This is a summary of all lectures, articles and workgroups of the course Introduction to Conflict Analysis. All the main lines are taken from the articles. The articles contained here are from: Demmers, Cramer, Mitchell, Brown, Ramsbotham, Collier, Kalyvas, Demmers (Identity groups), Baumann, Mason...
Aims of this article:
1. It brings together a diverse range of theoretical frameworks that try to explain and understand how
and why (groups of) people resort to violent action against other (groups of) combatants, civilians,
organizations or the state
2. It addresses the idea of multidisciplinary. Conflict Studies is a field of study, not a discipline. The
view is widely held that violent conflict is a complex social phenomenon that can only be understood
and explained from a multidisciplinary approach.
3. To carry out conflict analysis in a reflexive and critical way. It suggests placing ‘conflict analysis in
context’ and trying to understand how and why certain interpretations of conflict have come to
dominate others.
The interpretation of conflict: trends and frames
- The difference between ‘conflict’ and ‘war’ is determined by the casualty threshold: as soon as the
number of annual battle-related deaths reaches the threshold of 1000, the conflict is defined as ‘war’.
- Data sets such as the UCDP show a global shift from inter-state conflict to intra-state conflict in the
post-World War II era, with a peak in the early 1990s.
- The heightened policy attention for intra-state violent conflict, and the desire to contain this type of
conflict intertwined with a boom in academic research and training centres.
- The analytical vocabulary of ‘assemblage analytics’ allows us to approach the ‘conflict field’ as a
governing practice that is mobilized through particular threat representations, knowledge practices
and strategies of intervention.
- The mainstream view on intra state violent conflict in the post-Cold war era is that it can be
characterized as excessively cruel with an emphasis on breakdown, insecurity and criminality. It is
important not to take these representational trends for granted but to situate them in (geo) political
contexts of power.
Defining the field
Conflict
Any conflict consists of three component parts: goal incompatibility, attitudes and behaviour.
1. Incompatibility:
o Actors or parties think that the realization of one or more of their objectives is blocked by the
other party’s attempt to reach its own respective goal.
o The incompatibility is seen as the starting point from which a conflict becomes manifest and each
of the three elements begins to interact.
o Goals are defined as consciously desired future outcomes, conditions or end states, which often
have intrinsic values for members of particular parties.
2. Conflict attitudes
o Those psychological states (both common attitudes, emotions, as well as patterns of perception
and misperception) that accompany and arise from involvement in a situation of conflict.
o There is a difference between emotional orientations (feelings of anger, distrust, resentment,
scorn, fear, envy or suspicion of the intention of others) and cognitive processes (such as
stereotyping or tunnel vision).
3. Behavior.
o Behavior consists of actions undertaken by one party in any situation of conflict aimed as the
opposing party with the intention of making that opponent abandon or modify its goals.
The triangle model highlights conflict as a dynamic process in which incompatibilities, attitudes and behaviour
are constantly changing and influencing each other. Different research traditions emphasize different
components of conflict. Although generally recognizing the transformative capacity of conflict, analysts place
the source of conflict at different corners of the triangle.
Violence in conflict
Conflict behavior includes all actions undertaken by one conflict party aimed at the opposing party with the
intention of making that adversary abandon or modify its goals.
> In everyday representations, violence is often conceptualized as a degree of conflict: as something that
occurs automatically when conflict reaches a certain ‘temperature’.
> In contrast, most authors argue that violence is a form of conflict: ‘Violence is not a quantitative degree of
conflict but a qualitative form of conflict, with its own dynamics’
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,Whereas aggression derives from the ‘motivation to harm the other as an end in itself’. Violence is also always
communicative: it aims to send a message to an audience. ‘Violent acts are efficient because of their staging
of power and legitimacy, probably even more so than due to their physical results’. In many ways, the violent
strategy of the ‘terrorist attack’ is distinguished from other routines in the way it is designed to be visible.
