewed in Katkamsandi on 3 August 2012; in Imamganj on 4 August 2012; in Simariya on 7 August 2012; in Sikandra on 21 December 2012 and in Kisko on 26 December 2012, in Chatra on 2 August 2012 and Hazaribag on 6 August 2012. 36  Interview with a political analyst in Hazaribag on 26 July 2012. 37  Pramukh-pati from Katamsandi in an interview on 5 November 2011 opined that that ‘aaj bhi in ilakon afsarshahi raj hi chal raha hai’ (‘officers’ rule still continues in these areas’). 38  All the non-official respondents, including the PRI members, across the five districts sampled reported that aam and gram sabha are organised only when they get an official letter asking them to do so. 39  Many respondents – common people and ward members alike, especially those in interior areas like Kodaasi in Jamui, Debalbaan in Katakamsandi – were unaware of the organisation of these sabha meetings. However, in the tribal dominated areas, the Mukhiya as well as the ward member were aware that at least four aam and gram sabhas have to be organised every year. 40  Respondent from Katkamsandi, Imamganj, Simariya and Sikandra all narrated instances of liquor and meat parties being organised by various candidates in villages on the days leading up to the election. 41  Mukhiyas of Sabbalbigha, Sikandra, Jamui was serving her second term while in Navdiha, Imamganj, Gaya, the mukhiya was serving his third term. In the latter case, a group discussion was conducted on 8 November 2012 with eight PRI representatives including the ward member, Mukhiya and Zila parishad representative and none of them were serving their first tenure. 42  Respondents in Gaya on 8 November 2012 reported that there are several seats that nobody contests due to threats of the Naxals. In Hazaribag and Lohardaga, respondents reported that Naxals stood for elections but did not necessarily win. However, Chatra presented a contrast of Naxal ‘participation’ in PRIs wherein the Mukhiya is the wife of the local JPC area commander, interviewed on 17 November 2012. Naxal activists reported on 7 August 2012 that the chairman of Zila Parishad of Chatra is the wife of a TPC area commander. A district-level official in Chatra tacitly admitted in an interview on 2 August 2012: ‘Naxals joining PRI is a good thing as it allows them to join the mainstream’. 43  Interview on 26 July 2012. 44  One of the respondent during an interview on 24 July 2013 at Katkamsandi was of the view that ‘Naxali log sirf unhi thekon se paisa lete hain jis mein officer logon ne ghoos liya hai’ (‘Naxals realise levies only from those contracts in which officers have also taken a bribe’). Other respondents at Kisko on 26 December 2012 too argued that ‘yahan ek aisa construction ka theka nahin hai jis mein levy nahin diya gaya ho’ (‘there is not a single construction contract here in which levies have not been paid to Naxals’). 45  Several such instances were noted during the fieldwork where projects have been stalled for several years owing to Naxal turf wars. For instance, the



46 

47 

48 

49  50 

51 

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road between Sherghati and Imamganj in Gaya; between Sheila and Simariya in Chatra; and the bridge in Kisko village in Lohardaga. Respondent from Navdiha Panchayat, Simariya, during a group discussion on 26 July 2012 reported that ‘prevailing-rate’ for getting a well dug under the MGNREGA is Rs.10,000 while for benefits under the Kanyadaan schemes it is Rs.2,000. Similarly, a respondent in Katkamsandi in an interview on 3 August 2012 alleged that the BDO charges a fixed 3 per cent of all contract signed and passed. Respondents in a group discussion at Imamganj on 10 November 2012 reported on the insistence of government officials on enforcing a rule under MGNREGA tree plantation drive that fruit-bearing trees can only be planted on land owned by the SC/ST, even if few SC/ST have land and those who do, want to save it for Indira Awas Yojana (IAY) projects. Tree plantation targets were met by having a contractor plant karanj trees along roadsides, most of which have since died. It was alleged that this course was adopted so that the official concerned could secure his share of bribes from the contractor. Having learned of the planned protest during an interview with a PRI member in Chatra on the 26 July 2012, the fieldwork team followed the protest demonstration at Hazaribag on 3 August 2012. During the demonstration on 8 August 2012, National Highway 33 was blocked at Hazaribag by PRI members for half a day. Also, a meeting was organised at the block level in Katakamsandi by the Zila Mukhiya Samiti to disseminate strategic information about the conduct and location of the dharna. Participation however was poor and only 15 of the total 104 representatives of Katamsandi block were in attendance. Interview conducted after the block-level meeting at Katkamsandi on 3 August 2012. Mukhiya of Kisko, a tribal woman, had previously worked as an aganwadi teacher and was aware of the various provision, as revealed in our interview on 26 December 2012 but that is more an exception than the norm. Further, during our visit to a gram sabha in Ranchi to another such tribal village with a women Mukhiya on 12 November 2012, the fact that she was from the traditional Pahaan family was reflected in the manner in which she warned, in the gram sabha meeting, ‘aadmi log hadiya pee kar mahilaon ko peetna band karein nahin to hum sab mahilayein mil kar unko lathiyien ge’ (‘men who after getting drunk indulge in domestic violence should mend their ways or otherwise they will organise the women to beat them up with sticks’). In the case of Navdiha panchayat, where the field study team were, at a gram nayayalaya meeting on 27 July 2012, the lower-caste women ward panch were much more vocal in the group discussion among women, but the high-caste woman sarpanch was represented by her father-in-law, the local priest. While the OBC-dominated women SHG in Piri panchayat in Simariya, Chatra, and in the tribal-dominated women SHG at Devdariya

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54  55  56 

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Cultures of governance and peace panchayats, Kisko, Lohardaga, have done extremely well, as reflected in the diversity of their work, in the SC-dominated Serandaag panchayat, Simariya, Chatra, SHGs have succumbed to the corrupt practice of taking only the subsidised portion of their loan and using it for personal consumption. None of the non-official respondents were aware about the manner in which the categorisation of beneficiaries is undertaken. Moreover, owing to vote-bank politics, PRI members attempt to maximise allocation to their own community. For instance, paswans were prioritised in the Sabbalbigha panchayat visited on 23 December 2012; or, telis in Piri panchayat visted on 26 July 2012. Interview on 27 July 2012. Interview with a local respondent at Imamganj, 10 November 2012. Respondents in Dhontwa panchayat in a group discussion on 23 July 2012 pointed out that despite a very small number of tribal households, the seat of Mukhiya was reserved for a tribal woman. It was felt that a haphazard application of the reservation policy without careful demographic consideration has led to the election of an undeserving candidate to an important position. Respondent from all the five districts sampled reported a notable decline in caste-/tribe-based atrocities. However, it was also clear that that politicoeconomic empowerment among these communities is limited to those who have reaped the benefits of the reservation policy, especially through reservation of elected PRI seats or in the economic realm through reservation in government jobs, and not just in the social realm of welfare policies vis-à-vis education, health, housing and other basic needs. This issue was underlined in a group discussion.

References Annual Report 2003–4, New Delhi: Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India, n.d., http://mha.nic.in/hindi/sites/upload_files/mhahindi/files/pdf/ ar0304-Eng.pdf; accessed 8 November 2013. Annual Report 2006–7: 24; New Delhi: Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India, n.d., http://mha.nic.in/hindi/sites/upload_files/mhahindi/files/pdf/ ar0607-Eng.pdf; accessed 8 November 2013. Annual Report 2008–9, New Delhi: Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India, n.d., www.mha.nic.in/sites/upload_files/mha/files/pdf/AR(E)0809.pdf; accessed 8 November 2013. Annual Report 2010–11, New Delhi: Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India, n.d., www.mha.nic.in/sites/upload_files/mha/files/AR(E)1011; pdf; accessed 8 November 2013. Chatterjee, P., The Politics of the Governed: Reflection on Popular Politics in most of the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).



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Foucault, M., ‘Governmentality’, in G. Burchell, C. Gordon and P. Miller (eds), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991). Gordon, C., ‘Governmental rationality: An introduction’, G. Burchell, C. Gordon and P. Miller (eds), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991). Interview with a political analyst in the region of Lohardaga, 26 July 2012. Interview with a political analyst in Hazaribag, 26 July 2012. Interview with police personnel in Chatra, 2 August 2012. Interview with police personnel in Katkamsandi, 3 August 2012. Interview with police personnel in Imamganj, 4 August 2012. Interview with police personnel in Hazaribag, 6 August 2012. Interview with police personnel in Simariya, 7 August 2012. Interview with respondents in Gayan, November 2012. Interview with police personnel in Sikandra, 21 December 2012. Interview with police and the block officials in Sikandra, 21 December 2012. Interview with Thana Parbhari of Sikandra. Also attested to in interviews with villagers at the block office in Sikandra on 21 December 2012. Interview with villagers of Sabbalbigha Panchayats, 23 December 2012. Interview with a tribal woman Mukhiya in Devdariya Panchayat, Kisko block, 26 December 2012. Interview with police personnel in Kisko, 26 December 2012. Interview with respondents in Hazaribag and Lohardaga, 17 November 2012. Interview with a district-level official in Chatra, 2 August 2012. Interview with respondents in Katkamsandi on 24 July 2013. Interview with respondents in Imamganj, 10 November 2012. Interview with a PRI member in Chatra, 26 July 2012. Interview with representatives of Katkamsandi, 3 August 2012. Interview with a local respondent at Imamganj, 10 November 2012. McAdam, D., S. Tarrow and C. Tilly, Dynamics of Contention (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Mitra, S. and V. B. Singh, When Rebels Become Stakeholders: Democracy, Agency and Social Change in India (New Delhi: Sage, 2009). Prakash, A., Jharkhand: Politics of Development and Identity (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2001). Rudolph, S. H., ‘Consensus and conflict in Indian politics’, World Politics, 13:3 (April 1961), 385–99. Rudolph, L. I. and S. H. Rudolph, In Pursuit of Lakshmi: The Political Economy of the Indian State (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1987). World Bank, World Development Report 2011: Conflict, Security and Development (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2011).

4

Agency, autonomy and compliance in (post-)conflict situations: perspectives from Jammu and Kashmir, Cyprus and Bosnia-Herzegovina Elena B. Stavrevska, Sumona DasGupta, Birte Vogel and Navnita Chadha Behera

Introduction The nature of conflict has changed dramatically in the twenty-first century with non-conventional wars, terrorist attacks and civil strife assuming centre stage. State forces are pitted not just against each other but against non-state actors. Terrorists often target civil society as well as symbols of the state, while the Westphalian nation-state’s legal monopoly over instruments of coercion has sometimes been grossly misused to perpetuate a form of state terrorism where civil society has been coerced into inaction. The proliferation of internationals armed with the tools of liberal peacebuilding has set agendas for former warring factions that may be at odds with indigenous forms of peacebuilding. At other times, states, internationals as well as non-state actors have successfully co-opted civil society into accepting a course of action that has prevented it from acting freely. Since our searchlights are turned on ‘civil society’, at the outset we acknowledge that there are definitional problems and disagreements as to what constitutes it.1 In the peacebuilding field it is probably most useful to conceive of civil society as a ‘third space’ that includes but is not restricted to just civil society organisations (CSOs), embracing the entire arena of voluntary collective action around shared interests and values.2 Distinct from but located at the interstices of the family, government and market, politicians, scholars and practitioners continue to debate its roles, activities, capacities and impacts,3 primarily because it is often seen – not without reason – as a donor-driven, propped-up space



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created by international organisations. Even as we locate our study of agency within the space that we call civil society, we are mindful of the fact that significant segments of it can be coerced and co-opted particularly in conflict areas either by state or non-state actors. Drawing from three sites of contemporary (post-)conflict situations in this chapter – Jammu and Kashmir (J&K), Cyprus and BosniaHerzegovina (BiH) – we ask: what are the various ways in which agency is exercised by people, groups and associations within civil society living in the midst of or in the aftermath of violent conflict? When does an apparent act of what appears to be compliance (to the observer) have a different meaning for the complying party? How is resistance understood and manifested? In ongoing militarised conflicts or post-conflict situations, multiple stakeholders coalesce and converge and different fault lines are created which become sites of conflict, cooperation, co-optation, complicity or spaces for dialogue and reconciliation. They all constitute sites engaging state and non-state actors in complex patterns of relationships. As the de jure and de facto centres of authority and power in (post-)conflict situations enter into alliances or move towards a course of collision, the sites of conflict become spaces where people’s agency is either exercised or stymied. Often it is possible to mark agentive moments or phases in the lives of the people as they seek to negotiate the everyday manifestations of a militarised environment or the aftermath of violence, though, at other times, these are less clearly visible. Whether these agentive moments and opportunities are converted into a long-term empowerment for people and communities who have been affected by the conflict may remain a moot point. Bringing them into the spotlight of analysis, however, contests the overwhelming victimhood discourse in conflict zones. Focusing on local populations as passive pawns of conflict draws attention away from the fact that despite the power imbalances and the omnipresent state with its legal monopoly over instruments of coercion, spaces are charted out by people to exercise pressure, coercion or petition for change. Sometimes it takes the form of a demand for autonomy or self-rule which the state may be forced to concede, while other demands are put in cold storage or opposed, but in all such diverse conditions, the language of politics cannot be completely silenced. Hence negotiation and dialogue often exist side by side with the conflict and violence in zones of still active conflicts like J&K, frozen conflicts like Cyprus or a ‘post-conflict’ situation like BiH. While being cognisant of the fact that the three case studies studied in this chapter – J&K, Cyprus and BiH – straddle vastly different

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political contexts and are at different stages in the trajectory of a conflict – we posit that it is precisely this difference which might make for meaningful comparisons that shed light on the nature of what constitutes agency in the midst of a conflict.4 It enables us to enquire: are there differences in the way agency is expressed in situations of a live conflict such as in J&K where three post-colonial nationalisms and at least two nation-building projects clash head-on;5 a scenario of a frozen conflict in Cyprus where civil society working for peace seems to be shored up by a supranational organisation; and a situation of postconflict in BiH where the superimposition of a peacebuilding agenda from the outside may have resulted in further cementing fault lines among ethnically diverse people seeking to express their own forms of national aspirations? On the other hand, are there ways in which power is subverted, new alliances are formed, spontaneous movements find expression regardless of the specificity of the context and the stage of the conflict? Old theories, new realities This chapter is informed by, but is not focused on, testing existing theory. Though Peace and Conflict Studies as a separate multidisciplinary field has now come into its own, much of international conflict has typically been studied through the lens of International Relations. We find it difficult to locate an analysis of victimhood and agency especially in the positivist terrain of International Relations. Realism of different variants – classical, structural or neo-realism – remains tied to the state as the unit of analysis,6 and yet the externalist of its security dilemmas yields no space for critically analysing the inner political character of the state. We, on the other hand, focus on individuals, groups and communities, and how these units negotiate varied contested claims to power – which may be exercised by both state and non-state actors – in the midst of or in the aftermath of ethnic violence, insurgency and violent civil strife. The liberal turn in International Relations has produced the much publicised ‘liberal peace theory’7 which has been powerfully critiqued because of its market-driven agenda and focus on institutional aspects of democracy such as rule of law. It tends to gloss over deeper power imbalances that lie congealed within the institutional facade and which continue to generate dysfunctional conflict even after the violence dies out.8 This is indeed corroborated by our field studies, which suggest that that the political economy of violence does not disappear when the trappings of a liberal peace are imposed. While the liberal world-view



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in the context of Peace and Conflict Studies does accord better attention to ‘the local agency’, this analytic lens suffers from two serious shortcomings. First, these are mostly perceived as ‘willing local partners’ – albeit cast in a subordinate position with the international agencies setting the peace agendas – or as ‘spoilers’ referring to those who refuse to yield to the international peace agendas. Second, it tends to ‘romanticise’ the local, which entails an uncritical acceptance of everything local in the name of ‘cultural engagement’ without subjecting them to any scrutiny. To the extent that constructivism opens out to the idea of social norms, identities, beliefs and most importantly attributes ‘social meanings’ that are associated with the variables of power, it provides some helpful insights into our study of individuals, groups and communities exercising agency.9 However, this too fights shy of altering the dominant state-centric script of International Relations sufficiently to allow for a focus on a ‘third space’ outside of the state and market from where new forms of agency can arise that can potentially alter state behaviour. Searing critiques of the largely positivist epistemology of International Relations in general and Peace and Conflict Studies literature in particular have been offered by Marxist, post-colonial, feminist and critical theorists. Insights from this body of literature broadly located in the post-positivist domain are largely where we anchor our empirics from the conflict zones.10 The feminist interventions, in particular, have opened our eyes to looking well beyond the narrowly defined ‘battlefield’ to different aspects of social relations in personal as well as communal spaces within the nation-state and opening them up to critical scrutiny. It is perhaps here, in analysing gender relations during conflict that feminists have drawn attention to the most meaningful understandings of what constitutes victimhood and agency and the grey zone between the two,11 which is also what our field narratives indicate. While the feminist scholarship has taken a lead in critically interrogating the multiple hues of the phenomenon of resistance, much work remains to be done to understand the politics of resistance12 as well as problematise what is perceived as ‘compliance’ in a conflict situation. This is precisely why we present this chapter as a general overview piece that integrates multiple perspectives and includes thick descriptions across conflict contexts based on qualitative interviews and secondary literature that could lead to future theory-building. In our view it is time that new theories were generated by taking into account situations of direct and structural violence across conflict theatres throughout the world where power is being constantly contested, negotiated and renegotiated not just at the ‘high table’ with diplomats, but also in

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the everyday relations between individuals, groups, associations, the state and supranational bodies. Informed by this backdrop, in this chapter we look at the narratives around people’s lives in the midst of conflict or its aftermath and turn the searchlights on certain instances of exercising agency at the grassroots level. We focus on examples and narratives around formal associations, pressure groups, loose confederations, autonomous councils, village councils, CSOs, as well as individuals in their own right and a continuum of protests, seeming compliances and resistances to arrive at a more nuanced understanding of what politics means in both active and post-conflict zones. Locating everyday agency on the ground: narratives from J&K, Cyprus and BiH J&K is typically understood as a territorial dispute between two belligerent neighbours in South Asia, wherein each controls almost half of its territory (a small portion is occupied by China) with both claiming jurisdiction over the whole.13 The line of demarcation is called the Line of Control. A qualitative change in the conflict occurred in 1989 with the outbreak of an armed rebellion, which enjoyed mass support in the Indian-administered Kashmir Valley at that time. Over a period of time, however, the influx of foreign militants backed by Pakistan changed the basic character of the originally indigenous movement for selfdetermination. Since then, this conflict has become much more complex with multilayered issues emanating from equally complex causes.14 This chapter focuses largely on the Indian part of Kashmir, which has since the 1990s witnessed a wide range of activism by individuals and communities, as well as large mobilisations. These have ranged from street protests, some violent (including incidents of stone pelting directed against the Indian and the local state authorities) and some peaceful. Dialogue and constitutional means have also been used both by individuals and groups for redressal. In this process, the overall relationship and power equations of the non-state actors with the state and the society, as well as the fundamental character of their agency, has undergone several transformations. In the early 1990s, all militants irrespective of their ideological preferences symbolised a collective epitome of resistance against the Indian state authority and were revered and hero-worshipped by the Kashmiri society. However, sharp divisions within their own ranks on account of their differing social values, religious beliefs and political objectives eventually eroded this support base.15 Some militant groups continued



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to wage the armed struggle against the state, some switched sides by joining an assortment of counter-insurgency groups created by Indian state forces only to face being ostracised for betraying the cause of ‘azadi’16 while some others favoured exploring political options by negotiating with the state authorities such as the All Parties Hurriyat Conference. Consequently, each exercised their agency from a distinct vantage point. In the past few years, the militants’ relationship with the state and society seems to have come full circle from issuing diktats to the state authorities in the early 1990s to petitioning them now for addressing their welfare needs and seeking a political dialogue with the central government. At the same time, from a position of being hero-worshipped by the society, the ex-militants now face social ostracism within the Valley. They find it difficult to get jobs, get their children places in schools and colleges, forge marital alliances for their sons or secure passports because the ‘ex-militant’ tag proves to be a serious handicap everywhere. Extensive field interactions across the Valley show that 93 per cent of those interviewed believe that the ex-militants have ultimately suffered as a result of the Kashmir conflict and 68 per cent also put the surrendered militants in the same category.17 However, even from this position of marginality, the ex-militants are making renewed efforts to engage the state authorities by forming CSOs such as All Jammu and Kashmir Ex-Militants Welfare Association and Jammu and Kashmir Human Welfare Association in various districts, notably with the help of the local police and administration. The institutionalisation of the Autonomous Hill Councils (AHC) in Leh and Kargil districts of the Ladakh region since 1995 and 2007 respectively, has been a successful experiment that shows how communities can achieve their political and developmental aspirations through constitutional measures through creation of alternate and intermediary layers of governance. Historically, people in the Ladakh region, especially Leh, felt neglected by the Valley-centric state administration which paid little attention to these far-flung and scarcely populated cold desert regions in the developmental agenda of the state. The AHCs have empowered the local stakeholders – both Buddhist and Muslim communities – to decide their own development priorities. There is an overwhelming consensus among the elected councillors, panches and sarpanches, civil society representatives and government officials that development in Leh district has fared much better under the AHC regime than in the old bureaucratic system and people feel more empowered in the new dispensation,18 whereas in Kargil opinion on the efficacy of the AHC remains divided.19

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The emergence of the All Jammu and Kashmir Panchayat Conference (AJKPC) provides another illustration of how a forum of elected representatives, in this case village councils, can function as a pressure group in urging governments to translate the principle of devolution of power to the grass roots into actual action amidst an ongoing conflict.20 This forum was born in the wake of the growing disenchantment of the newly elected village council representatives following the village council – panchayat – elections of 2011.21 While the elections were free and fair – a fact that was widely appreciated in light of the continuing levels of militarisation of state and society – in operational terms it remained a ‘paper exercise’.22 The panches and sarpanches had quickly realised that individual petitions and complaints would not be effective in pressing for their multi-pronged demands. In a state where the landscape and politics is marked by sharp sub-regional fault lines, the statements of the smaller organisations from North and South Kashmir on the merger assumes salience: ‘we have decided to fight jointly for the cause of the state and its people and to project the real and democratic face of J&K before the political class and civil society of the country’.23 If J&K displays complex relationships between civil society actors and the state, in Cyprus, we see how citizens had to fight for a conflict resolution space outside the state structures. The ‘Cyprus Problem’, alongside Kashmir and the Israel–Palestine conflict, has become a synonym for intractability. It combines both elements of an external and an internal conflict. The Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot community – the two main communities living on the island – are divided along ethnic, cultural and linguistic lines.24 Despite significant geographical overlap, both communities remained distinct ethnic groups and a common Cypriot identity did not emerge. While the seeds for conflict can be traced back to British colonial rule, visible ethnic separation began in the early 1960s with the eruption of violent inter-communal clashes. In 1974, following a coup d’état by the Greek junta in their quest to unify Cyprus with mainland Greece, the Turkish government launched a military intervention that separated the island and eventually the two communities, territorially occupying one-third of the island.25 Since, the conflict has touched on a multitude of issues and social processes on both sides of the divide, such as local, regional and international security, sovereignty, international state recognition, territory and a range of other political and economic rights.26 At the same time, different resolutions to the Cyprus question have been advanced including arbitration, UN mediation, peacekeeping, proximity talks, shuttle diplomacy, elite face-to-face talks, and



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establishment of technical committees and working groups.27 These peace attempts have been locked into ethno-nationalist rhetoric from the very beginning, as political elites from both sides of the divide have been unable to move beyond this discourse.28 Nevertheless, political agency remained at the international and national elite level, allowing critics of previous peacemaking efforts to point to an inherent democracy deficit in the process of finding a solution.29 It was not before the 1990s that the bicommunal movement – an initiative consisting of Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots – was able to carve out a meaningful political space for non-state engagement. The movement was driven by its participants’ need to engage with Cypriots from the other side of the divided island.30 International donors have provided a physical space to meet in the UN-monitored Buffer Zone, a legacy of the 1974 partition of the island, as meetings could not take place on either side directly due to the closed borders. In a significant departure from Cyprus’s political culture dominated by ethno-national political elites and a civil society mainly organised along party lines, this dialogue process presented an exemplar of how peace might be imagined beyond the ethno-nationalist discourse. Nonetheless, civil society engaging for peace remained constantly under threat: during political tense times politicians actively supported the branding of inter-communal peace activists as traitors through diverse media campaigns in newspapers and on TV.31 Many of the movement’s participants were confronted with negative labelling, threats and social stigmatism in their own communities.32 Yet, these local actors were able to create an inter-communal space from which a new, inclusive discourse could emerge that inspired a range of other groups, bicommunal youth camps, sport activities, cultural heritage initiatives and artists engaging with conflict resolution and eventually ‘peace CSOs’. This ‘third space’ has long been dependent on a power equilibrium where international support counters ethnonationalist policies to enable local agency. The case of BiH offers an example of how individual agency can be exercised in spite of or by using to its advantage the limitations imposed by the existence of the so-called ethnic spaces. The 1992–95 conflict in BiH was fought along ethnic and religious lines, between the Bosnian Serbs, being predominantly Christian Orthodox, the Bosnian Muslims, also known as Bosniacs, and the Bosnian Croats, predominantly Christian Catholic. Following the break-up of Yugoslavia, the Bosnian and Herzegovinians had divided views on whether to declare independence or stay in the federation that was falling apart.33 This led to what is commonly referred to as the bloodiest conflict in Europe since the Second World War.

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The war was concluded with the signing of the Dayton Peace Agreement, which effectively paved the way for the creation of ethnic spaces, with one of the basic premises of the Constitution adopted in Dayton being that ethnic groups are homogeneous and fixed categories. Ethnicities are seen as mappable categories, with an understanding among the population over ‘which municipalities are whose’, largely because in post-Dayton BiH ethnically heterogeneous municipalities are rare. This leaves the BiH society to be governed not as a sovereign political community, but as a conglomerate of three different ethnic communities.34 As a result, we witness a case of spatial governmentality that contributes to the ongoing creation of social orders and identifications that occur as a result of the governing of ethnically conceived spaces divided between three ethnic communities.35 The existence of these ethnic spaces is evident throughout the country and is reinforced through a large number of metaphors and practices. As a result, supra-ethnic spaces or spaces for genuine reconciliation remain few and far between and are very difficult to carve out. The little that has been achieved in this respect comes as a result of the activities of various citizens’ associations brought together by a common interest or concern, as well as individuals who ideationally or practically disagree with the ethnic spatialisation. At the same time, however, agency is also exercised by those who partake in and benefit from the reinforcement of the existence of ethnic spaces. Like BiH, in J&K we also see instances where the social milieu within which actors are placed often constrain the ability to express their agency. The Houseboat Owners Association (Hanjis) and the Shikara Union in the summer capital of Srinagar in J&K, for instance, find calls for strikes and shutdowns disruptive to their trade with tourists, yet are powerless to openly express their views since they are members of a society where resistance is expressed in this way. As a result, most of their interventions are restricted to wresting environmental, monetary and logistical concessions from the state.36 Compliance with governance initiatives In this section we focus on the ambivalence of compliance in an area of conflict and how even a seeming act of compliance cannot be seen in a political vacuum. Seen through the lens of intentionality and autonomy it may even constitute an agentive action when it is a consciously made choice. Chantal Mouffe defines the political sphere as a sphere of struggle and contestation.37 Its location is precisely what affects the redefining of the politics of peace. To that end, seeing the local population in (post-)conflict societies as subjects of politics and shedding light



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on their agency sheds light on how governance does not necessarily depoliticise conflict societies, but on the contrary, provokes struggles that preserve the political sphere.38 This moves the analysis beyond the conception of the people as mere passive recipients of governance. Illustrating this point with reference to CSOs, with some exceptions, civil society in BiH and Cyprus remains donor-driven and by and large compliant with donors’ agendas.39 We have already pointed to the importance of problematising the notion of civil society, particularly in a conflict zone, and to the definitional problems and disagreements as to what it constitutes, as well as the role it can play in the presence of active coercion and pressures from the stakeholders of the conflict. In BiH, many share the sentiment of a Tuzla-based CSO representative that they have to ‘follow the donors’ trends and the availability of funding’ when defining their activities.40 The international community sees the civil society sector as vital and as their partner in the democratisation of the country and the approximation to the EU.41 Donors are quick to point out that in deciding the priorities in which areas projects are to be funded for the year they consult civil society.42 However, the opportunities for such input are perceived to be limited.43 As a result, very few try.44 Similarly, in Cyprus, CSOs often behave in a compliant manner towards international demands and, thus, the space created for and by these actors follows the rules of liberal governmentality.45 This governance approach involves a tendency to fund CSOs that have already been professionalised with the support of international actors and actors that are able to implement larger projects, while smaller and less professional organisations are neglected.46 Therefore, project aims can be defined in headquarters in Brussels and New York rather than in Nicosia or Sarajevo, as local CSOs are dependent on the financial support. Currently, regional cooperation has become one of the cornerstones and is described as ‘the road ahead’47 for Cypriot civil society. Influential donors, such as United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the EU pushed forward regional cooperation, claiming it enables activists to learn from each other across national boundaries.48 This example represents the constant struggle between autonomy and compliance to agendas suggested by international donors. Compliance, however, does not necessarily contradict autonomous agency, as most CSOs engage in a complicated process of negotiating the boundaries and possibilities of their work with the international donors. At the individual level, people usually comply with the governing expectations. Interestingly, often even when they complain about certain policies, they still consciously and intentionally comply with them.

