Kennette Benedict
John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
The title of this talk may seem an unfortunate misprint. How can there be international relations among rational competitive states, balancing one another under conditions of anarchy —in a village? Village suggests face-to-face relationships between individuals, structures of authority drawing on kinship and tradition, and a dense web of interactions based on daily observations and conversations. It is surely a contradiction in terms. And yet, we seem to be living in contradictory times. Processes of integration seem to be happening simultaneous with fragmentation. Time and space have become so compressed that we are more likely to know what’s happening in communities halfway around the globe than we are to know what’s going on in our own neighborhoods.
Some of this is happening because we are connected to people in other countries through television, the telephone, and the internet. Borders are more permeable, and states seem less able to control people and processes beyond those political boundaries. (You don’t need a passport to visit websites around the world.) We may not yet be a global village, but we have come some distance from a territory-based, state-centered notion of international relations. What do these changes in the way we perceive the world have to do with our understandings of violent conflict, its causes and consequences?
I am delighted and honored to have this chance to reflect with you on the issues raised in this conference. My vantage point, from a philanthropic foundation, allows me to dip a toe in each of several ponds—the academy, the international policy world, and the community of advocacy organizations. It is a perspective that is limited in many ways, but it is one that fosters a propensity to take a “crude look at the whole.” What I will offer this morning is necessarily a crude look at some of the issues with which you have been wrestling and one that draws as well from the world of advocacy and policy.
First, I’ll expand a bit on the contradictory context in which contemporary violent conflict erupts. In particular, I’ll say something about the phenomenon popularly known as “globalization,” as well as about trends in social equity. Second, I’ll turn to changes in the nature of armed conflict—especially its links with organized criminal activity and the implications for governance. Finally, I’ll close with a few comments on methods and approaches in the study of peace and security.
Context
As several have remarked throughout this conference, globalization emerges as a significant factor in understanding and reframing our thinking about conflict and security. While the increase in transboundary ties and contacts is not new in human history, the digital revolution coupled with world-wide communications technology has spurred economic integration and the global spread of ideas and images at a pace unimagined in past epochs. And, of course, the effects of the speed of transactions are not yet fully understood, although we have some hints in the recent economic volatility and financial turmoil emanating from Asia.
While globalization as a slogan has quickly made its way into the public media, the causes and consequences of this phenomenon are only dimly comprehended. In fact, we may wish to speak of globalizations, in the plural, which are occurring simultaneously. For example, the bio/geophysical environment—the life support system of the planet—is global. And humanity’s capacity to affect it on a global scale can be seen in climate change and the warming of the planet. Transnational economic integration is becoming global in scope, and communications are virtually global in reach.
These global processes, however, emanate from localities and, in turn, are felt in particular localities. Indeed, scholars like sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos speak of “globalized localisms” and “localized globalisms” rather than globalization. In Toward a New Common Sense (1995), Santos states:
What we call globalization, then, may be better described as a web of localized globalisms and globalized localisms. Whether the trends of globalization are beneficial or harmful, and to whom, is a matter of inquiry and observation.
The last two decades have witnessed, along with globalization, growing disparities in income and wealth between rich and poor in industrialized and developing countries and in countries in transition from centrally-controlled economies. The causes of growing within-country inequality are debated, but commonly cited factors include the globalization of the economy, technological change which favors skilled workers, deregulation, and privatization, among others. There is evidence, as well, that the gulf between rich and poor countries has also widened further over the past thirty years.
Whether within country or between countries, increasing disparities in opportunity and access to resources may bear some relationship to violent conflicts. Uneven natural and economic resource allocation, coupled with institutional failures, for instance, can lead to societal fragmentation and the real possibilities of mobilization for armed conflict among competing groups. Apparently, poverty itself is not a sufficient condition for violent conflict. Rather, a dynamic process of relative deprivation, coupled with a weakening of state structures and their capacity to provide services, can set the stage for civil warfare. And, as Dani Rodrik points out in Has Globilization Gone Too Far? (1997), “Social disintegration is not a spectator sport— those on the sidelines also get splashed with mud from the field. Ultimately, the deepening of social fissures can harm all” (pp.6-7).
