Post-Conflict Peace-building: Meeting Human Needs for Justice and Reconciliation
Peace agreements … do not in themselves end wars or bring about lasting peace. In most cases, prewar continuities and the war mentality jeopardize the prospects of a consolidated peace and postwar reconciliation.
By Michael Mading Akueth, Juba, South Sudan
November 30, 2015 (SSB) — The warring parties and other active stakeholders in South Sudan conflict should understand the realities of peace paradigms. The ending of overt violence through a peace agreement does not mean the achievement of peace. Rather, the ending of violence or a so-called ‘post-conflict’ situation provides “a new set of opportunities that can be grasped or thrown away” by the parties.
The international community can play a significant role in either nurturing or undermining this fragile peace-building process depending on their interests. The United Nations, individual states and international non- government organizations (INGOs) have become increasingly involved in trying to rebuild peaceful societies in the aftermath of violent conflict.
We must know this too well; that interests drive these groups of international institutions to become tireless engaged in looking for peace for the Republic of South Sudan. Therefore, the citizens of South Sudan cannot just sit and leave their destiny being decided by these organizations. They can evacuate their personnel if the conflict overweighs the benefits.
The dilemmas currently being faced in Iraq are only the latest in a line of learning experiences in this complex task of post-conflict peace-building. The South Sudanese stakeholders who had directly involved in the peace negotiation in Addis Ababa must understand these dilemmas.
In Namibia and Cambodia, for the first time, the UN launched expanded peacekeeping operations, which included not only military security but also the coordination of elections. In East Timor, the UN mandate broadened even further to include the establishment of a functioning government and society through comprehensive development, law and order, security and governance objectives.
In this article I argue that both justice and reconciliation are fundamentally significant goals that need to be addressed in the design of successful post-conflict peace-building processes and mechanisms, especially in the aftermath of civil war like what we have experienced in South Sudan. This argument is based on Burton’s human needs theory of conflict resolution, Lederach’s theories on conflict transformation, and Volkan and Montville’s theories of the need to overcome enmities through acknowledgement of chosen traumas and developing shared histories and empathy with the other.
These theories suggest the importance of reconciliation as a means to conflict resolution and transformation. My argument is supported by the results of my field research in Jonglei State, South Sudan and preliminary analysis of experiences in humanitarian works. The communities are willingly to forgive each other but with some compensation incentives to rebuild their lives.
Peace-building is difficult to define and even more difficult to achieve in practice. I define post-conflict peace-building as “strategies designed to promote a secure and stable lasting peace in which the basic human needs of the population are met and violent conflicts do not recur”. This definition takes a long-term focus and incorporates the goals of both negative peace (absence of physical violence) and positive peace (absence of structural violence), a distinction first outlined by Galtung.
My analysis is also informed by the more comprehensive and normative definition of peace-building provided by Spence: those activities and processes that: focus on the root causes of the conflict, rather than just the effects; support the rebuilding and rehabilitation of all sectors of the war-torn society; encourage and support interaction between all sectors of society in order to repair damaged relations and start the process of restoring dignity and trust; recognize the specifics of each post conflict situation; encourage and support the participation of indigenous resources in the design, implementation and sustainment of activities and processes; and promote processes that will endure after the initial emergency recovery phase has passed.
These definitions assume that, to be successful, post-conflict peace-building must address the underlying causes of conflict in addition to the surface manifestations such as the military culture and proliferation of weapons. In lieu of these peace-building activities the country may at some point slide back to conflict again. These can be avoided if the stakeholders put sustainable strategies into action to strengthen peace-building programs.
This focus on satisfying human needs is derived from the conflict resolution theories of John Burton. According to Spence, “the process of peace-building calls for new attitudes and practices: ones that are flexible, consultative and collaborative and that operate from a contextual understanding of the root causes of conflict”.
In the Republic of South Sudan, We the people should learnt from our failures that had contributed to this conflict and avoid them in the post-conflict era. It must go down in our conscious that we all South Sudanese and this country must accommodate all of us.
We should embrace the flexible, consultative and collaborative attitudes in order for us to take this country forward otherwise we may fall back into other serious conflict in 2018 during elections.
The peace-building approach should be transformative: it should be based on terminating something undesired (violence) and the building of something desired through the transformation of relationships and construction of the conditions for peace. It is consistent with the perspective enunciated by Ryan that the task of peace-building “involves a switch of focus away from the warriors, with whom peace-keepers are mainly concerned, to the attitudes and socio-economic circumstances of ordinary people. So whereas peace- keeping is about building barriers between the warriors, peace-building tries to build bridges between the ordinary people.
In this transitional period the stakeholders should focus on the peace-building activities to avoid recurrence of violence during or after elections. Government and international partners cannot do this work alone; it needs the involvement of citizens both from the rural and urban. They should forgive, reconciled and rebuild their relationships with each other so that trust can be regain.
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