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Numerous examples of compliance with the ethnic spatialisation can be found along the inter-entity line in BiH. According to the Constitution, the different sides of the line are governed in accordance with the legal framework of the respective entity. Importantly, the schools in the different entities follow different school curricula. Quite frequently geographical areas divided by the inter-entity line have only one school, which follows the curriculum of the entity it is a part of and does not offer a choice when it comes to the ‘national group of subjects’.49 In those cases, parents usually choose to send their children to a school in the other entity to enable them to study in ‘their’ language. Parents are not troubled by the distance, emphasising the importance that their children ‘can study in their own language’.50 The locals’ explanations and their understanding of why they comply with the governing policies show clear intentionality, often supported by rationalisation of the decisions, as well as autonomy in making those choices. Another example of compliance at the individual level can be found among Kashmiri youths in the Valley. Many strongly resent the security forces’ long-standing practice of inspecting identity cards at various checkpoints strewn across the cities and towns and yet most of them comply. They are acutely conscious of the unequal power equations between an individual and a group of security personnel they face at a checkpoint. However, they choose to comply because they would rather engage the latter on their own terms: for instance, in the downtown areas where the youths hold the advantage of quickly disappearing in the narrow lanes after resorting to stone pelting against the police or an altogether different domain of social media where they mobilise public opinion against the excesses of the security forces.51 What appears to be an act of compliance in one situation may therefore well be a strategic decision that enables the same person to stage an act of defiance against the same authority at a time and place of her/his choosing where the stakes are not entirely loaded to her/his disadvantage. Resistance to governance initiatives Foucault’s compelling argument that ‘[w]here there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power’52 seems to be borne out by what we observed in the field across the conflict theatres that we studied. In the context of resistance, a wide definition of intent is used, which includes not only actions aiming to bring about a larger systematic change, as is the case with the everyday resistance Scott analyses, but also acts that constitute conscious violations of dominant norms



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and power orders.53 Resistance here is understood as challenging these dominant norms and governmental technologies, driven by an actual opposition to the particular technology. Importantly, the motivations behind resisting are not always necessarily immediate personal gains. Richmond conceives of resistance as an act of power and hegemony being resisted either discursively or through social practices.54 Referring to Foucault’s work, he points out that ‘resistance is not merely an antidote to power but reconstitutes politics according to those who express agency, however diffuse’.55 To that end, resistance does not refer only to mass rebellious movements, but equally to everyday practices that do not comply with the given governance initiatives and challenge that hegemony.56 Such resistance can be defined as ‘those behaviours and cultural practices by subordinate groups that contest hegemonic social formations, that threaten to unravel the strategies of domination’.57 Keeping in mind that visibility is a necessary condition for resistance to be recognised, in making the distinction between everyday resistance and more conventional ways of political mobilisation, it is important to emphasise that in some instances of the latter, actors may purposefully try to avoid recognition.58 Here we focus on visible acts of resistance while acknowledging that in all three cases there might be such acts of invisible resistance. Simultaneously, some acts of resistance are observable, but fail to be recognised as resistance. James Scott calls them ‘ordinary weapons of relatively powerless groups’.59 The most potent form of visible resistance in a conflict situation is often violence, which was the case in Kashmir, especially in its initial phase when the militants exercised de facto power by almost paralysing the state apparatus and even succeeded in transferring people’s allegiance and loyalty to themselves.60 It began with a systematic campaign launched in 1988–89 that challenged and replaced the official state symbols with an alternative calendar of public events. The militants’ order to observe Friday instead of Sunday as a holiday, for example, was tacitly complied with in public offices, including the civil secretariat and banks.61 Of course resistance can be visible yet non-violent. As Manchanda points out in the early years of the militancy Kashmiri women confronted politicised violence and shaped their own survival and resistance strategies without resort to direct violence, a fact that is often sidelined when women are boxed into a victimhood discourse. At the beginning of the militancy, women participated in the popular upsurge in large numbers defying the crackdowns by state forces. Yet when the movement acquired a religious extremist hue with militants issuing diktats on the compulsory veiling of women, for instance, they resisted that

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too. Women’s activism in the midst of the violent conflict was rooted in their everyday concerns for survival and their ‘stretched’ roles whether as female heads of households or active crusaders for justice for parents of the disappeared often emanated from this struggle.62 Perhaps the most powerful example of this stretched role comes in the form of the movement led by a mother Parveena Ahangar whose personal quest for a disappeared son has morphed into a public movement of hundreds of parents under the banner of the Association for Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP). As Chitra Padmanabhan poignantly points out, the ‘tableau of loss and protest’ by APDP during the dharnas and sit-ins in Srinagar every year communicates a ‘life affirming aesthetic’ in a public space otherwise dominated by the rhetoric of power.63 In embodying a living memory of the missing, a woman and a mother has shown how it is possible to resist and yet keep alive the possibility of humanising politics and its practice in public space’.64 In sharp contrast to this alternative politics, youths in J&K have been involved in a new form of visible civilian violence through stone pelting against state authorities even as the older generations of militants are striving hard to put their violent past behind them. Notably, 69 per cent of those interviewed in the field identified the replacement of gun with the civilian violence as the most significant feature of the present-day resistance in the Valley, though 61 per cent of the same respondents considered it to be the least effective way of achieving their political aspirations. Significantly, 57 per cent of these respondents believed peaceful political protests to be the best way forward for achieving such goals.65 In Cyprus, examples of CSOs resisting neo-liberal governmentality are less visible due to the consequences of non-compliance with state and/or international agendas on the opportunities for such actors. One visible example, however, was the Occupy Buffer Zone Movement (OBZM) in Cyprus that emerged in late 2011. The youth movement emphasised the connection between the development of the internal conflict and the economic and political interests associated with the status quo. It occupied an abandoned house in the UN-administrated Buffer Zone, located in an area highly frequented by tourists to attract the attention of the media.66 The OBZM represented grass-roots resistance against the promotion of a conflict solution that envisages a bi-zonal, bi-federal state, as promoted by international actors. While many activists and CSOs fear that Cyprus may follow the negative example of BiH, where the Dayton Peace Agreement institutionalised ethnic divisions, such concerns have not been publicly raised as it might adversely affect their funding.67 In contrast, the OBZM openly voiced



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criticism towards the presence of foreign military forces in Cyprus and publicly debated the implementation of several EU laws and the EU’s approach to reunifying the island via economic interdependence. The movement clashed with the UN Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus as well, which asked them several times to vacate the Buffer Zone since their activities were ‘not in line with the UN’s regulation for activities in the Buffer Zone’.68 By being more political than their institutionalised counterparts, OBZM could not find any allies in the political spectrum, nationally or internationally, and though their permanent occupation was stopped after a police intervention in early April 2012, the movement had already begun to fall apart due to internal tensions earlier.69 The case showed, however, that without the support and protection of either international actors or political elites, peace-orientated civil society actors are indeed in danger of not finding space within which they can exercise their agency. While the Cypriot example suggests resistance against established or envisaged legal mechanisms, other actors have found ways to exercise agency through the usage of their constitutional rights. The legal strategy of the APDP in J&K has been to flood the courts with petitions and habeas corpus and even though it has not resulted in taking the cases to their logical culmination, it points to a new way of doing politics.70 The power of resistance represented by this movement creates a space that challenges both injustice as well as the militarisation of politics by showing an alternative path of what conflict transformation scholar Lisa Schirch calls ‘waging conflict non-violently’.71 The formation of the AJKPC also in J&K and the way it sees its own mandate, on the other hand, show how cooperation, conflict and resistance operate side by side in a site marked by militarisation. While the decision to devolve power to the Halqa panchayats was clearly a topdown decision once it was launched, the initiative no longer remained solely in the hands of leading politicians and bureaucrats. Through the formation of collectives of elected representatives such as AJKPC, the panchayat initiative acquired a different hue and potential momentum of its own. Similarly, the people of Leh district had accepted the proposition of an AHC with much reluctance since their original demand for a Union Territory’s status was not conceded to by the central government. And, despite the initial obstacles, for instance of not getting adequate funds and getting them released ‘in time’ – in view of their extremely short working season – by the state government, the elected councillors have not only learned the ropes of the system and managed to bring about a special regulation whereby their funds do not lapse at the end of the financial year, but also figured out how to mobilise

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resources from other avenues such as the central government schemes and the private sector.72 Unlike the APDP, which is resisting state actions, both the AHCs and the AJKPC are seeking proper implementation of the state’s own policies, albeit through peaceful and constitutional mechanisms. While the AHC mechanism is well established now, the AJKPC still resorts to dharnas, meetings, petitions and marches to the office of local bureaucrats to present their demands while also establishing direct channels of communication with the union government of India to achieve their goals. Resistance can take also form of subtle non-compliance. Right-based governance reforms in Cyprus, for instance, have not induced reconciliation and conflict resolution, but rather faced local resistance on various levels. Such is the example of the EU-driven project of advancing economic interdependence based on the premise that trade bridges the conflicting communities and fosters stable economic relationships. This has, however, largely clashed with local norms in both communities, interests of producers and incentives by state actors alike. As the division line between the Republic of Cyprus and the non-recognised Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus does not constitute an external border, special rules concerning the crossing of goods, services and persons were established through a ‘Green Line Regulation’ enacted in May 2004. It constitutes a mechanism to enable Turkish Cypriots to export goods to the Republic of Cyprus, and from there, to the rest of the EU. Although more products have been added to this regulation every year, the trade between the communities has been declining.73 In a gravity model, Gokcekus et al. have demonstrated the existence of a sizable gap between potential and actual volumes of trade. The realisation of trade between the two communities according to these calculations is only 10 per cent. Analysing the reasons, only 35 per cent can be attributed to technical trade barriers, leaving almost 60 per cent to subjective interpersonal and inter-communal barriers.74 Members of the European Commission assume that social norms have a major impact on trade, as communities seem to reject products from ‘the other side’.75 Some argue that state supermarkets in the south are afraid of protest by their customers if they stocked Turkish Cypriot products, resulting in little demand for trade products from over the Green Line.76 Individual everyday acts of boycott thus create a situation that has implications on business decisions at a larger scale. These acts of everyday resistance are common phenomena in BiH too. In the case of children of inter-ethnic marriages, individual resistance to ethnic divisions can be noticed in situations that request declaration of ethnicity on official forms. Many of them instead of selecting



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one of the three constituent peoples and ‘neglecting part of their identity’, or selecting ‘other’ and ‘accepting the marginalisation that they are faced with in the society’, choose to write in another category, ranging from Chinese to Jedi.77 Despite knowing they would be placed in the category of others, they nonetheless choose to mock the categorisation than ‘allow for someone else to make them fit into as narrow a category as one ethnicity’.78 There are also those that are not necessarily from an inter-ethnic marriage but oppose the ethnic categorisation and declare themselves as Bosnian and Herzegovinian.79 Ironically, this too falls under the category of others. There was an initiative by several CSOs in BiH in the run-up to the October 2013 census, the first since the war, to encourage people to declare themselves Bosnian and Herzegovinians.80 One reason for this was to challenge the thinking of ethnicities as the basic postulates of post-Dayton BiH and the ethnic quotas that have been derived from that. According to the Law on Civil Service in the Institutions of BiH, the structure of civil servants should reflect the ethnic structure of the population according to the last census. The initiative gained momentum and resisted the ethnic categorisation. Conclusion As this chapter has indicated, theoretical constructs borrowed from realism, institutionalism, constructivism and liberalism fall short of providing explanatory tools for the new reality of international conflicts where inter- and intra-state politics have meshed to refashion the conceptual alphabets of international politics. What we uncover from our field research into three contemporary conflicts requires a new wave of theorising, the contours of which are being explored by critical theory, particularly feminist insights, but clearly the envelope needs to be pushed. New theorisations will have to take into account the way in which power is defined and understood by the people, how its forms can change, how gender alters conflict relations, and the role of global capital and donor agencies in pacification of conflicts. Problematising agency in the midst of contending pressures and conflict politics can be an entry point into this. What is clear is that old theories wedded to the state as the sole or at least the primary unit of analysis can no longer be used as explanatory frameworks for understanding new international conflicts. Taking its basic cue from critical theory, this chapter has highlighted the complex and multifaceted character of people’s experiences amidst conflict and argued that even those cast in an apparently weaker position in the unequal power equations of a conflict situation may defy the

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macro narratives of victimhood by exercising their agency in different ways. Such agency, however, acquires different forms and the ones that are implicit in individual actions through their everyday practices are as important to understand as indeed the more obvious forms of collective resistance by a community. We have noted how people carve out alternative political spaces to engage with state authorities. We have seen that top-down governance measures are not necessarily controlled by the top once they are launched. In almost all the cases discussed in the chapter, we have observed that the notions of agency, autonomy, compliance and resistance are so interwoven that it is impossible to neatly categorise them. While scholarly endeavours to define such concepts may be useful for analytical purposes, the empirical realities on the ground – evident from all three case studies – bring the deep interconnectedness of such phenomena into sharp focus. As we have seen, sometimes instances of compliance show implicit resistance being exercised by the people. In conclusion, we observe that resistance, compliance, agency and autonomy are interlinked with power politics in all conflict and so-called post-conflict zones. To comprehend how they operate necessitates an analysis of how power is understood, distributed and subverted in an ongoing or frozen conflict zone between different organising units – the EU, the states, other units of governance, markets and non-state actors. Clearly, as the field studies have demonstrated, governance cannot be a technical task in (post-)conflict zones. Notions of power are interwoven into it and it is only through this power lens that we can understand how apparently contradictory terms like agency and victimhood, resistance and compliance are in practice interconnected on the ground. Evidently, it is time for a new wave of theorising that takes these ground realities from contemporary conflict theatres into account. Notes   1    2    3    4 

Verghese, ‘Civil society in conflict situations’. White, ‘Civil society, democratisation and development’, 10. Fischer, Civil Society in Conflict Transformation. This chapter draws on the idea that comparisons can be made both across similar and different systems and particularly in the latter case, comparisons do not need to be at the systemic level only. It can take into account different levels of analysis: individuals, groups, local communities, which is what the studies in this chapter seek to do. See Przeworski and Teune, Logic of Comparative Social Inquiry, 34.   5  Varshney, ‘Three compromised nationalisms’.



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  6  Booth, Realism and World Politics.   7  For a moderate critical approach that tries to ‘fix’ liberal peacebuilding, see Paris and Sisk, Dilemmas of Statebuilding; Call and Hawkins, Building States to Build Peace; Barnett, ‘Building a republican peace’.   8  For a radical critique to the liberal peace, see Chandler, Bosnia; Pugh, ‘The political economy of peacebuilding’; Mac Ginty, ‘Indigenous peacemaking versus the liberal peace’; Richmond, Failed Statebuilding.   9  Wendt, ‘Constructing international politics’; Hopf, ‘Promise of constructivism in IR theory’. 10  See Linklater, ‘Question of the next stage in international relations theory’; Runyan and Peterson, ‘Radical future of realism’. 11  Lorentzen and Turpin, Women and War Reader; Manchanda, Women, War and Peace in South Asia. 12  For a sociological perspective on resistance, see Hollander and Einwohner, ‘Conceptualising resistance’. 13  Lamb, Kashmir a Disputed Legacy; Thomas, Perspectives on Kashmir; Wirsing, Kashmir in the Shadow of War. 14  Bhattacharjes, Kashmir the Wounded Valley; Bose, Challenge in Kashmir; Ganguly, ‘Explaining the Kashmir insurgency’; Behera, State, Identity and Violence. 15  Behera, Demystifying Kashmir. 16  The term azadi literally means freedom and its most predominant notion is that of freedom of Kashmir from both India and Pakistan. Over the decades, however, it has acquired diverse meanings depending on which individual, community or political group’s opinion is sought and at what point of time. See, for instance Behera, Perception Survey of Media Impact on the Kashmiri Youth, 32–4. 17  Based on a field survey carried out by Delhi University and Islamic University in June 2013. The sample included 311 persons from all the ten districts in the Kashmir Valley who had actively participated in the armed struggle at some point during the past twenty-seven years (1985–2013). 18  Interviews with a cross-section of elected councillors of the AHCs, panches, sarpanches, members of the legislative assembly, government officials and civil society representatives in the Leh district in October 2012. 19  Based on a similar exercise carried out in the Kargil district in October 2012. 20  The J&K panchayat conference was renamed All J&K Panchayat Conference in 2013 following the merger of all major organisations of elected members of village councils. 21  Halqa means a village or such contiguous number of villages as may occasionally be determined by the government. Panch refers to a member of the halqa panchayat, whether elected or nominated; every halqa panchayat consists of not less than seven panches. 22  Fieldwork conducted by PRIA including conversations with newly elected representatives in 2011 to 2012. See DasGupta and Singh, ‘Village council

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23  24  25  26  27  28  29  30  31 

32  33  34  35  36  37  38  39  40  41  42  43  44  45  46 

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elections in Jammu and Kashmir’, CORE Policy Brief (2013), http:// file.prio.no/Publications/COREPolicyBrief-6-2013 Ibid. Joseph, ‘International dimensions of the Cyprus problem’, 95. Ibid., 96. Richmond, Mediating in Cyprus, xv. Jarraud et al., ‘Cypriot civil society movement’, 56. Vogel and Richmond, ‘A viable peace process already exists’. Jarraud et al., ‘Cypriot civil society movement’, 45; for critical works on the elite process, see for example: Ker-Lindsay, EU Accession and UN Peacemaking in Cyprus. Interview with Maria Hadjipavlou, Nicosia-based civil society pioneer and academic, conducted by Birte Vogel, 9 November 2011. Interview with Hadjipavlou, conducted by Birte Vogel, 15 October 2013, see also Hadjipavlou, ‘Unofficial inter-communal contacts and their contribution on peace-building in conflict societies’; Broome, ‘Overview of conflict resolution activities in Cyprus’. Interview with a head of CSO and participant in the early bicommunal activities, conducted by Birte Vogel, 3 November 2011. For more on this, see Bougarel et al., ‘Introduction’. Hayden, ‘ “Democracy” without a demos?’, 226. Hromadžić, ‘Bathroom mixing’, 271. Drawn from fieldwork carried out by Devika Sharma (Delhi University) in February 2012. Mouffe, ‘Democracy, power, and the “political”’, 247. On ‘peace without politics’, see, for instance Chandler, Empire in Denial. Interviews with Sarajevo-based CSO representatives, conducted by Elena Stavrevska, October–November 2011, and interviews with Nicosia-based CSO representatives, conducted by Birte Vogel, October–December 2013. Interview with a Tuzla-based CSO representative, conducted by Elena Stavrevska, 14 November 2011. Interviews with Sarajevo and Banja Luka-based international organisations’ representatives, conducted by Elena Stavrevska, November 2011 and November 2012. Interviews with Sarajevo-based international organisations’ representatives, conducted by Elena Stavrevska, 15–16 November 2011. Interview with a Sarajevo-based CSO representative, conducted by Elena Stavrevska, 15 November 2011. For a comprehensive analysis of the international approach to CSOs in BiH, see Belloni, ‘Civil society and peacebuilding in Bosnia and Herzegovina’; Fagan, ‘Civil society in Bosnia ten years after Dayton’. This seems not to be exclusive to Cyprus; for a similar argument on EU’s engagement with Arab uprisings movements, see Tagma et al., ‘“Taming” Arab social movements’. Vogel, ‘Caught in the third space?’.



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47  Interview with a Nicosia-based UNDP representative, conducted by Birte Vogel. See also UNDP, Citizen peacemaking in Cyprus, 69. 48  Buttenheim (Special Representative of the Secretary General and Head of the United Nations Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus), presentation, 6 December 2012; interview with a Nicosia-based UNDP representative, conducted by Birte Vogel, 4 December 2012. 49  See Elena B. Stavrevska, ‘Ensuring political representation in a restructured Bosnia and Herzegovina’. 50  Interviews with Trnovo village residents, conducted by Elena Stavrevska, 10 May and 10 November 2012. 51  Based on the results of a field survey carried out in Kashmir Valley in June 2013 (see note 17 for details). 52  Foucault, History of Sexuality, 95. 53  Scott, Weapons of the Weak; Campbell and Heyman, ‘Slantwise’, 4. 54  Richmond, ‘Critical agency, resistance and a post-colonial civil society’, 420. 55  Ibid., 422. 56  Two aspects of the everyday are crucial for this chapter. First, it reveals the extraordinary in the ordinary, present in all the existing systems, including judicial, contractual, pedagogical, fiscal and police systems. Second, the everyday also emerges as a realm both of the social and the political. The idea is to step away from the orthodox and narrow Western construct of the political often limited to the practices and institutions of the state, and explore other sites of change, such as culture and everyday life. 57  Haynes and Prakash, Contesting Power, 3. 58  Hollander and Einwohner, ‘Conceptualizing resistance’, 540. 59  Scott, Weapons of the Weak, 29. 60  Based on field data collected in Kashmir Valley in June 2013. 61  Behera, State, Identity and Violence, 165. 62  Manchanda, ‘Guns and burqa’. For more on women’s varied roles including acts of resistance, see also DasGupta, Breaking the Silence; Ramachandran and Mallavarapu, ‘Gender and armed conflict in Kashmir’. 63  Padmanabhan, ‘Viewing politics through a new frame’. 64  Ibid. 65  Based on the results of the field survey in Kashmir Valley in June 2013 (see note 17 for details). 66  See, for instance, Al Jazeera’s coverage of OBZM: http://stream.aljazeera .com/story/cypriots-occupybufferzone-0021865 67  Interview with Mihalis Eleftheriou, OBZM member, conducted by Birte Vogel, 26 February 2012; interview with a CSO employee in Nicosia, conducted by Birte Vogel, 2 March 2012. 68  ‘UN asks Occupy protesters to vacate Ledra Street site’, Cyprus Mail (14 January 2012). 69  Evripidou, ‘Tensions high after police raid’. 70  DasGupta, ‘Borderlands and borderlines’, 89.

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71  Schirch, Little Book of Strategic Peacebuilding. 72  Interviews with elected councillors of the AHCs and district-level government officials in the Leh district, conducted by Sumona DasGupta, October 2012. 73  Ibid. 74  Gokcekus et al., ‘Impediments to trade across the Green Line in Cyprus’, 864. 75  Interview with a European Commission representative, conducted by Birte Vogel, 1 March 2012. 76  Moestue, ‘Wrong side of the (trade) barriers’. 77  Interviews with Sarajevo, Tuzla and Banja Luka-based children of interethnic couples, conducted by Elena Stavrevska, 16–21 May, 2–6 June, 23 July 2012. 78  Interview with a Tuzla-based son of an inter-ethnic couple, conducted by Elena Stavrevska, 2 June 2012. 79  Interview with a young Sarajevo resident, conducted by Elena Stavrevska, 17 May 2012. 80  Interview with a Sarajevo-based CSO representative, conducted by Elena Stavrevska, 8 November 2012.

References Barnett, M., ‘Building a republican peace: Stabilizing states after war’, International Security, 30:4 (2006), 87–112. Behera, N. C., State, Identity and Violence: Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh (New Delhi: Manohar, 2000). Behera, N. C., Demystifying Kashmir (Washington, DC: Brookings Press, 2006). Behera, N. C., A Perception Survey of Media Impact on the Kashmiri Youth (New Delhi: IRIIS Report, 2011), 32–4. Belloni, R., ‘Civil society and peacebuilding in Bosnia and Herzegovina’, Journal of Peace Research, 38:2 (2001), 163–80. Bhattacharjes, A., Kashmir the Wounded Valley (New Delhi: UBSPD, 1994). Booth K. (ed.), Realism and World Politics (London: Routledge, 2011). Bose, S., The Challenge in Kashmir: Democracy, Self-determination and a Just Peace (New Delhi: Sage, 1997). Bougarel, X., E. Helms and G. Duijzings, ‘Introduction’, in X. Bougarel, E. Helms and G. Duijzings (eds), The New Bosnian Mosaic: Identities, Memories and Moral Claims in a Post-war Society (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). Broome, B., ‘Overview of conflict resolution activities in Cyprus – Their contribution to the peace process’, Cyprus Review, 10:1 (1998), 47–66. Buttenheim, L. M. (Special Representative of the Secretary General and Head of the United Nations Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus), presentation, 6 December 2012.



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Call, C. T. and W. V. Hawkins (eds), Building States to Build Peace (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2008). Campbell H. and J. Heyman, ‘Slantwise: Beyond domination and resistance on the border’, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 36:1 (2007), 3–30. Chandler, D., Empire in Denial: The Politics of State-building (London: Pluto, 2006). Chandler, D., Bosnia: Faking Democracy after Dayton (London: Pluto, 2009). DasGupta, S., Breaking the Silence: Women and Kashmir (New Delhi: WISCOMP, 2001). DasGupta, S., ‘Borderlands and borderlines: Renegotiating boundaries in Jammu and Kashmir’, Journal of Borderland Studies, 27:1 (2012), 83–93. DasGupta, S. and P. Singh, ‘Village council elections in Jammu and Kashmir: A lost opportunity for conflict-sensitive governance’, CORE Policy Brief (2013); http://file.prio.no/Publications/COREPolicyBrief-6-2013 Evripidou, S., ‘Tensions high after police raid’, Cyprus Mail (8 April 2012). Fagan, A., ‘Civil society in Bosnia ten years after Dayton’, International Peacekeeping, 12:3 (2005), 406–19. Fischer, M., Civil Society in Conflict Transformation: Ambivalence, Potentials and Challenges, www.berghof-handbook.net/documents/publications/ fischer_cso_handbook.pdf; accessed 14 September 2014. Foucault, M., The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction (New York, Random House, 1978). Ganguly, S., ‘Explaining the Kashmir insurgency: Political mobilization and institutional decay’, International Security, 21:2 (1996), 76–106. Gokcekus, O., J. Henson, D. Nottebaum and A. Wanis-St John, ‘Impediments to trade across the Green Line in Cyprus: Classic barriers and mistrust’, Journal of Peace Research, 49:6 (2012), 863–72. Hadjipavlou, M., ‘Unofficial inter-communal contacts and their contribution on peace-building in conflict societies – The case of Cyprus’, Cyprus Review, 5:2 (1993), 68–87. Hayden, R. M., ‘ “Democracy” without a demos? The Bosnian constitutional experiment and the intentional construction of nonfunctioning states’, East European Politics & Societies, 19:2 (2005), 226–59. Haynes, D. and G. Prakash (eds), Contesting Power: Resistance and Everyday Social Relations in South Asia (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992). Hollander, J. A. and R. L. Einwohner, ‘Conceptualising resistance’, Sociological Forum, 19:4 (2004), 533–54. Hopf, T., ‘The promise of constructivism in IR theory’, in A. Linklator (ed.), Critical Concepts in Political Science, Vol. 4 (New York: Routledge, 2000). Hromadžić, A., ‘Bathroom mixing: Youth negotiate democratization in postconflict Bosnia and Herzegovina’, Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 34:2 (2011), 268–89. Interview with a head of CSO and participant in the early bicommunal activities, conducted by Birte Vogel, 3 November 2011.

