John Feffer’s article appearing in Wednesday’s (16.03.2016) issue dealt with the pessimistic question of whether today’s wars can be ended, like so many earlier conflicts with finite terms, or whether today’s wars are doomed to rage on for generations as did the century long English-French war (actually 116 years, 1337 – 1453). Employing the metaphor of the hypothermic human body, and a case study on Syria, Feffer argues that there are five main reasons why peace is ‘so often beyond our grasp’ – (i) the world is awash with weapons, (ii) international and regional institutions are weak, (iii) superpowers such as the USA and superpowers in waiting like Russia and Turkey are determined to achieve their goals by force, (iv) states are weaker, and (v) particularism is flourishing.
Feffer’s arguments are rooted in realist theory, understanding and viewing the world and conflicts according to the geopolitical division of nations. This perspective ignores the fact that globally, most conflicts are not being fought between nations, but between states and the people realist theories assume them to represent. Despite his claim that (iv) states are weaker and have fewer nation-building ‘levers’ at their disposal, states are more empowered than ever to employ extraordinary powers to subdue and oppress their populations. Bangladeshi, Indian, Afghani, Turkish, Thai, Philippine, Egyptian and Mexican governments have and continue to utilise extra-ordinary legislation to expand their power and subdue domestic and international opposition. In the case of India, an especially poignant example of this is the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (1958) employed in Jammu-Kashmir and in the northeastern states of Assam, Nagaland, Manipur, parts of Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh, and until very recently Tripura, an everyday reminder of the exceptional powers of states to intervene in and selectively apply or ignore laws applying to the lives of it’s citizens.This is not only limited to the global South though. 9/11 and the new era of global terror has offered new opportunities for the USA, UK, Australia, Russia and China to legitimise extra-legal measures against real and perceived internal threats.
Claims that the world is awash with ‘frozen conflicts’ likewise break down when liberating oneself from the realist perspective. ‘Kashmir, Israel-Palestine, the Taiwan Strait, Burma, Nagarno-Karabakh, South Sudan, southern Thailand, northwest Pakistan, eastern Congo, eastern Saudi Arabia’ are all very ‘hot’ conflicts indeed. While state-state border disagreements appear at first to be wholly stalemated, this is often far from the case. States continue to contest and control borders through their attempts to control movement, trade and border economies, often at high economic and human cost to the communities at the border. Everyday interactions and encounters at the India-Bangladesh border are fraught with insecurity and unpredictability due to the heat that has surrounded the porous border since the 1971 liberation of Bangladesh. Likewise, Kashmiri residents face conflict and insecurity on a daily basis due to fears and suspicions of miscreants moving between borders. Israel-Palestine’s ‘frozen conflict’ involves the arrest, torture, maiming and killing of combatants and civilians on a daily basis. Communities in northwest Pakistan continue to suffer and live in fear as border politics are rained on them from above, an outcome of heat extending from the ongoing Afghan conflict. Likewise, the second and third generations of Interahamwe, along with M23 rebels and village based thugs bring hot conflict to communities in eastern Congo regularly, where rape has been used as a weapon and young boys are conscripted through force or through the need to survive. To claim that these ‘hotspots’ are in a ‘deep freeze’ is to deny the daily atrocities committed in these communities.
Underlying the argument is a nostalgic, ‘return to normal’, ideology. That “it’s always possible that a miracle cure – a robust peace treaty followed by some form of nation-building – will end the bloodshed in these countries and gradually knit their disparate parts back together”. That “at some point in the future these failed states might be brought back to life, perhaps when some of the trauma has healed… In this best case scenario, the countries involved might lose some extremities – a Crimean pinkie, for instance”. This return to normal ideology, however, is fundamentally flawed. To encourage a ‘return to normal’ in Syria is to encourage a return of a despotic dictatorship. A ‘return to normal’ for north and south Kivu provinces in the eastern Dem. Rep. Congo assumes a re-invasion of Interahamwe fighters onto the streets of Kigale. A ‘return to normal’ in Israel-Palestine denies the claims of one of two groups for a homeland.‘Normal’ is a conflict-in-waiting, often involving deep cleavages between ethnic groups, despotism, corruption, extra-ordinary cruelty to civilians and the often more extra-ordinary tolerance of the international community to this cruelty. To aim for ‘normal’ is to reproduce the structures and networks of injustice that place the weight of national and regional conflicts on vulnerable populations.