Particularly in the contemporary 24/7 news cycle, the violent act is efficient above all if it is screened.
Definitional boundaries
The ‘new wars’ are seen to differ from inter-state or conventional conflict in a number of ways:
1. They do not have precise beginnings and endings.
2. The ‘new wars’ are protracted
o they typically last for decades, during which episodes of fierce fighting alternate with times of
relative peace. Often the war/peace boundary is blurry.
3. There are differences in modes of warfare.
o The new type of war is fought by loosely knit groups of ‘regulars’ and ‘irregulars’: soldiers,
rebels and civilians, local warlords, cadres and paramilitaries, and not by two (or more)
conventional clear-cut national armies.
4. External interference with local wars typically comes from overseas diaspora, international military
interventions, private security firms, military-to-military (M2M) programs, lobby groups or foreign
mercenaries.
o Local war economies are not funded by taxation by the state but sustained by global
networks of trade, outside emergency assistance and the parallel economy.
5. New wars are deterritorialized
o Involving globally dispersed networks of actors and organizations (or ‘cells’). Strategic decisions
can be made and instantly communicated across the globe.
6. Organizations claiming to represent identity groups that are at the core of contemporary violent
conflicts.
From the above list, two definitions are broadly applied: internal violent conflict and civil war. Internal violent
conflict is the more general. Definitions emphasize the internality of the conflict to the territory of a
sovereign state and the participation of the government as combatant and often include a requirement that
the conflict exceeds a certain threshold of deaths.
Small and Singer define civil war as any armed conflict that involves
(a) military action internal to the metro pole
(b) the active participation of the national government
(c) effective resistance by both sides
Civil war
No definition comes without its hazards, and the categorization of contemporary violent conflict as civil war,
or ‘internal’, is criticized for a number of reasons.
1. Both terms tend to obscure the international element in conflict. Many of the origins of conflict stem
from the conditions of dramatic social change related to postcolonialism, Cold War military
involvement, spill-over effects from neighboring wars, the War on Terror and their integration into the
global neoliberal market.
2. Another critique pertains to the criterion of ‘government involvement’. Large-scale violence not
directly involving the state is set apart as analytically different from civil wars. But the distinction
between civil war and communal violence may fade in some zones of conflict.
3. A final sense in which the category of civil war is analytically fragile concerns the distinction between
criminal and political violence.
Conflict analysis
The task of conflict analysis is to unravel the complex dynamics of interactive processes in order to explain
and/or understand how and why people resort to violence. Social research involves a dialogue between theory
(ideas) and evidence (data). Theories help to make sense of evidence, and researchers use evidence to extend,
revise and test theories.
Mapping a conflict
By ‘mapping’ a conflict, you visually (on a flip chart, blackboard) break a conflict into its key component parts.
Conflict mapping is used in many different ways. It also shows how (1) a conflict mostly consists of a cluster of
conflicts and (2) conflicts involve different ‘levels of analysis’. Conflict analysis is not just an exercise in the
organization of evidence, it is also about ‘explaining’ or ‘making sense’ of particular phenomena.
2
,Abstract knowledge about social life is called social theory. In Ragin’s words, ‘social theory is an attempt to
specify as clearly as possible a set of ideas that pertain to a particular phenomenon or set of phenomena’
Theories of conflict form an important resource and guidance in grasping the complexities of war. Roughly,
theories are informed by different underlying claims on ‘being’ (ontology) and ‘knowing’ (epistemology).
Ontological and epistemological stances
Ontology is the study of being, and concerned with questions such as ‘who/what are we?’ or ‘what moves us?’
Epistemology refers to theories of knowing; it relates to ideas about how we can know the (social) world.
Underlying the ‘how and why of violent conflict’ are ideas on what drives humans into action supported by
ideas on knowing: on how do we know what we claim to know about conflict?
In the end, the many different theoretical traditions of violent conflict are all simply variations on two sets of
ontological and epistemological themes: ‘structuralism’ and ‘individualism’ as ontological stances, and
‘explanation’ or ‘understanding’ as epistemological stances.