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Interview with Maria Hadjipavlou, Nicosia-based civil society pioneer and academic, conducted by Birte Vogel, 9 November 2011. Interview with a Tuzla-based CSO representative, conducted by Elena Stavrevska, 14 November 2011. Interviews with Sarajevo-based international organisations’ representatives, conducted by Elena Stavrevska, 15–16 November 2011. Interview with a Sarajevo-based CSO representative, conducted by Elena Stavrevska, 15 November 2011. Interviews with Sarajevo-based CSO representatives, conducted by Elena Stavrevska, October–November 2011, and interviews with Nicosia-based CSO representatives, conducted by Birte Vogel, October–December 2013. Interviews with Sarajevo and Banja Luka-based international organisations’ representatives, conducted by Elena Stavrevska, November 2011 and November 2012. Interview with Mihalis Eleftheriou, OBZM member, conducted by Birte Vogel, 26 February 2012. Interview with a European Commission representative, conducted by Birte Vogel, 1 March 2012. Interview with a CSO employee in Nicosia, conducted by Birte Vogel, 2 March 2012. Interviews with Sarajevo, Tuzla and Banja Luka-based children of inter-ethnic couples, conducted by Elena Stavrevska, 16–21 May, 2–6 June, 23 July 2012. Interview with a young Sarajevo resident, conducted by Elena Stavrevska, 17 May 2012. Interview with a Tuzla-based son of an inter-ethnic couple, conducted by Elena Stavrevska, 2 June 2012. Interviews with elected councillors of the AHCs and district-level government officials in the Leh district, conducted by Sumona DasGupta, October 2012. Interviews with Trnovo village residents, conducted by Elena Stavrevska, 10 May and 10 November 2012. Interview with a Sarajevo-based CSO representative, conducted by Elena Stavrevska, 8 November 2012. Interview with a Nicosia-based UNDP representative, conducted by Birte Vogel, 4 December 2012. Interview with Maria Hadjipavlou, conducted by Birte Vogel, 15 October 2013. Jarraud, N., C. Louise and G. Filippou, ‘The Cypriot civil society movement’, Journal of Peacebuilding & Development, 8:1 (2013), 45–59. Joseph, J., ‘International dimensions of the Cyprus problem’, in H. Faustmann and E. Solomou (eds), Independent Cyprus 1960–2010 (Nicosia: University of Nicosia Press, 2011). Ker-Lindsay, J., EU Accession and UN Peacemaking in Cyprus (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Lamb, A., Kashmir a Disputed Legacy (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1993).



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Linklater, A., ‘The question of the next stage in international relations theory: A critical–theoretical point of view’, Millennium, 21:1 (1992), 77–98. Lorentzen, L. A. and J. Turpin (eds), The Women and War Reader (New York: New York University Press, 1998). Mac Ginty, R., ‘Indigenous peacemaking versus the liberal peace’, Cooperation and Conflict, 42:2 (2008), 139–63. Manchanda, R., ‘Guns and burqa: Women in the Kashmir conflict’, in Manchanda (ed.), Women, War and Peace in South Asia (New Delhi: Sage, 2001). Manchanda, R. (ed.), Women, War and Peace in South Asia: Beyond Victimhood to Agency (New Delhi: Sage, 2001). Moestue, H. P., ‘Wrong side of the (trade) barriers’, European Voice (5 September 2008), www.europeanvoice.com/article/imported/wrong-side-of-thetrade-barriers/62192.aspx Mouffe, C., ‘Democracy, power, and the “political”’, in S. Benhabib (ed.), Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996). Padmanabhan, C., ‘Viewing politics through a new frame’, Hindu Magazine (30 January 2010). Paris, R. and T. D. Sisk (eds), The Dilemmas of Statebuilding: Confronting the Contradictions of Postwar Peace Operations (London: Routledge, 2009). Przeworski, A. and H. Teune, The Logic of Comparative Social Inquiry (New York: Wiley, 1970). Pugh, M., ‘The political economy of peacebuilding: A critical theory perspective’, International Journal of Peace Studies, 10:2 (2005), 23–42. Ramachandran S. and S. Mallavarapu, ‘Gender and armed conflict in Kashmir’, in S. DasGupta and S. Rajagopalan, Revisioning and Engendering Security (New Delhi: Rupa, 2010). Richmond, O. P., Mediating in Cyprus – The Cypriot Communities and the United Nations (London: Frank Cass, 1998). Richmond, O. P., ‘Critical agency, resistance and a post-colonial civil society’, Cooperation and Conflict, 46:4 (2011), 419–40. Richmond, O. P., Failed Statebuilding: Intervention, the State, and the Dynamics of Peace Formation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014). Runyan, A. S. and V. S. Peterson, ‘The radical future of realism: Feminist subversion of IR theory’, in A. Linklater (ed.), Critical Concepts of Political Science (London: Routledge, 2000). Schirch, L., The Little Book of Strategic Peacebuilding: A Vision and Framework for Peace with Justice (Pennsylvania, PA: Good Books, 2005). Scott, J. C., Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985). Stavrevska, E. B., ‘Ensuring political representation in a restructured Bosnia and Herzegovina’, CORE Policy Brief (2013), http://file.prio.no/Publications/ COREPolicyBrief-1–2013/#1

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Tagma, H., E. Kalaycioglu and E. Akcali, ‘“Taming” Arab social movements: Exporting neoliberal governmentality’, Security Dialogue, 44 (2013), 375–92. Thomas, R. G. C. (ed.), Perspectives on Kashmir: The Roots of Conflict in South Asia (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1992). Thomas R. G. C. (ed.), Perspectives on Kashmir: The Roots of Conflict in South Asia (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2005). ‘UN asks Occupy protesters to vacate Ledra Street site’, Cyprus Mail (14 January 2012). UNDP, Citizen Peacemaking in Cyprus (UNDP: Nicosia, 2013). Varshney, A., ‘Three compromised nationalisms: Why Kashmir has been a problem’, in R. G. C. Verghese BG, ‘Civil society in conflict situations: An overview’, in V. R. Raghavan (ed.), Civil Society in Conflict Situations (Chennai: Centre for Security Analysis, 2008). Vogel, B., ‘Caught in the third space?’, Ph.D. dissertation (University of Manchester, 2014). Vogel, B. and O. P. Richmond, ‘A viable peace process already exists’, in J. Ker-Lindsay (ed.), Resolving Cyprus: New Approaches to Conflict Resolution (London: I.B. Tauris, forthcoming). Wendt, A., ‘Constructing international politics’, International Security, 20:1 (1995), 71–81. White, G., ‘Civil society, democratisation and development: Clearing the analytical ground’, in P. Burnell and P. Calvert (eds), Civil Society in Democratization (London: Frank Cass, 2004). Wirsing, R., Kashmir in the Shadow of War: Regional Rivalries in a Nuclear Age. (Gurgaon: Spring Books, 2004).

5

Peace via social justice and/or security Roger Mac Ginty and Paula Banerjee

Introduction There are, of course, multiple approaches used by states, international organisations and others to achieve and maintain peace. Prominent among the approaches are those that prioritise security, and there are also approaches that see social justice and development as a driver of more pacific ways of dealing with human problems. While it is possible to conceive of these approaches stretched along a continuum, with pure security approaches at one end and pure social justice approaches at the other end, such a view is, of course, overly simplistic. Most cases of peace-support intervention involve a mix of the two, often sequenced and calibrated to suit a particular phase of a conflict, or to suit the domestic agenda of a government or its external sponsors. A hybrid political economy of security and welfare is in operation in most societies. This political economy is usually accompanied by competing discourses of justification and legitimacy. Often, one of these is concerned with the state and narratives of state protection and provision for citizens. Another significant narrative, however, and one that may be beneath the surface of society, is one of protest, dissent and alternatives.1 This chapter seeks to unpack the complex relationship between social justice, security and peace. It does so with reference to cases from the CORE project (India and Europe) but also deploys other examples in passing. It recognises that ‘India’ and ‘Europe’ constitute massive and diverse entities. Even with the statebuilding process in India, and the European project of standardisation, significant internal heterogeneity remains in each mega-entity. The chapter begins by looking at the relationships between social justice and peace, and security and justice, respectively. It then moves on to consider two key issues in relation to social justice and security: sequencing and prioritisation. In other words, when they are used in conjunction, which comes first: security or social

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justice? And, when choices are to be made between social justice and security, which one do governments tend to prioritise? Terms like social justice and security defy easy definition. They deserve a deep contextualisation that cautions against any universal claims made on their behalf. Thus security and social justice from one context could look vastly different if placed in a different context. What is interesting, however, are the relationships formed between the two terms and practices. It is, perhaps, best to think beyond linear ways of conceptualising social phenomena.2 Social justice and security do not operate along single tracks in a state. Instead, they operate simultaneously along many tracks. This may appear confused, messy and even contradictory, but this pattern is likely to be the experience of social justice or security in any particular context. In relation to welfare, for example, it was reported that Britons gave more generously to a donkey sanctuary than to leading domestic abuse and sexual violence charities.3 Yet at the National Health Service, a publicly funded free at the point of use medical system, is hugely popular. The key point is that public attitudes and state policies towards welfare are likely to be inconsistent. Confusion also abounds in the security sphere, with demonstrable threats (e.g., climate change) attracting much less attention, and political traction, than ‘terrorist’ incidents which, while shocking, often have low casualty rates. The chief point is that orthodox ways of thinking, and the orthodox ways in which many governments frame issues of security and social justice, do not reflect accurately the complexity and messiness of real-life situations. Social justice and peace The relationship between social justice and peace is complex. In headline terms it is possible to point to the link between satisfying people’s needs and their peaceful outlook and behaviour. We can point to the ‘Scandinavian model’ of welfare–capitalism and note how Scandinavian states, in the modern era, have had reasonable levels of social harmony, tolerance and good records as development actors. In the words of one commentator, the Nordic states are ‘nearly perfect’.4 Of course, we can scratch the surface of this narrative and see that Scandinavian states are not idylls. Each has experienced tensions, especially in accommodating minorities, and a number of them have been involved in international policing wars as members of NATO or allies of the United States.5 Numerous arguments link social justice to peace. Of course, both ‘social justice’ and ‘peace’ are open to interpretation and both have



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slipped in and out of fashion. This chapter does not afford an opportunity for lengthy expositions on the concepts, save to say that they are dynamic, contested and highly political. Both social justice and peace can be conceived of in maximalist and minimalist versions. Both concepts have been used by social and political entrepreneurs to mobilise communities and institutions. At least five sets of ideas have sought to link social justice with peace, either directly or obliquely. In many cases, these ideas actually link a lack of social justice with conflict, but it is reasonable to ‘retro-fit’ them and make the more positive connection (that is, between social justice and peace). The first set of ideas revolves around basic needs. Drawing on Maslow’s notion of basic needs, peace and conflict scholars in the late 1960s and early 1970s constructed the case that if people’s basic needs were addressed then they were likely to be cooperative with the each other and the polity.6 This conceptualisation of basic needs was influenced by behavioural and communicative theories and also included quite advanced needs linked to identity and recognition.7 The second, and related, set of ideas was linked with relative deprivation.8 This was especially relevant in deeply divided societies in which different identity groups would judge their status and treatment by the authorities in relation to other groups. Put simply, groups used ethnic, racial or identity lenses to assess their own position.9 Given that many societies were, and are, organised along apartheid lines, peoples did not need to look far for evidence of relative deprivation. Ruling elites stayed in power by favouring particular groups over others. Contemporary Bahrain, for example, provides a good example of how a state institutionalises division.10 Ideas of relative deprivation were reinforced by social psychological work on the importance of social categorisation and social identity to the running of societies.11 Theories of relative deprivation gained credence as a number of civil rights and antiauthoritarian movements seemed to be primarily motivated by the desire for equality or their ‘fair share’. The third set of ideas that underscored the importance of social justice explanations to peace and conflict derived from the ‘greed thesis’ of conflict causation.12 The link between the greed thesis and social justice is tangential rather than direct. But given the popularity of the greed thesis, and the extent to which it was adopted by influential elites in international organisations and leading states, it is worth flagging. The greed thesis identifies economic decline and economic predation as predictors of conflict. Using econometric data, it suggests that civil wars are often precipitated by a serious deterioration of a country’s economic position, and by calculations by armed groups that they can profit from

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violent conflict. Put simply, combatants engage in civil war because of the profit motive: they calculate that rents can be extracted, bribes gained and loot appropriated in times of war. In this view, peace is a threat to income generation. The greed thesis has been contested by many scholars who questioned the quality of data upon which it rests (often culled from war-affected societies that were poorly placed to gather economic data) and for its rejection of conflict explanations linked with identity.13 The academic consensus has tended towards greed and grievance, in combination, being the most convincing explanation of conflict onset.14 Nevertheless, the influential nature of the greed thesis focused attention on the economic dimensions of the outbreak of war. While the greed thesis did not go so far as to advocate advanced forms of social justice as a balm against war, it did underscore that economic decline can lead to discontent and thus the risk of instability and war. The fourth strain of thinking that has linked social justice with peace can be loosely grouped under the heading of liberalism. Clearly, there are many liberalisms,15 and the ideology has suffered more than most in terms of appropriation and reappropriation. At the heart of mainstream interpretations of liberalism though lie ideas of the emancipation of people by awarding them freedoms that they can then use – judiciously – in the running and organisation of society. The thinking goes along the following lines: if societies are organised in a transparent manner, with governance systems to ensure opportunities for advancement and access to public goods, then social harmony should reign. Advocates of liberalism also claim that it can have a positive impact beyond individual states. In the liberal world-view, individuals are rational and seek to maximise their own well-being. As a result, they will encourage their governments to act cautiously in relation to foreign policy, lest foreign entanglements lead to wars and related dislocations. Similarly, as noted by Kant, leaders can see the self-preservation benefits of offering a stable and moderately enriching environment for their inhabitants. The fifth strain of thinking is linked to religious or spiritual belief systems that emphasise care for others. Virtually all religions have such notions and they have been operationalised in many different ways, from the crassness of missionaries feeding famine-threatened ‘converts’ to more subtle acts of charity and selflessness. What is interesting from the point of view of this chapter is that religious narratives often involve peace through good deeds or submission to God. Many religiously motivated actors take a holistic approach that combines their religious beliefs and practice with this world-view.



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Collectively, the five sets of ideas mentioned above have reinforced the notion that taking social justice seriously offers a way of preserving social harmony, reducing tensions and staving off war, particularly civil war. Clearly notions of social harmony and its relationship with peacefulness fall into the sociological paradigm of explanations of war.16 They have little traction with realist and neo-realist accounts of war that concentrate on interstate relations and geopolitics. These latter interpretations emphasise the role of states, statesmen (and it usually is men), territory, institutions, militaries and strategic resources. They tend to have little space for sub-state actors, other than as mobilised masses in the service of state-led or nationalist projects. Case study work has been particularly useful in showing the links between a lack of social justice and unrest. Most prominently in recent years, many of the ‘Arab uprisings’ have showed a profound disconnection between the needs and aspirations of people and the willingness of governments to address these.17 Many of the protests did not seem to be primarily caused by authoritarianism and the unwillingness of leaders to consider democratic transitions.18 Instead, the issues raised by protesters tended to be dissatisfaction with corruption, under-employment, inflation and a perceived lack of social mobility. These are classic social justice issues. It would be incorrect to say that these issues are nonpolitical: all issues connected with how states and societies distribute resources are political. However, the issues connected with the Arab uprisings were not necessarily connected with overtly political issues such as nationalism, identity or sect. A similar critique can be made about many of the Occupy protests that arose from the near collapse of global capitalism after 2008 (and indeed the anti-globalisation movement before that).19 Many of these movements had no leaders, and were wary of mainstream institutions and political parties. In a sense, they were ‘announcement’ groups, saying ‘we are here’ and that issues of inequality and the rapacious nature of capitalism need attention, but without putting together a conventional political programme. Although there is strong evidence for the idea that social justice enhances the prospects for peace and social harmony, the actual enactment of many peace-support interventions have not emphasised social justice. While peace processes and peace accords have tended to include more social and identity-related issues, data from the Peace Accords Matrix (PAM 2014) project makes clear that the emphasis in many peace accords remains on the security and constitutional aspects of the dispute.20 Issues of social inclusion are often seen as marginal, and implementation levels of security provisions in peace accords is often higher than for welfare issues. In other words, there is demonstrable

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support – from multiple cases – that a security peace rather than a welfare peace exists in many cases of societies emerging from conflict. This has profound consequences for the nature of peace. To some extent, the lack of emphasis on social justice issues reflects the agendas of international peace-support agents. Leading states in the global north and international financial institutions have played a significant role in shaping the nature of peace accords and post-accord political and economic entities in many societies coming out of civil war. This peace-support, in the post-Cold War era, has often emphasised statebuilding and the construction of compliant, economically open states that do not threaten the international order.21 The World Bank and International Monetary Fund have been directly involved in peace negotiations in a number of contexts, and have wielded significant influence in the governance and institutional arrangements of states emerging from conflict. Together with leading states (particularly the United States), these international financial institutions have often pushed neoliberal agendas that emphasise the priority of markets and underplay the social aspects of the state. Peacebuilding, stabilisation and reconstruction have, in many instances, revolved around securing the state and paring down the state’s role in economics. The principal role of the state, in this ‘liberal peace’, is to ensure order – both order between competing groups, between neighbouring states, and in markets. This neo-liberal and securitised peace does not encourage an extensive welfare role for the state. While welfare might help secure social justice and therefore social harmony and peace, it clashes with laissez-faire mores of neo-liberalism that see welfare spending by the state as a threat to low inflation and honouring international economic strictures. So while there is strong theoretical and empirical connections between social justice and peace, in reality it has not been mainstreamed in contemporary internationally supported peace interventions. There has been much variance between cases, of course, with some peace processes more attentive to citizen basic needs, and better funded, than others. In general, however, welfare issues have found themselves sidelined.22 This is not to say that large sums have not been expended in the name of peace, security and development. Many such interventions are Keynesian in the extreme and involve large transfers of funds from governments in the global north to states coming out of civil war. These funds, however, rarely go to social welfare and instead are often directed towards national elites, state security apparatus, debt repayment and overseas consultants. Indeed, by tracking the financial flows from national development aid organisations we can argue that they do engage in welfare, but the



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welfare is directed back to the home country.23 This is a subversion of the notion of aid as an altruistic activity based on ideas of empathy and generosity to others. Instead, governments in the global north make a virtue of noting how much aid revenue comes back to taxpayers in terms of goods and services bought by the war-affected country.24 Security and peace One end of the continuum mentioned at the beginning of this chapter is security. Depending on one’s orientation, peace and security can make for very odd or very compatible bedfellows. There are plenty of examples of the peace of Carthage whereby the city had to be destroyed in order to make it safe. In the post-Cold War era, Aleppo, Grozny, Gaza and Fallujah have all experienced destruction to cleanse them from ‘terrorists’ or others who threaten the ‘peace’.25 Away from these extreme examples there are many other cases of security-led interventions that give way to ‘softer’ security measures and perhaps are leavened with social provision. Indeed, counter-insurgency strategies have long realised the need to calibrate security responses with welfare provision.26 This calibration has met with varying degrees of success, and at times over-zealous security responses have been counterproductive in mobilising populations against authoritarian governments. The twentieth century, and the early part of the twenty-first, did not witness any consistent pattern in the relationship between security and peace. On the one hand there were advances in human rights law, the effective mobilisation of anti-authoritarian social movements (for example against apartheid in South Africa), and a range of anti-colonial and anti-authoritarian campaigns that achieved some measure of emancipation with limited bloodshed. But, on the other hand, there was no shortage of security-led responses, the invention of new techniques to strip liberty from peoples, and geo-strategic conditions that often prevailed in favour of security-led responses. The War on Terror is merely the latest iteration of a narrative that justifies power-holders in maintaining their own hegemony and in using security measures to do so. The securitisation of development and humanitarianism is not particularly new, but it has been intensified after 9/11.27 The key issue with the linkage of peace and security is where the balance lies. This connects with the age-old set of dilemmas faced by order and liberty; a set of dilemmas that still tax most societies. There are few clear-cut patterns with regard to the peace and security relationship. Much depends on how security is defined and what the principal object of the security is: the state, the regime, the leader of the regime,

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the territory, an idea, or even people? States that have a reasonable record in term of human rights at home may have a poor one abroad. The United Kingdom, for example, is a (reluctant) signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights and its citizens have a number of safeguards against arbitrary excesses by the authorities. On the other hand, the United Kingdom has been involved in the interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq: adventures that included egregious human rights abuses.28 The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have also seen the development of national security states, especially in the case of the United States but emulated by a number of others.29 This has been facilitated by the Cold War, the War on Terror or specific existential narratives (e.g., Israel’s mobilisation of its citizens and allies) that justify the rallying of people and resources under the mantle of security. The principal cases in this chapter, India and Georgia, have not been immune from elite attempts to elevate the importance of security issues (both internal and external) and, as a consequence, overlook issues of citizen welfare. In India, the issues of unresolved tensions with Pakistan and ‘terrorism’ have regularly been invoked by politicians as existential. Branding political opponents as ‘agents of Pakistan and enemies of India’ is not unheard of in Indian domestic elections.30 When in office, Georgian President Saakashvili accused his electoral opponent (and successor) Ivanasvili of being controlled by Moscow.31 We have also seen the securitisation of development-related disputes with the state anxious to discourage dissent lest it escalate and prompt revolutionary or secessionist moves. In Georgia, and with historical justification, elites point to the role of a hungry Russian bear on the borders. The chief point is that states frequently instrumentalise security issues as a means to mobilise their populations, and justify particular courses of action and spending decisions. Security issues are particularly malleable as they often rely on incomplete information, can tap into nationalism and chauvinistic narratives and can satisfy important stakeholders such as the state security establishment. Somewhat contradictorily, a government emphasis on security issues (at the expense of social justice or other more positive public policy issues) can lead to situations of ‘security welfare’ whereby state security forces become a specialised welfare agent. The police, military or paramilitaries become a source of state largess through employment, status and other benefits such as housing or the ability to collect bribes. In many societies undergoing transition, the security sector can be a large employer and serve as a means to transfer state and international funds



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to (it is hoped) loyal citizens. Afghanistan provides a case in point. In late 2013 the Afghan National Security Force (comprising the Army, police force, Air Force) had a total complement of 344,500. In addition to this, the Afghan Local Police (a village militia) had 24,000 members and the Afghan Public Protection Force over 16,000.32 Taken together the security establishment constitutes a vast employment system designed to encourage loyalty to the NATO-backed regime. In a sense, it is a form of ‘welfare’. It may not conform to transparent or equitable standards of social justice, but it is a means of incentivising loyalty. Put simply: it feeds and clothes many families. Certainly this pattern has been witnessed in India with the creation of a very elaborate security apparatus (multiple forms of police forces and militias) that augment the regular army and police. A total of twelve paramilitary forces (or localised state-sponsored militias) have been established, with a total complement of approximately 1.5 million personnel.33 These include the Central Reserve Police Force, Border Security Force, Central Industrial Security Force, Indo-Tibetan Border Police, National Security Guard and the National Railway Protection Force.34 In part this proliferation of security forces reflects the federal framework and overlapping jurisdictions. But these schemes also create incentive structures that give the state meaning in people’s lives. Through the vast employment schemes, the state becomes a combined paymaster and security agent. This can only happen if a number of enabling factors are already in place: a reasonably efficient state that has the capacity to make payments, and a state (and to a certain extent population) that is willing to tolerate an enhanced, and often unchecked, role for the security forces and associated controls on the citizenry. Georgia has taken a different route. As explained in more detail below, it has adopted a neo-liberal stripped-down version of the state and does not regard Keynesian employment schemes as a model it would like to pursue.35 There is a rationality here. In the first place, maintaining a large military apparatus would be pointless given the sheer scale of Russian forces nearby. Second, there is no need to keep citizens on board by employing them through the military or police. The state narrative – a fledging state attempting to survive under the Russian shadow – is a formidable mobilising tool that does not need the incentive of army jobs. Indeed, as evidence of the neo-liberal credentials of the Saakashvili government, thousands of policemen were sacked overnight in a major anti-petty corruption drive. Moreover, the narrative of an insoluble Georgian state, in the face of separatism, meant that the state did not pander to minorities. It recognised that

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their principal loyalties probably lay elsewhere and that social inclusion ‘inducements’ would probably be wasted. Sequencing Which comes first: social justice or security? As already established, governments and their external backers in many states affected by conflict have sought to develop a calibrated mix of social justice and security interventions. This leads to the question of sequencing. The sequencing can send out an important message on state priorities, and its attitudes to human rights and minorities. In a number of prominent examples, states have tended to concentrate on security issues first and then address social justice, or development issues afterwards. In the post-Cold War era this has been most prominently captured by the ‘institutionalisation before liberalisation’ formulation.36 This idea and policy practice, most closely associated with international peace-support interventions in the mid 1990s to early 2000s, rationalised that the state must be secured before the other needs of citizens can be attended to. Thus statebuilding and the securing and building of institutions (often security institutions) was deemed a more urgent priority than the democratic or social justice requirements of inhabitants. The logic in this regard was that without secure institutions, the state would be unable to make social provisions for its citizens. The drawback of such an approach, of course, was that it raised questions of where power lay: with the international and national elites who had an interest in strong institutions, or with citizens and inhabitants who may be more interested in basic needs and the extension of individual rights? Moreover, who would make the choice to switch from an emphasis on institutionalisation towards an emphasis on liberalisation and when? The danger was that once entrenched, elites would be loath to relax their hold on power in a meaningful way. In cases where sequencing is visible, it would seem that priority has been given to security over social justice. Britain’s history of twentiethcentury decolonisation, for example, involved a wide range of hard security measures, sometimes leavened with development and ‘hearts and minds’ activity. Targeted assassinations, extreme human rights abuses, and forcible population clearances were all part of the British counter-insurgency repertoire in Kenya, Malaya, Aden and elsewhere.37 Even when the strategic decision for withdrawal had been made, British policy was to maintain hard security measures so that the ‘independent’ regime would be largely sympathetic to the United Kingdom, and certainly not part of the Soviet ambit. This ‘security first’ emphasis should



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not be entirely surprising. Britain was a colonial power after all. The raison d’être of gaining and maintaining colonies was one of exploitation in favour of the imperial centre. In the decades of imperial rollback (the late 1940s to 1960s) sophisticated ideas of citizen welfare were only just being introduced in the United Kingdom in the form of the National Health Service and the welfare state.38 Making the same provision for ‘subjects’ in the far-flung parts of the Empire was simply not on the agenda. The welfare state was based on a notion of a social contract between citizens and the state. The notion of Empire, on the other hand, was based on a much less emancipated relationship. India’s post-independence story has been a long exercise in contested statebuilding.39 This statebuilding process has sought to guard the state’s territorial integrity above all else. The satisfaction of the populace within the territory has largely been relegated to a secondary position. As a result, the predominant sequence has seen security measures introduced first, and then, once an area has been ‘pacified’, a greater emphasis on development and addressing social inclusion. As Amin and Prakash note with reference to Naxalite disputes in the north-east of the country, law and order responses were usually given a priority. When development programming was introduced to supplement this, it was often done in a piecemeal manner that was not precisely calibrated with the security measures.40 The government of India primarily saw unrest in Kashmir in the 1990s as a security issue, and one that had been stirred up by Pakistan. It was only after pacification had been secured that the Indian government engaged in job creation schemes.41 Successive Indian governments have devoted attention to issues of development and inclusion, with some policies being significant and welfarist. Given that India has had a series of national development plans, it is possible to trace the evolution of these and the varying emphasis they place on social inclusion versus security.42 What becomes clear is that there has been an increasing sophistication in understandings of the links between underdevelopment, de-development and poorly shared development on the one hand, and conflict on the other. But a security rationale still trumps these ever more sophisticated understandings of conflict. The elite political and policy narrative, at least, is one of social inclusion plus security rather than security alone. The establishment of Panchayati Raj Institutions (PRIs) denoted a significant devolution of power to the local level, and further evidence of elite understandings that development held a key to pacification. One-third of all PRI seats are reserved for women, illustrating a recognition of the gendered nature of exclusion.

