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Exploring the Local Capacity for Peace : The Role of NGOs

 

 

By Mr. Paul Van Tongeren

 

In the old days, when wars fought between rather than within countries, the rules of the game were stark but clear. The battle raged on until one of the sides surrendered, unless diplomats reached a peace agreement prior to that. All decision-makers, negotiators and heroes were on the state's payroll, as were most of the victims. The people in the street's feelings about the enemy were largely irrelevant to the outcome of the war.

All of this has changed. Now that internal strife has become the predominant form of war, with the state as just one actor among several, it stands to reason that society should do its bit to stop violence; civil war demands civil action. As long as sections of the population within a country desire to wipe each other out or bring down the powers that be rather than to reach a settlement, national and foreign governments will find that they are in no position to impose peace. Local leaders, guerrilla commanders or warlords may continue fighting. In a way, war has been democratized.

Confronted with the trend of increased violence in intra-state fighting, combined with an increasing complexity of conflicts, the conventional means of conflict prevention and resolution seem outdated or powerless. New approaches to explaining and understanding conflicts and their underlying causes, as well as how best to act in preventing and resolving conflict, are therefore needed.

Multi-Track Diplomacy : This understanding has concept known as multi­track diplomacy. Originally coined by John McDonald, founder and chair of the Institute for Multi-Track Diplomacy, the term is now spreading as the catchall for a wide range of peace­making efforts. McDonald distinguished nine actor given rise to a categories, or tracks: governments, professional organizations, the business community, churches, media, private citizens, training and educational institutes, activists and funding organizations.

In addition, to McDonalds's group of actors, the Carnegie Commission envisions a contribution for the UN, and regional organisations. Kumar Rupesinghe, secretary­general of International Alert, distinguishes roles for the UN, 'second-track diplomacy' (such as the Oslo peace talks), 'eminent persons' (such as former US president Jimmy Carter), women's movements, youth groups and artists. He often refers to these latter forms as 'citizen-based diplomacy'. Many scholars now consider a multi-track approach to be the natural answer to 'multi-cause' of conflict. 'The multiplicity and variety of actors involved in generating conflicts requires a similar multiplicity of international partners to resolve them', according to Barnett Rubin and Susanna Campbell in a study for the Center for Preventive Action (CPA).

The various parties can act in unison or separately, according to the local situation and the stage of the conflict. When official peace talks fail, businessmen can try to break through the impasse, as was the case in Namibia. Sometimes NGOs monitor human­rights abuses at the grassroots level, while international institutions like the World Bank press discreetly for a peaceful settlement and national civic groups form peace coalitions to bring the various parties to the negotiating table. In general one could say unofficial second track negotiations may stand greater chance of succes if intended to complement official negotiations, but they cannot focus on all the areas of concern which have affected the causes and duration of the conflict. Non­governmental diplomacy may be effective in creating dialogue, but does not have the necessary resources or political leverage to bring about change. Thus, there is a need for complementary action, as the combined force of these approaches can address the fundamental issues, and still bring the necessary political momentum. Or, as the group of eminent persons forming the Carnegie Commission on Deadly Conflict in its 1997 Report put it: "We have come to the conclusion that the prevention of deadly conflict is, over the long term, too hard­intellectually, technically, and politically - to be the responsibility of any single institution or government, no matter how powerful. Strengths must be pooled, burdens shared, and labor divided among actors".)

Although the concept of multi-track diplomacy is still quite novel, there are high expectations of this approach, and particularly of the role of NGOs and religious organizations. Their familiarity with the local situation and their close contacts with grassroots movements are seen as major' advantages in complex intra-state conflicts, Besides, western NGOs and global religious organizations can act on different levels: the local and the international.

Fundament Al Roles Ngos Might Play2
A preventive role by means of early warning : Because of their close involvement with local communities, NGOs are in an excellent position to fulfil an early-warning function, alerting the international community to potential breakdowns in a distressed country's government or in relations among the country's major domestic groups. NGOs can thus serve as the first step in preventive action to avert future complex emergencies.

Human-rights monitoring : As a next step, after such early-warning signals have been delivered, NGOs can, play an important role through the gathering of supplementary information in areas of tension, sending out mission, etc.

Peace-building/strengthening civil society : NGOs have an important role to play in strengthening the social system. NGOs contribute to this goal in many ways, for instance through small-scale local capacity­building (training of local leaders, etc.) This function gains an extra dimension in a situation of state collapse, where there is little or no government authority at all.

Supporting peace constituencies : In addition to creating general conditions that enhance peace-building, NGOs can help to establish well-knit local infrastructures across the levels of society that empower the resources for reconciliation. International Alert has dubbed these infrastructures 'peace constituencies', comprising people from different sectors of civil society whose prevailing interest is the development of sustainable peace and whose activities are based on long-term commitment.

Conflict-resolution activities : This is certainly not a traditional NGO role, but there is growing agreement that NGOs should become more active in this area, for instance through training of their own employees and those of local NGOs.

Advocacy /lobby / education : A traditional role for NGOs in many ways, this task should be taken forcefully to hand in the realm of conflict prevention too.

