CONSTRUCTIVISM AND CONFLICT ANALYSIS

An evaluation of constructivism and conflict resolution begins with the fundamental issue of conflict analysis; without an effective diagnosis of the nature and causes of conflict, conflict resolution is likely to be ad hoc, inef­fectual or even counter-productive.

However, it is important to recognize that there are relatively few self-consciously constructivist studies which focus directly on war and conflict, although there are a growing number of studies on related issues, such as: national security and the decision to use force (Campbell, 1993; Katzenstein, 1996; Williams, 1998); the construction of national security threats (Campbell, 1992; Howard, 2004; Weldes, 1996, 1999); securi­tization and critical security studies (Buzan, Waever and de Wilde, 1998); national security cultures (Gusterson, 1998); military doctrine (Kier, 1997); military strategy (Johnson, 1995); war proneness (Ross, 1993); and the social construction of genocide (Bauer, 2001; Browning, 2001). In part, this is due to the tendency of many constructivists to concen­trate on the impact of positive norms and ideas in international politics. Nonetheless, it is a cause for concern that war and violence, a key concern of IR, is accorded a relatively low priority in the broader constructivist research agenda (Adler, 1997: 346-7; Checkel, 1998: 339). This situation is particularly surprising given that like any other social institution, war is a social construction and would therefore appear to be an ideal subject for constructivist research.

Despite the relative dearth of explicitly constructivist studies, it is possible to sketch out a constructivist framework for studying and understanding war and conflict and a set of supporting findings on many of its key elements. Constructivist research on conflict aims broadly to uncover the constitutive nature of norms, ideas and other discursive elements in making the social practices of war and conflict possible in specific historical contexts and in general (Alkopher, 2005:716), and to elaborate on the relationship between the structures, agents and deliberative agentic action of conflict. Based on the findings of existing studies - some of which are explicitly constructivist in design, others which are not but nonetheless adopt broadly constructivist assumptions - and drawing upon wider constructivist theory, it is possible to identify three broad elements in the social construction of conflict: the construction and manipulation of identity; the co-constitution of structures and agents; and the construction of society-wide conflict discourses. As noted above, while these findings are not necessarily novel in the context of earlier peace studies research, they do challenge the narrow focus of much IR-based conflict analysis and open up space for considering alternative kinds of questions about the nature and ‘causes' of war to those posed by neo-realism and neo-liberalism.

The construction of identity

Like other approaches within the conflict resolution field, constructivists argue that identity - individual, group or national - is critical in the construction of war and conflict for a number of obvious reasons. In the first instance, war and conflict require a clearly identifiable enemy ‘other' against whom to struggle. Moreover, the practicalities of generating the necessary legitimacy and consensus to launch a war, mobilizing the necessary resources from society, and moti­vating individuals to kill in battle, necessitates the social existence of a negative, and importantly, deeply threatening, ‘other'.

The important point that constructivists make is that identities are not pre-existing, prior to society and culture, or fixed; rather, they are context-dependent, highly malleable and continuously evolving in response to external events and processes, such as immigration and globalization. Identity is never settled or essential, but is made and re-made everyday through a vast array of discursive processes and social practices, including war and conflict, and its content is liable to change - even if discursive practices make it seem as if identities are fixed and immutable. Constructivists draw attention to the key roles played in this process by different types of political and cultural elites, and the importance of history, myth, culture, symbols, ideology, religion, political practice and nationalism in the constitution and maintenance of identity. In addition, constructivists demonstrate how violence and conflict itself acts as a discursive structure which constructs identity in particular kinds of ways. In some cases, violence may be deliberately constructed as ‘ethnic' or ‘communal' violence by elites in order to obscure its origins in other kinds of material or political struggles, but this construction nonetheless has lasting effects on the identities of the conflicting parties.

Constructivism draws on sociological and anthropological theory to highlight how identity is, in fact, predicated on an external ‘other’ which in turn constructs a series of subject positions within a broader nar­rative, usually based on dichotomous cate­gories such as friend/enemy, civilized/savage, peaceful/violent and the like.