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Which is deemed more important by power-holders: social justice or security? In part, this question has already been answered in the section above that looked at the sequencing between the two elements. This section looks at the emphasis on each in states affected by conflict and violence. Post-revolution Georgia provides an interesting example in terms of the emphasis placed on social justice versus security.43 The state is something of an outlier in that it prioritised neither. The ‘facts on the ground’ meant that the state had relatively little autonomy in relation to its security. As a small state on Russia’s frontier, there was a limit to Georgia’s foreign policy freedom of action. Moreover, the state’s legitimacy was contested by minorities that sought to break away to form a closer relationship with Russia. After the disastrous 2008 Russian–Georgian War, Georgia’s foreign policy and security freedom of movement was even more restricted. The terms of the European Union Monitoring Mission meant that there were strict controls on police and military movements. There was no doubting the wish of the Saakashvili government to orient itself towards the west; the main route from Tbilisi city centre to the airport was renamed in 2005 to George W. Bush Avenue. But there was a limit to the extent to which western states wanted Georgia in the fold. As the civil war in Ukraine has revealed, western states want to avoid military confrontation with Russia. So, Georgia’s security stance is caught up in a much wider context of geopolitics over which it had limited control. In a sense, the restrictions on the ability of the state to be activist on the security front gave it room to pursue a social justice route as a way to promote the inclusion of minorities. The opportunity was there to ‘kill minorities with kindness’ through welfare provisions and development projects aimed at assuring them that they had a future in the Georgian state. This route was not taken. Instead, the state under President Saskashvili was an extreme example of post-shock doctrine neoliberalism.44 A US-educated and business-oriented elite around the president set about recalibrating the state so that it made little social provision and instead prioritised the cutting away of ‘red tape’ to create a business-friendly environment. To illustrate the extent to which ‘red tape’ was cut, it is worth noting that Georgia has no food safety regulations whatsoever. It has some of the freest employment laws in the world, and rapidly ascended the World Bank’s ease-of-doing-business league table.



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In some respects, everyday life for citizens did get better under the Saaskashvili government. The government cracked down on petty corruption,45 and addressed popular bugbears like frequent power cuts. But perhaps the most significant change was in modifying public expectations of what the government could and should do. The state withdrew from many aspects of life, especially in connection with social provision. This amounted to a significant cultural change given Georgia’s past as part of a communist regime. In part, international organisations and INGOs provided some social provision in the aftermath of the war, and to minorities on Georgia’s fringes. Much government energy was invested in ‘optics’ and ‘acoustics’ in the sense that the government used nationalist and reformist language to give the impression of dynamism. But the direction of travel was clear: the government was moving from being a provider to an enabler and facilitator. Concluding discussion This chapter ends with four points. First, no state faces a simple trade-off between social justice and security. The picture tends to be much more complex with competing demands from different sectors of society, and demands also varying at different phases of the statebuilding process. Moreover, the notion of a ‘balance’ between liberty and order, or peace and security, has been described as a ‘liberal myth’ that hides the structural advantages that security (anti-liberty) narratives have.46 Adding to the complication in the case of India is the caste system. It is not a case of citizens claiming rights on a universal basis. Regardless of what the Constitution says, the caste system (and tribal allegiances in some areas) means that not all citizens are equal. This does not mean that par­ ticular castes are without power and agency, merely that a power analysis is important in order to recognise the contexts in which groups operate. Although there is no simple trade-off between social justice (and justice more broadly) and security, it is worth mentioning that there is a definite link between the two factors. On reviewing contemporary conflicts in India (Kashmir, North-East India and the Maoist–Naxal civil war), those associated with the Arab ‘uprising’, and others on Europe’s borderlands it is clear that justice, and perceptions of justice, lie at the heart of these conflicts. Without addressing issues of justice then pacification strategies can only do just that: pacify. That virtually condemns many communities to conflict recidivism.

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Second, legislating for social justice is not the same as instituting social justice. India, for example, has seen immense legislative activism in the field of social justice and inclusion. This has not always led to similar implementation activism. Moreover, legislative activism on social justice is not the same as inculcating a widely held socio-political culture that supports organised forms of social justice. Post-independence India has a long history of initiatives to deal with the hugely sensitive and complex caste system, and the systematic marginalisation of millions of people but the issue has often been cynically exploited by political leaders at election time.47 Some states, notably Kerala, have a solid record of implementing emancipatory legislation while others do not. Third, although social justice and security tend to be activities that are top-down and state-directed (in the sense that they are discussed and legislated for by policymakers), we should not overlook the capacity of individuals and groups of citizens to provide these two commodities. States do jealously guard their hold over the monopoly of violence and therefore see themselves as the primary (and only) provider of security. Germane to this chapter are the expectations that states create about the level of social provision. Contemporary Georgia, as a beacon of neo-liberalism, has sent out the message that citizens should expect very little by way of state assistance. India, on the other hand, has sent out mixed messages at both the national and federal levels. But often, and especially during election campaigns, messages are sent out that the state will provide. The often repeated failure to fulfil these promises may encourage citizens to either look elsewhere for provision (e.g., towards rebel groups) or to lower their expectations of the state as a provider. Moreover, often it is communities, whether kinship networks or intra-ethnic groups NGOs, that are the primary welfare providers for communities. The state might be largely absent from peoples’ lives.48 It might be a remote actor with very limited capabilities and/or little interest in social provision. In such circumstances, citizens rely on effective actors that might have a local presence: INGOs, NGOs or faithbased charities. The fourth and final point is that there are few international incentives to deal with domestic issues of social inclusion and social justice, while there are considerable incentives to address security issues. This relates to the international structures that underpin how ‘peace’ is made and secured. Clearly states and international bodies do not want to see humanitarian emergencies in other states, and commitments to Responsibility to Protect have shown some evidence of taking root (albeit selectively). Yet there are few incentives for international activism by states to attend to the conditions within other states. Greater incentives



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exist to underpin respect for state sovereignty and the maintenance of international order. The principle is well illustrated by Bahrain. On any indicator it is an apartheid state guilty of sustained human rights abuses. Yet, it is also the home to the US fifth fleet and the US has shown itself determined to protect that strategic asset ahead of tackling repression.49 So, if order comes before welfare on many international agendas, we cannot be surprised if national agendas often follow suit. This applies to both Georgia and India. In Georgia, a consciously neo-liberal economic orientation signalled that citizen welfare was not high on the government agenda. Pressing security issues, often framed as existential threats, further reinforced the sense of welfare as a secondorder priority, while helping the state orient with international goals of maintaining regional order. In India, the state has been extremely successful in delimiting overseas interest in ‘internal affairs’. This jealous protection of sovereignty has extended to the refusal of aid after sudden onset disasters.50 India is a signatory to an impressive array of international legislation on human rights, yet it does not welcome international scrutiny on the issue. This chapter has shown the complex and non-linear relationships between justice and security. It has taken two somewhat unusual, and rarely compared, examples to illustrate that both issues require deep contextualisation. They operate at all levels of human organisation: from the family to the geopolitical. The links between the two concepts and practices are highly contingent, for example varying between regions in India. The links between justice and security or peace are broadly understood: an unaddressed perception of injustice is likely to lead to citizen discontent which can result in conflict. Yet it is not clear that states translate this understanding into policy. In many cases there are pressing reasons why they do not, linked with strategic imperatives, a global financial system that encourages small government, and vested interests of the security apparatus in many states. Notes   1  Mac Ginty, ‘Transcripts of peace.’   2  Chandler, ‘Democracy Unbound?’; Sandole, Capturing the Complexity of Conflict.   3  Booth, ‘Britons give more to donkey sanctuary than abuse charities’.   4  Booth, Almost Nearly Perfect People.   5  Booth, ‘Dark lands’.   6  Avruch and Mitchell, Conflict Resolution and Human Needs; Jacoby, Understanding Conflict and Violence, 21–8.

128   7    8    9  10  11  12  13  14  15  16  17  18  19  20  21  22  23  24  25  26  27  28  29  30  31  32  33  34  35  36  37  38  39  40  41  42  43  44  45  46  47  48 

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Burton, ‘Conflict resolution as a political philosophy’. Korpi, ‘Conflict, power and relative deprivation’. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict. Louer, ‘Sectarianism and coup-proofing strategies in Bahrain’. Tajfel and Henri, Social Identity Theory and Intergroup Relations. Collier and Hoeffler, ‘Greed and grievance in Civil War’. Cramer, ‘Homo economicus goes to war’; Bensted, ‘Critique of Paul Collier’s “greed and grievance” thesis of civil war’. Berdal, ‘Beyond greed and grievance’. Gray, Two Faces of Liberalism. Brewer, Peace Processes. Brooks, ‘Abandoned at the palace’. Joffe, ‘Arab Spring in North Africa’. Venter and Swart, ‘Anti-globalisation organisation as a fourth generation people’s movement’. Joshi et al., ‘Just how liberal is the liberal peace?’. Richmond and Franks, Liberal Peace Transitions. Pugh, ‘The political economy of peacebuilding’. Develtere and De Bruyn, ‘The emergence of a fourth pillar of development aid’. Hill, ‘Project based foreign aid is a must for national profit’. Agnew, ‘Killing for a cause?’. Grob-Fitzgibbon, Imperial Endgame. Tschirgi, ‘Securitization’. Cobain, ‘UK needs prompt action on human rights, UN panel warns’. Homolar, ‘Political economy of national security’. Press Trust of India, ‘AK Anthony not a Pak Agent’. Bedwell, ‘Putin wants me dead or caged’. NATO, ‘Afghan National Security Forces’, 1–2. Sharma, Paramilitary Forces in India. Fair, ‘Prospects for effective internal security reforms in India’. Mac Ginty, ‘Hybrid governance’. Paris, At War’s End. Grob-Fitzgibbon, Imperial Endgame. Ibid. Pogodda et al., ‘Intimate yet dysfunctional?’. Amin and Prakash, ‘Conflict, governance and development’. DasGupta, ‘Pacification is not peacebuilding’, 19–21. Pogodda et al., ‘Intimate yet dysfunctional?’. Mac Ginty, ‘Transcripts of peace’. Lazarus, ‘Democracy of good governance’. Di Puppo, ‘Anti-corruption interventions in Georgia’. Neocleous, ‘Security, liberty, and the myth of balance’. Jha and Pushpendra, ‘Governing caste and managing conflict’. Kabamba, ‘Heart of darkness’.



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49  Simoes, ‘Bridge installed to give navy base in Bahrain easy access to waterfront’. 50  Sengupta, ‘Pride and politics’.

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DasGupta, S., ‘Pacification is not peacebuilding: Why special economic packages and special legislations do not work’, in J. B. Galvanek, H. J. Giessmann and M. Mubashir (eds), Norms and Premises of Peace Governance, Berghof Occasional Paper 32 (2012), 18–24, www.berghof-conflictresearch.org/ documents/ publications/boc32e.pdf; accessed 2 April 2014. Develtere P. and D. De Bruyn, ‘The emergence of a fourth pillar of development aid’ Development in Practice, 19:7 (2009), 912–22. Di Puppo, L., ‘Anti-corruption interventions in Georgia’, Global Crime, 11:2 (2010), 220–36. Fair, C. C., ‘Prospects for effective internal security reforms in India’. Paper presented to International Studies Association Annual Convention, New Orleans (February 2010). Gray, J., The Two Faces of Liberalism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000). Grob-Fitzgibbon, B., Imperial Endgame: Britain’s Dirty Wars and the End of Empire (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011). Gurr, T., Why Men Rebel (New York: Paradigm, 2011) Hill P., ‘Project based foreign aid is a must for national profit’, Daily Express (12 March 2013), www.express.co.uk/comment/columnists/peter-hill/ 383490/Project-based-foreign-aid-is-a-must-for-national-profit; accessed 31 March 2014. Homolar, A., ‘The political economy of national security’, Review of International Political Economy, 17:2 (2010), 410–23. Horowitz, D. L., Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985). Imran, A. and A. Prakash, ‘Conflict, governance and development: Issues of social justice and participation in Jharkhand and Bihar, India’, CORE Policy Brief 7, Oslo: PRIO (2013). Jacoby, T., Understanding conflict and Violence (London: Routledge, 2007) Jha, M. K. and Pushpendra, ‘Governing caste and managing conflict – Bihar 1990–2011’, Policies and Practices, 48 (Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group: Kolkata, March 2012). Joffe, G., ‘The Arab Spring in North Africa: Origins and prospects’ North African Studies 16:4 (2011), 507–32. Joshi, M., S. Y. Lee and R. Mac Ginty, ‘Just how liberal is the liberal peace?’, International Peacekeeping, 21:3 (2014), 364–89. Kabamba, P., ‘Heart of darkness: Current images of the DRC and their theoretical underpinnings’, Anthropological Theory, 10:3 (2010), 256–301. Korpi, W., ‘Conflict, power and relative deprivation’, American Political Science Review, 68:4 (1974), 1559–68. Lazarus, J., ‘Democracy of good governance: Globalization, trans-national capital and Georgia’s neo-liberal revolution’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 7:3 (2013), 259–86. Louer, L., ‘Sectarianism and coup-proofing strategies in Bahrain’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 36:2 (2013), 245–60. Mac Ginty, R., ‘Hybrid governance: The case of Georgia’, Global Governance, 19 (2013) 443–61.



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Mac Ginty, R., ‘The transcripts of peace: Public, hidden or non-obvious?’ Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, first view, online, 9 pages (2013). NATO, Afghan National Security Forces: Media Backgrounder (October 2013), www.nato.int/nato_static/assets/pdf/pdf_2013_10/20131018_131022 –MediaBackgrounder_ANSF_en.pdf; accessed 4 April 2013. Neocleous, M., ‘Security, liberty, and the myth of balance: Towards a critique of security politics’, Contemporary Political Theory, 6 (2007), 131–49. Paris, R., At War’s End: Building Peace after Civil Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Peace Accords Matrix (PAM), http://kroc.nd.edu/research/peace-processes -accords Pogodda, S., R. Mac Ginty and O. P. Richmond, ‘Intimate yet dysfunctional? The relationship between governance and conflict resolution in India and the EU’, Conflict, Security and Development, online first (2013). Press Trust of India, ‘AK Anthony not a Pak Agent’, Indian Express (29 March 2014), http://indianexpress.com/article/india/politics/a-k-antony-not-a-pakagent-arvind-kejriwal-lacks-credibility-venkaiah-naidu; accessed 30 March 2014. Pugh, M., ‘The political economy of peacebuilding: A critical theory perspective’, International Journal of Peace Studies, 10:2 (2005), 23–42. Richmond, O. and J. Franks, Liberal Peace Transitions: Between statebuilding and peacebuilding (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009) Sandole, D. J., Capturing the Complexity of Conflict (London: Routledge, 1999). Sengupta, S., ‘Pride and politics: India rejects quake aid’, New York Times (19 October 2005), www.nytimes.com/2005/10/19/international/asia/ 19quake.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0; accessed 8 April 2014. Sharma, M. C., Paramilitary Forces in India (New Delhi: Gyan Publishing House, 2008). Simoes, H., ‘Bridge installed to give navy base in Bahrain easy access to waterfront’, Stars and Stripes (31 January, 2014), www.stripes.com/news/bridgeinstalled-to-give-navy-base-in-bahrain-easy-access-to-waterfront-1.264882# .UzwPOTm0Ldk; accessed 2 April 2014. Tajfel, H. (ed.), Social Identity Theory and Intergroup Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982) Tschirgi, N., ‘Securitization’, in R. Mac Ginty (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Peacebuilding (London: Routledge, 2013), 197–210. Venter D. and I. Swart, ‘Anti-globalisation organisation as a fourth generation people’s movement’, Society in Transition, 33:1 (2002), 50–71.

6

The local is everywhere: a post-colonial reassessment of cultural sensitivity in conflict governance Kristoffer Lidén and Elida K. U. Jacobsen

Introduction The problem of sensitivity to ‘the local context’ is a recurrent theme in scholarly and political debate on global governance, including international development aid, humanitarian assistance and, more recently, international peace operations associated with ‘liberal peacebuilding’.1 Global, or ‘transnational’, peacebuilding governance is repeatedly seen as having inadequate concern for social and cultural differences, entailing shortcomings of ‘local ownership and participation’.2 In some of the literature, this concern has entailed an uncritical call for ‘going local’, a demand that relies on a naively romantic and simplistic notion of local actors and structures, cultures and traditions as inherent sources of peace.3 This understanding, however, undermines the insights of the criticism of liberal peacebuilding by reducing it to an orientalist caricature – a ‘negative’ of the occidentalism of the liberal peace that is criticised.4 Because the liberal peacebuilding critique is associated with such a romanticisation of the local, it has engendered a sobering ‘critique of the critique’ that questions the distinction between the ‘liberal’ international actors and the ‘non-liberal’ locals. While rightly contending that the homogeneous, self-contained and inherently peaceful and nonliberal ‘local’ is nowhere, this critique also opens for a perversion: a failure to recognise that a heterogeneous, interdependent and conflicted ‘local’ nonetheless is everywhere, including in the premises of international engagement.5 This misinterpretation would allow considerations on liberal governance to revert to Western centric debates on peace and development, instead of challenging the very theoretical premises of these debates and their political implications in non-Western contexts.



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In this chapter we address this problem by investigating how the notion of sensitivity to ‘the local’ has been addressed in theories of liberal governance. While departing from debate on liberal peacebuilding, particularly the contributions of Oliver Richmond and Roger Mac Ginty, we eventually turn to the history of liberal governance in colonial and ex-colonial India as a source of insight on the problem of adapting to local culture (see also Chapter 1 in this volume). Then, in an attempt at drawing implications for peacebuilding, Ilan Kapoor’s pragmatic application of a post-colonial perspective on the liberal politics of development is invoked. Finally, his response to the problem of political representation of marginalised (‘subaltern’) groups through development assistance is related to recent literature on what it would take for liberal peacebuilding governance to be more representative. The problem of sensitivity to ‘the local context’ in peacebuilding In the first generation of liberal peacebuilding assessments, liberal peacebuilding was criticised for being biased by reinforcing a Western political hegemony, and in particular for failing to adapt to the local conditions of its implementation. Both the peace that was sought, and the means to achieve it, were seen as presupposing that ‘one peace fits all’. While presented as politically neutral and ethically altruistic in UN policies, liberal peacebuilding was therefore criticised for failing to build peace, or for introducing a foreign peace dependent on continuous international presence and support.6 While some observers took this as evidence of the inherent imperialism of the venture, leaving no room for improvement, ‘revisionist’ critics committed to the ideal of peacebuilding prescribed ways in which operations could become more sensitive to the social and cultural conditions ‘on the ground’ within the political parameters of current policies.7 For instance, Mac Ginty investigated the potential of indigenous forms of peacemaking and everyday capacities for conflict resolution as alternatives to the liberal peace.8 Similarly, Richmond emphasised the everyday conceptions of peace among groups that do not neatly fit a modern liberal outlook, as well as the peace potential of social movements.9 As we will return to in the final section, these analyses highlighted the role of local agency, resistance and manipulation in peacebuilding processes and how it may result in a peace that is better rooted in local culture. Elements of this theoretical outlook are found in several of the contributions to this volume. Robert A. Rubinstein calls attention to two aspects of the notion of culture that are at stake in this context: culture as learned systems of

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meaning that create particular senses of reality, and culture as meaningful, patterned activities – cultural practices.10 The former aspects relate to our horizon of understanding, the latter to custom. In order to have their intended effects, peacebuilding strategies must take into consideration what their practices mean in the symbolic systems of the host society, as well as how they interact with local cultural practices.11 The criticism of liberal peacebuilding implied that it failed on both of these accounts because ‘the liberal glasses’ of the proponents of peacebuilding were coloured by Western culture.12 Apparently, the ‘local turn’ that was initiated by this criticism presupposes that it would be possible to rather see ‘the locals’ on their own terms by revealing and removing the cultural glasses of the peacebuilders. This agenda of representing societies on their own premises defines the very discipline of social and cultural anthropology. Hence, we might look to this discipline for insights on the potential and limits of such representation. Anthropology combines ethnography, the collection of ‘cultural data’, with theoretical analysis.13 The former aspect involves an internal (‘emic’) perspective of the societies that are studied, as reflected in what their members say, think and do. The latter, external (‘etic’) perspective is what the observer makes of these ideas and practices, interpreting them through general theoretical perspectives, for instance on the nature of evolution, language or trade.14 Any attempt at making sense of ethnographic data involves an element of such interpretation. The ideal of fully evading the cultural baggage of the observer has proven unrealistic even when anthropologists learn the local language and spend years together with their informants. The role of the anthropologist is therefore rather understood as a form of translation (not only in a literal sense), based on theoretical presuppositions that are not objective, but explicit and subjected to scholarly scrutiny. With the simple analogy of glasses, this involves an ideal of clearing and polishing the glasses of the observer, compensating for the bias of a non-theoretical outlook. In a sense, the history of anthropology is a history of disclosing, testing and challenging the theoretical perspectives of previous studies by applying them to new contexts or by questioning them on more philosophical grounds and testing out alternative frameworks of understanding. On this basis, it is evident that no conception of peacebuilding can be derived directly from the observation of ‘the local’. Of course, if a certain group or person is supported on their own terms, one might say that the peacebuilder does not rely on any theoretical or cultural ‘glasses’. Yet, the strategy of supporting that particular group instead of others – there will always be a plurality of partly conflicting conceptions of peace – would still rely on an interpretation of the situation.



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Hence, the call for ‘going local’ by seeing the assisted societies on their own terms needs to be combined with conscious theoretical frameworks of interpretation. Does this mean that the criticism of liberal peacebuilding for being biased is based on flawed premises? Or, does it imply that any peacebuilding interference would rely on a theoretical bias, and that a more representative form of peacebuilding therefore is impossible? Clearly not. It rather implies a need for better theories of peacebuilding – of its nature, implications, possibilities and limitations. In order to lead to prescription, this would encompass a political theory of representative governance in situations where such representation is not guaranteed by democratic political institutions. What would it mean to understand the local conditions of governance in a way that can generate political outcomes that represent the norms and interests of the governed on their own premises? In the following sections, two responses to this question are considered against the background of past and present attempts at understanding and representing societies through colonial and ex-colonial governance in India. The first is to rely on technocratic solutions such as statistics and surveillance in order to better manage the population in accordance with its actual attributes rather than generalised accounts of the local culture. In the second, we review the ‘postcolonial politics of development’ of Ilan Kapoor,15 and his response to problems of subaltern representation. It is demonstrated how the agenda of representing the local can be counterproductive: that it can serve to effectively conceal and promote the power and knowledge of the governors. Troubles with representing ‘the local’ The lacking ability of Western ‘liberal’ governance to represent ‘the local’ is a classic theme in post-colonial theory and subaltern studies. One of the main occurring themes in the literature has been the various ways in which the ‘local’ has been represented as the Other, the figure which both allows for practices of domination, and of (missionary) care. Colonialism relied on a homogenising narrative of the ‘local-as-other’. Locality can thereby be seen as a historical product,16 and the view of a homogenised ‘local’ a result of a historical process whereby the ‘indigenous other’ was made knowable. India is a case in point.17 An analysis of the impact of colonial rule on Indian lives and subjectivities is thus important for understanding the changes that have been brought about by ‘disciplining’ subjects and homogenising the so-called local, not only in Europe, but also outside the boundaries of the traditional ‘history of

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politics’. Colonialism in India not only introduced new forms of knowing reality – through scientific, medical and statistical techniques – but also new forms of knowledge and institutions.18 Several Indian authors have written about the relation between the various ways in which the colony was governed, and subjectification (and resistance to power) both pre- and post-colonial regime.19 They highlight that one cannot look at the history of Europe and India as separate histories, but rather see them as ‘contiguous but affiliated histories of colonialism that would account for connected and coherent developments across the colonial divide’.20 In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, generations of elite Indian nationalists found their subject positions, as nationalists, within a transition narrative that, at various times and depending on one’s ideology, hung the tapestry of ‘Indian history’ between the two poles of the homologous sets of oppositions, despotic–constitutional, medieval–modern, feudal–capitalist. Within this narrative shared between imperialist and nationalist imaginations, the ‘local Indian’ was always constituted as the embodiment of error or privation.21 This representation of the ‘truth’ of the Indian body further ‘set the stage for the sanitary policing and regulation of the population’22 deeming the colonised incapable of their own self-governance. Parallel to contemporary governmental strategies, these techniques of governmentality shaped the spatial and temporal reality of India.23 The ‘lacking’ subject that is also at the same time a local subject is a narration that has been historically constituted in governance agendas both in Europe and in India, a hybridised product of negotiations over differences. The illiberal and non-modern other – representing humanity’s past, the pre-modern – has to be transformed into a ‘modern’ citizen. Yet, the ‘local’ other is also incorporated into the Indian nation state,24 a focus which has been widely researched by the Subaltern Studies collective. As such (post)colonialism is also written into contemporary politics in India. What is of particular focus in the Subaltern Studies group – represented by names such as Ashis Nandy, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Ranjit Guha and Partha Chatterjee – is the relationship between the central elite and the ‘subaltern’ peasantry. Many have expanded the notion of a ‘subaltern’ also to include other forms of marginalised groups, and the positioning of post-colonial knowledges vis-à-vis a dominant Western narrative of history and science. Postcolonial critiques have thereby unpacked the political representation of the local ‘other’ in liberal and modernising agendas – be they the building of institutionalised nation states in post-colonies, or more recent developmental modernisation projects. Through various governing mechanisms and techniques, the ‘local’ has been identified and classified



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according to different forms of identification that ultimately produces various positioning of power. These imaginary/cultural and political representations can be seen as continuities in the collective imagination of the governing and the governed. The earlier literature coming from the Subaltern Studies collective as well as other contributions to post-colonial scholarly work focused on changing the negative representations of the local, thus Gayatri Spivak’s now famous article ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’.25 The literature focused much on bringing about more correct representations of Indian peasantry and marginalised groups – including Dalits, women, peasants and transgendered – through both scholarly publications and creative arts. One of the main contributions of the post-colonial literature regarding locality and culture has been to show the various ways in which colonial forms of domination on domestic populations led to new forms of cultural and political practices, both in the colony and the home country. Post-colonial scholars have unpacked the various ways in which the encounter between the colonisers and the colonised created hybrid ways of governing, and changed administrative and cultural practices, as well as transforming self-understanding and agency of the subjects of these hybridised encounters. In recent years, instead of prescribing a more genuine representation of the local post-colonial literature has challenged the very distinction between the local and the international/ global. This undermines the ideal of ‘seeing the local on its own premises’. Rather, post-colonial theory recently paints a much more heterogeneous and complex picture of the ‘everyday’, and furthermore emphasises the various ways in which what is perceived as ‘global’ is indeed shaped through processes of borrowing from, and interacting with, the localised and ordinary. Governing the local: global and local cultures and practices The tension between knowing, reaching and representing the local perpetually follows any governance initiative seeking to change the dynamics of conflicts and build peace. Technocratic solutions – defined as ‘the systems and behaviours that prioritize bureaucratic rationality’26 – combined with mechanisms such as statistics and surveillance technologies could in many ways be seen as resolving the problem of representation in democratic governance as they address the ‘messiness’ of the local that is to be reached through various conflict resolution initiatives. A common understanding of technocratic solutions to conflict resolution and peacebuilding is that they are both neutral – thus avoiding for example various forms of discrimination – effective

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and transparent.27 This is contrasted to other forms of conflict resolution practices that involve human judgement and therefore are bound to the behaviour and interpretations of those enacting the peacebuilding policies. According to Mac Ginty,28 technocracy favours impartial and disinterested systems over decision-making mechanisms. Both international organisations and the private industry endorse a variety of mechanisms and technologies that will facilitate effective and unbiased governance. Technocratic solutions furthermore allow for a largescale standardisation of practices. Both with regard to cost and effectiveness, such solutions have increasingly gained prominence in conflict governance and peacebuilding. One of the main tools that support technocracy in peacebuilding and conflict resolution initiatives are technologies that facilitate the gathering of knowledge on the local. Surveillance technologies – including various forms of data gathering, identification technologies and census – make it possible to know the social (economic, cultural, political) features of the governed population, and systematise the knowledge in categories that are more easily addressed by peacebuilding agencies. Arguably, through the accumulation of knowledge, representative governance can be realised if it is combined with a genuine concern for assisting people on their own premises. Enquiring knowledge on the population through various forms of surveillance thereby could be seen as enabling ‘reflexive’ governance.29 If the well-being of the people is the guiding principle, then, combined with certain moral standards, people’s behaviour and needs can be known and adjusted to. However, a variety of literature has assessed this assumption. The main concern is not the intention, but the variety of techniques and apparatuses that combined form a certain rationality of governance. Statistical analysis, census, biometric technologies and other similar forms of technologies embed a certain scientific and numerical rationality about the world and the population. It narrows/simplifies the overview of the population and individuals – according to prescribed values of efficiency and neutrality – in order to make it possible to govern in a most effective way. Rather than being neutral, numbers are indeed political tools that can be used for different ends depending on the socio-political climate. Surveillance techniques as an important integral part of population management is a powerful strategy, because ‘it implies a viewer with an elevated vantage point, it suggests the power to process and understand that which is seen, and it objectifies and interpellates the colonized subject in a way that fixes its identity in relation to the surveyor’.30



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In governing agendas, the local is in the position of being surveyed – be it as the recipient of governance packages or as a subject of conflict governance. The local is thereby interpellated according to a dominant discourse or agenda. This gaze, as essential for population management as it is for resolving conflict, binds the histories of colonialism and modernity into a continuous thread. In the case of colonial rule in India, for example, enumeration, surveillance and measuring facilitated the reconstitution of the Indian population, thereby producing a population constituted as ‘subordinated subjects, whose health, resources, productivity, and regularities were the objects of governance’.31 The establishment of a governable political order conducive to trade and employment relied on this ‘colonialisation of the body’ associated with welfare and development.32 The governance of conflicts within the territory of India arguably on the one hand follows a (post-)colonial trajectory, and on the other hand in many aspects resemble the global practice of liberal peacebuilding. One could thus speak, as did Foucault33 of various ‘boomerang effects’, that led to the ‘internal colonialisation’ of the West upon itself, whereby mechanisms and techniques of power – such as the census, fingerprinting and the now much studied panopticon – were first applied in the colony and later transported to the internal civic governance of European countries. This ‘internal colonialisation’ is not merely geographic – that is the transferral of colonial techniques from the colony to the governing of life ‘at home’ – but in contemporary assemblages of commercial and public agencies, the boomerang effect could be seen much more as a movement from military to civic spaces and back again. Techniques of domination that seemingly take place in the midst of violent conflict and military operations, in other instances become part of civil administration. This is why the very same biometric technology can be used to bring ‘identity’ to the poor in India through biometric registration of the entire populace, for ensuring fraud-free and effective delivery of cash transfers to flood victims in Pakistan, or as an important component of the US-led war in Afghanistan.34 The very same technology – a very similar implementation and practice, similarities in discourses (fraud-free, effective, truthful, for the greater good) – but for very different objectives.35 The same technologies and practices can be used for both civil and military means, thereby blurring the distinction between security and the everyday. This in turn highlights the falsity of ‘neutral’ governance mechanisms, indeed, as we argue in this chapter, any intervention into a conflict setting is bound to bear issues of power and positioning.

