The Peaceworkers' Dilemma

In the summer of 2009 I published a book arguing that conflict resolution and peacebuilding practitioners needed to work alongside business, both local and multinational, to address contemporary violent conflict. What felt like a innovative approach at the time has rapidly been taken up by organizations and the amount of business-based peacebuilding has been increasing quickly – likely not directly attributable to my work, but longer trends in peace and development work. This can be seen in the work of groups like International Alert, collaborative organizations like UN Global Compact, and the growing literature on conflict-sensitive business practices. In spite of this, I have found myself apprehensive about the very cooperation I was encouraging, in a way that I was not able to fully explain until I spent a semester in a seminar working with Richard E. Rubenstein and joined the Unrest crowd.

My path into the field is neither the traditional undergraduate-Master’s-PhD line of the focused student, nor that of the international professional stopping by to round out their education. Instead, like many of the people involved with Unrest, I coupled my particular employment history (let me tell you another time why selling minivans to suburban families is the best preparation for mediation work) and reading – a lot of reading. From this reading and the influence of some good professors, I had already decided that the growing neoliberal consensus about how the world should be structured was insufficient for promoting positive peace, incorporating freedom from physical, structural and cultural violence. And yet, I wrote a thesis and then a book encouraging the expansion of multinational business operations in conflict zones.

While working on the project, I recognized this contradiction and eventually proposed a solution that was simply sufficient to let me finish the project. My idea was that the problem was not one of ethics, but of taxonomy. I divided the range of possible work on conflict along two axes, producing four quadrants. The first axis separates approaches that engage the world now from those that attempt to engage the world of the future. The second separates those approaches that include a normative drive toward the resolution of conflict from those that do not. The result is a simple chart:

Source: Sweetman, Derek. 2009. Business, Conflict Resolution and Peacebuilding: Contributions from the Private Sector to Address Violent Conflict. New York: Routledge. p16

While my tone was much more formal in the book, the argument basically came down to, “See, what I’m doing here is conflict resolution, which my chart proves has to address the here-and-now. I know there are long-term concerns, but set those aside for another day.” I’m not completely repudiating this approach, especially as a useful taxonomy of the field, but as a guide for ethical action, as I said above, it was only “good enough to let me finish the project,” not a real solution. I may have produced an interesting academic approach to the problem, but it is one that provides absolutely no guidance for how we should actually act when facing a world full of violence.

As we have been developing Unrest, we have talked about the kinds of questions that should be being asked. I feel that one of the most fundamental is this one – one I cannot answer to my own satisfaction. Recognizing that we need resources, exposure, and support to effectively affect change, and recognizing that the institutions able to provide those resources, exposure, and support are the same ones compromised by the critical perspective I find so persuasive, when and how can we ethically intervene? This may sound more like a classroom exercise than a practical consideration, but in the world people are dying. And for me, this is what makes the question both relevant and difficult to answer. I am unwilling to blindly support the continued development of a system that embeds structural and cultural violence over an expanding territory, but I am also unwilling to blindly follow this belief into inaction or counterproductive efforts in the light of documentable human suffering.

I have started thinking of this problem as “The Peaceworker’s Dilemma”:

Collaboration with institutions that promote structural and cultural violence can help stop direct violence, while avoiding such institutions or working against them could in the longer term improve conditions of structural or cultural violence, but would either result in an increase in suffering and direct violence in the short term or, at best, maintain its current levels.

I would love to say that the dilemma can be resolved through interactions between conflict resolution practitioners and the institutions of structural violence, that what we do and believe will just rub off on those around us and over time the situation will improve, but I do not think that history supports this conclusion. On the small scale, many practitioners can tell stories of parties who are transformed by their exposure to mediation or other collaborative forms, but even this is more likely to affect how such parties approach dispute resolution in the future than their participation in structures of violence. On a international scale, we have seen both an increase in the awareness and use of conflict resolution techniques coupled with growing inequality and other forms of structural oppression.

It is not simply enough to return to discussions of conflict transformation and peacebuilding that claim to strive for fundamental changes in relationships and structures. The situations in which these true transformations are possible are those that avoid the Peaceworkers’ Dilemma entirely. Is these cases, the dilemma is resolved by only focusing on the cases where it is not relevant. This is not a moral option in the face of death and misery. The dilemma arises now, when we are faced with true suffering.

It would be helpful if we could easily weigh the benefits of immediate resolution against the long-term perpetuation of structures of violence, but no easy utilitarian calculation is possible. We cannot have the benefit of hindsight and all large scale conflict resolution efforts operate in a shroud of ignorance about true conditions and true possibilities.

The Peaceworkers’ dilemma would not be much of a dilemma if it was not difficult to resolve, however. I expect that each participant in conflict resolution practice and research has already come to a tacit decision on this issue, although it may not be one that could bear much critical reflection.

By joining the field of conflict analysis and resolution I, too, have tacitly privileged the prevention of the immediate loss of live over the possibility of long-term reform or revolution. I did not do so with a conscious decision, but in the end I have settled on a personal ethics that is close to that presented by Johan Galtung in his essay Peace and Conflict Research in the Age of Cholera: Ten Pointers to the Future of Peace Studies [1]:

I would not dispute the right of everybody to act out of compassion, according to their best knowledge, to reduce suffering and enhance life. But human beings are imperfect, and so is our compassion, and so is our knowledge. This principle of human fallibility should, in my view, lead us to draw one consequence: act so that the consequences of your action are reversible. Prefer the action that can be undone. Proceed carefully, you may be wrong.

Death is the ultimate unreversible outcome, so I feel justified in collaborating with institutions that may extend structural violence. But in the end, is this just another rationalization, like the original taxonomy above? Quite possibly.

Ultimately, I do not think there could be a single, categorical ethical guideline that resolves the Peaceworkers’ Dilemma. Our field is made up of layers of gray and few, if any, decisions we make in practice can be stated in black and white terms. Additionally, it is constituted from a very diverse group of researchers and practitioners, both culturally and ideologically. What we must do, as our field continues to develop, is to look for ways to bridge the personal and the structural so that our work can promote peace on both fronts.

Notes:

[1] Galtung, Johan. 1996. Peace and Conflict Research in the Age of Cholera: Ten Pointers to the Future of Peace Studies. International Journal of Peace Studies 1(1). http://www.gmu.edu/programs/icar/ijps/vol1_1/Galtung.htm