Critically, constructivist research does not support the view that difference is sufficient on its own to initiate war (Fearon and Laitin, 2000: 859-60). There are, after all, literally thousands of ethnic groups divided among hundreds of states, but relatively few identity­based wars. Instead, constructivists argue that two other conditions are necessary for constructing conflict: first, a particular kind of identity construction which plays on fear, threat, hatred, victimhood and dehumaniza­tion of the ‘other’; and second, the presence of elites committed to organizing the discursive and material instruments of war. Without these two factors, identity differences may result in sporadic outbreaks of violence during long periods of accommodation and co-existence, but not in full-scale war.

In sum, a constructivist account of conflict starts with an analysis of the nature and purposes of identity construction; it sug­gests that understanding how groups and nations conceive of themselves and others, and how elites instrumentalize particular kinds of identity, goes a long way towards explaining how violent conflict is initiated and reproduced. This argument is in no way novel to the broader conflict resolution field, but it does challenge the rationalist neo-realist and neo-liberal approaches which dominate much of the international conflict management sub-field.

There is a growing body of case research which broadly fits into a constructivist framework which illuminates the central role of identity in international conflict (Bowman, 1994, 2003; Brass, 1997; Campbell, 1998; Fearon and Laitin, 2000; Jackson, 2004; Kapferer, 1988; Kaufman, 2001; Lemarchand, 1994; Mertus, 1999; Prunier, 1995; Wilmer, 2002; Woodward, 1995). This research demonstrates that elites play a key role in deliberately constructing hostile identities between ethnic groups, often reversing decades of peaceful co-existence and inclusive political identities. In each case, ethno-nationalist elites reconstructed existing group identities into hostile, dehumanized and threatening oppositions, defining their group’s interests in zero-sum ethnic terms. Importantly, much of this research shows that the initial violence at the start of the conflict has the intended effect of constructing opposing identities in evermore antagonistic and rigid ways (Fearon and Laitin, 2000:846), and that the apotheosis of inter-ethnic hatred comes after the violence has got under way. The construction of such deeply threatening and dehumanized forms of identity, and its intensification through acts of violence, goes some way to explaining the disturbing level of atrocity and human rights abuses visible in many of these conflicts. These studies also confirm earlier anthropological and post-colonial research which demonstrates the central role that colonialism played in constructing hostile identities to begin with (see Prunier, 1995).

Interestingly, constructivist research demon­strates that violent identity construction processes are not confined to intrastate conflicts. Roxanne Doty (1993), for example, has demonstrated how the discursive construction of Philippine national identity as underdeveloped, unstable, childlike and vulnerable (to Soviet control), subject- positioned next to the United States’ identity as responsible, enlightened and paternal, enabled US counter-insurgency in that country in the 1950s.

Structures and agents

In terms of the structures and agents of conflict, constructivists take as their point of departure the observation that similar structural conditions often produce different conflict outcomes. Stuart Kaufman (2001), for example, notes that despite similar structural conditions in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, only 6 of the 15 former republics experienced sustained civil war, and while the break-up of Czechoslovakia was peaceful, the break-up of Yugoslavia was extremely violent. Similarly, Jackson (2004) raises the point that while virtually all African states share the same debilitating structural features of poverty, corruption, instability, ethnic division and the like, only a few experience sustained violent conflict and only for certain periods of time. A key limitation of many of the structural correlation-based studies that dominate IR scholarship, therefore, is that they cannot explain why societies which possess all the features highly correlated with the outbreak of conflict do not experience war or why war erupts at particular times and not others.

The answer to this apparent puzzle accord­ing to constructivists is that social, economic, political, cultural and normative structures are insufficient on their own to cause conflict; agents are required to transform the latent structures of conflict into the manifestation of violence. On the other hand, certain agents may desire to construct conflict (such as white supremacists wishing to trigger a race war), but lack the necessary structural conditions to enable them to achieve their goals. In this sense, structures and agents are inter-dependent and co-constitutive in the construction of conflict.

One important way that structures and agents interact in violence construction is that political elites use the grievances generated by existing structural conditions - such as poverty, unemployment, discrimination, cor­ruption and state incapacity - to inflame and manipulate identities and perceptions of threat and victimhood, thereby laying the foundation for legitimizing violent retaliation (Kapferer, 1988). At the same time, these structural conditions provide the human raw material for initiating and sustaining organized violence: large numbers of unemployed, lumpen youth who can be recruited from slums and jails. In a number of conflicts during the 1990s, such elements were organized into armed gangs and irregular fighting units and it was these elements who committed much of the violence directed against civilians in Rwanda, the Balkans, Sierra Leone and elsewhere (see Abdullah, 1998; Woodward, 1995).

