Suchergebnisse

"The relationship between development policy and security policy has undergone rapid changes over a period of only a few years. In Germany, as well as other donor countries, there was in the past a clearly recognizable distance between development actors and military actors and between their respective tasks. This distance is shrinking. The new debate is important for many developing countries and regions (e.g. Afghanistan), but is especially relevant to sub-Saharan Africa. Peace and security are at the top of the agenda for Africa. While they have been recognized in the past as among the most urgent challenges facing the continent, they have not previously gained the marked profile they are now assuming as a political priority for practical policy approaches and efforts both in and outside Africa. The basic parameters involved have shifted in the direction of greater visibility and a heightened political will to act. The African Union (AU), created in 2002, is most important for this new situation. However, the new peace and security architecture faces a number of challenges. Although the AU's ownership approach to peace and security is fundamentally correct, it contrasts sharply with African funding and implementation capacities. Ultimately, the AU will prove to be effective only if the relevant donors are prepared to support, and above all to fund, its policies. Interfaces between development policy and security policy are not a phenomenon confined to Germany. The UN, for example, is increasingly interested in conducting comprehensive peace missions in Africa. Integrated missions with civil and military components were first undertaken in Sierra Leone. Another important example is Britain, which established an Africa Conflict Prevention Pool in 2001. The British development, foreign and defence policies are contributing to this fund. Germany's cross-policy approaches in Africa's case cover different categories, such as strategic planning, funding and operational activities. It is important to stress that many of these efforts are made within a broader context of international approaches of the G8 and the European Union. An important effort as regards a German 'whole-of-government' approach began with an action plan for 'Civilian Crisis Prevention, Conflict Resolution and Post-Conflict Peace-Building'. The action plan is an interministerial exercise and was approved by the Cabinet in May 2004. Its objective is to develop the Federal Government's capabilities and to make greater use of the foreign, security and development policies in civil crisis prevention. One of its main aims is therefore coherent and coordinated action on the part of all state and non-state actors. Several parts of the plan are devoted to Africa. The new tendencies in Germany have led not to a merging of development and security concepts, but to a new relationship between the actors concerned. This closer relationship also entails differences of view on a number of issues." (author's abstract)

"This chapter was borne out of a need to bring together two contending constituencies and their arguments about why and how to identify impact in peacebuilding initiatives in practice. The two constituencies, which the authoress calls 'frameworkers' and 'circlers', involve sets of people who blend across the lines of development and conflict transformation work and possess very different arguments about how to conceptualize and operationalize issues of impact and change in program design, monitoring and evaluation. The differences matter in a practical sense for workers in international and national non-governmental organizations (NGOs) because their views often clash during program design, monitoring and evaluation processes, and leave both sides dissatisfied. The groups also matter for conceptual reasons because they capture unspoken differences that hinder people's ability to talk clearly about impact and change, what matters, how people 'know what they know' about impact and change and, therefore, how they do their peacebuilding work. Unmasking the conceptual debates can improve our ability to speak about and achieve effectiveness and impact. The authoress receives diverse reactions to the arguments contained here. People who self-identify as circlers are often delighted to find an argument that recognizes them. For example, when one raises the topic in a course one co-teaches an peacebuilding monitoring, evaluation and learning there is a palpable sense of relief amongst some in the room who question linear causal logic and objective measures. Others, who are frameworker-orientated and work extensively in the field, tend to be open to the arguments below; they want frameworkers to be depicted positively but appreciate that different worldviews operate in the field and believe people need to be aware of differences and able to translate between them where possible. On infrequent occasions, academics steeped in positivist research have read the chapter and been appalled by the discussion regarding alternative worldviews, perceptions of reality and the questioning of causality; they find the suggestions disturbing and counter to their commitment to discover objective truths. Overall, these reactions reinforce for the authoress the importance of identifying and discussing assumptions at work in peacebuilding monitoring and evaluation; they also suggest that there are further issues to be addressed and that the authoress only begins to scratch the surface of the issues presented here. In this chapter, she begins by outlining the two basic constituencies: frameworkers and circlers. She briefly reviews the current status of peacebuilding monitoring and evaluation, which continues to grow and evolve. This is followed by an analysis of a series of topics that are debated between frameworkers and circlers; some of these topics are debated openly and addressed by other works that examine peacebuilding monitoring and evaluation, and some lie below the surface or are not articulated as debates. The tensions provide insights into the underlying issues that need to be identified in order to be fruitfully addressed. Finally, the authoress presents some concrete examples of ways that peacebuilding or other social change orientated programs have adopted to Bridge the positions in practice and identify practices that can strengthen particular areas that are currently under-developed and can benefit programs." (excerpt)

