Conflict Prevention and Peace in Peril - The Futile Nature of Africa’s wars
By GERRIE SWART (1)
Horn of Africa enemies Ethiopia and Eritrea may return to war over their disputed border in a matter of weeks if there is no major international effort to prevent the outbreak of a potentially devastating regional conflict, an influential think tank warned at the start of November 2007. A 1998 to 2000 war on the boundary killed 70,000 people and brought untold hardship to two of the world's poorest nations. Now analysts are warning of a repeat as troops build up ahead of a deadline at the end of November by an independent boundary commission for Ethiopia and Eritrea to mark out their border.
"The risk that Ethiopia and Eritrea will resume their war in the next several weeks is very real," the International Crisis Group (ICG) warned in a report on the growing crisis. "A military build-up along the common border over the past few months has reached alarming proportions. There will be no easy military solution if hostilities restart - more likely is a protracted conflict on Eritrean soil, progressive destabilisation of Ethiopia and a dramatic humanitarian crisis."
The threat of yet another potentially devastating conflict in Africa comes as no surprise, as the continent has been beset by violence for many decades now. Yet what is of greater concern is the relative inability to address and to effectively prevent the outbreak of conflict in Africa. In this respect reflections on the actual success of peace agreements in Africa, that are painstakingly negotiated in order to provide for tangible and visible progress towards sustainable peace has proven rather disappointing and provides ominous warning signs to those tasked with the prevention of conflict.
While a genuine wave of optimism has swept across the entire continent that peace processes in Africa were yielding some positive results, regrettably it appears as if much more has to be done in order to provide for a sobering reflection and evaluation of peace agreements in Africa and whether they actually are succeeding in restoring peace and security to the African continent. The threat of yet another conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea and other conflict situations scattered across the rest of Africa that threaten to reignite yet again, point to the urgent need to pay greater attention to the very nature of the peace agreement in Africa.
PEACE AGREEMENTS IN AFRICA - PEACE OR AGREEMENT
Conflict Prevention has been cited as one of the major objectives in guarding peace on the African continent. The reality has however been rather sobering, with successful conflict prevention proving more elusive. Research undertaken over the period 1945 to 1993 suggests that about half of all peace agreements fail in the first five years after they have been signed.(2)
Conflict prevention has remained underdeveloped, undervalued and to an extent elusive in practice. Many seemingly avoidable intrastate and interstate conflicts in recent years have inspired only token international efforts at prevention. The key characteristics of contemporary warfare in Africa reveal a profound disjuncture between traditional security analyses and the kind of approaches that are needed for excavating the root causes of Africa’s wars.
Orthodox analyses of Africa’s wars have only been capable of providing limited understandings of their causes and characteristics.(3) The failure of effective conflict analysis has too often resulted in remedial bankruptcy: misconceiving the deeper causes of Africa’s wars, practitioners have repeatedly applied unsuitable or ultimately damaging solutions to conflict settlements. The conceptual failure of conflict analysis has presaged the normative failure of conflict resolution. The true nature of Africa’s wars suggests that conflict management has become wholly insufficient as a durable solution to endemic violence. What therefore is required is the prioritisation of preventive and transformative approaches to conflict resolution.
An essential lesson that has yet to be learnt and applied with greater diplomatic fervour is that the process of reaching an agreement is often more important than the agreement itself. The debate is marked by a growing sense of pessimism about the ability of external third parties not only to influence the process of negotiation but also to assist with the implementation of a settlement once a peace agreement is reached. Many analysts accept the argument that implacable “ancient hatreds” fuel these civil conflicts and believe that coercive or non-coercive interventions by external actors to end violent conflict are likely to be marginal at best and counterproductive at worst.
A further major problem encountered is that of so-called ‘spoilers’ who could potentially derail peace agreements, even in those instances and circumstances where an agreement received critical backing and support by the majority of the parties. Spoilers exist only when there is a peace process to undermine, that is, after at least two warring parties have committed themselves publicly to a pact or have signed a comprehensive peace agreement. Peace creates spoilers because it is rare in civil wars for all leaders and factions to see peace as beneficial. This could also directly be related to conflict attitudes. Even if all parties come to value peace, they rarely do so simultaneously, and they often strongly disagree over the terms of an acceptable peace. Spoilers who have signed peace agreements for tactical reasons have an incentive to keep their threat hidden and thus minimise the amount of violence they use; they want the peace process to continue as long as it promises to advantage them against their adversary. Spoilers operating from within a peace process need to comply enough to convince others of their perceived goodwill, but not so much that it weakens their offensive military capability.
Another analysis posits that parties are solely motivated by insecurity and only seek party survival. According to this view, the only reason for parties in civil wars to fight is their fear that if they make peace and disarm, then their adversary will take advantage and eliminate them. The lack of an overarching authority that can enforce a political settlement in civil war means that warring parties cannot credibly commit to making peace, either in the short term (through disarmament) or in the long term (through a Constitution). Thus any party who violates or opposes a peace agreement does so, primarily out of fear.
Empirically wars often do not end when peace accords are signed. In fact, the process of ending conflict in a negotiated settlement often continues long after agreements are signed.
The way negotiations are carried out is almost as important as what is negotiated. The choreography of how one enters negotiations, what is settled first and in what manner is inseparable from the substance of the issues.
While all conflict settlements require the mutual agreement of both sides, in some instances that agreement arises out of duress or is compelled on one side by the other. As a result, either the settlement does not directly address the political issues in dispute or the settlement decides these issues at the expense of the weaker side. While such agreements may settle the conflict, they are unlikely to resolve it as they have not eliminated, and in fact may have exacerbated, the underlying issues in dispute. Since grievances remain, such exploitative or incomplete agreements provide a permissive condition for the resumption of hostilities.
Regrettably much sentiment, value and importance has been attached at the process of arriving at paper peace agreements as quickly as possible, while overlooking the need to engender a true sense of trust, acceptance and cooperation amongst disparate adversaries engaged in conflict.
It is often the nature of the experiences gained by the rivals in relation to one another, rather than the duration of rivalry per se, that influences the prospects for mediation success. Rivalry policies are not easy to change either. In general, conflict tends to beget conflict. Repeated conflicts between rivals, particularly those that involve significant numbers of fatalities, are likely to engender considerable hostility toward the adversary amongst the general population.
Peace implementation, or the process by which warring parties implement and comply with their written commitments to peace, is often the most difficult phase in the resolution of armed conflicts. In Africa this critical phase has far too often provided justification for the continuation of conflict in defiance of peace. Therefore the architects of peace agreements will ultimately have to pay greater attention not only to the substance of a peace proposal, but to the very nature of the peace agreement that is required to foster genuine and sustainable peace in Africa.
(1) Gerrie Swart is Head Researcher: Conflict & Terrorism Unit. He is also a lecturer in the Department of Political Sciences, University of South Africa, and a Research Associate with the Centre for International Political Studies, University of Pretoria (gerrie.swart@consultancyafrica.com).
(2) Licklider, R, 1995, The Consequences of Negotiated Settlements in Civil Wars 1945-1993 in American Political Science Review, Volume 89, Number 3, September, 1995, pp. 681-690.
(3) Jackson, R, 2006, Africa’s wars: overview, causes and the challenges of conflict transformation, Ending Africa’s Wars: progressing to peace, edited by Oliver Furley and Roy May.
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