Many other features of the current context are important for the analysis of contemporary violent conflicts, but the intensification of globalization processes and the consequences of increasing inequality head the list of conditions which require further investigation.
Issues
I want to turn now to three issues, some of them touched on in this conference, related to globalization. First, I wish to talk about the “new wars.” Civil wars, ethnic strife, sectarian conflicts, complex humanitarian emergencies— these are some of the terms of art used to describe what is happening in places like Bosnia, Somalia, Haiti, and Rwanda. Second, I will comment on the emergence of a transnational legal order. Third, the problem of adapting and designing institutions that can provide governance without government is one that several of you have worked on. At the end of the Cold War, however, the quest for institutional arrangements that can provide for security in a time of uncertainty and rapid change takes on a special urgency.
New Wars
The “new wars,” as Mary Kaldor has called them in her introduction to the first volume of Restructuring the Global Military Sector (1997), are the violent conflicts that typify this decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall. While civil wars and ethnic and sectarian conflicts have been increasing since 1945, the violent conflicts that have erupted since 1989 appear to have different features from those of the past. Three bear special mention here: the disintegration of the state, the prominence of identity politics, and the changing nature of external support for war.
First, in many of these conflicts, we are witnessing the disintegration of states rather than attempts to capture or maintain state structures. Of course, one of the contributing factors to the outbreak of civil war may be a weak state, a failing or flailing state. Over the course of the war, however, state control of any kind seems to disappear, and new power arrangements emerge .
The final breakup of state structures, in fact, may be a result of the adoption, by soldiers, of military doctrine that aims to destabilize a country rather than seize power. Some observers of conflicts in Africa, for instance, suggest that military doctrine has been modeled on Western counter-insurgency doctrine and practice. From French, British, and U.S. -trained experts, and most proximately from the Rhodesian and South African military intelligence, a strategy of destabilization has emerged—a strategy aimed at destroying or humbling states, rather than seizing state power. The adaptation of these strategies in wars across the Continent has resulted in a different kind of war—with disorder, rather than control, as its final goal. To achieve the goal, modes of warfare are dispersed and fragmented, involving paramilitary groups, criminal gangs, and children, and, therefore, require only light weapons to carry out. The strategy uses fear and fosters corruption. Finally, it leads to the targeting of civilian populations, the use of atrocities, famine, and rape.
Second, added to the destruction of the state is the prominence of identity politics, whether nationalist, tribalist, or communalist. In the absence of state institutions, organization around ethnic or family identity may be the only form left for collective action. On the one hand, communal ties may offer a way to continue social relations and maintain a sense of community and common purpose in a country where government no longer has legitimacy or the capacity to maintain public order and where the economy is criminalized. On the other hand, these ethnic and family ties can be the basis for mobilizing against other ethnonationalist groups.
The new wars, it is suggested, are less about control of territory than they are about control of people and their political loyalty. In Bosnia, the sites of battles were people. Genocide was a military tactic to produce political allegiance to one faction or another by destroying those of another ethnic background. The intentional destruction of cultural sites is also part of a strategy to demoralize, remove, and obliterate whole groups of people.
Third, external support to carry on the wars comes from diaspora communities, foreign mercenaries, organized criminal organizations, and regional, rather than super, powers. The war economy comes to be based on emergency assistance from foreign donors and an informal parallel economy, much of it involving organized crime. The criminalization of the economy means that political violence and criminal activity are deeply intertwined.