"The question at hand seems relatively simple and straightforward: whether and to what extent the protection and promotion of human rights is necessary for efforts to address conflict and build peace. The issue has been much debated over time. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights forcefully associated the protection of human rights with the prevention of violent conflict, stating that 'it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law' (UN 1948, preamble). Yet in 1996, an anonymous author in Human Rights Quarterly accused the international human rights movement of prolonging the war in Bosnia Herzegovina. There, human rights activists had rejected pragmatic deals that could have ended the violence and, from hindsight, were no worse than the eventual agreement in rewarding ethnic cleansing and aggression. In that author's view, it made 'today's living the dead of tomorrow' by pursuing a perfectly just and moral peace that would bring 'justice for yesterday's victims of atrocities' (Anonymous 1996, 259). Since then, the idea that the normative nature of human rights standards may complicate the practical demands of peacemaking has been a recurrent theme in discussions on the relationship between human rights and efforts to address violent conflict. This is especially the case when the latter is conceived of in terms of conflict settlement or resolution. Questions of definitions and objectives are thus key. Also relevant are the time frame, context and level of intervention one focuses on, though few authors on the subject make this explicit. In addition, narrow perceptions and generalizations abound in this debate as people working on human rights, peace and conflict have been grouped into categories of 'human rights activists' and 'conflict resolvers' as if these were homogenous and coherent clusters of actors. In this chapter, the authoress argues that considering human rights and conflict transformation in conjunction deepens one's analysis of what is involved in moving from violence to sustainable peace. It is informed by the idea that the two fill 'gaps' in one another, in that each contributes to a better understanding of the other by highlighting elements that are relatively under-explored in the theory and practice of each separate field. For conflict transformation, which will be the main focus here, the perspective of human rights forces a greater emphasis on structural conditions, especially the role of the state, systems of governance and issues of power in generating, escalating and transforming violent conflict. Considering human rights in relation to conflict transformation, moreover, highlights the need to employ a holistic, multidimensional understanding of human rights that does not reduce them to their legal foundations. This chapter suggests that conflict transformation, because of its explicit grounding in social justice, and hence inherently normative foundation, may provide a more nuanced and fruitful conceptual space for thinking about human rights, conflict and peace than conflict resolution and conflict management. Placing constructive social change at its core, conflict transformation acknowledges the need for addressing power imbalances and recognizes a role for advocacy and the importance of voices that challenge the status quo. Its concern with direct, structural and cultural violence is thus also highly relevant from a rights perspective. In order to place these ideas in context, the chapter will briefly comment on literature that has been published on human rights and approaches for addressing conflict and building peace (section 2). Section 3 proposes a framework for understanding the relationship between human rights and conflict transformation, using the metaphor of an iceberg, with its graphic image of things visible connected to matters unseen. It also introduces four dimensions of human rights that need to be taken into account in processes to build a just and sustainable peace. Section 4 discusses some of the practical implications of adopting a human rights perspective on conflict transformation. Nepal, South Africa, and other countries where the authoress has worked over the past 15 years, are used as illustrative examples throughout sections 3 and 4. Finally, section 5 concludes and points to some areas for further research." (excerpt)