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What, then, is the meaning of peacebuilding on the conceptual premises of post-colonial theory? Clearly, the point is exactly to resist the temptation of coming up with an alternative miracle drug, a universal recipe that assumes a global homogeneity in the ingredients of peace. On the other hand, as long as we stick to the idea of ‘peacebuilding’ – defined as efforts to identify and support actors and structures that tend to strengthen and solidify peace in order to avoid a relapse into armed conflict – it is impossible completely to ignore our general ideas of what this means and why it is justified. Some would argue that the concept is too loaded with imprecise or hegemonic connotations of paternalistic interference to be rescued at all. It is not evident, however, that leaving peacebuilding discourse in peace would solve this problem. Post-colonialism is characterised by a normative commitment to ‘decolonization’ in the broader sense of ‘disrupting hegemonic power in all forms’.36 Yet, it tends not to concentrate on the political prescription but on the discourses, knowledge and perceptions underpinning such prescription.37 Among the recent exceptions to this rule is Ilan Kapoor’s work on ‘the postcolonial politics of development’.38 Here, post-colonial theory is integrated into prescriptive debates on development, instead of merely dismissing them as theoretically flawed. He recognises that this approach cannot result in all-inclusive emancipatory practices: ‘just as hegemonic politics is always unravelling, so is postcolonial resistance; it is, as I hope to show, an impossible politics, replete with dangers and the prospect of reproducing neo-colonialism in various forms’.39 His more modest objective is to reduce the bias of development politics. On a similar note, one should not expect a purely non-hegemonic mode of peacebuilding governance to emerge from the application of a post-colonial perspective. The strategy of engaging with peacebuilding discourse instead of dismissing it because of its hegemonic features is in accordance with the ‘hybridization strategy’ that Kapoor prescribes as a response to the fragility of neo-colonial discourses and practices.40 Kapoor introduces his ‘postcolonial politics of development’ as follows: ‘By better establishing an ethical and dialogic relationship with the subaltern, by being ever-vigilant to the disguises of power, by clearing discursive spaces for bottom-up and insurgent subaltern action, a postcolonial politics may better be able to strive towards an always unfinished yet democratic development.’41 He thereby shares some of the basic normative commitment to freedom and equality with human rights-based development and peacebuilding policies. However, he



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confronts the essentialist definitions of these values in human rights doctrine, as the meaning of values will always be contextual and subject to political and cultural contestation. If the political meaning of values is precisely defined in a certain context and then transferred to different contexts, as is typical for peacebuilding and development policies, it will, according to Kapoor’s perspective, not have the intended social or political effects. He also shows how concepts like human rights and good governance are played as trump cards in international forums like the UN by those who have the power to define their political meaning and implications. Kapoor rather encircles the political significance of freedom and equality by demonstrating how these values are misrepresented by ‘universalists’ and ‘cultural relativists’ alike. The problem of the latter position, he writes, is that it merely is a reaction to Western hegemony: ‘it is caught up in the same modernity–tradition dualism as its opponent, thus reproducing an essentialist view of rights (namely all non-Western legal traditions are communitarian, individual rights are uniquely Western and therefore bad, traditional law is necessarily good)’.42 Illustrating this problem of applying cultural relativism to political reasoning, he mentions how Hindu nationalists in India during the 1990s ‘quite successfully propagated a view of the “traditional Indian woman” to buttress their politics, causing those women’s groups that resisted to be accused of betrayal for being too “westernized”’.43 According to Kapoor, the problem is not that the universalist or cultural relativist positions ignore ‘non-Western culture’, but that they generalise this culture as either being an inherent impediment to, or source of, development, ignoring how this essentialised notion of culture is a projection of their own culturally biased and simplified representation of the nonWestern other: ‘each appears so focused on culture that neither adequately grapples with the political character of rights’.44 Inspired by Spivak, Kapoor dismisses withdrawal as a solution to the problem of flawed development policies.45 In a sense, he combines a ‘communitarian’ descriptive critique of the current political manifestations of development with the normative foundations of ‘cosmopolitanism’.46 He even welcomes a version of ‘cosmopolitan democracy’ at a point.47 The question is rather ‘how to get there’ in a politically representative manner. What cosmopolitanism needs, according to this perspective, is a ‘post-colonial cure’ in order to pursue its emancipatory objectives without turning neo-colonial. Two overarching themes in Kapoor’s account are central to such a cure. First, addressing the cultural biases, unrecognised motives and fragility of development practices, which creates a flawed space for

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prescription. Here he employs the writings of Spivak in particular.48 Underpinning the problem of representing the ‘will’ of post-colonial societies politically is the problem of representing the identities and lifeworlds of ‘the subaltern’, or to allow the subaltern to represent themselves and their political interests on their own terms. Second, drawing on the work of Bhabha, Kapoor is concerned with the possibilities of the governed for manipulating and altering governance. This resonates with the preoccupation in revisionist peacebuilding theory with the role and potential of local actors in rooting liberal governance. Concerning the problem of representation, he emphasises that it is not limited to Western ideological accounts of the post-colonial subject. It relates to any attempt at representing the identity and interests of ‘others’. Even self-representation implies the fundamental problem of ‘self-understanding’ and its connection to the social environment of ‘the self’. Kapoor points out that one of the problems of ‘letting the subaltern speak’ is that it presumes that the subaltern can identify ‘themselves’ as homogeneous and stable political subjects.49 The hybridity of the post-colonial condition is also reflected in a hybridity in postcolonial identities that for instance makes it unlikely to conceive oneself as either being fully ‘modern’ or ‘traditional’. Furthermore: ‘verbalizing oppression is a difficult task when power is so complicatedly and abstractly mediated through global socioeconomic and cultural systems’.50 With Spivak, Kapoor describes how a major source of misrepresentation in development policies is that social elites and welleducated ‘expats’ are allowed to speak on behalf of their societies, including its ‘genuine’ norms and interests.51 When development policies are based on such accounts, it thereby reproduces the hierarchies that privileged these groups in the first place, and development policies thereby become complicit in patterns of exclusion that contradict the justification of their assistance. This clearly applies to peacebuilding strategies as well, as these tend to rely on close collaboration with foreign educated elites and expats. Kapoor discusses various responses to this problem from the development scene, including efforts at ‘letting the subaltern speak for themselves’ or letting disinterested experts and scholars represent them based on scientific research.52 He identifies essential weaknesses in such responses as well that make it impossible to root a truly representative politics in it. Yet, in spite of these substantial problems of political representation he does not conclude that subaltern groups would necessarily be better off without imperfectly representative governance. This also relates to the potential for creative manipulation and resistance of foreign governance, leaving substantial room for local agency even



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when they are severely misrepresented.53 The challenge for intervening actors is therefore rather to be aware of their own shortcomings, including a self-reflexive attitude towards their own biases, and attune their practical and theoretical premises to these insights. This involves the complicating factor of tearing off the layers of representational certainty that otherwise would make the governance of conflict ridden societies a technical rather than deeply political problem.54 Conclusion Against the backdrop of Kapoor’s account, we may now return to the question of how ‘the local turn’ in peacebuilding theory should be understood and what it implies that ‘the local is everywhere’. Drawing upon insights and concepts from post-colonial studies, a second generation of liberal peacebuilding research challenges the framing of the problem of liberal peacebuilding as imposing a ‘foreign peace’. Instead, it demonstrates the incoherence of liberal peacebuilding governance and its chronic subjection to manipulation and resistance. Rather than either a ‘foreign/virtual’ or ‘local/real’, the outcome of this encounter is described as a hybrid.55 While instructive as a corrective to the narrative of liberal peacebuilding, this notion is nonetheless far too general to carry the weight of empirical analysis and political prescription alone. Richmond and Mac Ginty rather use it as a conceptual entry point for detailed analysis of the interaction between the actors involved in peacebuilding. Rejecting the framing of the peacebuilding debate as a choice between liberal and non-liberal/local governance, they recognise that liberal governance has always been a liberal-local hybrid. Instead of presupposing that the bias of liberal peacebuilders can be replaced by a neutral representation of ‘the local’, or alternatively, that the difference between local and international perspectives can be ‘transcended’ through dialogue, they thereby develop a notion of peacebuilding that presupposes a heterogeneous mix of symbolic systems and practices, ‘local’ and ‘global’. While this lack of a neutral vantage point for peacebuilding governance could be seen as contradicting the very idea of peacebuilding, they describe how this meeting of a plural ‘local’ still involves a potential for peacebuilding, as well as the opposite. The objective representing ‘the local’ on its own terms may lead peacebuilding theory astray. Cultural sensitivity in the governance of conflict does not imply (1) understanding the particular conditions of the implied societies, identifying local sources of peace and emancipation, analysing the nature of the governance apparatus (the human and

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material resources), calculating the effects of various governance strategies, or (2) on this basis prescribing a particular governance strategy. This would generate yet another governance discourse legitimising quasi-liberal intervention. Such neo-orientalism is normatively reactionary and descriptively blind. Instead, socio-cultural sensitivity would first of all imply getting as acquainted as possible with the particularities of the conflict situation in which an intervention is to take place, and in particular with its actors, perceptions, history and institutions, thereby doing one’s best to understand how the situation is perceived by the various actors. Furthermore, this would entail analysing former governance interventions, how they were understood and evaluated by the involved actors, and drawing lessons learned from such interventions. Second, socio-cultural sensitivity would mean recognising that the descriptive analysis, translation or representation of this understanding into a ‘disinterested’ academic or ‘third-party’ account of the problem requires a subjective and situated theoretical interpretation. This necessitates a critical analysis of the assumptions at play, seen against theoretical debates in relevant academic disciplines on the descriptive and normative premises of the interpretation. A third ingredient of a socio-cultural sensitive conflict resolution agenda would be including a consideration of principled political solutions based on explicit descriptive and normative assumptions. Thus, it would imply making an ethical but realistic argument, including signalling effects and hard choices of the distribution of limited resources. And, lastly, it would be important to address the international aspects of the problem, as well as its local dimension by avoiding methodological national/localism. In terms of prescription, this surely does not imply that international actors with a peacebuilding commitment should enter war-torn countries wittingly blindfolded by their own prejudice and dogmas in order to generate local resistance and manipulation. On the contrary, it means that international actors ought to reflect on their subjective horizons of understanding as well as the local conditions for their governance and seek to generate hybrid outcomes in accordance with the objective of peacebuilding. As long as the subjective norms and interests of the peacebuilders are in accordance with this peacebuilding objective – i.e. not creating new tensions but harmonising with local culture and practices – they may be legitimately promoted. While this observation focuses on the objective of peacebuilding, it may be equally relevant to other objectives of domestic or ‘global’ governance, including security governance, development aid and humanitarian assistance.



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Notes

  1    2    3    4    5    6    7    8    9  10  11  12  13  14  15  16  17  18  19  20  21  22  23  24  25  26  27  28  29 

This chapter is based on our brief chapter ‘Theoretical challenges for assessing socio-cultural sensitivity in governance and conflict resolution’, in Janel B. Galvanek, Hans J. Giessmann and Mubashir Mir, Norms and premises of peace governance. Berghof Occasional Paper No. 32, 25–30. Our discussion relies on research conducted within the FP7 project Cultures of Governance and Conflict Resolution in Europe and India (CORE). Lidén, ‘Building peace between global and local politics’. Chopra and Hohe, ‘Participatory peacebuilding’; Donais, Peacebuilding and Local Ownership; Mac Ginty and Richmond, ‘Local turn in peace building’. Miklian et al., ‘Perils of “‘going local”’. Lidén, ‘Peace, self-governance and international engagement’, 58–60. Mac Ginty and Richmond, ‘Local turn in peace building’, 772, 778; Lidén, ‘In love with a lie?’, 86. Paris, At War’s End; Richmond, Transformation of Peace. Tadjbakhsh and Richmond, ‘Conclusion’. Mac Ginty, ‘Indigenous peace-making versus the liberal peace’. Richmond, ‘Romanticisation of the local’; Richmond, ‘Resistance and the post-liberal peace’. Rubinstein, ‘Intervention and culture’, 533. For a useful discussion of this task, see Bernhard, ‘Report on theme C.’. Lidén et al., ‘Introduction’. Eriksen, Small Places, Large Issues, 34. Ibid., 40. Kapoor, Postcolonial Politics of Development. Appadurai, Modernity at Large. McKee, ‘Post-Foucauldian governmentality’. Kalpagam, ‘Colonial state and statistical knowledge’. Spivak, ‘Can the subaltern speak?’; Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity and ‘Postcoloniality and the artifice of history’; Prakash, Another Reason; Kapalgam, ‘Colonial state and statistical knowledge’. Bhattacharya, ‘Public penology’, 10. Chakrabarty, ‘Postcoloniality and the artifice of history’, 6; Keshari, Postcolonial Encounter; Prashad, ‘Technology of sanitation in colonial Delhi’. Prashad, ‘Technology of sanitation in colonial Delhi’, 130. Robb, ‘Colonial state and constructions of Indian identity’; Kapalgam, ‘Colonial state and statistical knowledge’. Gill, ‘Politics of population census data in India’. Spivak, ‘Can the subaltern speak?’. Mac Ginty, ‘Routine peace’, 289. Ibid. Ibid. Rose, Powers of Freedom.

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30  Ashcroft et al., Post-Colonial Studies, 185; Zureik, Israel’s Colonial Project in Palestine. 31  Prakash, Another Reason, 126. 32  Jacobsen, ‘Unique identification’. 33  Foucault, ‘Society Must Be Defended’. 34  Jacobsen, ‘Unique identification’. 35  Jacobsen, ‘Preventing, predicting or producing risks?’. 36  Kapoor, Postcolonial Politics of Development, xiv. 37  Sylvester, ‘Development studies and postcolonial studies’. 38  Collected in Kapoor, Postcolonial Politics of Development. 39  Ibid., xiv. 40  Ibid., 136–45. 41  Ibid., xvi. 42  Ibid., 34. 43  On this case, Kapoor refers to Uma Narayan’s Dislocating Cultures. A similar example is described by Inger Skjelsbæk in a study of the politics of ‘good womanhood’ in the peacebuilding process in Bosnia and Herzegovina (‘Traditions and transitions’, 407). 44  Kapoor, Postcolonial Politics of Development, 36. In this connection, Kapoor refers to the work of Fred Dallmayr, including the article ‘“Asian values” and global human rights’, 177. 45  Kapoor, Postcolonial Politics of Development, 45. 46  Lidén, ‘Building peace between global and local politics’, 618–19. 47  Kapoor, Postcolonial Politics of Development, 117. Cosmopolitan democracy ‘involves the development of administrative capacity and independent political resources at regional and global levels’ that would complement those in local and national politics ‘in clearly defined spheres of activity where those activities have demonstrable transnational and international consequences, require regional or global initiatives in the interests of effectiveness and depend on such initiatives for democratic legitimacy’ (Held, ‘Democracy and globalization’, 24). 48  Spivak, ‘Can the subaltern speak?’. 49  Kapoor, Postcolonial Politics of Development, 46–58. 50  Ibid., 115. 51  Ibid., 45. 52  Ibid., 41–59, 115–16. 53  Ibid., 118–46. 54  For Kapoor’s suggestions of how this can be done, see Postcolonial Politics of Development. 55  Mac Ginty, ‘Hybrid peace’; Richmond and Mitchell, Hybrid Forms of Peace.

References Appadurai, A., Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).



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Ashcroft, B., Writing Past colonialism: On Post-colonial Futures (New York: Continuum, 2001). Ashcroft, B., G. Griffiths and H. Tiffin, Post-colonial Studies: The Key Concepts (Routledge: London, 1998). Bachmann, J. and J. Hönke, ‘“Peace and security” as counterterrorism? The political effects of liberal interventions in Kenya’, African Affairs, 109:434 (2009), 97–114. Bernhard, A., ‘Report on theme C. The dynamics of relations between different actors when building peace: The role of hybridity and culture’ (Berlin: Berghof Foundation, 2013). Bhattacharya, B., ‘Public penology: postcolonial biopolitics and a death in Alipur Central Jail, Calcutta’, Postcolonial Studies, 12:1 (2009), 7–28. Chakrabarty, D., ‘Postcoloniality and the artifice of history: Who speaks for “Indian” pasts?’, Representations, 37 (1992), 1–26. Chakrabarty, D., Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002). Chatterjee, P., ‘Colonialism, nationalism, and colonialized women: The contest in India’, American Ethnologist, 16:4 (1989), 622–33. Chatterjee, P., The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in most of the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). Chopra, J. and T. Hohe, ‘Participatory peacebuilding’, in T. Keating and W.A. Knight (eds), Building Sustainable Peace (Alberta: University of Alberta Press, 2004), 241–61. CORE, ‘D.2.2. Report on the state of the art of governance and conflict resolution literature’ (Oslo: PRIO, 2011). Dallmayr, F., ‘“Asian values” and global human rights’, Philosophy East and West, 52:2 (2002), 173–89. Donais, T., Peacebuilding and Local Ownership: Post-conflict Consensus Building (New York: Routledge, 2012). Eriksen, T. H., Small Places, Large Issues: An Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology (3rd edn) (London: Pluto, 2010). Foucault, M., ‘Society Must Be Defended’: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–76 (New York: Picador, 2003). Gill, M. S., ‘Politics of population census data in India’, Economic and Political Weekly, 42:3 (2007), 241–9. Held, D., ‘Democracy and globalization’, in D. Archibugi, D. Held and M. Köhler (eds), Re-imagining Political Community: Studies in Cosmopolitan Democracy (Cambridge: Polity, 1998). Jacobsen, E. K. U., ‘Unique identification: Inclusion and surveillance in the Indian biometric assemblage, Security Dialogue, 43:5 (2012), 457–74. Jacobsen, E. K. U., ‘Preventing, predicting or producing risks? National biometric IDs in India’, in J. Miklian and Å. Kolås (eds), India’s Human Security: Lost Debates, Forgotten People, Intractable Challenges (London: Routledge, 2013), 135–48. Kalpagam, U., ‘The colonial state and statistical knowledge’, History of the Human Sciences, 13:2 (2000), 37–55.

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Kapoor, I., The Postcolonial Politics of Development (New York: Routledge, 2008). Kaviraj, S., The Imaginary Institution of India: Politics and Ideas (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). Keshari, R. N., The Postcolonial Encounter: India in the British Imagination (Pondicherry: Busy Bee Books, 2005). Lidén, K., ‘Building peace between global and local politics: The cosmopolitical ethics of liberal peacebuilding’, International Peacekeeping, 16:5 (2009), 616–34. Lidén, K., ‘Conceptualizing the structural dimension of the socio-cultural and political premises of peacebuilding and conflict resolution related governance’, CORE Workshop on Theme 1 (Berghof Conflict Research, 2011). Lidén, K., ‘Peace, self-governance and international engagement: from neocolonial to post-colonial peacebuilding’, in S. Tadjbakhsh (ed.), Rethinking the Liberal Peace: External Models and Local Alternatives (London: Routledge, 2011), 57–74. Lidén, K., ‘In love with a lie? On the social and political preconditions for globalpeacebuilding governance’, Peacebuilding, 1:1 (2013), 73–90. Lidén, K., R. Mac Ginty and O. P. Richmond, ‘Introduction: Beyond northern epistemologies of peace: Peacebuilding reconstructed?’, International Peacebuilding, 16:5 (2009), 587–98. Mac Ginty, R., No War, No Peace: The Rejuvenation of Stalled Peace Processes and Peace Accords (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Mac Ginty, R., ‘Indigenous peace-making versus the liberal peace’, Cooperation and Conflict, 43:2 (2008), 139–64. Mac Ginty, R., ‘Routine peace: Technocracy and peacebuilding’, Cooperation and Conflict, 47:3 (2012), 287–308. Mac Ginty, R. and O. P. Richmond, ‘The local turn in peace building: A critical agenda for peace’, Third World Quarterly, 34:5 (2013), 763–83. McKee, K., ‘Post-Foucauldian governmentality: What does it offer critical social policy analysis?’, Critical Social Policy, 29:3 (2009), 465–86. Miklian, J., K. Lidén and Å.Kolås, ‘The perils of “going local”: Liberal peacebuilding agendas in Nepal’, Conflict, Security & Development, 11:3 (2011), 285–308. Narayan, U., Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions, and Third World Feminism (New York: Routledge, 1997). Paris, R., At War’s End: Building Peace after Civil Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Prakash, G., Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). Prashad, V., ‘The technology of sanitation in colonial Delhi’, Modern Asian Studies, 35:1 (2001), 113–55. Rahnema, M., ‘Poverty’, in W. Sachs (ed.), The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power (London: Zed Books, 2001), 158–76. Ramsbotham, O., T. Woodhouse and H. Miall (eds), Contemporary Conflict Resolution. (Cambridge: Polity, 2005).



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Richmond, O. P., The Transformation of Peace (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Richmond, O. P., ‘A post-liberal peace: Eirenism and the everyday’, Review of International Studies, 35:3 (2009), 557–81. Richmond, O. P., ‘The romanticisation of the local: Welfare, culture and peacebuilding’, International Spectator, 44:1 (2009), 149–69. Richmond, O. P., ‘Resistance and the post-liberal peace’, Millennium, 38:3 (2010), 665–93. Richmond, O. P. and A. Mitchell (eds), Hybrid Forms of Peace: From the ‘Everyday’ to Post-liberalism (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Robb, P., ‘The colonial state and constructions of Indian identity: An example on the northeast frontier in the 1880s’, Modern Asian Studies, 31:2 (1997), 245–83. Rose, N., Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Rubinstein, R. A., ‘Intervention and culture: An anthropological approach to peace operations’, Security Dialogue, 36:4 (2005), 527–44. Skjelsbæk, I., ‘Traditions and transitions’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 11:3 (2009), 392–411. Spivak, G. C., ‘Can the subaltern speak?’, in C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (London: Macmillan, 1988). Sylvester, C., ‘Development studies and postcolonial studies: disparate tales of the “Third World”’, Third World Quarterly, 20:4 (1999), 703–21. Tadjbakhsh, S., ‘Introduction: Liberal Peace in Dispute’, in S. Tadjbakhsh (ed.), Rethinking the Liberal Peace: External Models and Local Alternatives (London: Routledge, 2011), 1–16. Tadjbakhsh, S. and O. P. Richmond, ‘Conclusion: typologies and modifications proposed by critical approaches’, in S. Tadjbakhsh (ed.), Rethinking the Liberal Peace: External Models and Local Alternatives (London: Routledge, 2011), 221–41. Zureik, E., Israel’s Colonial Project in Palestine: Brutal Pursuit (New York: Routledge, forthcoming).

7

Everyday resistance to conflict resolution measures and opportunities for systemic conflict transformation Janel B. Galvanek and Hans J. Giessmann

Introduction Initiatives and measures for conflict resolution are often met with resistance from various conflict stakeholders, often those groups and individuals whom the measures are designed to assist. Much of this resistance is labelled by the owners of such initiatives as ‘spoiler’ activity – seen as opposed to conflict resolution in general – and is therefore disregarded. However, not all resistance should be brushed aside so easily. Everyday forms of resistance – acts carried out informally and often anonymously – in response to conflict resolution measures deserve more acknowledgment as a legitimate response to these measures. This is particularly true if the measures are perceived as constraining options on the ground, rather than providing helpful support. Often this resistance expresses itself not as outright opposition, but rather adapts and modifies conflict resolution measures to better fit into the local context and cultural environment. Furthermore, to an external observer, the responses to the conflict resolution measures may be perceived as resistance (as the terms of resistance are determined by the outsider), yet rather than being actual resistance, these responses may simply reflect the existence of different priorities, objectives and approaches of local actors, which are rooted in different values and traditions. This ‘everyday resistance’ reflects the uneasiness that many local actors feel with approaching conflict resolution in the usual way – a way most often guided by the theory of liberal peace. Individual acts of everyday resistance show the needs and interests of those whom the measures are intended to benefit, and demonstrate that there is a general discomfort with having measures imposed upon them.