The article ends with a deterministic consideration of the post-cold war era – ‘twenty five years ago, the Cold War ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Thereafter, we were supposed to embark on a path of peace and prosperity. But somehow, we lost our way’. To assume that post-cold war peace was a natural end point that was somehow missed is farcical. Through a realist lens, an end to cold-war hostilities indeed appears to signal the closure of a time of tension and conflict, one where states faced off across walled and guarded borders. However, such a perspective is ignorant of the overwhelming involvement of major powers at the time in containing and encouragingsimmering states of conflict; of propping up dictatorships including those of Manuel Noriega, Mohammad Pahlavi, Augusto Pinochet and Saddam Hussein; of exploiting ethnic divisions and using the suffering and desperation of populations as political and ideological bargaining chips (US policies towards Ethiopia in the years before the 1983 famine are just one example of this continuing process). The end of the cold war did not usher a natural peace, or even weigh heavily on prospects for global peace. Rather, the end of the cold war ushered a process of destabilisation and desperate and draconian efforts to maintain unpopular authoritarian regimes, and the unabated revival of ethnic and ideological violence.
The point of this response is not to discredit Feffer’s argument wholly. Many of his conclusions are well-founded. The world is indeed awash with weapons. Young men with smaller arms have done far greater damage cumulatively than the two nuclear exchanges that have so far landed on populated cities. And just like the long-lived radioactive consequences of nuclear exchange, these arms continue to bring harm and misery decades after the initial conflicts they were bought, bartered or stolen to fight. International and regional institutions are stymied by the trump card of national sovereignty, and their own under-resourcing. Superpowers, as discussed above, intervene directly and indirectly, both regionally and in the case of the USA, globally. Arguably as well, particularism is flourishing, as ethno-politicians exploit genuine and fictitious differences, and a discourse of ‘West vs. Islam’ is promoted to populations on either side as a winnable and uncompromising fight. States are not weaker though, and arguably are stronger in a security-focused post 9/11 world. The point of this response has been to highlight the fallacy of Feffer’s notion of ‘frozen conflicts’. While a top-down, realist perspective offers a simplified and accessible idea of ‘hot conflicts’, ‘cold wars’, ‘frozen’; for the people who continue to suffer and live insecure lives in ‘frozen’ zones the term loses all meaning. The terminology reduces lives in conflict to abjects. It denies recognition of the ongoing relevance of conflict at the ground level, even when such conflicts appear to have lost geopolitical urgency. It asks audiences to ignore some lives lived in conflict and insecurity, and to focus on others in more news-worthy, immediate and geopolitically urgent conflicts. It trivialises suffering based on assuming some conflicts are unusual and need to be resolved such as Syria, and others such as those in Kashmir, Israel-Palestine, Taiwan, Burma, Nagorno-Karabakh, South Sudan, southern Thailand, northwest Pakistan, eastern Congo and eastern Saudi Arabia, are embedded, natural and unworthy of such attention.
We are able to end wars. Even those conflicts that appeared to embed themselves into the identities and cultures of those who fought them. The English-French 116 years war, the American Revolutionary war, the Russo-Japanese war of 1905, have not re-ignited into generations-long wars of attrition. The bigger hurdles to resolving violent conflicts are the international community’s and intellectual’s perceptions of conflict as between states alone, as ‘frozen’ or ‘hot’, and of peace being attainable within the confounds of a post-colonial, post-cold war neoliberal world. Resolving today’s conflicts involves deep and often compromising considerations of reframing the ‘rules’ of conflict, such as the primacy of sovereignty, the geopolitics of a post-colonial world, by reconsidering borders and spaces, and most importantly, questioning the efficacy of an uncompromised Western-inspired framework of governance in spaces that have wholly different histories, cultures and norms.
Matthew Wilkinson