The value of this approach is that it provides important clues as to why conflicts break out at particular junctures: it takes a coincidence of enabling structures and purposeful actors to provide the necessary conditions to spark a war. In the case of Yugoslavia, for example, it was the combination of severe economic crisis, social and political instability and the actions of Milosevic and his nationalists that created the conditions which made war possible. One without the other - the absence of debilitating structural conditions or a determined nationalist leadership - would have likely resulted in sporadic disturbances and isolated acts of violence rather than the sustained and widespread warfare that was seen.

Central to the process of violent conflict construction is the role of conflict agents, typically described as ‘conflict entrepreneurs' or ‘ethnic entrepreneurs'(Lemarchand, 1994). These actors are usually elites - political, mili­tary, religious or cultural and local or national. The point is that while individuals in society strategically construct identity boundaries on a daily basis, and while some may desire to engage in violence against an ‘other', it takes the political power of elites to materially and discursively organize and construct a society-wide conflict or war. The reasons why elites would deliberately construct hostile identities and conflict revolve around the desire to gain, maintain or increase their hold on political power, the need to eliminate or neutralize sources of opposition, the desire to defend boundaries or the pursuit of material gain through the control and exploitation of economic resources (Fearon and Laitin, 2000).

A number of studies (Alkopher, 2005; Jackson, 2004; Kaufman, 2001; Wilmer, 2002) reveal that in violent conflict, actors attempt to achieve similar sets of goals across different cultural contexts and historical periods. In an organized and concerted effort to construct the necessary conditions for conflict, elites attempt to deconstruct existing social norms of tolerance, non-violence and peaceful co-existence, put in place new norms of ‘other'-directed violence, recon­struct group identities into clearly defined dichotomies, enforce group unity and coop­eration in the nationalist project, redefine group interests in zero-sum terms, establish a pervading sense of threat and victimhood, censor and de-legitimize alternative non­violent discourses, militarize society and physically organize the means and tools of war. Elites do this by attempting to exert direct control over authoritative discursive sites in society, such as political institutions, the media, education, religion and other cultural processes, and the means of coercion, such as the security services and the military. Typically, key posts across all social insti­tutions are filled with individuals willing to promote the entrepreneur's political agenda. Usually, after a few years of organizing and when the conditions are ‘ripe' for conflict, it is not uncommon to see violent provocations used as a trigger to launch all-out war.

In this sense, constructivists argue that war is always a social construction requiring delib­erative action by individuals and groups and extensive social cooperation and organization between different groups and individuals. It is a form of deliberative politics made possible by particular kinds of discourses and social practices. They would argue, therefore, that key weaknesses of rationalist and structurally based quantitative approaches are that they fail to fully examine or account for the role of agents and agency in deliberately constructing war and conflict and the political struggles that this entails. Without a framework that includes a clearly defined notion of human agency, the resultant understanding of con­flict processes will necessarily be limited. Moreover, they would argue that effective conflict analysis requires in-depth, qualitative, case-specific knowledge, preferably gathered through ethnographic methods, rather than the necessarily simplified and generalized data that tends to characterize much quantitative research.

The discourses of conflict

Constructivist approaches to war and conflict also focus closely on the key role played by ideational and discursive factors, such as myths, narratives, histories, symbols, beliefs, ideologies and discourses. They suggest that the initiation of war requires the construction (by agents) of a vast and powerful cultural complex - a society-wide conflict discourse - that makes war possible by rendering it conceivable, legitimate and reasonable; it involves the construction of a new common sense. Importantly, such conflict discourses draw upon a mix of existing discursive and normative structures, such as national myths, political symbols, cultural norms, popular narratives, historical memory and newly introduced discursive elements deriv­ing from recent events and processes, such as immigration or terrorist attacks, for example. Historically contingent on the discursive opportunity structures of particular societies, conflict discourses may entail substantial reinvention of tradition and history, or simply the mobilization of existing cultural material. In this process, symbols, ideas and discourses are deployed instrumentally by elites as a kind of ‘symbolic technology' (Laffey and Weldes, 1997) in the effort to create a dominant ‘regime of truth' or ‘grid of intelligibility' for large numbers of people (Milliken, 1999: 230).