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This chapter will give examples of everyday resistance with an eye to expanding the discussion of conflict resolution away from the somewhat limiting discourse of liberal peace to alternative forms of conflict resolution that take into account issues of justice, rights and dialogue. It will shed light on the ‘legitimacy of difference’ in approaching conflict resolution – depending on context and experience, traditions and cultures. To capture this spectrum of diversity we will reflect on holistic and systemic approaches which take patterns of interaction and the dynamics of relationships among the system’s actors into consideration. From a systemic point of view, peace processes and measures to resolve conflict can only be modelled to a limited extent, and can therefore not be simply transferred from one conflict to the next. Instead, the nonlinearity of interaction between single elements within a conflict system is unique to each conflict and such complexity must be seen through to the underlying structures generating change. Everyday resistance The concept of resistance is understood differently in different contexts and situations. While visible, organised protests and demonstrations against governmental policies or authoritarian regimes can easily be labelled resistance, so can less organised, virtual networks of resistance to more global concerns, such as large corporations. One may associate resistance with armed guerrilla movements or, conversely, with the numerous and creative forms of non-violent resistance.1 Resistance can take many different and diverse forms, and can be violent or nonviolent, organised or spontaneous, individual or collective. Often the type of resistance varies dramatically depending on who is carrying out the resistance and what exactly is being resisted. However, the commonality of all these forms of resistance is that, at their core, they are a response in some way to power. Vinthagen2 defines resistance as a subaltern response to power, or an act that challenges power and contains at least the possibility that this power will be undermined by the act of resistance. Resistance can take either a defensive or reactive stance, for instance in order to protect values and norms that currently exist, or it may be more ‘strategic and pro-active … aiming for structural and radical change’.3 James C. Scott, in his ground-breaking work Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, gives us a painstaking account of how poor and dispossessed rural farmers in a region of north-west Malaysia resist both the rich landowners as well as the generally hopeless circumstances in which they live.4 Due to increasing mechanisation

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of farming techniques, there is a steadily decreasing income for the unskilled. The corrupt political system privileges the landowning class, while the elite remain callous to the plight of the poor peasants. Under these dire circumstances, the peasants find it monstrously unjust that they are labelled lazy and undeserving. Therefore, they do whatever they can – with their limited options – to resist this injustice. Not only do they steal or siphon off rice, but they also employ methods that Scott refers to as ‘the ordinary weapons of relatively powerless groups: foot dragging, dissimulation, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander, arson, sabotage, and so forth’.5 This type of resistance, carried out by relatively powerless groups and individuals – often anonymously and covertly, can be labelled ‘everyday resistance’. The notion of the ‘everyday’ has been examined within various disciplines that range from anthropology to philosophy, from art to feminist studies. Examples include the French Impressionists’ depiction of everyday life in the nineteenth century and Betty Friedan’s depiction of the ‘problem that has no name’ – the everyday, unsatisfactory life of the American housewife in the 1950s. Sigmund Freud put a name to that most common of experiences – the everyday slip of the tongue, while the philosopher Roland Barthes sang the praises of that ubiquitous and all-purposeful material, plastic.6 In spite of the great diversity of their subject matter, all of these artists, writers and thinkers had one goal in common: to make the everyday significant. Highmore argues that the concept of the everyday refers to ‘those practices and lives that have traditionally been left out of historical accounts … voices from “below”: women, children, migrants and so on’.7 In the conflict transformation and peacebuilding field, these voices from below would then include not only women and migrants, but also the poor, the refugees, the slum dwellers, the oppressed and discriminated, and those suffering under violent conflict in general. At this marginalised level of society among these historically overlooked or forgotten groups of people we can witness (often unconscious) resistance to their social, political or economic situations. Because everyday resistance is often carried out by the powerless, the methods of resistance that can be employed are dramatically limited. In such cases it is practically impossible – and potentially dangerous – to resist openly in the form of public protest or demonstrations. With everyday resistance, however, there is often no genuine hope of fundamentally changing the given circumstances; nor is there any expectation of a coordinated and popular resistance movement. It is rather the everyday acts – the ‘seemingly mundane practices by which people constantly shape and reshape their environment’8 – that are the essence



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of everyday resistance. Such acts are often carried out individually and anonymously, even subtly and covertly. Everyday resistance is the act of the North Korean peasant who chooses to divert less water for the irrigation of those fields whose crops he must render to the government. Typically having no leader or structure, such resistance is generally concerned with immediate material gains or with ideological satisfaction, and is often carried out informally and spontaneously. Throughout history, subjugated populations have often chosen not to completely reject the rules and laws imposed on them, as this could be a dangerous and possibly lethal decision, but have rather transformed and manipulated these rules in order to make them more relevant to their context, giving an external appearance of assimilation.9 Therefore, the populations were able to escape the dominant system while remaining within it. This manipulation and/or transformation of the system or dominant social order can plainly be interpreted as everyday resistance and is similar to what Scott refers to with regard to his own research as the ‘safe disguise of outward compliance’.10 Everyday resistance is also typically tactical resistance, carried out when and where the opportunity presents itself. According to de Certeau, tactics do not have a ‘place’ of their own, but must therefore use the place that belongs to the ‘other’. Furthermore, they must take advantage of ‘time’ – they must ‘constantly manipulate events in order to turn them into “opportunities”’.11 This differs dramatically from strategic resistance, which can be coordinated, planned and carried out at a specific time and place. Moreover, strategic resistance has an identifiable agent who exerts pressure on an identifiable target, for instance a citizen protesting against the actions of her government; while tactical resistance does not necessarily need a specified target. With everyday resistance, ‘[p]ower is not met head on … but instead is subtly circumvented and set off course’.12 One last aspect of everyday resistance which is important to consider in our attempt to understand how and why such resistance is carried out is the presence of intention. Whether or not an act of resistance is intentional is disputed among those researching on the topic. For some individuals, including Vinthagen, intent is not a necessary criterion for an act to qualify as resistance.13 Scott, on the other hand, focuses much of his research not on the intended outcomes of the resistance, such as a challenge to power, but rather on the intentions of those resisting.14 Herein lies one of the difficulties in examining the notion of everyday resistance among subaltern groups: intent is difficult to prove, particularly as the acts of resistance may not be obvious to outsiders. As external actors, researchers can only speculate on the intention behind

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acts of everyday resistance. Furthermore, the question of intent is often a matter of perspective. An external actor may understand an individual or collective action as resistance, but it may simply be a case of convenience or ‘getting by’. Nevertheless, if intent within an act of everyday resistance can be proved, the argument for classifying the act as resistance is correspondingly strengthened.15 Moreover, demonstrating intent can assist in understanding why individuals resist in the first place. This more complete understanding of the reasons underlying the resistance could lead to a better response – a response to both the resistance itself as well as to the socio-economic, political and/or cultural factors that underlie the resistance. In terms of measures for conflict resolution, there will always be those individuals and groups who support and encourage the measures and those who do not. The reasons for lending support or denying it can be highly dependent on what role these people have played in the conflict, what they may gain or lose from the initiative, or simply their identity and the context in which they live. In some cases, local communities may only accept certain aspects of conflict resolution initiatives, while ignoring or disregarding other aspects. This is perhaps common practice in instances in which a peacebuilding initiative is designed according to the Western agenda of liberal peace, while being implemented on the ground in a setting with a tremendously different context and set of norms. Everyday resistance to conflict resolution measures, being more subtle than vocal non-violence and much less harmful and destructive than violent acts, often does not come to the attention of the planners and implementers of such measures, who are very often external actors, rather than locals. Such opposition can nevertheless be sufficiently challenging for conflict resolution efforts – enough to hinder, impede or ultimately derail an initiative. The Panchayati Raj in Bihar and Jharkhand16 The Panchayati Raj Institutions (PRIs), a mechanism for local selfgovernance established by the 73rd and 74th amendment of the Indian Constitution, were historic in the sense that they provided the official, legal groundwork for direct democracy at the local level, effectively empowering local actors in grassroots governance. Local governance institutions have traditionally played an important role in India, with typically a council of elders (panchayat) having both executive and judicial powers. The 1993 amendments to the Constitution brought transparency and democracy to these panchayats by introducing democratic elections every five years and providing significant affirmative



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action measures for marginalised groups. The rationale behind the establishment of the three-tier system of local government was to enable local communities to play a larger role in their own governance, specifically with regard to economic development measures and social justice. Using mechanisms of local self-governance as a type of conflict resolution measure is not typically a priority for the Indian government. Nevertheless, there is an acknowledgement that strengthening the local governmental structures in areas with left-wing violence is perceived as urgent.17 If the government believes that citizens have joined the armed Naxal movement partly because they are dissatisfied with the limited effects of the development policy of the central government, then the government should provide more development benefits. Simultaneously, the argument goes, if the government then gives the people their own rights in terms of planning and implementation of development initiatives via local governance, this will resolve armed conflict even more quickly. There is, of course, an underlying assumption here that citizens will be interested and willing to become involved in local self-governance. However, as Mac Ginty has shown, many individuals and communities voluntarily choose not to become involved in political activity, whether out of principle, for tactical reasons, or merely out of disinterest.18 This is certainly the case with regard to some of the Naxalite factions in Bihar and Jharkhand, as well as the Communist Party of India (Maoist), who are strictly opposed to any sort of cooperation with the government. Yet even for those Naxalite groups that do choose to become involved in the governance system, this doesn’t mean that they do so in democratic or transparent ways, as we will see below. In terms of everyday resistance, it interesting to see how individuals and groups, specifically the Naxalites, have responded to the PRIs and how they have been able to transform, modify and adapt the panchayats to their specific contexts. Such modifications and adaptations are not always seen as positive by those individuals who are affected by them. Indeed, such instances often involve patriarchal or unequal social norms being applied to the panchayat system, thereby distorting the democratic structures that the PRIs are meant to be. Many of the cases of adaptation involve women who have been elected Mukhiya (chairperson) of their Gram Panchayats, but in actuality the positions the women hold are being controlled and manipulated by men. In this sense, the men in question are adhering to the modern system of local governance on the surface, by letting women campaign for office and become elected according to the quotas, but at the core they are simply

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upholding the patriarchal tradition. In some cases, this happens due to ‘elite capture’,19 or the dominance of certain families within the panchayat system. For instance, a seat that has been previously filled by a man is sometimes reserved for a woman in the next election. In this case, often the wife or daughter of the man will campaign for the seat and once the woman has been elected, the man who previously held the position will carry on with his job as if nothing had changed.20 This practice of men doing the job of the elected women is so common that these men have a title, Mukhiya-Pati, which denotes the husband of the Mukhiya, particularly if he is known to have taken over the official duties of his wife. The Naxals in the region have also proved to be adept at adapting the panchayat system to their needs and interests. In certain areas, they have been able to either contest the elections for the panchayats themselves or have their family members or supporters campaign for the positions. Contrary to what one might expect, many individuals feel that the Naxalites contesting the PRI elections is a positive development. As the district supply officer in Chatra stated, the Naxals ‘should join the PRI system to find a way to vent their fears and anger and to contribute in the process of making better societies’.21 One positive outcome of this arrangement is that the panchayat elections have been very peaceful in the region.22 However, because no one dares to contest the seats against Naxalite candidates, a peaceful election – an outcome in everyone’s interests – is at the cost of true democracy. This is certainly not what was intended when the PRI system was developed as a mechanism of local governance. These various adaptations of the PRI system demonstrate that many local actors, while embracing the concept of local governance, have nevertheless chosen to modify the system in order to make it work for them. For instance, men misuse the quotas for women in order to have a female relative elected, with the intention of carrying out the women’s duties. In this sense, we could argue that these men are (implicitly) resisting the concept of the empowerment of women that the panchayati raj is expected to contribute to. They are not resisting the system in its entirety, but have instead intentionally chosen to fashion the system to appropriately fit their (patriarchal) context. We see the same phenomenon with the Naxal groups who have chosen to contest PRI elections. They work within the panchayati raj institutions – so do not resist them as a whole – but instead adapt them in an (undemocratic) way that was not intended by their design. Lastly, of course, there are those Naxal groups who choose to openly resist the PRIs. This clearly remains the biggest challenge to the panchayati system as it means that



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many people (both the Naxalites who refuse to take part as well as those who due to security reasons cannot take part) are excluded from the system of local governance and the benefits that it could potentially bring. Resisting ethnic divisions in Bosnia-Herzegovina23 The Dayton Agreement, signed in December 1995 to officially put an end to warfare in Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH), has been criticised extensively for creating institutions that have implicitly reinforced the ethnic divides in BiH.24 The political structure that was established for the central and entity governments comprises ethnic quotas and voting rules explicitly based upon ethnic categorisations.25 Indeed, James Lyon argues that the ‘entire constitution enshrines ethnic discrimination as a principle of law’.26 If the goal of the Dayton Agreement was to achieve peace by setting up extensive liberal structures in order to do so, it is curious that it established a government structure so explicitly along fixed, ethnic lines. As Fischer argues, this structure has proved to be ‘unsuitable for the purpose of consolidating peace’.27 One possible interpretation is that this was perceived as the only way to end the violence; the assumption may have been that if the Bosnian people were separated along fixed, ethnic lines and given both territory and autonomy, peace would follow. Elena Stavrevska argues that this understanding of ethnic groups as homogeneous and fixed categories is not only one of the basic premises of the BiH Constitution, but is also one of the main governance assumptions.28 The acceptance of ethnic categories as the most significant and meaningful identity marker for Bosnian citizens has led not only to quota systems and electoral rules based upon ethnicity, but has also led to initiatives for development, conflict resolution and reconciliation to use these fixed categories as a premise for various projects. However, many Bosnians express frustration with the ethnic classifications, regarding them as inadequate, and reject the idea that ‘one ethnic category could describe their self-conception’.29 Many individuals have multiple identities due to their family histories, while others reject the very principle of the division into constituent peoples and prefer to see themselves as citizens of BiH, without an ethnic label.30 Such categorisation has led to what Stavrevska refers to as the ‘spatialisation of ethnicity’, or the existence of ethnically conceived spaces.31 This refers to the understanding that each ethnicity has its own space in which it has legitimacy and authority. These spaces are not just geographical, such as Serb- or Croat-dominated municipalities, but also

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conceptual, linguistic and representative of the everyday. One example is the use of the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets; both are official alphabets of BiH, but Cyrillic is seen as intimately linked to the Serbian people, which leads to the alphabets being manipulated for nationalistic purposes.32 A further example is the phenomenon of two schools under one roof. In such schools, children of different ethnicities study completely separately, either in different classrooms or in different shifts, and often have different entrances.33 This official ethnic division is mainly enforced by the governmental structures and legal framework of the country, but it is also implicitly supported and reinforced by Bosnian citizens – most likely unconsciously or at least without any reflection. Nevertheless, various methods are used by the citizens of BiH to resist this assumption of ethnicities as fixed categories. If this assumption is understood as a rationality of peacebuilding as well – the assumption that grouping people together based on ethnicity will satisfy their ethnic needs and that separating ethnic groups from each other will keep the peace – we could understand resistance to it as people’s way of saying that this is not the proper way to build a just peace. The important question here is whether or not the authorities are acknowledging this resistance for what it is. For example, one of the many ways to resist ethnic categorisation is to refuse to declare ethnicity on forms, such as for university registration, as described in more detail in Chapter 4. Further examples include those citizens who choose to sign their names in both alphabets to oppose the strict association of Cyrillic with the Serbian population or the actions of a woman from Sarajevo who states that she often visits Republika Srpska, because, if she didn’t, ‘it would mean that they have won and that the division has succeeded’.34 Other ways in which citizens resist this ‘spatialisation of ethnicity’, are for instance, Bosniac mothers-to-be registering in Serb-dominated east Sarajevo in order to get better maternity benefits. Such resistance is perhaps not really carried out intentionally as a matter of principle, but rather simply ‘to make life more bearable’.35 These are just a few examples of Bosnian citizens intentionally – however inconsequentially – resisting the ethnic division. These individuals do not protest publicly against this situation, or try to change it on a national or political level. Instead, they exercise their agency in whatever form they can out of principle, even though they know that their actions will most likely not lead to any change, except perhaps in terms of their personal satisfaction in resisting the system. This is everyday resistance at its finest – a personal way of saying that although these actions cannot change the system, they can at least voice dissatisfaction with the system itself.



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The Green Line Regulation in Cyprus36 The Green Line Regulation in Cyprus came into effect in 2004 and has been the EU-designed and implemented mechanism through which goods from the Turkish Cypriot-controlled Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) can be formally ‘exported’ to Greek Cypriotcontrolled Republic of Cyprus in the south, and vice versa. The explicit objective of the Green Line Regulation is to foster economic cooperation and integration between the two sides, yet the regulation has not had its intended effect. Among the most serious impediments to its success is the simple fact that the trade between the two sides remains too small to be significant. Essentially, the implicit societal understanding in the Republic of Cyprus that products from the north should be subject to a boycott severely affects and limits the effectiveness of the regulation. This everyday resistance against supporting the businesses or farmers of northern Cyprus is reflected in Greek Cypriot newspapers refusing to advertise for Turkish Cypriot products, or, as already pointed out in Chapter 4, supermarkets being unwilling to put Turkish Cypriot products on their shelves out of fear of protests by their customers.37 This clearly limits the demands for such products to a significant extent and severely restricts the impact that a mechanism such as the Green Line Regulation can make. Resistance to the bicommunal trade exists as well among Greek Cypriot farmers, who are passionately opposed to the Green Line Regulation, as the agricultural sector in the Republic of Cyprus ‘fears unfair competition from farmers in the North and frequently complains about lower production standards in the North’.38 There are often rumours spread about illegal pesticides on goods from the north39 – an act that cannot be attributed to the farmers with any proof, but contributes nonetheless to the slander of Turkish Cypriot goods. In one case farmers blocked the highway with their tractors to prohibit the crossing of goods across the Green Line and used the protest as an opportunity to voice their concerns over unfair competition. On the same day, a storage facility for potatoes in the south was burned down. While the Greek Cypriots authorities claim that this was mere coincidence, Turkish Cypriots perceive it as a malicious act of Greek Cypriot farmers.40 There is also a certain level of resistance to the regulation on the other side of the conflict divide as well. Farmers in the TRNC feel that it is not safe enough to export their goods to the Republic of Cyprus due to sabotage or mistreatment of their cargo.41 This demonstrates the general lack of trust between the two communities and shows that more confidencebuilding measures in terms of trade and farming are needed to make

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the Green Line Regulation truly profitable for Turkish Cypriots and to increase its potential for inter-ethnic cooperation. The European Commission is very open about its ultimate aims for economic integration, for instance, in its Council Regulation (EC) No. 389/2006 which states that ‘[t]he Community shall provide assistance to facilitate the reunification of Cyprus by encouraging the economic development of the Turkish Cypriot community with particular emphasis on the economic integration of the island’.42 Clearly, the EU feels that economic integration has a large role to play in the ultimate settlement of the Cyprus problem. But if the two sides have little interest in trading with one another and being economically interdependent, a well-developed initiative may have very little effect. Furthermore, if the communities resist such initiatives, such resistance and methods of boycotting could become even more popular and self-evident. Therefore, it seems that the assumption on the part of the EU that direct trade over the Green Line will ultimately help the reunification of Cyprus is naively optimistic. This viewpoint does not take into account the various societal restrictions in the south concerning the recognition of the north and the extreme level of mistrust on both sides, which is reflected in the everyday resistance to this initiative. Revisiting and unfolding everyday resistance from a systemic perspective Looking from a systemic perspective, the scope and context of everyday resistance can be described as follows. First and foremost, everyday resistance is manifested in different appearances, adopting violent or non-violent, long- or short-term-oriented, sporadic or constant forms. Second, everyday resistance can be expressed as a rather defensive and reactive behaviour, but it may also result in proactive and offensive actions. Third, everyday resistance is often rooted in widespread social dissatisfaction and in grievances on the side of marginalised social actors who lack the power to satisfactorily tackle social problems in their own capacity. Everyday resistance is conducted by them as a strategy of protection against undesirable effects resulting from an outsider’s intervention that is perceived to be a threat against their integrity and aspired self-determination as individuals or collectives. Fourthly, everyday resistance may be directed and intentional, e.g. though targeting selected actors. However, such resistance is often considered targeted and intentional only by those who feel directly affected by such resistance, whereas for those who ‘resist’, their own activities may be neither targeted nor intentionally directed, but are rather determined by different priorities and objectives. And last but not least, the perception of



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everyday resistance is a matter of subjective assessment and is attributed to relational behaviour. Resistance is reactive. But any reaction may then become the reason for a counter-reaction (or ‘counter-resistance’) and so forth. Perspectives on actions and reactions become fuzzy if socially constructed and subjective assumptions about causes and drivers of behaviour come into play. While interventions by some actors may be looked at by others as an incentive for resistance, the former may regard resistance as an act of disrespect or a lack of recognition of legitimate rights. There is not sufficient space here to put the whole variety of alternative analytical frameworks to a detailed critical test. For illustration we will confine our analysis to the social phenomenon of everyday resistance and on lessons learned from systemic analysis. This approach seems to be suited to help to reconcile the different perspectives from Europe and India that we have experienced in our research. Everyday resistance from a systemic perspective Protracted social conflicts43 are always multidimensional, interdependent, highly dynamic and ‘non-linear’.44 The complexity of such conflicts resonates most often neither with the intellectual challenge of identifying its root causes and drivers, nor does it correspond to the political need to articulate comprehensible objectives and implement legitimate policies. Governance in conflict situations is usually contextualised by expectations of social actors about effectiveness and success. Effectiveness means creating sustainable outcomes; while success means that the outcomes should ideally match the underlying theories of change. The emphasis on governance is on the one hand based on a common recognition of the importance of social actors other than governments to organise a society and to foster social and economic progress. On the other hand it also reflects widespread disillusionment about the effectiveness of governmental policies. Resistance is one possible response to this disillusionment. Resistance against interventions ‘from outside’ has an additional implication, though, because it can bring about intentional cooperation – if not pragmatic alliances – between conflicting actors on the ground, despite lasting differences between them, especially if these external interventions are considered culturally insensitive and politically selfish. The underlying assumption for the CORE project was that (cultural) empathy and sensitivity in designing and implementing governance initiatives, in particular a sense of and respect for diversity, would decisively contribute to the objectives of effectiveness and success. This assumption started from the conviction that any external intervention,

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no matter if politically or morally justified, may have a problem with legitimacy if it is guided by normative models such as the theory of liberal peace45 or associative assumptions such as post-colonial settings. However, measuring both effectiveness and success are contested in the context of a wide range of studies related to conflict and peace, as are assumptions about causality and the impact of peacebuilding in systemic environments.46 Against the background of social and political diversity, a critical validation of prescriptive and normative frameworks of analysis is justified. However, validation only makes sense if it takes the likelihood of perspective-related biases into account and if such different perspectives related to diverse social and cultural frames are considered legitimate. In other words: a research design would be too narrow if it were confined to a single social or cultural approach. In the following sections we will try to illustrate an alternative perspective, but cannot argue, of course, that this perspective is better than others. Instead, we want to point to the need for a more balanced and culturally sensitive diagnosis. We would also like to elaborate on the opportunities of nurturing tolerance with respect to the variety of possible responses to equal or similar challenges of governance related to conflict resolution. This leads us, as a first step, to a necessary clarification of the term ‘resistance’ from a systemic perspective. Resistance is a relational term through which the behaviour of an actor or a group of actors is understood and assessed in direct relation to the behaviour of other actors or group(s) of actors. But as social actors’ motivations and forms of behaviour differ, the understanding and assessment of behaviour may also vary, depending on the distinct perspective of the socialised analyst, since ‘we never see the “world out there” as it is, but comprehend it through our concepts’.47 Of course, a reconciliation of different concepts and perspectives of analysis is not precluded in principle and it could be partially achieved if, for instance, a basic consensus on a core group of universal principles and rights (such as enshrined in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights or the Universal Declaration on Human Rights) were to exist across cultural differences. But reconciliation is neither a natural given, nor is it easily attainable, and sometimes it is not recommended at all in certain areas (for example with regard to shaping socio-economic institutions according to local needs, or in efforts to establish constitutional law in areas where community-based rule of law has been functioning well throughout centuries). Characterising behaviour as ‘everyday’ assumes that such attitudes and activities have presumably become mainstreamed in larger parts of society and as such have become socialised and internalised as a kind



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of ‘behavioural norm’ by large social groups. A systemic perspective comprehends ‘resistance’ in the context of the underlying conflict of interests. According to Koerppen and Ropers five principles apply to a systemic conflict (transformation) analysis: (1) thinking in network structures; (2) the importance of dynamic frames and relationships; (3) accepting the solution as an integral element of the conflict; (4) acknowledging perspective dependency, ambivalence and contingency; and (5) concentrating on learning processes of human beings.48 Network structures and networking Networks emerge and evolve from interests of like-minded actors who seek options to tackle problems or challenges together more effectively than what seems attainable within other given institutional or procedural settings. Hence networking provides a platform of additional or enhanced legitimacy for collective action towards common aims. Network-based coordination means applying pragmatic and open methods of coordination49 through a stepwise approximation of standards, governance by committees, procedures and benchmarks, and bestpractice sharing.50 ‘Resistance’ provides a unifying framework and a motivation for creating influential formal and informal networks, in particular because resisting actors don’t have, or may have lost, trust in the capacity of existing institutions to balance competing vital interests in a fair and acceptable way. Informal networks can be organised as ‘issue groups’, which emerge or fade away according to the current pressure of issues. The farmers of the Republic of Cyprus discussed above could be classified as such an issue group, albeit with a rather negative goal in terms of conflict resolution. Networks of resistance are stable and volatile at the same time, because they are primarily based on external pressures. A common identity among a network’s members is not strong enough to survive if the external drivers for networking disappear. As such, networks are responsive and adaptive to the changing needs of its members, but at the same time they are also exclusive vis-à-vis other actors who do not accept the informal rules of coordinated resistance that are applied. Networking is, of course, not a privilege of only those who resist. All social actors use networks and networking to maximise influence and impact. Governments and governmental actors use networks for the sake of accumulating influence as well. However, if political or social relations are in trouble, if the rule of law has not been established or is not recognised, and if state-based institutions are ineffective or

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dysfunctional, networks may gain a significant, alternative role in organising (parts of) society and the political space. Furthermore, for civil society actors, social influence and control can hardly be attained without nurturing the accumulative power of networking. Dynamic frames and relationships Flexible and pragmatic networking based on like-minded motivation and a strong loyalty to collective objectives allows action to shift from being based on static rules to having more problem-solving aspects: experimenting and developing new knowledge, fostering local initiatives and contextual problem solving by devolution. Resistance manifested in networked action can help to foster collective or coordinated initiatives independent of existing political differences or social conventions, thereby creating temporary alliances, for instance across the private– public divide and ensuring broad participation based on a perceived shared legitimacy of resistance. However, there is a caveat to this. While resistance is an important driver of collaboration and networking, it may become volatile if based only on targeted resistance. In systemic settings the boundaries between action and reaction are most often fluid, which is why the relations within a network can only be understood in the context of its drivers. As mentioned before, resistance is a relational term; it can increase or decrease, but it is always responsive to external factors. A good example of this is the everyday resistance that individuals carry out in Bosnia as a reaction to being obligated to define themselves in terms of their ethnicity. These citizens are active in their resistance to the rules of the state in which they live, but their actions are a reaction motivated by an external pressure to designate themselves as belonging to one single ethnic category. Thus, the nature of the relationship between action and reaction is dependent on the scope and direction of change. Moreover, in social contexts the stepwise transformation of relationships between (and among) the conflicting actors can turn even seemingly irreconcilable differences into constructive interaction. As a result, the frames of action must be considered dynamic and the relationships adaptive to the dynamics of change. Conflict and problem-solving approaches In large parts of the traditional peace research the use of force is understood as a deviation from the norm of living peacefully together. In this sense the renunciation of force is looked upon as the prerequisite for preventing or resolving social and political conflicts. In other words, the