The first divide is that of ontology: theories are informed by two different claims on what primarily moves
people. There is a fundamental ontological divide in the social sciences between approaches that attempt to
account for human action by reference to movement in an encompassing social structure (structuralism) and
approaches that take the actions of individuals to be the stuff of history and that regard structures as the
outcome of previous actions (individualism). Conflict is understood as deriving from tensions and contradictions
inherent to the ways social systems are structured.
Table 0.1 The Hollis matrix (based on Hollis 1994, The Philosophy of Social Science)
Structuralism
Social structures are systems (like Social structures are sets of meaning
clocks, planets, bodies, beehives) rules (‘games’) telling people how ‘to
external and prior to actions and do’ social life (language, religion,
determining them fully. economy). Actors are role/rule
followers.
Individualism
Actors are self-contained units and the Actors are embedded in society but
source of action (act have agency, they can act, initiate
upon individual laws of utility change, they have room for reflexive
maximization, natural preferences, self-direction.
psychological laws).
Article Cramer: categories, trends and evidence of violent conflict
In this chapter the concern is chiefly with violent conflict as a common source of the insecurity of nations and
individuals.
In the contrast between the idea of the end of history or a successful post-cold war peace and that of a deadly
peace or an enduring insecurity, there are clearly questions of what evidence different interpretations draw on
as well as how they interpret that evidence. While interstate wars overall declined in numbers, the incidence
of internal wars increased. The world has not produced more and more civil wars, rather there has been a
mounting in-tray of unfinished wars. States in the international system have been subject to a more or less
constant risk of violent civil conflict over the period (after the Cold War) but the conflict they suffer have been
difficult to end.
Classifying is a compulsion of the curious. Without categorical distinctions and grouping the things people try to
understand are typically too diverse to resolve into any clear patterns. The higher the degree of variation
among related things, the greater the need for more sophisticated system of classifications.
> The most straightforward implication is that classification systems are generally determined by some purpose
– they are not ‘natural’ and they should always be questioned. Where the events or phenomena being
organized are largely continuous, inventing or choosing categories involves fixing an artificial border around
one group of events. Just as the imposition of borders is at the heart of much social and political conflict, so
3
,analytical borders are at the heart of much debate in the social and other sciences. This is very much the case
in violent conflict.
One of the most basic challenges is to decide which conflicts to include in a set of observations of violent
conflict and which to exclude. One source of variation between datasets on violent conflict is the choice of a
‘threshold’ which then determines whether or not a given episode is to be judged as a war. The number of
‘battle-related deaths; in a conflict usually sets the threshold. The choice of where to set the threshold of
deaths is arbitrary – it is a rough aid in conveying some idea of the scale or seriousness of an event.
An annual threshold fails to capture the intensity of a given civil war: it does not show whether the given
number of battle deaths was minuscule or substantial proportion of the total population.
> In other words, there is a case for a different classification system ruled by relative criteria rather than just
absolute casualty numbers. There is a question of whether relevant casualties are only ‘direct’ civilian deaths
or whether it is appropriate to include ‘indirect’ conflict related deaths. (famine is the most obvious example)
The border of the category of civil wars is fenced with criteria
1. Such conflicts must involve fighting between agents of or claimants to a state and organized non-state
groups from within the same country but seeking to replace the government, to secure power in a
region or even secession from the country, or to change government policy
2. To be classed as a civil war a conflict of this type must produce enough deaths to cross the casualty
threshold
3. At least 100 of these battle deaths must be on the government side. The point of this last control post
is to exclude state-led massacres where there is no organized or effect rebel opposition.
Boundaries between intra- and interstate wars
The level of development is rather important. It is often assumed that wars take place in the poorest
countries. When the poor have little alternative, there is little to be lost in fighting (greed theory).
> However, clearly there is violent conflict in countries that are not the poorest, in middle income countries.
