When people say they are struggling for Peace, they actually mean justice, because genuine sustainable peace cannot exist unless it is founded on the values of truth and justice. Justice – political, social, cultural, economic and legal – is fundamental to peace. Invariably, when elites, dominant societies and the powers that be talk about peace without justice, they are actually telling the people to “suffer peacefully.” Peace is indeed sustainable only when the aspirations as determined by the will of the people are realized.
The struggle for peace is often determined by two fundamental factors – first, the oppressor often determines the nature of conflict and second, the resultant peace is often determined by the nature of the peace process. Human history is full of examples where Governments and ‘the powers that be’ in different parts of the world have often chosen to use force and violence to suppress the legitimate struggles for the natural inherent rights of peoples. Use of coercion, co-optation and assimilation has often been the polity in dealing with struggling people.
Hence, the path towards peace is difficult and one in which the end is not known at the beginning. It’s a journey that cannot be made by denying or avoiding the root causes of the conflict. Those paths are tempting but in the end often futile and frustrating. It is only by walking through the conflict with the people who are living it, sharing the dust, the fatigue, stumbling on rocks and starting again, weeping with those who weep and rejoicing with those who rejoice that transformation can be reached. For transformation to take place it is fundamental that the decision making power must be located within the people.
The continuing traditional perspective where Peace processes have been largely reduced to brokering peace and hence removing the peace process from the democratic process has to be replaced by a more progressive and inclusive approach. Peace cannot and should not be brokered at the expense of the rights of peoples. This ironic feature of the way conflict is resolved – lack of democracy – has been responsible in the first place for the creation of conflicts. Peace has to be discussed and placed within the perspective of the larger and broader democratic values that should not be lost sight despite the severity of the conflict.
Further, the search for peace needs to transcend the agenda of security as peace. It is imperative to realize that the dialogue between peace and security has never been encouraging and its perspective has been advocated only from certain dominant worldviews thus impeding its universal application. Peace processes have been largely reduced by conditions of the state that involves pattern of domination, global hegemony and by technologies that make war a permanent feature in today’s world. For a holistic peace process to take place, it must transcend institutional structures and bureaucratic rigidity.
When we Nagas talk about peace, what kind of peace are we talking about? This is so critical to understand. Nagas need to transcend this ‘politics of silence and passive attitude’ if genuine change is to come about. Passivity of people only enhances the legitimacy of the status quo of illegitimate power imbalance between the people and the powers that be. Peace should not be interpreted only as an absence of war. If peace is only in the mirror of war, then what one is really implying is that war is the natural condition and that peace is only what authority brings about. Is this not the contention in most peace processes and the reason why peace continues to be a distant dream? Hence it is imperative that Peace as a common victory for justice and for human dignity has to be restored.
