THE CORE ARGUMENTS

This chapter engages with the peace vs. justice debate, particularly as found in the research literature to date, and relates it to conflict resolution in particular. In so doing, the aim is to take the debate further in several ways.

The work on addressing these questions is started in this chapter, with the development of some founding arguments. One is that the pursuit of justice does not categorically either undermine or promote peace. It can do, and does, both. We need to examine specific contexts in order to get clearer on how they affect each other. In other words, it depends largely on the contextual details. Overall, the two values are not quite as contradictory as they are often portrayed to be.

One factor stressed here is the impor­tance of stages and timing in examining how justice relates to peace. The chapter examines three stages of the peace-making process: the stages in which parties move from conflict to dialogue (pre-negotiation), and from negotiation to agreement, and the post-agreement and post-conflict phases of securing a durable peace. Each stage of the conflict resolution process raises its own issues and principles of justice which affect peace-making differently.

Another contextual factor is the particular justice issues and concepts involved. Some questions of justice are far more easily addressed and acted upon in a peace process than others. Put differently, some principles or aspects ofjustice relax or even remove the tension with peace while others increase it. Moreover, if parties hold compatible notions of justice, or are able to reconcile conflicting principles, this will obviously pave the way better for peace than if they do not. A third contextual factor is the relations between parties, in particular the distribution of power between them. It will often influence (but not alone determine) how far justice is taken into account, and whose claims are most heard. A common reason for the break­down of peace negotiations, for example, is discrepancy between the most compelling justice principles and the distribution of power (Zartman et al., 1996): Justice argues for something which the prevailing (im-)balance of power resists or does not permit. The balance of forces among former opponents has shown to influence how far justice, in the sense of accountability for past human rights violations, is compatible with peace in soceities emerging from civil war (Sriram, 2004). A fourth factor is the time-frame used: Peace—for example, in the sense of an urgency to cease hostilities - may require compromise on justice in the short term, but not in a long-term perspective.

Of course, the peace vs. justice question is not new. Nor are the debates and controversies over it. They have deep roots, and many current arguments now put forward pick up on older traditions. The proponents of various “peaceprojects” in the 17th and 18th centuries clearly associated the avoidance of war and international order with important aspects of justice - such as the rule of law and its impartial application to all states, and collec­tive decision-making within a federation of states from which nations would derive their rights (see Jacob, 1974). Most well-known among these is Immanuel Kant's proposal of 1795 for a “league of peace”, which would be able to secure perpetual peace. This normative-legal tradition as an answer to the problems of international anarchy and war was reflected in the later design of the League of Nations and its successor, the United Nations. But both institutions set it off against another - that of entrusting major powers and a balance of power system with preserving peace and order. Classical realist theory of international relations, at its heyday in the 1950s and 1960s, often ignores the subject of international justice altogether (see Brown, 1997). Alternatively, it overtly rejects that peace, defined as the absence of force, is dependent upon justice in any meaningful sense: “Nothing substantive is said about the nature of the justice which presumably forms the indispensable concomitant of peace” (Osgood & Tucker, 1967, p. 221). In international political theory, Henley Bull's The Anarchical Society (1977) is a classic pointing to both commonalities and differences with realist theory. Here order, maintained by a balance of power between states, is generally the most fundamental value to be prioritized when required over both justice and peace. Issues of justice which threaten order are best left closed. But order, whenever possible, should serve justice: normative principles help to govern inter-state relations.

The terms “peace” and “justice” refer to and imply widely different matters in the research literature.