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Summary Introduction to Conflics Studies Readings Final Exam
- Instelling
- Universiteit Van Amsterdam (UvA)
This is a summary of (some of the) Readings for the final exam of the course Introduction to Conflict Studies.
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Readings Final Exam Introduction to Conflict StudiesArticle / chapter Page nr.
Dekker and Faber: Violent Conflict and the Individual Security Dilemma 1
Autesserre: Hobbes and the Congo: frames, local violence, and international 8
intervention
Fortna: Does peacekeeping keep peace? International intervention and the 9
duration of peace after civil war
Balachandra et al.: Improvisation and Mediation: Balancing Acts 13
Rooney: The Use of Intuition in Mediation 15
Hamelink: Chapter 1: Living with Others. The Inevitable Conflict 18
Hamelink: Chapter 2: Media and the Spiral of Escalation 23
Hamelink: Chapter 7: International Media Alert System (IMAS) 27
Jentzsch et al.: Militias in Civil Wars 30
,Dekker and Faber: Violent Conflict and the Individual Security
Dilemma
Introduction
● People who are suffering from, or threatened by, violence, are confronted with
numerous dilemmas when they seek to protect themselves and those around them
● The way one acts when war breaks out, and the strategies one has to consider, differ
from person to person
● During WWII most Danish Jews survived the war because the occupation was solely
of a military nature, while in the Netherlands, where the Dutch government and Royal
family fled the country, the Jews were massacred in German concentration camps
○ The Jews in Denmark were still protected by the Danish state
● Jews in the Netherlands were largely dependent on the behaviour of fellow citizens
for their security
○ The choice of offering a hiding place to Jews in your home was not an easy
one to make, as it significantly increased the insecurity of yourself and your
family
○ It was dangerous to become a resistance operative and this is why only a
small group was actively involved
● Human security starts and ends with individuals
○ each conflict is largely determined by forces on the ground and shaped by
decisions make by individuals
Human security and critical studies
● The Copenhagen School: by increasingly labelling certain phenomena as existential
threats to the state, this designation of the threat as existential justifies the use of
extraordinary measures to handle it
○ Securitisation is a speech act meant to legitimise the use of force and to
maintain or enforce beneficial power relations
● Despite the many security scholars who plead for bringing the individual back to the
centre of security analyses, the state often remains essential
○ insecurity is perceived to occur at the level of actual people but the act of
preventing or decreasing security problems is still attributed to state actors
● Despite being presented as a shift away from neo-realist security thinking, and thus a
departure from traditional state security and signalling a human-centred approach,
the idea of the state as main provider of human security remains pivotal
○ Solutions for human insecurity are devised in the hallways and conference
rooms of cosmopolitan institutions like the United Nations, the European
Union, the African Union and others, like NATO
● In this chapter a critical view is offered of the cosmopolitan peace project, and its use
of human security as a guiding principle in particular
● It remains rather doubtful whether a cosmopolitan approach will be an effective
answer to elusive phenomena like new wars and international terrorism
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,Human security and new wars
● How to critically assess human security and look at it from the individual perspective?
● In a bottom-up approach, the first issue to be addressed is the situation on the
ground in contemporary wars and conflicts
● After the end of the Cold war there was a change in security that was linked to the
drastic changes in international power relations
● Two representations of what the post-Cold War political arena would look like:
○ Kantian democratic peace
○ Increasingly chaotic and violent era (Snow, Huntington, Ogata et al.)
● Violent conflict, as the ultimate manifestation of political struggle, has remained
rather constant in occurrence
○ But some authors argue that the nature of conflicts did change
■ 'New wars' theory (Münkler; Kaldor)
■ Much can be argued against new wars theory. All of the supposedly
new characteristics attributed to contemporary conflicts have clearly
been present in wars before, whether it concerns the involvement of
private actors, the occurrencë of intra-state (or civil) wars, the explicit
targeting of civilians, the funding by non-state actors, or the
importance of the illegal war economy (Hossein-Zadeh 2006) and the
myriad small-scale criminals who benefit from conflict
■ According to Newman it is not so much the characteristics of war that
have changed themselves but rather our perception or, rather,
awareness of them
● On the one hand, new wars theory seeks an explanation for the chaotic and
combustible mixture of identity politics, organised crime, terrorism and other
gruesome forms of violence that characterise war
○ On the other hand it acknowledges that finding ways to provide security in
contemporary conflicts does not start with looking at the current international,
cosmopolitan institutions, or applying labels such as 'civil war', 'new war' or
'war of aggression' to conflicts, but that it has to commence with a deepening
understanding of the unpredictability and chaos that constitute the reality on
the ground
The security fabric - self protection, horizontal and vertical security
● When the individual is the focal point of security, we have to take the instinctive need
for human self-preservation as a starting point
● Hobbes: the human right to self-preservation was the only natural right. But in a
situation of anarchy, where everyone is trying to preserve their individual power, the
security of one person/group may lead to the insecurity of others
● Peace paradigm Middle Ages → human beings are ultimately inclined to live
peacefully together, by God’s will
○ But according to Hobbes humans’ natural condition is constant war
■ Solution: contract between state and citizens
● Freedom is a prerequisite for feeling secure, but either too much or too little of it, will
increase an individual's insecurity
● Negative, liberal interpretation of freedom
→ freedom equates the freedom from interference by the state and is considered
2
, inversely proportionate to state strength
● The more powerful a state and its security apparatus are, the more constraints they
will place on the individual to provide for his or her own security
● The success of a state, expressed in its legitimacy, largely depends on finding the
right balance between liberty and law enforcement, or, put differently, between
individual freedom and security by government regulation
● The extreme ends of the axis are the violent state of nature as it was described by
Hobbes and the totalitarian state as it was envisioned by George Orwell in his 1984,
respectively
● For Hobbes, the ultimate answer to his natural state, in which there was no governing
body, was the Orwellian state of repression, in the form of an absolute monarch
● States' positions in the graph obviously change over time
● In a stable state positioned somewhere in the middle of the Hobbes-Orwell scale and
where conflict is absent, it is usually clear which institutions are responsible for
providing security; the police, intelligence, and the army
● While largescale inter-state wars have become quite rare, (cross-border) intra-state
conflicts have gained pronunence as the most common, and thus threatening, form
of organised violence
○ Sub-state actors, from armed militias to full-fledged secessionist movements,
also add to the multitude of processes that undermine the state's power and
monopoly on the legitimate use of forceThree different types of security
provisions and their
● Three different types of security provision and their related actors:
○ 1. Self-protection (of the individual, family, community, etc.)
○ 2. Horizontal protection (protection of category 1 subjects by non-state actors
of all kinds, like life-lines, humanitarian organisations, militant groups, etc.)
○ 3. Vertical protection (protection by state-actors, including foreign states, UN,
NATO, etc.)
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