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prevention and renunciation of using force is considered to be the ‘guiding norm’ for conflict resolution.51 This perspective confronts the idea of peaceful community coexistence with the use of force as an illegitimate alternative. This approach is supported by widespread, partly codified norms such as the prohibition on the use of force. But norms can also ‘describe collective expectations for the proper behaviour of actors with a given identity’.52 If such collective expectations collide, any related norms will most probably do so as well. This will then inevitably also affect ‘everyday behaviour through a process of inducting actors into the norms and rules of a given community’.53 So what is considered a normative solution of a conflict – peace – may be looked at by the conflicting actors rather as an impediment, as a tool to maintain the rule of one group over the other. Systemic approaches contextualise the relations between conflict actors. Particularly protracted conflicts ‘warp’ societies and may thus create ‘complex emergencies’, as Hugh Miall has pointed out.54 It is not the renunciation of force that can unfold sustained healing power in such conflicts, but rather turning violent into non-violent relations can change the patterns of the conflict, through which its underlying causes can then be tackled. Recalibrating interests and nurturing relations for constructive interaction in social transformation are considered suitable routes which may lead at a later point to the intentional renunciation of force as an outcome of systemic change and an emerging conviction that better alternatives do not exist. Systemic approaches refer to – and build upon – the interdependence of actors and therefore prefer means of inclusion and participation to influence relationships. Perspective dependency Perspectives on governance and conflict as social constructs are culturally determined and therefore inevitably biased. Cultural socialisation is one among other determinants of individual and collective identity. Rationalist theories tend to relate identity to interests. However, against the background of cultural and social socialisation, the behaviour of actors may not be primarily or necessarily motivated by interests, but may also be shaped by the cultural context and social patterns that have constructed a sustainable framework for expectations about individual and collective behaviour. Such cultural factors for shaping group identities are, for example, ethnic and religious allegiances, traditional community law, and also to a certain extent age and gender. Adapting to mainstream cultural norms of the respective collective can become an influential driver for individual and group behaviour and therefore also

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for creating collective expectations with regard to the behaviour of other actors.55 Resistance is based on individual or collective expectations about the disadvantageous consequences of actions undertaken by others. Such expectations become internalised as well and hence may even prevail if the nature of action to which resistance responds is changing or has already changed. The operational disconnect between action and reaction in complex social systems underscores the importance of focusing on interactive relations and on related trust-building instead of seeking shortcut outcomes based on simplistic causal assumptions.56 In other words: problem-solving interaction must be based on functioning relations between the engaging parties. All of the case studies of the CORE project have revealed that in complex situations, true and sustained social change is most often experienced (and socialised) more effectively on the subnational level.57 It is here where the legitimacy of intervention to foster conflict resolution must be inherently culturally sensitive, participatory and open-minded in order to be effective.58 Local leadership is essential to make external initiatives work in the face of everyday resistance, but it can also become extremely volatile if interventions are not designed to fit the context and do not take the complex social and cultural constructions of local identity into account. Conclusion We started this analysis by emphasising that peace and conflict resolution processes are complex and non-linear endeavours. One lesson that can be drawn from the analysis of the aforementioned cases is that most forms of (everyday) resistance are constructed by – and therefore are reflections of – this complexity. In all three cases analysed above, it is difficult to understand and acknowledge such everyday resistance without a thorough understanding of the complex societal context as well as the conflict setting in which it is carried out. Without this knowledge, such everyday resistance is easily overlooked or disregarded. A systemic and holistic perspective of conflict and its resolution may help to better comprehend resistance as a normal but distinct form of social behaviour in conflictive relations. Systemic thinking resonates with the complexity and interdependence of protracted social conflict and provides a response to other, rather simplistic strategies that attempt to handle this complexity with little success. Systemic thinking is epistemology based and addresses the relations between conflicting actors by encouraging them to deal with each other constructively. The underlying idea of transforming the interacting relations in the system is based on



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the rational expectation that beliefs, attitudes and behaviour can be changed though reflection and learning. By bringing the relations based on cultural identities, social constructions and behavioural patterns of social actors to the fore, the underlying causes and motivations of everyday resistance can be uncovered and brought into perspective. Mutual learning processes and self-critical reflection can help to deconstruct the motivation for resistance and assist in identifying the root causes of the underlying conflict. Notes   1  See, for example, Dudouet, ‘Nonviolent resistance in power asymmetries’.   2  Vinthagen, Understanding ‘Resistance’, 7.   3  Vinthagen and Lilja, Resistance Studies Mission Statement, 4.   4  Scott, Weapons of the Weak.   5  Ibid., 29.   6  For texts by Friedan, Freud and Barthes, see Highmore, Everyday Life Reader.   7  Highmore, ‘Introduction’, 1.   8  Bleiker, ‘Discourse and human agency’, 34.   9  de Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, xiii. 10  Scott, Weapons of the Weak, 283. 11  de Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, xix. 12  Richmond, ‘Critical agency, resistance and a post-colonial civil society’, 428. 13  Vinthagen, Understanding ‘Resistance’, 7. 14  Scott, Weapons of the Weak, 290–2. 15  Ibid., 290. 16  We are greatly indebted to Amit Prakash and his colleagues, who carried out fieldwork in Bihar and Jharkhand (2011–12) within the framework of the EU-funded CORE project ‘The Role of Governance in the Resolution of Socioeconomic and Political Conflict in India and Europe’. 17  See Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India: ‘The Left Wing Extremist affected States have been asked to implement PESA on priority, which categorically assigns rights over minor forest produce to Gram Sabhas’ (Annual Report from 2010–11, 26), http://mha.nic.in/pdfs/ AR(E)1011.pdf; accessed 14 June 2014. 18  Mac Ginty, ‘Between resistance and compliance’, 173–5. 19  Narayana, ‘Local governance without capacity building’, 2828. 20  Prakash et al., Thematically Arranged Fieldwork Report Bihar Jharkhand, 19. 21  Ibid., 11–12. 22  Ibid., 11.

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23  We are greatly indebted to Elena Stavrevska, who carried out fieldwork in BiH (2011–12) within the framework of the EU-funded CORE project ‘The Role of Governance in the Resolution of Socioeconomic and Political Conflict in India and Europe’. 24  Fischer, ‘Introduction’, 9. 25  Friedman, Bosnia and Herzegovina, 60–4. 26  Lyon, ‘Overcoming ethnic politics in Bosnia?’, 52. 27  Fischer, ‘State formation and civil society in post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina’, 5. 28  Stavrevska, Bosnia and Herzegovina, 5. 29  Pickering, Peacebuilding in the Balkans, 67. 30  International Crisis Group, ‘Bosnia’s Gordian knot’, 7. 31  Stavrevska, Bosnia and Herzegovina, 6. 32  Ibid., 7. 33  Ibid., 8. 34  Ibid., 19. 35  Ibid., 21. 36  We are greatly indebted to Birte Vogel, who carried out field research in Cyprus (2011–12) within the framework of the EU-funded CORE project ‘The Role of Governance in the Resolution of Socioeconomic and Political Conflict in India and Europe’. 37  Moestue, ‘Wrong side of the (trade) barriers’. 38  Vogel, ‘Report on fieldwork in Cyprus’, 7. 39  Ibid. 40  Ibid. 41  Ibid., 8. 42  European Commission, Council Regulation (EC) No. 389/2006, 2006, 2. 43  Azar, Management of Protracted Social Conflict. 44  Koerppen et al., ‘Non-linearity of peace processes’. 45  Richmond, ‘Critical research agendas for peace’; Paris, ‘Saving liberal peacebuilding’. 46  Call and Cousens, ‘Ending wars and building peace’. 47  Kratochvil, ‘Looking back from somewhere’, 25. 48  Koerppen and Ropers, ‘Addressing the complex dynamics of conflict transformation’, 12. 49  Tulmets, ‘New policy modes in EU’s external relations’. 50  Radaelli, ‘Europeanization of public policy’, 41. 51  Ackermann, ‘Prevention of armed conflicts as an emerging norm in international conflict management’. 52  Katzenstein, ‘Culture of national security’, 5. 53  Checkel, ‘International institutions and socialisation in Europe’, 804. 54  Miall, ‘Conflict-transformation’. 55  Le Baron, ‘Transforming cultural conflict in an age of complexity’. 56  Lipson, ‘Performance under ambiguity’, 254. 57  For more information on this, see the policy briefs published within the framework of the CORE project on each individual case study. Available



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under ‘Publications’ at: www.prio.org/Projects/Project/?x=928; accessed 14 June 2014. 58  Doyle, ‘Making war and building peace’, 18.

References Ackermann, A., ‘The prevention of armed conflicts as an emerging norm in international conflict management: The OSCE and UN as norm leaders’, Peace and Conflict Studies, 10:1 (spring 2003), 1–14, http://shss.nova.edu/ pcs/journalsPDF/V10N1.pdf; accessed 7 November 2013. Azar, E. E., The Management of Protracted Social Conflict (Aldershot: Dartmouth, 1990). Bleiker, R., ‘Discourse and human agency’, Contemporary Political Theory, 2:1 (2003), 25–47. Call, C. T. and Cousens, E. M., ‘Ending wars and building peace: International responses to war-torn societies’, International Studies Perspectives, 9:1 (2008), 1–21. Checkel, J. T., ‘International institutions and socialisation in Europe: Introduction and framework’, International Organisation, 59:4 (2005), 801–26. de Certeau, M., The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984). Doyle, M. W. and N. Sambanis, Making War and Building Peace: UN Peace Operations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). Dudouet, V., ‘Nonviolent resistance in power asymmetries’, in Austin B., Fischer M. and Giessmann H. J. (eds), Advancing Conflict Transformation: The Berghof Handbook II (Opladen/Farmington Hills: Barbara Budrich, 2011). European Commission, Council Regulation (EC) No. 389/2006, 2006, http:// eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:2006:065:0005:0008 :EN:PDF. Fischer, M., ‘Introduction: Moving out of the Dayton era into the era of Brussels?’, in Martina Fischer (ed.), Peacebuilding and Civil Society in BosniaHerzegovina: Ten Years after Dayton (2nd edn) (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2007). Fischer, M., ‘State formation and civil society in post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina’, paper presented at International Peace Research Association, Sydney, 6–10 July 2010. Friedman, F., Bosnia and Herzegovina: A Polity on the Brink (London: Routledge, 2004). Highmore, B., ‘Introduction: Questioning everyday life’, in Ben Highmore (ed.), The Everyday Life Reader (London: Routledge, 2002). Highmore, B. (ed.), The Everyday Life Reader (London: Routledge, 2002). International Crisis Group, ‘Bosnia’s Gordian knot’, 2012. Katzenstein, P. (ed.) The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). Koerppen, D. and N. Ropers, ‘Addressing the complex dynamics of conflict transformation’, in D. Koerppen, N. Ropers and H. J. Giessmann (eds), The

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Non-linearity of Peace Processes: Theory and Practice of Systemic Conflict Transformation (Opladen and Famington Hills, MI: Barbara Budrich Publishers, 2011). Koerppen, D., N. Ropers, and H. J. Giessmann, The Non-linearity of Peace Processes: Theory and Practice of Systemic Conflict Transformation (Opladen and Famington Hills, MI: Barbara Budrich Publishers, 2011). Kratochvil, F., ‘Looking back from somewhere: Reflections on what remains “critical” in critical theory’, Review of International Studies, 33 (2007), 25–46. Le Baron, M. ‘Transforming cultural conflict in an age of complexity’, Berghof Handbook, 30 March 2001, http://edoc.vifapol.de/opus/volltexte/2011/2578/ pdf/lebaron_hb.pdf; accessed 8 November 2013. Lipson, M., ‘Performance under ambiguity’, Review of International Organizations, 5:3 (2010), 249–84. Lyon, J., ‘Overcoming ethnic politics in Bosnia? Achievements and obstacles to European integration’, in Martina Fischer (ed.), Peacebuilding and Civil Society in Bosnia-Herzegovina: Ten Years after Dayton (2nd edn) (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2007). Mac Ginty, R., ‘Between resistance and compliance: Non-participation and the liberal peace’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 6:2 (2012), 173–5. Miall, H., ‘Conflict-transformation – A multi-dimensional task’, Berghof Handbook for Conflict Transformation, www.berghof-handbook.net/documents/ publications/miall_handbook.pdf; accessed 7 November 2013. Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India, Annual Report from 2010–11, http://mha.nic.in/pdfs/AR(E)1011.pdf; accessed 1 November 2013. Moestue, H. P., ‘Wrong side of the (trade) barriers’, European Voice, 5 September 2008. www.europeanvoice.com/article/imported/wrong-side-of-thetrade-barriers/62192.aspx; accessed 17 November 2013. Narayana, D., ‘Local governance without capacity building: Ten years of Panchayati Raj’, Economic and Political Weekly, 4:26 (2005), 2822–837. Paris, R., ‘Saving liberal peacebuilding’, Review of International Studies, 36:2 (2010), 337–65. Pickering, P. M., Peacebuilding in the Balkans: The View from the Ground Floor (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007). Prakash, A., I. Amin and J. Rukmani, ‘Thematically arranged fieldwork report Bihar Jharkhand’, unpublished field research report, November 2012. Radaelli, C. M., ‘The Europeanization of public policy’, in K. Featherstone and C. M. Radealli (eds), The Politics of Europeanization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Richmond, O. P., ‘Critical research agendas for peace: The missing link in the study of international relations’, Alternatives, 32:2 (2007), 247–74. Richmond, O. P., ‘Critical agency, resistance and a post-colonial civil society’, Cooperation and Conflict, 46:4 (2011), 419–40. Scott, J. C., Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985).



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Stavrevska, E. B., ‘Bosnia and Herzegovina – Between a rock and a hard place’, unpublished fieldwork report (2012). Tulmets, E. ‘New policy modes in EU’s external relations: Adapting the experience of enlargement to the Neighbourhood Policy’. European University Institute, Florence, 2006. Vinthagen, S., Understanding ‘Resistance’: Exploring Definitions, Perspectives, Forms and Implications, Resistance Studies Network, Gothenburg, 2007. http://resistancestudies.org/files/VinthagenResistance.pdf; accessed 5 December 2013. Vinthagen, S. and Lilja M., Resistance Studies Mission Statement, Resistance Studies Network, Gothenburg, 2006, www.resistancestudies.org/files/ Missionstatement.doc; accessed 5 December 2013. Vogel, B., ‘Report on fieldwork in Cyprus: International, European and local approaches to conflict resolution’, unpublished fieldwork report, 2012.

8

Peacebuilding in India: Meghalaya’s experience Priyankar Upadhyaya and Anjoo Sharan Upadhyaya

Ideas and praxis The long lineage of peace ideas and praxis in India has been full of disjuncture and ambiguities.1 Their substantive interpretations are mediated amid global transformations as also the shifting interests of dominant identities and groups. One could still discern a set of convergent values and parameters that continually permeated India’s normative template on peacebuilding and conflict resolution. Many of these traits provide the standards of governance and influence the agenda of public policy, constitutional provisions, legislation and judicial pronouncements as well as everyday governance. Specifically, the legacy of non-violence, a commitment to development and social justice, and an accommodation of diversity through autonomy and decentralisation mechanism have represented three principal avenues of Indian peacebuilding. In the modern era, Mahatma Gandhi contributed significantly to peacebuilding perspectives by conceptualising the norms of non-violence (Ahimsa) and truth force (Satyagraha). He not only abhorred wars and killings under any guise, but also addressed the insidious ramifications of indirect violence embedded in governing structures and cultures.2 Gandhi had no doubts that the modern state based on coercion is unlikely to resolve disorder, whether external or internal. Gandhi’s belief in people’s power opens up space for a range of local non-violent trajectories of peacebuilding to cope with social injustice and external aggression.3 The role of civil society in peacebuilding has been thus intrinsic to an indigenous Indian ethos. Several studies demonstrate how the existence of social networks of civic engagements across communal lines has been the key to prevent violence.4 Similarly, the cultural dimensions and multi-religious synergy contribute imperceptibly to



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peacebuilding in urban centres where episodes of communal and ethnic violence occur with greater frequency.5 Indian peacebuilding has been traditionally marked by a commitment to dialogue and the accommodation of diversity. Amartya Sen6 attributes the Indian democratic ethos to its distinctive dialogical traditions, heterodoxy and public reasoning. He reveals how the political councils in ancient India provided a negotiating space for people with divergent opinions on matters of law and governance. Given this background, it was not surprising that the quest for self-rule (Swaraj) became the rallying point of the Indian freedom movement and the framers of the Indian Constitution (1949) accorded highest priority to the participation of all sections of the population in governance.7 Notwithstanding Gandhi’s aversion for the establishment of a centralised state, Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister adopted the apparatus of the modern nation state to meet the imperatives of security and order. Along with the traditional values of non-violence, dialogue, and respect for diversity, Nehru infused the ethos of enlightenment and experiences of Western liberal democracies in the foundation of the modern Indian state. Expectedly, many provisions of the Indian Constitution were inspired by the spirit of enlightenment, i.e. respect for human rights, democracy, constitutional government, progressive liberation from the tyranny of tradition, and government by public reason.8 Nehru famously spelled out the concepts of ‘composite culture’ and ‘unity in diversity’ to deal with India’s astonishing heterogeneity. Decentralisation, federalism, and autonomy were conceived as the lead tracks of resolving conflict arising out of communalism, provincialism, separatism, and casteism. Democratic measures like universal suffrage, free and fair elections, and special constitutional provisions for minorities and weaker sections of society were to ensure a peaceful process of nation building. While the reorganisation of states in India along linguistic lines aimed to deal with the autonomy quest, all religious and ethnic groups were accorded equal footing by the Indian Constitution (articles 26–30). In Indian democratic parlance, the federal devolution of power along with decentralisation has been a time-tested trajectory to resolve, or at least contain, conflictual assertions of autonomy. While the British Raj introduced the concept of local self-government way back in 1882,9 it was Gandhi’s vision of village self-rule (Gram Swaraj), which provided a leitmotif for good governance in independent India. The concept of village councils (Panchayats) enshrined in Part IV ‘Directive Principles of State Policy’ (article 40) of the Constitution was remarkably

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supplemented through the 73rd amendment in 1992, which introduced the three-tier Panchayati Raj Institutions (PRIs). It contains provisions for the devolution of powers and responsibilities to panchayats to facilitate development and social justice.10 The reorganisation of states along linguistic lines during the 1950s was a major step in incorporating cultural diversity into political and administrative units. The Constitutional provisions and subsequent amendments ensured self-government under special administrative provisions for Jammu and Kashmir (Schedule IV, article 370) and in tribal areas of the North-East (Nagas, Mizos, Manipuri, Tripura) under articles 371 and 371A–I. In the past several decades, the union government has created new states in order to satisfy the demands for greater autonomy and the protection of ethnic interests, as well as to pacify and manage the violent conflicts that have grown out of such demands. The peacebuilding template in India has continually evolved during the past decades. An instructive example is Amartya Sen’s concept of development as freedom highlighting the import of pluralist institutions and agencies for providing and sustaining peace as freedom.11 The often repeated trend of administering ‘peace’ through economic development by the Indian state has led many to doubt its long-term efficacy. Dash for instance detangles the so-called ‘governance of peace’ in the North-East through ‘developmentalism’ and demonstrates that sustainable peace will not be achieved only through rapid economic development.12 The Indian democratic governance claiming indigenous values of peacefulness and traits of liberal peacebuilding has had a mixed record in handling democratic upheavals and conflicts peacefully. It has evolved and improvised many conflict-mitigating remedies around the norms of power-sharing and inclusion, notwithstanding downsides and deficiencies in their implementation. The practical experience of the Indian state in handling conflicts and violent upheavals thus unravels a multipronged approach, which is often a blend of coercive–persuasive trajectories. The rationalities of democratic accommodation and socio-economic development thus coincided with the strong-arm use of law and order machinery. It is of course an open debate whether such mixed tracks of governance can be considered political acts or just ad hoc reflection of inertia to grapple with the generic issues in the conflict. It is therefore critical to discern and evaluate such conflict resolution trajectories visà-vis specific case studies. It is in this context that we have examined the case study of Meghalaya13 – a so-called example of peacefulness in India’s otherwise ‘troubled’ North-East.



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Interrogating peace in Meghalaya Meghalaya acquired its independent statehood peacefully through the North-Eastern Areas (Reorganisation) Act, 1971 conceding the autonomy assertion of three main tribal communities, namely Khasi, Garo, and Jaintia.14 Further, the Sixth Schedule of the Indian Constitution, while limiting the powers of the union government in the new state, provisioned Autonomous District Councils (ADCs), in the Khasi, Jaintia, and Garo Hills, to protect and empower the ethnic, indigenous communities of the region. The peaceful transition to independent state and the absence of large-scale violence in recent times has thus projected the image of a ‘peaceful Meghalaya’, which we propose to review. However, any interrogation of peacefulness in Meghalaya needs to be contextualised within an overall understanding of the conflict dynamics in the North-East and how the Indian state architecture negotiated these fault lines through state formation and the granting of autonomy. India’s North-East has been in the throes of violent ethnic assertions for autonomy and secession along with protracted native–migrant conflicts. This is despite its unique constitutional status, which limits the mandate of the central government in north-eastern states and extends special provisions to meet the special needs of the region.15 Further, the space-centric homeland demands in the North-East have been met through the creation of seven ethnically and linguistically diverse states,16 along with autonomy solutions embedded in federal structures, processes, and institutional mechanisms provisioned in the sixth schedule of the Constitution. Along with the constitutional autonomy solutions, the union and the state government have been open to hold peace talks with insurgent groups, at times relaxing its pre-negotiation conditionality of arms surrender.17 In the course of this, over fifteen accords were signed with ethnic groups creating either territorial or non-territorial means of representation and self-governance. The politics of peace accord along with the appeasement measures of financial incentives often coincided by the short-term coercive methods against recalcitrant groups. However, it always remained doubtful whether such an ad hoc ‘carrot and stick’ policy of peacebuilding brought any good to assuage the disaffection among tribal peoples. This fieldwork-based study18 interrogates the unique claims of peacefulness in Meghalaya and whether the conflictual triggers and dynamics continue to operate under a veneer of so-called peace in the state. Eliciting insight through fieldwork around the Khasi, Garo, and Jaintia Hills,

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we examine the efficacy of governance trajectories of dialogue, negotiation, and rehabilitation and how these mediated with everyday peace in the region. Rise of ethnocentrism The creation of the new state of Meghalaya unleashed a fresh spurt of ethnocentric jostling by competing groups to reclaim their identity and as well as greater dividends from the state.19 Asserting their cultural superiority, the Khasis and the Garos committed many dreadful acts against the non-tribal population. This trend was more conspicuous in the Khasi Hills, where the elevation of Khasis to a dominant political position led them to challenge the hitherto ascendancy of the non-tribal population. Beginning with the much publicised Durga Puja incident of 1979, the Bengali-speaking population (often branded as Bangladeshis) were sporadically targeted. A single incident of the idol of the Goddess Kali being beheaded by the Khasi men in Shillong led to the biggest riot against the Bengali community in Meghalaya. The traditional Khasi ‘Durbars’ like Laitumkhrah ordered the tribal population to resort to violence against the outsiders. The ensuing violence against outsiders unfolded a ‘trail of human woes’ in which several innocent became the victim of Khasi jingoism.20 The Khasi Students’ Union (KSU), along with the Federation of Khasi, Jaintia, and Garo People took the lead in evicting the non-tribal population from their land and homes which were subsequently occupied by the Khasi rioters. Opposition to such forced eviction by civil society remained mute due to the clan-based nature of the community. Such riots against non-tribal communities both Hindu and Muslim also took place in the Garo Hills in 1987. This violence supposedly triggered by a Muslim boy’s comments in relation to a Garo girl, resulted in the deaths of nearly fifty people. These acts of violence unleashed a fear psychosis among the non-tribal population, and led to their mass exodus.21 This incident in turn stirred many similar acts of violence against other non-tribal communities including the Nepalese in 1987 and the Bihari and Marwari communities during 1992 and 1993. Although large-scale acts of violence do not commonly capture headlines, sporadic incidents of violence against non-tribal people, especially in the Khasi Hills, are reported frequently. The non-tribals continue to be seen as ‘enemy alien’ and discriminated against the locals in education, jobs, or in local political processes. Besides the legal constraints,



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drafted by the ADCs to secure the dominance of local tribal groups, non-reserved job posts in practice are intercepted through unofficial means, even in high-profile government agencies.22 Moreover, the ethnic riots set a precedent for restricting the right to publicly express one’s religion, like confining non-tribal processions (Hindu, Muslim) to only specific areas of Shillong. Inter-ethnic conflict The ethnic disaffection between the Khasis and the Garos has been another potent conflict in Meghalaya. The Khasis, having acquired the upper hand in the Hills since colonial times,23 claimed higher positions in the government, much to the chagrin of the Garos. The Garos have nursed a grouse against the Khasis for manipulating greater resources into the Khasi Hills. The implementation of the 1971 Reservation Bill seemingly favouring Garos however did not resolve the contentions.24 The Khasis’ insistence on increased quotas within government jobs was seen as an affront to the Garos’ quest for justice who feared that if the reservation policy is redrafted, the Khasis will make ‘inroads into their entitlement’.25 The Garos’ increasing sense of alienation, led to the rise of Garo militants demanding a Greater Garoland (GGL) which further antagonised the Khasis who feel alarmed at the prospect of losing parts of the Garoinhabited Khasi Hills. Such animosity between Khasi and Garo tribes sporadically led to violence. In 2005, the reorganisation of the Meghalaya Board of School Education as per the demands of the KSU, led to the escalation of the usually subdued Khasi–Garo conflict. Various Garo organisations alleged this to be another instance of Khasi hegemony. During one such protest in Tura and Williamnagar on 30 September 2005, the police and paramilitary forces indiscriminately opened fire against students, killing four of them (including two minors) and injuring hundreds. This event, popularly known as ‘Bloody Friday’, cast doubts on the neutrality of state machineries, which were believed to favour the Khasis. This also led to the Garo Students’ Union articulating a demand for a separate Garoland. Scarcity and skewed development The spectre of unemployed youths haunts Meghalaya’s Garo Hills region – the worst site of underdevelopment and poverty in the state. With the decline of community-based agrarian economy and the absence

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of other employment opportunities, the uneducated and unemployable Garo youths join the insurgent bandwagon in order to make a living. The Garo Hills’ meagre infrastructure, scanty health and education facilities, and poor connectivity to the rest of Meghalaya accentuate the sense of relative deprivation of its inhabitants. Widespread administrative corruption in allocation of development funds, bureaucratic inertia, tend to escalate the severity of the situation. Unsurprisingly, the Garo Hills have become a fertile ground for insurgents, especially in the coal belt areas, where extortion activities provide a rich incentive to take up arms. Illegal mining has been rampant in Meghalaya, which is quite rich in minerals like coal, limestone, and uranium. Lack of governance has made it a common feature of the hills, which along with criminal extortion has emerged as the most sought after activity. The unregulated extractive activity not only leads to environment decay and population displacement but also aggravates ethnic and social unrest due to growing disparities. Armed insurgency Insurgent activities often linked to the ethnic mobilisation have posed a constant challenge to the peace and security in the state. The rise of the Achik Liberation Matgrik Army (ALMA) and the A’chick National Volunteer Council (ANVC) in the Garo Hills, and the Hynniewtrep National Liberation Council (HLNC) in the Khasi Hills reflected the growing scale of insurgency. While the insurgency in the Khasi Hills targeted the non-tribal populace, the insurgency in the Garo Hills had its roots in the economic instability of that backward region. The policy of blending coercive means with economic benefits helped to quell the HLNC-led insurgency in the Khasi Hills. However, it didn’t succeed in pacifying the insurgents in the Garo Hills.26 Once again this policy succeeded partially in the case of the ALMA, but it was not so successful in establishing a peace settlement in the case of the ANVC. The emergence and rise of the Garo Liberation National Army (GLNA) and of ANVC (B), a splinter faction of the ANVC, are evidence that the insurgency in the Garo Hills is not going to be over any time soon. Managing conflict Like elsewhere in the North-East, in Meghalaya too, the union government has the upper hand in managing and negotiating insurgency issues through the office of the Governor, Ministry of Development of North



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Eastern Region (DONER) or, the Home Ministry and its subsidiary agencies. The armed outfits also prefer to exclude the mediation of state government in peace negotiations. This at times compromises the position of state agencies and the ADCs which share greater responsibility in managing the day-to-day administration, and happen to be the first port of call for tactical operations in case of counter-insurgency. Similarly, there is a visible trend not to tap the potential of ADCs in negotiating civic space between tribal and non-tribal groups. This despite the fact that legislation, drafted by the ADCs, shape the current distribution scheme limiting the non-tribal sphere of access to both political and social spheres.27 However, some groups believe that the reallocation of central government funds to the Meghalaya state government, during the 1980s curtailed the influence of the ADCs.28 Maintaining historic roles in current socio-economic contexts poses a challenge for the traditional authorities whose sphere of influence on the local population is directly determined by the extent of state presence in areas under its jurisdiction. For instance, the political space manoeuvred by a Nokma, a traditional authority, might be larger in a remote location even if its resources are meagre. Overlapping powers between formal and informal layers further implies that local actors can take advantage of legal loopholes in government procedures to decide which institution will ‘govern’ their case. Traditional authorities continue to maintain their spheres of influence on the local population since specific local ‘procedures’ require prior approval from traditional authorities. Another traditional peacebuilding institution of the Garo tribe is the Laskar, or ‘judge’ elected by a group of villages. Traditionally the Laskar was the first contact point in the community to seek peace and justice, especially in relation to offences that did not fall under the Indian Penal Code. However the salience of the Laskar has been undermined through law and justice enforcement reforms. Yet another platform of peacebuilding has been the Christian church, including the United Churches Peace Forum, Shillong Khasi Jaintia Church Leaders’ Forum, and the Meghalaya Baptist Convention. Many of these forums have extensive networks that cut across the rest of the governance layers in the state, enabling communication channels among high-profile politicians, local businessman, and also the individuals in-hiding. The church played an important role in promoting negotiated settlements of the state-insurgency dispute. The Garo Baptist Church, for example, was instrumental in bringing the insurgents of both the ALMA and the ANVC to the negotiating table. During 2003, the Garo Baptist Church, along with the Mothers’ Union, another prominent civil society organisation, helped to bring peace to the Garo Hills at a

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difficult time. Even during the ethnic conflicts, the church frequently played a crucial role in efforts to maintain peace by providing channels of communication.29 Although the church played a major role in bringing the parties together for peace talks, religious services and counselling is not part of the official rehabilitation strategy.30 However, some local churches including the Garo Baptist Church do provide occasional service in the camps on special dates and the surrendered cadres are free to attend the service outside the camp. Meghalaya has also witnessed the emergence of so-called secular civil society organisations coming together around such concerns as human rights, gender equality, and inter-ethnic justice.31 However, such nonethnic associations face resistance from those who refuse to take public debate away from ethnic-oriented discourses. The hardliners question civil society’s right to exist on grounds that a non-tribal has no right to political agitations in tribal dominated spaces.32 Both the union and state governments have sought to mitigate conflicts in the hills of Meghalaya by promoting rapid growth and development through heavy doses of public investment. While many such cases never brought desirable results due to endemic corruption and lack of long-term perspectives. However, some of the projects that could claim a degree of sustainability include the Second Rural Tourism Resort Project at Chandigre, which showcased the lifestyle of the rural Garos within the rural setting to attract tourism while providing a means of generating income.33 Similarly, the financial assistance provided under the Integrated Basin Development and Livelihood Programme (IBDLP) led to a visible economic empowerment of women in the region. The functioning of the Enterprise Facilitation Centre (EFC) helped to increase people’s awareness of such schemes. Community policing is another innovative practice, which has increased the police force’s social responsibility by obliging its members to treat citizens with dignity and respect. Such community policing would also work towards providing medical facilities to people in the rural areas and integrating them into the mainstream through various training programmes and workshops. Specifically, the idea of social responsibility mandates police officers to act as facilitators for people in distress, particularly accident victims who urgently require transport to the nearest health centre. In addition, they are also required to escort health personnel to inaccessible areas, such as those where insurgents are active. The government has also launched some notable initiatives to mitigate the ethnic disaffection between tribal and non-tribal communities.



