A Response to CRCs

For the better part of 2011, I have, due to much self-interest, bugged Roi Ben-Yehuda to write a piece for Unrest. Roi is a colleague and a fantastic writer who even when I firmly disagree with him, still manages to push the boundaries of my own assumptions about the meaning, purpose, and practice of conflict resolution. You can imagine my excitement then when Roi proposed publishing a piece he had co-written with Andrea Bartoli, world-renowned scholar, practitioner, and now Dean of The School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution. You can also imagine my, shall we call it surprise, when I read the following article on the creation and deployment of conflict resolution commandos (or CRCs). Were they serious? I felt like I had walked in on the middle of a joke and was about to make Unrest the butt of it by publishing a piece that sits uncomfortably between deadly seriousness and total absurdity.

I quickly started to calculate the volumes of email I would receive by publishing something that so obviously appeared as pro-Israeli propaganda. Those thoughts were just as quickly replaced with considerations of how best to extricate myself from this awkward situation with two people I highly respect and not publish the piece. Even if the proposal of a CRC is supposed to be read tongue in cheek, life in the post-Bush II era makes such material extremely difficult to distinguish between one person’s genuine policy proposal and another’s old-fashioned sarcasm. Additionally, I ran the risk of scarring Unrest with the mark of Cain for daring to gaze into the black box of international affairs and commit the act of printing something about the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.

It was during these ruminations that I realized how disciplined my own thinking had become to what was supposedly the appropriate attitude to have towards publishing anything related to Israel or Palestine. Instead of interrogating what the authors were actually proposing, the entire article by the fact of its very subject moved within the realm of what Pierre Bourdieu would describe as the universe of the undiscussed. My discomfort with the article had little to do with its content. Instead, it was more about the article’s threat to reveal the reflexive conditioning that demands those of us within university and academic settings behave a certain way toward the notion that there may be new, alternative and/or imaginative ways to reconsider the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. But the article also pointed to something beyond the narrow scope of the conflict it attempts to engage. While the piece is ground in the particular details of the 2010 Gaza Flotilla incident, it essentially serves to provoke a conversation about a much broader set of issues far beyond this specific context. In its bare form, Ben-Yehuda and Bartoli prod the complexities and challenges of the incorporation of conflict resolution within the state, specifically in relationship to the state military apparatus.

For those outside the field of peace and conflict studies, the very concept of CRCs might seem instantly absurd or outlandish. Images of Jeff Bridges character in the film adaptation of The Men Who Stare at Goats spring to mind: LSD-charged psychic super soldiers capable of disarming the enemy with the power of only their thoughts. While the United States’ attempts to develop this technology have yet to pan out or at least become public knowledge, there is without question extensive interest from military and police agencies about the potential of developing non-lethal and non-violent practices for dealing with spread of violence and terrorism. There are a significant number of students from the armed forces who study conflict resolution based on their experience in combat, counter-terrorism, or peace operations, and who see the practical applicability of conflict resolution theories and practices to their work. They recognize the limitations of sheer force and seem to have a genuine desire to influence and change the way their particular agency conducts its operations. Their sympathy certainly lies with aims of the state, but they do strive to find ways to achieve the goals of the state through less violent and ultimately less destructive means.

Ben-Yehuda and Bartoli use the idea of CRCs to take this infusion of the state and conflict resolution to the extreme. The interesting question is not what this means specifically in regard to the continued oppression Palestinians by the state of Israel, but how certain professions and techniques are used to enforce the universe of the unquestioned and undiscussed. The mistake we make in dismissing their article as only sympathetic to Israel, which it might very well be, is that we miss what it reveals about the direction of conflict resolution and peace operations. While CRCs might not comprise a full military unit, it is likely that someone within a unit will be trained in conflict de-escalation and resolution techniques, similar to the cultural knowledge of anthropologists deployed as part of human terrain teams in Afghanistan or psychologists partnered with interrogators at Gitmo. What we need to investigate is whether such parings actually work to resolve conflict by satisfying the needs of those involved and/or changing the structures that give rise to further outbreaks of violence.

I am grateful to Ben-Yehuda and Bartoli for the opportunity to generate further discussion about what is a sorely under-discussed issue amongst practitioners and scholars of peace and conflict. Over the past few years I have tried as both a contributor to and editor of Unrest to articulate what appears as fundamental contradictions between the interests of the state and the practice of conflict resolution. I remain deeply skeptical that placing the tools of conflict resolution further inside the defense apparatus of any militarized state, be it Israel or the United States, can help resolve the factors that generate structural and direct violence. I cannot help but interpret CRCs as Dispute Pacification Units. I default to agreement with John Burton’s slightly arrogant tirade that it is worth distinguishing between such terms as conflicts and disputes, because at the very least, such a distinction allows us to understand conflict as something far more complex than just a single explosion of violence or a confrontation between groups. CRCs could certainly be used to police disputes or as a preventive force (actions which should not be seen purely in the negative), but their work would be based in the execution of techniques that prevent violence, not in changing the conditions that lead to it. By their very location and origin within the state these agencies are unable to challenge its aims and are at best reformist efforts to make the state play a bit nicer with others. However, at present neither the United States nor Israel remotely posses the social capital necessary to make anyone believe that if dialogue failed they would hesitate to impose their military might. Conflict resolution at its very core is about changing structures that produce and reproduce violent conflict within the individual, within society and throughout the world. It is a mistake to assume conflict resolution as an equivalent, non-politicized synonym for the use of non-violent action by the state.

Regardless of my own skepticism about the state’s use of conflict resolution, Bartoli and Ben-Yehuda's suggestion should be celebrated. One should take the opportunity to read the work as an attempt to push the limits of the rather stale thinking dominating current debates within the field and policy circles that favor continued militarism and champion the use of predator drones as an alternative to war. In debating the impossible and the improbable we come to learn much about the boundaries of the real and possible, and more importantly, we illuminate the limitations and flaws that tend to cloud our own thinking about the world and the way it operates.