The nature of these new wars calls for rethinking international responses to them. Publicly accountable governance structures within the country are destroyed; the line between civilians and soldiers is blurred, and there is no legitimate indigenous economy. It would appear that such a breakdown in social order requires more than military intervention. Nor is economic aid sufficient. While force must be used to control the armed violence, other means are required to restore order and legitimate relations in society. The task would seem to entail the establishment of agreed-upon rules to protect human rights, to prosecute corruption and crime, and to restore some measure of predictability and openness in the implementation of laws.
In addition, where there are pockets of civil society in the midst of disorder, these need to be supported with both military or policing force and economic investment. It is not enough to deal with the belligerents, and it is not a matter of taking sides among the warring parties. Rather it requires enlarging the circles of lawful or normal action, community by community and town by town. During the war in Bosnia, the city of Tuzla, which had rejected the nationalist candidate for mayor in 1991 in favor of a more cosmopolitan leader, remained a center of pluralism. Though mostly Serbian, the town took in more than 500,000 Muslim and Croat refugees in the course of the conflict, providing for their welfare in the most extreme conditions.
Reconstruction and a return to “normal” life may also require the prosecution and removal of both war criminals and economic criminals in a transnational effort to stop the potential spread of destabilizing actions. For the international community to act in such a decisive fashion, agreement on appropriate standards of political and economic behavior, for both individuals and organizations, would need to be established. Transnational civil-society organizations would need to be coordinated with international governmental action to provide both the stick and the carrot to produce lasting peace.
Transboundary Governance and Legal Order
This prescription for building a transnational legal order to prevent violent civil conflict would seem to be hopelessly idealistic—especially in the face of events in Bosnia, Rwanda, the Congo, and the Sudan. And yet, we have seen some initial success in efforts to establish an International Criminal Court that could prosecute and punish perpetrators of mass violence. Beyond the Court, some countries have been moving to transboundary shared governance in prosecution of criminal activity, on commercial matters, and in trade law. Transgovernmental relations, as Anne-Marie Slaughter calls them in her Foreign Affairs article on “The Real New World Order (Sept/Oct 1997) have developed most densely between Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. Parallel legal structures and shared values provide a common basis for the development of transnational law and for joint action. As legitimate economic activity becomes even more global, rules and commonly held standards for regulating financial, commercial, and investment transactions, as well as for dealing with criminal activity, will be required. It may be possible that other undertakings, like the preventing or ending of civil war, may be susceptible to similar forms of standard-setting and enforcement.
The questions that a transnational approach to governance raises require empirical research and ethical study. Some of these are already addressed in the political science literature on regimes and in the legal literature on transnational law. But many questions remain. For example, in the face of regional and global criminal networks, and their connection to the possible spread of disorder and war, does the development of transgovernmental relations offer an adequate balancing force and a positive basis for societal coherence? What are the consequences of this system of governance for state sovereignty?
Transnational legal arrangements, thus far, have developed along functional lines—commercial, criminal, environmental, for example. What kinds of conflicts or trade-offs might such a system have? What should be done if the prosecution of a war criminal interferes with free elections of a political leader? Or if harmonization of laws on environmental protection are detrimental to human rights? Or if a ruling on trade relations has negative effects on the environment or on labor rights? How can these be reconciled if no central global authority exists?
In the end, building a global transboundary legal order will depend on establishing shared values on which to build a common dispute settlement regime. Westerners may bring assumptions from democratic traditions. But there are many forms of democracy and many alternative kinds of dispute resolution based on different value systems in different cultures around the world. These differences could use further exploration with the possibility that common understandings may be revealed as well. The utility of a transnational governance approach to violent conflict requires imagination, experimentation, and study if it is to be used to prevent and respond to new wars.
Institutional Design
I turn now to problems of institutional design, especially as they relate to transgovernmental relations. How can institutions be designed to achieve governance without government? What kinds of organizational arrangements will allow societies to come to agreement on international public goods and how they should be provided? The world-wide proliferation of weapons, of environmental pollutants, and of pathogens threatens human existence. And yet, whether the public good is security, environmental protection, or public health, we are only dimly aware of whether and how these can be provided on a global scale.
