Demmers Introduction: Conflict Analysis in Context
Behind every analysis of violent conflict is a set of assumptions.They form the base of
academic theories of conflict and indirectly they also inform the ways policy-makers and
politicians ‘read’ a conflict. Lack of grounded and critical analysis of violence and war results
in misreading and inaccurate strategies and interventions, with at times dramatic
consequences (the author uses the case of Clinton and Bosnia). This book has three aims:
● 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) people.
● It addresses the idea of multidisciplinarity.
● To carry out conflict analysis in a reflexive and critical way.
The Interpretation of Conflict: Trends and Frames
Contemporary research on violent conflict has typically focused on causes of conflict, with
war and conflict defined differently in various datasets. The Uppsala Conflict Data Program
(UCDP) defines armed conflict as: ‘a contested incompatibility that concerns government or
territory or both, where the use of force between two parties results in at least 25 battle-
related deaths in a year. Of these two parties, at least one has to be the government of a
state.’ The difference between ‘conflict’ and ‘war’ is determined by the amount of casualties.
Data sets such as UCDP show a global shift from inter-state conflict to intra-state conflict.
Within the category of intra-state conflict there also exists ‘internationalized armed conflict’,
which encompasses intra-state conflict in which states contribute troops to warring sides.
The boundaries between classifications of violent conflict are contested. On the one hand,
academics cannot do without categorizations. On the other hand, categorizations may hide
more than they reveal, because certain conflicts are left outside of the categorization (in the
case of UCDP armed conflict in which no state is involved).
The past decades have seen a growing preoccupation with governing ‘internal’ violent
conflict. New international bodies were set up and it also led to a boom in academic
research. The field of conflict governance can be conceptualized as an ‘assemblage’, a term
applied in Critical Security Studies to understand the ways complex social and material
formations that consist of heterogeneous elements still hold together and exercise power.
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. It is possible to detect certain trends.
Over the past decades, discursive representations of ‘internal’ violent conflicts have shifted
substantially:
● During the Cold War, local conflicts were mostly seen as ‘proxy wars’ and explained
in ideological terms. After the Cold War, violent conflicts were coded as ‘ethnic’.
● Since the late 1990s, conflicts are framed as driven by greed, ‘terror’ and evil.
Particularly after 9/11, terrorism became the dominant policy frame through which
local wars were understood.
For the study of contemporary violent conflict, it is important not to take these
representational trends for granted but to situate them in (geo)political contexts of power.
Defining the Field
This section first introduces the reader to a general definition of conflict, into which most
examples and categories of conflict can be placed. It then looks at the relation between
conflict and violence and discusses a number of prominent classifications.
,Conflict
In 1981, Chris Mitchell presented a general model of conflict that has become a standard in
the field. For Mitchell, a conflict is ‘any situation in which two or more parties perceive that
they possess mutually incompatible goals’. Any conflict consists of three components:
● Goal incompatibility
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. This incompatibility is
the starting point of a conflict. Goals are defined as consciously desired future
outcomes, conditions or end states, which often have intrinsic values for members of
particular parties.
● Attitudes
Psychological states that accompany and arise from involvement in a situation of
conflict.
● Behaviour
Actions undertaken by one party in any situation of conflict aimed at the opposing
party with the intention of making that opponent abandon or modify its goals.
Although generally recognizing the transformative capacity of conflict, analysts place the
source of conflict at different corners of the triangle.
Violence in Conflict
We have defined conflict as any situation in which parties perceive they have incompatible
goals. This broad definition sees conflict as a situation and thus includes the possibility for
inaction. Another implication of Mitchell’s working defnition is the unimportance of violence
as a criterion for conflict behaviour. Conflict behaviour 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. This book, however, is explicitly interested in violence as a form
of conflict.
In everyday representations, violence is often conceptualized as a degree of conflict: as
something that occurs automatically when conflict reaches a certain intensity. In this book
violence is represented as a form of conflict. This book aims to address how different
research traditions explain and understand the occurrence of violence in situations of
conflict. The focus is on violence in conflict. Violence is not easy to categorize:
● Some authors understand violence as a product. Violence is understood as an
outcome or result, for which a causal explanation can be found.
● Others emphasize how violence is dynamic and processual. Violence is understood
as a part of a dynamic process and as having a transformative capacity.
● Some authors define violence as a physical act of force, it is visible.
● Others argue that violence also includes ‘symbolic violence’.
Definitional Boundaries
Up until the 1990s, while the overwhelming majority of scholarly attention was directed to the
‘big wars’, the conflict landscape around the world was gradually assuming a different profile.