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One such step was the implementation of the 1971 Reservation Bill that granted reservation quotas for the three tribes of Meghalaya – the Khasis, the Garos, and the Jaintias. But due to the varied size of the quotas, the bill subsequently stirred up existing animosity between the Khasis and the Garos. However, this initiative subsequently became a bone of contention between Khasis and Garos, who continue to contest the size of their respective quotas. Another prominent governmental initiative has been the Land Transfer Act of 1971, which concerned ownership and transfer of land and prohibited the transfer of land to non-tribal entities. This Act undoubtedly helped to safeguard tribal interests against the misuse of land by non-tribals. It was later supported by the Benami Transaction (Protection) Act of 1980, which provided additional security to the tribal population by banning the transfer of land to a non-tribal entity through illegal means – that is, through use of the name of a tribal person as a proxy for the land transfer. The KSU has proposed the introduction of a three-tier system – involving separate ID cards for permanent residents, students, and professionals, and for tourists and migrant labourers. The state government of Meghalaya is yet to decide on these two influx-control mechanisms. One of the persistent grievances in Meghalaya related to the unregulated ways in which the region’s abundant mineral resources are being mined and utilised for the benefit of the rest of the country, without accruing benefits to the local people. The complaint also relate to the damaging impact of such unregulated mining on social and environmental milieux. However, the Meghalaya Mines and Minerals Policy, 2012 has tried to streamline the utilisation of mineral resources and mineral-based development, bearing in mind, protection of the environment, land, health and safety of the people in and around the mining areas, including tribals, the poor, women, and children. It also prescribes norms to generate revenue for socio-economic development, uplift the economy and on-mine and off-mine employment opportunities along with provisos of corporate social responsibility schemes, setting aside 3 per cent of their net profit of the previous year.34 The union and state governments have offered a range of rehabilitation schemes for the surrendered cadres. During rehabilitation, surrendered cadres (SCs) are provided with pocket money and vocational training, so that they can reintegrate into civic life.35 The performance and development of the ‘rehabilitated’ cadres is monitored and tracked for a period of up to ten years. Once rehabilitated, their citizenship right is completely restored. The most important profiles in the outfits (i.e., leaders, chairpersons, treasurers, or members of the politburo) do not

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go through the same rehabilitation schemes as the rest of the insurgents. They are allowed to go back into public life and start businesses (private or government contracts) with the funds allocated for their specific rehabilitation scheme.36 ANVC peace process The peace negotiation process with ANVC that resulted in the ceasefire agreement on 23 July 2004 was accorded greater importance as compared to the earlier ALMA peace process. The General Secretary of ANVC Wanding K. Marak along with five other members agreed on a ceasefire agreement with the government for a period of six months. Since then, the ceasefire has periodically been renewed. Most talks were related to development and the perceived inequalities between the Garos and the Khasis as beneficiaries of state services. Yet, the marginal participation of the state government37 underscored the fault lines of the federal balance between the union and state governments regarding peace and security issues. The government resisted the ANVC’s demand for the creation of a union government-funded Garo Autonomous Territorial Council that had stronger power and a role in implementing development schemes than the actual ADCs and its demand for ‘de-proscription’,38 prior to its surrendering of arms.39 The failure to insert the provisions of the Garo Autonomous Council in the peace agreement led to further acrimony and a split. In fact the Suspension of Operations agreement was signed between the state, central government, and the ANVC without reckoning that there was an armed group within the ANVC working independently.40 The fact that the new faction, known as ANVC (B), immediately looked for their own negotiation process with a separate truce agenda reinforces the idea of bargaining insurgencies.41 The postceasefire era thus witnessed a mushrooming of amorphous outfits such as the United Achik National Front (UANF), Liberation Achik Elite Force (LAEF), United Achik Liberation Front (UALF), Achik National Liberation Front (ANLF), Hajong United Liberation Army (HULA), the Retrieval Indigenous Unified Front (RIUF), and the Garo National Liberation Army (GLNA). While the GLNA was declared a ‘terrorist organisation’ on 1 February 2012, the union government has refrained from using its security forces in counter-insurgency operations in the state of Meghalaya.42 One of the failings of the ANVC peace process was that the poorly planned rehabilitation process could hardly discourage the SCs not to return to their insurgent activities. One possible weakness was



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the top-down and non-inclusive nature of the rehabilitation process, which entirely depended on official/military insight. The official rehabilitation process would not include any other stakeholder in planning or implementing the vocational training, counselling, or religious activities.43 Challenges, lessons learned One of the evident flaws in the Indian peacebuilding approach in Meghalaya or other places in the region has been the unwillingness to reckon with the nuances and varied patterns of ethnic assertion. There is an overwhelming trend to conflate the conflictual demands simply around the lack of integration, underdevelopment, or political autonomy. However, the assertions of local ethnic communities need to be seen on a wider template, which might include threats to their diverse cultures and identities emanating from other ethnicities as well as from the integrationist approach. Such identity-based anxieties of the indigenous populations easily absorb the real and perceived threats of being swamped and robbed by the outsiders. No wonder that the politicians in Meghalaya and the North-East as a whole found it easy to hype the spectre of illegal Bangladeshis in the region. Indeed the peacebuilding discourses need to factor in the complex continuum of identity formation and existentialist anxieties of indigenous communities. Meghalaya’s state architecture comprising varied levels of governance reveals many fault lines and incompatibilities. Most conspicuous is the lack of communication and coordination between agencies concerned with peacebuilding in the state. These fault lines constrict the political space for the negotiation and pre-empts the framing of longlasting commitments. The other obvious deficit of governance is its inability to see the prevalence of the insurgency in a continuum rather than intermittent episodes of uprising. The work culture and quotidian practices of the peace-building agencies leave a lot to be desired. While law enforcement mostly reveals cross-cultural sensitivity, the development agencies suffer from endemic corruption. The parochial electoral gains define the peace and development work as they do the course of agitation politics. The unmonitored pumping of funds into the region in the name of peace can also play a dangerous double in the ground conditions. Many contentious issues continue to haunt the so-called peacefulness in the state. The recipe of inter-ethnic reservations itself became a bone of contention between the Khasis and the Garos. The tension between the two communities usually remains dormant, but it does have the

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potential to escalate into something more violent, when given the proper trigger, such as demands or protests by one of the politically active student unions. Similarly, the aggravation caused by the influx of Bangladeshi immigrants has become increasingly contentious, and there is a common tendency to project all non-tribal people as illegal migrants. This in turn has led to an increasing exodus by members of the nontribal population. As a result, minority groups in the state continue to nurture security anxieties in their own hometowns amid sporadic episodes of insurgency. Efforts to curb insurgent activities in the Garo Hills have largely been unsuccessful owing to the region’s grim economic conditions and poor communication infrastructure, as well as the indifference of political leaders towards the people’s woes. It is often suggested that while the government employed serious measures to curb the HLNC insurgency in the Khasi Hills, a similar degree of earnestness has been lacking in the case of the Garo Hills. Politicians are often perceived as being hand in glove with the insurgents, sharing the spoils of the latter’s illegal activities. However, the lucrative extractive industry, a favourite site of extortion campaigns, has been a major source of funding for sustaining the armed conflict.44 Another vital concern for long-term peacebuilding in this region is how to deal with the displacement and loss of homes and livelihoods arising out of mega-development projects. For, such displacements, and income disparities between the contending ethnic groups, arising out of mining and dam projects tend to engender inter-ethnic acrimony and conflict as well as with the non-tribal population.45 Keeping both demography and development imperatives in mind, serious consideration should be given to new ideas, such as proposals for a three-tier system that would encourage outsiders to work in Meghalaya for stipulated short periods of time. Meghalaya needs to be better connected to the rest of India, both politically and otherwise, to alleviate its sense of alienation. Little has been done to address the contended monopoly of the Khasis within the administrative system, which has strained the relationship between the Khasis and the Garos. Better communication channels need to be built up between Meghalaya’s tribal and non-tribal populations, as well as between the Garos and the Khasis. Festive seasons provide good opportunities for improving the day-to-day relationships between the communities. National media should be more sensitised towards the conflict situation within the state. Awareness raising is required to enhance the capacity of the people to carry out their responsibilities as citizens, participate in democratic governance.



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Acting in concert with the government, civil society could play a critical role in this context. The fieldwork experience reveals a strong need to move away from short-term pacification achieved through monetary compensation, as it only adds to the growth of insurgent outfits. Instead, governance should follow a comprehensive approach towards rehabilitation and the reshaping of development schemes as part of the peacebuilding strategy. Greater emphasis to improve education and job opportunities in more backward areas could go a long way to mitigating social conflicts. Similarly, governance needs to maintain transparency in the allocation of welfare funds and make allowance for the social audit against nonimplementation of development projects and complaints of corruption. This would not only ensure that programmes are implemented, but also guarantee that the benefits of programmes reach those in need. The peacefulness of Meghalaya should not be taken for granted within policy circles. It is still fragile and may not endure in the long run. If generic issues of governance and development – such as providing basic facilities for the day-to-day life of the population – are not addressed in time, the seeming peace may give way to violent upheavals and new conflicts. Efforts to achieve peace through the appeasement of one or other political community or through the provision of economic incentives are unlikely to endure for any length of time. Such efforts cannot cater to the imperatives of rights, justice, and democracy for all the communities. The deficit of governance provides a ready-made recipe to undermine the peaceful avenues of Indian democracy. It is hard to convince suffering tribal people that real power flows from the ballot box and not from the bullet. Notes   1  For claims and counterclaims on the peacefulness in India’s ethos, see Upadhyaya, ‘Peace and conflict, reflections on Indian thinking’, 71–83.   2  Conceptualised subsequently as ‘structural violence’ by Johan Galtung, Weber, ‘Gandhi, deep ecology, peace research and Buddhist economics’, 349–61.   3  Gandhi’s belief in people’s power, inspired Gene Sharp to develop a range of non-violent trajectories (Gandhi as a Political Strategist).   4  Varshney, Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life.   5  Upadhyaya, ‘Communal peace in India’.   6  Sen, Argumentative Indian.   7  The universal franchise to all citizens was guaranteed in India much earlier than in many developed countries.   8  Mehta, ‘Do new democracies support democracy?’, 97–109.

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  9  Institutions of local self-government introduced initially through the Ripon Resolution of 1882 were augmented through the Montague–Chelmsford reforms of 1919 and the Government of India Act of 1935. 10  The three-tier system of the PRIs consist of Panchayat at village, block, and district level and ensure 50 per cent reservation for women since 2009. 11  Drawing on Sen’s ideas, Jon Barnett spells out ‘theory of peace as freedom’ focusing on the equitable distribution of economic opportunities, political freedoms, social opportunity, transparency guarantees, protective security, and freedom from direct violence (‘Peace and development’, 75–89); Sen, Development as Freedom. 12  Dash, ‘Meghalaya’. 13  The word Meghalaya denotes ‘Abode of Clouds’. 14  Meghalaya attained statehood on 21 January 1972, following concerted efforts by the combined tribal leadership of the Khasis, the Garos, and the Jaintias under the flagship of the APHLC party. 15  British colonial state sought to restrict outside influence in the North-East through the so-called ‘Sixth Schedule’ and the ‘Inner-line’ policy. 16  Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, and Tripura. 17  As in the case of NSCN (I-M) and United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA). 18  Upadhyaya et al., ‘Interrogating peace in Meghalaya’ and ‘Exploring sustainable peace in Meghalaya’. 19  Baruah, ‘Ethnic conflicts and traditional self-governing institutions’. 20  Shillong Times, ‘Chavan’s appeal for restoring amity’. 21  The demographics of the state have changed since then with the non-tribals now becoming minorities whose population percentile is declining by 2 per cent each year (interview with Manas Choudhuri, MLA, Mawprem, Shillong, 7 February 2012). 22  The protests led by KSU forced the government to stop the induction of the non-tribal college teachers. 23  Khasis found an elite status through their early access to Shillong-based missionary education and administrative system (Karlsson, Unruly Hills, 255). 24  The Bill specified quotas of 40 per cent for Khasis and Jaintias, 50 per cent for Garos, and 10 per cent for minorities in government jobs and educational institutions. 25  Bang, ‘Garo–Khasi tension’, 249–75. 26  Upadhyaya et al., ‘Exploring sustainable peace in Meghalaya’. 27  See Meghalaya Transfer Act of 1972 and the Meghalaya Benami Transaction Prohibition Bill. 28  Confidential source, Office of the Presidency of the Garo Student Union, Tura, Meghalaya. 29  Upadhyaya et al., ‘Exploring sustainable peace in Meghalaya’.



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30  Confidential source, Office of the Garo Baptist Convention Presidency, Tura, West Garo Hills, 8 February 2011. 31  Srikanth, ‘Prospects of liberal democracy in Meghalaya’, 3987–93. 32  Baruah, ‘Communities and democracy’, 29. 33  Upadhyaya, et al., ‘Interrogating peace in Meghalaya’. 34  Government of Meghalaya, Gazette of Meghalaya (Extraordinary), PART-IIA. 35  Confidential source, Indian Army personnel, Office of the Counterinsurgency Unit, interviewed during a seminar on conflict studies, Guwahati University, Guwahati, Assam, 2 February 2012. 36  Ibid. 37  Confidential Source, Office of the Garo Baptist Convention Presidency, Tura, West Garo Hills, 8 February 2011. 38  The union government extended the ban over the ANVC and the HNLC on 9 November 2006. 39  Dash, ‘Meghalaya’. 40  Shillong Times, ‘Statement of CM Mukul Sangma’, 3 April 2012, www .sentinelassam.com/meghalaya/story.php?sec=2&subsec=8&id =112645&dtP=2012-04-04&ppr=1; accessed 30 April 2012. 41  Baruah, ‘Communities and democracy’, 19. 42  The Hindu, ‘Statement of Home Minister P. Chidambaram’, 19 February 2012, www.thehindu.com/news/states/other-states/article2910141.ece; accessed 20 November 2014. 43  Ibid. 44  Samaddar, ‘Governance structures and the current history of peacebuilding in India’s Northeast’, 63; Upadhyaya et al., ‘Exploring sustainable peace in Meghalaya’, 9. 45  Bhaumik, ‘India’s Northeast’, 144–74.

References Bang, S. M., ‘The Garo–Khasi tension: Implications for the youth and women’, in Lazar Jeyaseelan (ed.), Conflict Mapping and Peace Processes in North East India (Guwahati: North Eastern Social Research Centre, 2008). Barnett, J., ‘Peace and development: Towards a new synthesis’, Journal of Peace Research, 45 (2008), 75–89. Baruah, A. K., Tribal Traditions and Crises of Governance in North East India, with Special Reference to Meghalaya, Working Paper No. 22 (Shillong: Crisis States Programme, Development Studies Institute, 2003). Baruah, A. K., ‘Ethnic conflicts and traditional self-governing institutions: A study of Laitumkhrah Dorbar’, LSE’s Crisis States Programme, 1:39 (2004), 1–19, http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/28226; accessed 12 November 2012.

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Index

AFSPA see Armed Forces Special Powers Act agency 1, 13, 34–5, 42, 47, 50, 58, 60, 61n.3, 67, 87–93, 95–7, 99, 101, 103–4, 107n.54, 111, 125, 133, 137, 142, 158, 167n.8, 167n.12, 170 Armed Forces Special Powers Act 33, 52 autonomy 1, 3–4, 33, 47–8, 51–5, 57–8, 62n.19, 62n.26–7, 64–6, 81, 88–9, 96–8, 104, 124, 157, 172–5, 183 Balkans 4, 16, 24, 48, 53, 168n.29, 170 BiH 20–1, 24, 26, 29–31, 33, 37–8, 41n.58, 43, 48, 51, 53–7, 59–60, 62n.32, 65, 89–90, 92, 95–7, 100, 102–3, 106n.44, 157–8, 168n.21 Bihar 4, 12, 14, 20, 25, 40n.44, 41n.43, 42, 45, 68–9, 72–4, 76, 80–1, 82n.9, 82n.24, 130, 154–5, 167n.16, 167n.20, 170 see also Bihar and Jharkhand Bihar and Jharkhand 68–9, 71–2 Bosnia 13, 20, 22, 31, 35, 39n.18– 19, 41n.72, 42–5, 53–4, 59, 62n.33, 63n.45, 65–7, 105n.8, 106n.44, 167n.49, 108–9, 111, 146n.43, 164, 168n.25–6, 168n.28, 168n.30–1, 168–71

Bosnia-Herzegovina 12–14, 20, 44, 47–8, 61, 62n.29, 65, 88–9, 157, 169–70 see also BiH civil society 10, 13, 15n.3, 19, 21, 29–30, 34–5, 37–8, 88–90, 93–5, 97, 101, 104n.1–3, 105n.18, 106n.27, 106n.29–30, 106n.44, 107n.54, 108–12, 164, 167n.12, 168n.27, 169–70, 172, 176, 179, 180, 185, 188 colonial 3, 9, 12, 14, 19, 40n.40, 50, 52, 94, 123, 133, 135–7, 139, 145n.18–19, 145n.21–3, 145n.30, 147–9, 177, 186n.15 conflict resolution 1–4, 9, 12, 14, 19–28, 30–8, 37–8, 38n.4, 39n.6, 47, 61, 65, 81, 94–5, 102, 106n.31, 108, 112, 127n.6, 128n.7, 129, 131, 133, 137–8, 144–5, 147–8, 150–1, 154–5, 157, 162–3, 165–6, 171, 172, 174 conflict transformation 20, 37, 101, 104n.3, 109, 150, 152, 168n.48, 169–70 containment 20, 38n.4, 52 Cyprus 13, 14, 20–1, 25, 29, 33, 35, 88–90, 92, 94–5, 97, 100–2, 106n.24, 106n.26, 106n.29, 106n.29, 106n.45, 107n.47–8,



Index 107n.68, 108n.74, 108–12, 159–60, 163, 168n.36, 168n.38, 171

Dayton Peace Agreement 44, 48, 54, 57, 67, 96, 100, 103, 106, 109, 157, 169–70 democracy 1–2, 6–7, 9, 11, 16n.17– 18, 16–19, 21, 23, 29, 34–5, 37, 41n.77, 41n.79, 44, 46–7, 64n.41, 65–6, 68, 76, 87, 90, 95, 106n.34, 106n.37, 108–9, 111, 127n.2, 128n.44, 129–30, 141, 146n.47, 147, 154, 156, 173, 185, 185n.8, 187n.31–2, 187n.41, 188 dialogue 5, 10–11, 17–18, 33, 45, 67, 89, 92–3, 95, 102, 143, 147, 149, 151, 173, 176 displacement 63n.48, 64, 178, 184, 188 ethnic 7, 10, 13, 19, 22–3, 31, 33, 36, 40n.29, 42, 48, 53–4, 56, 60, 63n.35, 63n48, 64–5, 90, 94–6, 98, 100, 102–3, 115, 128n.9, 130, 157–8, 164–5, 168n.26, 170, 173–5, 177–8, 180, 183–4, 185n.4, 186n.19, 187, 189 ethnicity 12, 14, 47–8, 51, 54, 57–8, 51, 103, 157–8, 164 everyday resistance 13–14, 98–9, 102, 150–5, 158–61, 163–4, 166–7 Foucault, M. 4, 6, 15n.1, 15n.3–4, 16n.5, 16n.7, 16n.9, 16–17, 38n.3, 44–5, 61n.3, 62n.16, 65, 67, 82n.10, 87, 98–9, 107n.52, 109, 139, 146n.33, 147 gender 7, 12, 47–8, 51, 57–60, 66, 91, 103, 107n.62, 111, 165, 180

191

Georgia 14, 20–1, 25, 29, 31, 33, 37, 41n.78, 120–1, 124, 126–7, 128n.45, 129–30 global governance 3, 15n.2, 17–18, 45, 130, 132, 144 good governance 38, 61, 63n.35, 128n.44, 130, 141, 173 governmentality 1–2, 6–8, 12, 17, 20, 26, 68–9, 71, 73, 75–7, 79, 81, 82n.10, 87, 96–7, 100, 136, 145n.17, 148 heterogeneity 11–13, 21, 61, 113, 173 human rights 5, 8–9, 21, 29, 33–4, 37–8, 65, 119–20, 122, 127, 128n.28, 129, 141, 146n.44, 147, 173, 180 hybrid 15n.2, 20, 22, 44, 113, 128n.35, 130, 137, 143–4, 146n.55, 149 Jammu and Kashmir 13, 20, 25, 29, 31, 33, 35, 88–9, 93, 94, 106n.22, 109, 174 Jharkhand 12, 25, 40n.43–4, 45, 69, 72–4, 76, 78, 81, 82n.9, 82n.18, 82n.24, 87, 103, 154–5, 167n.16, 167n.20, 170 see also Bihar and Jharkhand justice 2, 4–6, 10–14, 15n.2, 17–18, 32–3, 40n.44, 41n.73–4, 41n.83, 42–3, 48, 50, 56–7, 59–60, 79, 81n.1, 100, 111, 113–18, 120–2, 124–7, 151, 155, 172, 174, 177, 179, 180, 185 Kashmir 3–4, 22, 25, 29, 33, 41n.73, 92–4, 99, 105n.13–17, 107n.51, 107n.60, 107n.62, 107n.65, 109–12, 123, 125 see also Jammu and Kashmir

192

Index

liberal peace 1, 9–10, 14, 15n.1, 17–19, 21–2, 38, 47, 50–1, 61n.1, 67, 90, 105n.8, 111, 118, 128n.20–1, 130–1, 133, 145n.8, 148–51, 154, 162, 170 Maoist 4, 26, 39n.13, 40n.31, 40n.39, 44, 46, 74, 83n.30, 155 Naxal 13, 41n.67, 42, 70, 73–5, 77–8, 81, 82n.9, 83n.29–32, 83n.34, 84n.42, 84n.45, 155–6 Naxalite 25, 27, 123, 155–6 non-violence 10, 48, 154, 172–3 North-East 3, 12, 20, 22, 25–6, 29, 35, 47–8, 52, 55–7, 59, 61, 62n.20, 63n.35, 66, 125, 174–5, 178, 183, 186n.15, 188 pacification 3, 20, 22, 32, 47 Panchayati Raj Institutions 27–8, 34–5, 72, 76–8, 80–1, 82n.9, 84n.38, 84n.41–2, 85n.48, 85n.51, 86n.53, 86n.57, 123, 154–6, 174, 186n.10 peacebuilding 3–11, 14, 15n.1–2, 16, 18–20, 24, 36, 38n.2, 39n.14, 39n.25, 43–5, 47, 51, 67, 88, 90, 105n.7–8, 106n.44, 108n.71, 108, 110–11, 118, 128n.22, 128n.41, 130–5, 137–44, 145n.2, 146n.43, 147–9, 152, 154, 158, 162, 168n.29, 168n.45, 169–70, 172–5, 179, 183–5, 187n.44, 188 post-colonial 1–4, 6, 9, 11, 14, 15n.1, 90, 91, 107n.54, 111, 132–3, 135–7, 140–3, 146n.30, 147–8, 162, 167n.12, 170

post-conflict 5–7, 13, 15n.2, 17, 19, 24, 34, 37, 38, 89, 92, 104, 147 PRI see Panchayati Raj Institutions reconciliation 12, 42, 65, 89, 96, 102, 157, 162 resistance 12–14, 34–5, 38n.3, 44–5, 60, 66, 70, 89, 91–2, 96, 98–102, 104, 105n.12, 107n.54, 107n.58, 107n.62, 109, 111, 133, 136, 140, 142–4, 145n.9, 149–55, 158–67, 167n.2–3, 167n.12, 167n.13, 167n.18, 169–71, 180 security 2, 4, 6–7, 12–14, 15n.2, 16n.8, 16n.10, 16n.14, 16–19, 21–3, 25, 29–34, 36–8, 41n.57, 41n.66, 42–5, 50, 62n.29, 64–5, 69–75, 81, 81n.1, 90, 94, 98, 108–9, 111–14, 117–27, 128n.29, 128n.32, 128n.34, 128n.46, 129–31, 139, 144, 147–9, 157, 168n.52, 173, 178, 181–2, 184, 186n.11 sovereignty 3–4, 7–8, 25, 33, 37, 52, 69–70, 94, 127 statebuilding 4, 12–13, 16n.15, 18–22, 29–30, 32, 36–9, 67, 105n.7–8, 111, 113, 118, 122–3, 125, 130–1, 170 subjectivity 5, 61 technocratic 24, 30, 68, 135, 137–8 tribal 26–8, 35–6, 62n.25, 63n.35, 66–7, 73, 77, 79, 83n.28, 84n.39, 85n.50, 86n.56, 125, 174–81, 184–5, 186n.14