Social scientists have been working on these institutional design issues for some time. Elinor Ostrom’s work, for example, on common pool resource management has been invaluable. But problems remain when these approaches are applied on a global scale, where face-to-face interactions are impossible and where common values, which offer a basis for negotiation, have not been established.
Institutional adaptation and invention may be required on a local level as well, especially if the role of states changes. A complicated experiment in participatory, municipal budgeting in Porto Allegre, Brazil, is one example of local efforts to make governance more transparent and more accountable to the public. It involves direct citizen voting on funding levels for city services, from schools and education to garbage collection and street paving. In cities like Perm, in the Russian Federation, government officials and enterprise managers are inventing complicated bartering systems to provide public goods and services, to keep schools and hospitals running, in an economy with a cash shortage. Social scientists such as Tatiana Zaslavskaya and Theodor Shanin are documenting, as well, the development of what they call a social economy in Russia. This economy combines, in the extended family network, the benefits of the old state system of enterprises—housing, health care, pensions—with subsistence farming on dachas to provide foodstuffs and with very small-scale entrepreneurial activity that produces cash for purchase of durable goods. These new forms of economic life are borne of necessity. But in an era of weakening states and criminalizing economies, it is these local forms that may well provide economic security.
Approaches and Methods
The issues I have emphasized here—the changing nature of wars, the emergence of transgovernmental relations, and the development of new institutions, all in the context of rapid globalization—require minds that can bring a range of methods and perspectives to their study. Of course, very good work can be accomplished within the boundaries of a single discipline. But some of the very best understandings of social phenomena come from those who can move easily across disciplinary boundaries, who can at least place their particular inquiry into a larger whole.
In addition, new approaches and methods for understanding the larger whole are being developed. One such approach is complexity theory, or plectics. Whatever you may think of the utility of this particular theory for developing adequate understandings of social dynamics, it does challenge the social science community to develop new ways of organizing and connecting knowledge so that we can begin to put together what Murray Gell-Mann calls a “crude look at the whole” in “The Simple and the Complex,” his paper in Complexity, Global Politics, and National Security (1997) edited by David S. Alberts and Thomas J. Czerwinski. This volume was assembled to explore how complexity theory may offer a potentially fruitful way of understanding global processes and the requirements for international security. The theory has been useful in studying complex adaptive systems— nonlinear systems. In the preface, Alberts and Czerwinski explain that these are systems,
It’s safe to say that the international system is a nonlinear system, and it may be that investigations which can make use of methods and metaphors associated with complexity theory will be extremely helpful in discovering why the whole looks as it does and why it operates in ways that, at times, seem incomprehensible.
Finally, it is this crude look at the whole that may best serve those beyond the academy. Peacekeeping forces, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the citizens of Porto Allegre, Human Rights Watch, the Zapatistas, to name a few, are all looking for new ways of understanding the complex worlds they live in. They must act. And they struggle to obtain the best information and knowledge they can, in order to make intelligent judgements. They can turn for such knowledge to journalists and to wise practitioners working in the field. But as good and accurate as those individuals may be, the assessments they offer will be only partial. What social scientists have to offer could be much more useful because their knowledge and perspectives can serve to uncover the nonintuitive and the unintended consequences of policies and actions as well as the regularities, routine practices, and habits of thought that constitute institutions and societies. It seems to me that there is a significant opportunity to contribute to more sophisticated frameworks for action and study but only if there is a willingness to move beyond past methodological assumptions and modes of inquiry.
The issues and themes addressed in this conference are among the most difficult that we face as a global society. While the agendas we have been discussing seem ambitious—perhaps foolishly heroic—I take heart from Tom Stoppard’s 1993 play Arcadia. One passage especially speaks to the complexity of the world and the new tools required to comprehend it. One of the main characters, a mathematical biologist named Valentine, is talking enthusiastically about the challenges for science of explaining system turbulence, growth, and change:
It is the best of times.
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