Critical to this process is the role played by existing normative structures which function to construct identities and interests; such structures can be either pacifist or conflictual (Alkopher, 2005: 720; Jabri, 1996). The ideas and practices of sovereignty and anarchy (Wendt, 1992), for example, both internation­ally and domestically, encourage actors to define their identities, interests, perceptions and behaviours in ways that provoke self­perpetuating security dilemmas. Similarly, the normative structures imposed by the ideas and practices of citizenship create exclusionary and oppositional identities easily manipulated to encourage conflict. From this perspective, it can be seen that conflict discourses do not emerge from a vacuum, nor do they operate in only one direction from the elite to the masses. Rather, conflict discourses are embedded in the normative and discursive structures of society and everyday reality and both draw upon and reflect the cultural and historical context in which they operate; they combine and recombine extant cultural materials and linguistic resources (Milliken, 1999: 239; see also Laffey and Weldes, 1997). At the same time, individuals con­struct and reconstruct identities and identity boundaries through their everyday practices and behaviour ‘on the ground', as it were. Ontologically, this suggests that conflict is not a breakdown in essentially peaceful social systems or a temporary abnormality, but is instead rooted in the structures, practices and conditions of social existence (Duffield, 1998).

A growing number of studies (Alkopher, 2005; Bowman, 1994; Brass, 1997; Campbell, 1993, 1998; Jabri, 1996; Jackson, 2004; Kapferer, 1988; Kaufman, 2001; Weldes, 1999; Weldes et al., 1999; Woodward, 1995) reveal some of the main elements of conflict discourses. These include: the construction of exclusionary and oppositional identities; the invention, reinvention or manipulation of grievance and a sense of victimhood; the construction or exaggeration of a pervading sense of threat and danger to the nation or community; the stereotyping and de­humanization of the enemy ‘other'; and the legitimization of organized pre-emptive and defensive political violence. The role of the media is crucial in this process, which is why conflict entrepreneurs go to extreme lengths to influence or control media sources. In Serbia, for example, in the lead-up to the war, the official Milosevic-dominated press started to publish stories about Albanian Muslims raping Serbian women, the expulsion of Serbian families by Albanian officials, and the desecration of orthodox monasteries in Kosova, creating a widespread sense of threat (Bowman, 1994). In relation to Croatia, the Serb media revived memories of the Ustasha regime, which appeared to be reincarnated in the declarations and symbols of the new Croat government. Newspapers and book­shops filled with stories illustrating the history of the ‘Croatian' attempt to exterminate the ‘Serbs'. At the same time, in Croatia and Slovenia, the media published pictures of thousands of allegedly Slovene and Croat vic­tims of partisan reprisals from World War II.

Importantly, Vivienne Jabri (1996) demon­strates the role of cultural-political notions of just war and militarist values and practices in reproducing war as a social continuity, particularly in Western societies. The exis­tence and dominance of such narratives in society provide a potent discursive resource for elites wishing to mobilize for war against other states. Jabri also draws attention to the ways in which war (re)constructs individual and national identity. The prevalence and potency of ‘good war’and ‘justwar’ narratives referring to World War II in the dominant discourse of the war on terror (Croft, 2006; Jackson, 2005) are a current example of this process. Interestingly, Tal Alkopher’s (2005) study reveals that similar kinds of ideas and institutions - particularly the potent, religiously imbued notion of ‘just war’ - made the social practices of the Crusades possible. Similarly, Stuart Kaufman’s (2001) analysis of ‘symbolic politics’ in the former Soviet Union draws attention to the ways in which local symbols and myths are imbued with potent meanings and manipulated by political leaders pursuing nationalist aims.

In short, constructivist accounts of conflict fill an important gap in many rationalist and quantitative studies by revealing the necessary ideational and discursive conditions that permit the construction of war and political violence; such ‘variables’ are rarely included in rationalist studies. Mapping such processes require interpretive rather than quantitative methodologies, as much of the relevant discourse falls outside of rational choice analyses. In addition, constructivist analyses add depth and detail to existing peace studies research by exploring the micro-physics of discourse construction and manipulation. Combining all these elements - the concurrent presence of conflict structures and purposive agents, the manipulation of oppositional identities, and the construction of powerful society-wide discourses - fur­nishes a comprehensive and richly textured understanding of conflict, which in turn is a necessary initial step in conceptualizing conflict resolution.