Posts
"Negative peace," says peace scholar Kent Shifferd, "is the peace the generals get after they win the war."[1]
Negative peace might be said to be the peace in a situation that locks in a power imbalance, often by some version of a gun-to-the-head threat to the losing side: Do not mistake this for peace with free speech, law that applies equally to all, or any sort of equality, much less equity.
Peaceworkers, peace scholars, and peacebuilding practitioners note many of the aspects of classic negative peace have existed in Sri Lanka since the 2009 victory of the government military over the Tamil Tigers. The administrations in power since then have refused to entertain any examination of alleged war crimes committed by government forces during the war and have essentially excluded external peace professionals from post-war reconciliation efforts in a "context of denial" (Walpita, 2023).
One element of this denial is to stymie local grassroots peace activists in the areas home to the Tamils, obviating the perspectives that might help toward building a sustainable peace as envisioned by many international experts. This is especially pernicious when the defeated armed forces of one ethnic group seemingly become what the ruling party sees as the identity of the populace of that ethnicity, effectively silencing them and virtually guaranteeing a future outbreak of hot conflict again.
It is hard work to overcome the traumas of war and perhaps hard work to set aside the desires to punish the identity group deemed responsible. We've seen the results in Israel/Palestine, we see them in Sudan, in Congo, and indeed, those concepts scale up and down, from the international, to the aftermath of civil war in some places, domestically in the inability of some who even lose a free and fair election to accept the results, all the way down to workplace and family dynamics.
Trauma-informed peacebuilding is not easy, can feel unfair, and requires more grace than many can manage. In fact, some trauma is so severe that reconciliation may be exceedingly rare. There are folks in the US who nurse grudges for generations against those who have been enemies, even though none of the actual enemies are living; the end of the US Civil War was officially signed nearly 160 years ago, yet intergenerational retention of grievances in the white culture of the former Confederate states is clearly a political and cultural factor in ongoing political and cultural conflict in the US.
While reconciliation cannot absolutely efface all trauma as an emotional artifact in opposing identity groups, it can dampen it so effectively that the expressions of the grievances become more and more rare and are seen as less and less valid. Few in the US express open hatred for Japanese because of Pearl Harbor, few talk openly of despising all Germans because of what Nazis did 80 years ago, because the respective governments on both sides worked very hard to achieve reconciliation and strong collaborative economic partnerships.
In sum, the voices, cultural knowledge, and egalitarian participation of all sides in the aftermath of hot conflict are vital if future slippery slopes to destructive conflict are to be avoided.
Denial is not a strategy; it is not even a decent band-aid on what should be a healing process.
References
Walpita, S. K. (2023). Context of Denial in the Practice of Local Knowledge during Grassroots Peacebuilding: An Analysis of Grassroots Activists’ Experiences in North and East Sri Lanka. Asian Journal of Peacebuilding, 11(2), 237–256. https://doi-org.proxy.lib.pdx.edu/10.18588/202311.00a348
No comments:
Post a Comment