CAUSES OF INTRACTABILITY

Intractability has many causes. As we argue below, those factors that contributed to the outbreak of a conflict typically recede into the background while other factors, such as the vested interests of war profiteers and political opportunists who benefit from the conflict’s continuation, move to the foreground of the identifiable “causes” of intractability.

Geography and geopolitics may promote intractability. Some states lie on the border­line line between larger civilizations—Sudan between black and Arab Africa, and Kashmir between large Islamic and Hindu states. In other cases, neighboring wars may engulf a conflict, holding it captive to a resolution of the larger war, as Burundi’s conflict was engulfed by the war in neighboring Congo. And many so-called “internal” patterns of enmity and amity are shaped by regional power distributions and specific factors such as border disputes, ethnic diasporas, ideo­logical alignments, and neighboring states whose interests are served by continuing conflict, as illustrated by a number of conflicts in the former Soviet Union: South Ossetia,Abkhazia, Transnistria, and Nagorno- Karabakh.

Deep-seated identity and grievance issues as well as a considerable amount of war profiteering by representatives of one group or another are frequent characteristics of intractable conflicts. The conflict in Sri Lanka has endured for 60 years, and pits the majority Sinhalese against a sizable minority group, the Tamils. These groups are divided by ethnicity, religion and language, and grievances in this conflict are deep around each of these frac­tures. In many cases, these identity conflicts are manipulated by political entrepreneurs— or what Michael Brown (1996, p.

fomented civil war in his own Liberia as well as neighboring Sierra Leone, and now stands accused of war crimes by the Special Court for Sierra Leone, is one example of a political agency entrepreneur. President Slobodan Milosevic, head of Serbia during the Balkans conflict, whipped up anti-Muslim hatred as a means of consolidating his hold on his own country—and on Serbs through the Balkans area.

Poverty and the denial of basic human needs are seen by some as key sources of con­flict. While there are examples throughout his­tory of conflict erupting because of the denial of economic needs—the French Revolution for one—there are also a number of examples of countries that have endured poverty without falling into conflict. However, the extent to which the basic needs of certain groups in society are systematically denied and/or discriminated against by those in power can lay the seeds for conflict, especially if there is no legitimate way to channel those grievances through the political process (Stewart & Brown 2007). In other cases, however, it is not internal instability that feeds intractability, but rather a kind of stasis that develops around the fighting. For instance, a stable and tolerable stalemate makes it easy for sides to settle into comfortable accommodation with persistent warfare that sustains power bases. Continued war does not jeopardize either side's core constituency, even though those who suffer and pay the price for continued fighting—especially the civilian targets—are disenfranchised in every sense. The long war in Angola was sustained because the government had access to oil revenues and the rebels profited from an illegal trade in diamonds. This access to a steady stream of resources created a stalemate in which neither side was hurt sufficiently by the conflict to want to give it up.

Avarice of predatory warlords who profit from the political economy of violence through arms sales, smuggling, and other illicit commercial practices and transactions is another important factor in intractable conflict settings.

Polarized, zero-sum notions of identity can also produce intractability. The situation between Israelis and Palestinians shows us that conflicts which continue over long periods lead to the accumulation of grievances incorporated into each party's version of history. Each side sees itself as a victim, and creates or reinterprets key cultural and reli­gious symbols that perpetuate both the sense of resentment and the conflict. In intractable conflicts, violence enters the everyday world of thousands of people and becomes a way of life. Conflict becomes institutionalized as vested interests rise in keeping the conflict going. Violence becomes the norm as parties become wedded to a logic and culture of revenge. Young people grow up in a conflict and know no other way of life. And as a population becomes inured to conflict, the hope that it will end recedes.

Failures in earlier peacemaking efforts can also result in the promotion by the parties of mutually exclusive basic requirements and preconditions for negotiations. These basic requirements may mask a fundamental unwillingness to negotiate, as both parties know that you cannot satisfy the requirements of one side without contradicting the basic requirement of the other side. For instance, in many internal conflicts, the underdog insurgents keep the ability to continue the struggle as a trump card, resisting all attempts at disarmament or demobilization before a political agreement has been reached.

Local decision-makers who see their battle as a zero-sum game may resist or prevent the emergence of politics as the arena for settling their differences because, for them, what their opponent gains, they lose. Resistance to a settlement may appear to derive from a single cause or principal ingredient, but closer examination usually points to multi­ple causes and many contributing factors. Nevertheless, intractable conflicts share a common characteristic: they defy settlement because leaders believe their objectives are fundamentally irreconcilable and parties have more interest in the ongoing war than in any known alternative state of being.

In sum, the sources of intractability are not the same as the original causes of the conflict. No matter what issues formed the foundation for the initial conflict, a number of other elements will come into the mix to augment or even supplant the original disputes. Wars over time create new issues and agendas that were not present at the outset, including the way each side treats the other. The conflict in Kashmir is part of a larger set of bilateral conflict issues that have divided India and Pakistan since their joint emergence from the British Empire in the 1940s. Now, that agenda includes nuclear risk reduction and targeting/weaponization programs, trade/travel issues, other border issues, regional rivalries, and above all the two countries’ identity dispute between Muslim homeland Pakistan and secular India. The bilateral issue agenda has ballooned with the passage of time, so that today Kashmir is much more deeply embedded in polarized issues than it was in the late 1940s.