From the 1960s to the 1990s there was a sharp increase in the total incidence of violent
conflict within states. It was particularly during the 1990s that many scholars began to realize
the limited explanatory power of the ‘proxy war paradigm’. After the Cold War, violent conflict
and war prevailed but now predominantly on a local scale. Small wars turned out to have
dynamics of their own. The realization that local conflicts had in fact become the rule caused
,an important shift in the study of violent conflict and war. Traditional theories of international
relations and strategic studies proved incapable of grasping the dynamics and complexities
of the ‘new wars’. A new but fragmented field of study emerged and, with this, a plethora of
definitions and classifications. Roughly, the ‘new wars’ are seen to differ from inter-state or
conventional conflict in a number of ways:
● They do not have precise beginnings and endings.
● They are protracted: they typically last for decades, during which episodes of fierce
fighting alternate with times of relative peace.
● There are differences in modes of warfare. The ‘new wars’ are fought by loosely knit
groups of ‘regulars’ and ‘irregulars’ and not by conventional clear-cut national armies.
● External interference with local wars typically comes from overseas diaspora,
international military interventions, private security firms, military-to-military programs,
lobby groups or foreign mercenaries. 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.
● Due to the revolution in communication technology, new wars are deterritorialized:
involving globally dispersed networks of actors and organizations.
● It is organizations claiming to represent identity groups that are at the core of
contemporary violent conflicts.
All these labels underline the necessity to theoretically distinguish inter-state war from intra-
state war. From the above list, two definitions are broadly applied:
● Internal violent conflict
A more general term that is applied to distinguish internal violent conflict from inter-
state war and other types of large-scale social and political violence. Definitions
emphasize the internality of the conflict to the territory of a sovereign state, the
participation of the government as a combatant and that the conflict exceeds a
certain threshold of deaths.
● Civil war
Classic definitions of civil war often resemble those of internal conflict. More recently,
scholars have argued for the necessity to specify the term, however.
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.
● Both terms tend to obscure the international element in conflict.
● 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.
○ Government involvement can be cryptic, such as when governments
indirectly support militias.
○ It may not be possible to identify who represents ‘the government’ because all
warring parties may be claiming the state.
● The distinction between criminal and political violence.
Approach: Group Formation and Violent Action
In reviewing theories of ‘violence in conflict’, this book takes the centrality of the group as an
actor in contemporary conflict as a point of departure. The key role of the group and the
, organization claiming to represent the group is widely acknowledged. Any meaningful study
of violent conflict should thus consist of a systematic analysis of group formation, dynamics
of interaction and collective action. This is not to say that ‘identity’ or ‘identity differences’ are
causing violent conflict. Rather, identity boundary drawing is a central aspect of the
mobilization of support for armed conflict. By taking the process of group formation and
violent action as points of departure, we are left with three rather straightforward questions:
1. What makes a group?
2. Why and how does a group resort to violence?
3. Why and how do they (not) stop?
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. The authors
briefly discuss a number of guidelines on how to do theoretically informed analysis based on
Charles Ragin’s Constructing Social Research (1994, 2010) and Martin Hollis’ The
Philosophy of Social Science (1994). Ragin argues, 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. The end result is a
representation of social life that has been shaped and reshaped by ideas. An important part
of doing social research is dedicated to the analysis of the phenomena the researcher is
studying. In analysing a violent conflict, a researcher aims to break the conflict up into its
component parts, dissecting the different key elements and conditions that combine to
‘make’ the conflict. A first possible step in making such an analysis is conflict mapping.
Mapping a Conflict
By ‘mapping’ a conflict, you visually break a conflict into its key component parts. These
parts can then be studied in isolation from one another, in relation to one another or in
relation to the larger conflict. Basic questions that will help you to map a conflict are:
1. Who are the main parties?
2. What is happening between them?
3. What is happening within them?
4. Who are the secondary parties?
5. What is happening between them all?
6. What is happening between the parties and the external environment?
7. Where are you on the map?
Uses of conflict mapping:
● To get a good overview of a conflict situation.
● A method in conflict resolution, to bring out the different perceptions of conflict.
● A playful way to organize evidence.
● It shows:
○ How a conflict mostly consists of a cluster of conflicts
○ That conflicts involve different ‘levels-of-analysis’
● To bring out your own perceptions and ‘reading’ of a particular conflict.
Theories of conflict form an important resource in grasping the complexities of war. Theories
are informed by different underlying claims on ‘being’ (ontology) and ‘knowing’
(epistemology). As a way to bring out the affinities and contradictions between the theories