Even in these instances violent conflict might not occur only where there is a lack of development, or a period
of extended economic stagnation, but precisely in the thick of change, economic growth, development and
social upheaval.
Those who have been drawn to the view that modern wars are more and more like non-war violence have
coined a categorical distinction between ‘new wars’ and ‘old wars’. Kaldor highlight several features of these
new wars said to be distinct from old wars in their mode of warfare, in their causes and their financing. The
changes in warfare are associated with ‘globalization’. But the most distinctive feature of so-called new wars is
often said to be that they are apolitical. Warlords of the new wars regarded as lacking any political
programme: they are simply scaled up organized criminals, they do not need to win hearts and minds of local
populations but rather prey upon them, to sustain their warfare and accumulate wealth. Now war targets
civilians as much as it targets military personnel. Yet the way war is fought does change, the technology of
war changes. Commodity markets have come to play a more significant role in the conduct and scale of wars.
The conflict is often dominated by the characteristics of production and marketing of a given commodity.
Proponents of the new wars thesis, in dramatizing the criminality and apolitical dimensions of contemporary
wars, tend to romantics ‘old wars’. Many of these news wars contain traces of what are presumably the
characteristics of old wars; direct support from other governments to either the government or rebel forces;
general foreign development aid, whose obvious fungibility allows governments to pursue military activities in
their own or in other countries and so on.
Evidence of violence
There are two main ways in which data on violence are accumulated: official records and news reports.
There are often problems with the official recording of violence, especially but not only in wartime. In
wartime health information systems and civil registration systems that would record deaths and their
causes often break down.
There are also problems in comparing data on violence across countries – again partly because
different countries may have more or less, accurate and full reporting systems or even cultures and
incentives of reporting.
o Between countries there are differences in definitions of particular crimes, variations in
levels of reporting and traditions of policing and variations in the accessibility of the police.
4
, Conclusions
It is more useful to begin by thinking in terms of a spectrum of violence; a continuum along which events easily
shade into one another and the grand categories mark rather artificial breaks. A critical reflection on
classification systems is in the need to encourage new and more refines ones.
A basis approach would arrange episodes of violent conflict that may be related to development, along a
spectrum of scale. Three other examples highlight ways of thinking about a continuum of violence:
Lecture 1 – Introduction
Field of Conflict studies
Conflict studies is a Field of Studies, not a discipline
Multidisciplinary approach to Conflict Analysis
Main question: Why do groups of people resort to violent conflict?
Conflict Triangle – Mitchell
Contradiction
/ /
Attitude __________ Behaviour
Violent Conflict
The field of Conflict Studies addresses how different research traditions explain and understand the
occurrence of violence in situations of conflict. Our focus is on violence in conflict, not on conflict as
such.
Violence is not a quantitative degree of conflict but a qualitative form of conflict, with is own
dynamics.
Civil War
What are the characteristics of a civil war?
Within a nation state, within a territory of a sovereign state
Government and non-state actor as combatants
Battle death exceed a particular threshold (+/- 1000 deaths per year)
Conflict are complex
Coleman: intractable conflict is a complex web of latent and manifest issues that are difficult to
analyse and understand, and respond to.
Ramsbotham: most conflicts are hybrid conflicts that spill across international state and societal levels
- makes them difficult to resolve.
Conflict Analysis
Analysis: the mental process of breaking a phenomenon into its constituent parts and viewing these
parts in relationship to some whole (Ragin)
Conflict Analysis: unravel the complex dynamics of interactive processes in order to understand how
and why groups of people resort to violence (Demmers)
What is conflict mapping?
Snapshot of a violent conflict: A method of presenting a structured analysis of a particular conflict at
a particular time.
Different forms:
o Written maps: actors, factors, processes
o Graphic
Bellingcat > found out who was responsible for bringing the MH17 down
Lectures / Courses literature
Theories (analytical models) that help us to organise/structure evidence on violent conflict
Theories that help us to explain/understand violent conflict
Theory
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