Early warning signals are frequently not translated into political action. The early alarms on Somalia, Bosnia and Rwanda sorted no effect. Thus more concerted political action is required from NGOs. This is all the more necessary because experiences with recent humanitarian crises move governments to adopt more isolationist positions, inclined to intervention only when national security is at danger. NGOs, on the contrary, embody an internationalist, moral position, with a strong involvement directed towards empowerment, peace, well-being and social and economic justice. In addition, NGOs can do more for less money. In the words of the World Bank: 'NGOs work at low cost: they are funded largely by charitable contributions and staffed by volunteers.3

NGOs are fit to work in the realm of civic society because they have access to groups and organisations that may bear responsibility for ethnic tension. In ethnopolitical conflicts, responsibility for ethnic rivalry and hatred to a large extent lies in the hands of local players, such as local media representing a particular ethnic group or organizations seeking to defend the rights of an ethnic minority. Dealing with local actors in civic society could therefore lead to confrontations between neutral international NGOs and local NGOs that have taken sides. But the outsider NGOs may also see a chance to influence the attitude of radicalized local organizations towards moderation.

Reasons why NGOs qualify for these Roles4 : Collectively, NGOs have the ability to

  • function without being constrained by narrow mandates of foreign-policy imperatives;

  • achieve access to areas inaccessible to official actors;

  • talk to several parties without losing their credibility;

  • deal directly with grassroots populations;

  • operate in obscurity without media, parliamentary or public scrutiny;

  • take the greatest risks, given their public-advocacy and social justice agendas;

  • effectively network, given their public­advocacy and social-justice agendas;

  • draw upon public opinion to galvanize political will;

  • to focus on a longer-term perspective than governments are able to.

The value of Coordination & Cooperation : Nonetheless it may be detrimental for NGOs to assume all these roles simultaneously. It is not even suggested that every NGO should fulfil all these roles. Coordination and sharing of time and efforts is the answer here. With so many actors at different levels of the international system available to intervene in complex emergencies, coordination is essential to avoid overlapping, and often counter-productive, responses that result in wasted resources and inefficient operations.

There is a need to renegotiate the roles played by governments and NGOs. The two actors' contributions can and should be complementary. For instance, NGOs very' often feel free to engage themselves while governments may be hampered by the notion of sovereignty and nonintervention and while governments in many cases are able to put pressure on conflict parties, NGOs are good at people to people contact. Developing a multi-disciplinary approach to conflict prevention and transformation requires coalition-building, An effective multi­disciplinary approach would involve a wide variety of constituencies, including NGOs, governments, military personnel, the business sector, the media and parliamentarians. Coordination must be pursued not merely as a means of information-sharing but also as a vehicle for strategic planning and evaluation.

In addition, there is a need to recognize the continuum from conflict prevention to post-conflict peace maintenance and development and to organize a division of labour amongst the actors mentioned above to reflect this continuum. One of the most difficult problems those seeking to prevent conflicts have to overcome is the lack of political will for action. A collective effort is vital to break policy-makers' reluctance and make sure that early warning is followed by early action.

In several countries, such as Canada, Sweden, Belgium and the Netherlands, there is growing cooperation among different sectors and kinds of organizations active in this field, or wishing to become so. The Canadian conflict prevention policy included the establishment of a resource group of experts in the field of human rights and peace- building who are available for NGOs. The Canadian government also supports the NGO-led Peace-building Contact Group. a network of Canadian NGOs active in the field of conflict prevention. The governments of Finland, the Netherlands and Sweden helped NGOs to organize conferences and seminars on conflict prevention. Joint platforms and coalition-building is all the more useful because for many participating NGOs conflict prevention is on the margin of their mandates.

Some Recommendations For A Conflict-Resolution Agenda5 : Some of the following recommendations are of a general nature, because they go beyond most others, or are of importance to all actors (such as mobilizing political will for conflict resolution). Other recommendations are directed specifically to governments (aiming at a UN standing force) or NGOs (the importance of mutual cooperation, codes of conduct). But there is only a difference in degree, because a call to governments is also a call to NGOs to put pressure on these governments.

General

  • Political will-It is of crucial importance to mobilize the political will of IGOs, national governments and NGOs to act in time, in order to prevent major humanitarian crisis or genocide.

  • Early warning/early action-An effective Early- Warning system has to be created, in order to recognize a pattern of massive human-rights violations at an early stage. Furthermore, the international community has to have answers at hand on a scale of escalation and appropriate action-starting with diplomatic pressure and the sending of observation missions, and with the deployment of armed forces as a final means. NGOs should support and stimulate an effective response.

  • Comprehensive strategy-One way of ensuring an effective international response is for the NGO community to coordinate its members' separate responses to complex emergencies, aiming at a comprehensive strategy that allows major actors to participate in an integrated fashion. The ultimate challenge to governments and international organizations is to construct a system that can respond to a complex emergency in a comprehensive, unified, integrated way, combining diplomatic skill, military power and NGO field experience under a UN mandate.

  • International coordination of activities directed towards potential crisis areas-It would be desirable to create international harmony about which countries/regions are in the greatest danger of escalation, in order to direct a broad range of preventive activities towards these areas.

  • Building networks-NGOs could boost the efficiency of their operations by setting up networks that focus on particular conflict regions, preferably comprising partners of both the North and South, earmarked to share knowledge and experience.

  • Enlargement of capacity-In such countries/regions the capacity for early warning, monitoring and conflict resolution should be greatly enhanced. An efficient approach of capacity building would be the establishment of local peace constituencies.

  • Redirection of resources- Governments and development/ humanitarian NGOs should consider a fundamental change in their programme development to address the interdependence of relief, development and conflict resolution.

  • Transparency-Exchanging informa­tion on what NGOs are doing, where they do it, when and why, would be a big step forward towards evading redundancies and allocating resources and energy more adequately. This task could be carried out by umbrella organisations such as clearing houses, which gather and disperse information in newsletters and surveys. Transparency of NGOs' activities would also be a prerequisite for establishing accountability.

Governments

  • Politico-military means-Governments and regional institutions like the European Union should enlarge their capacity in this field, including the extension of their instruments into a permanent UN standing force.

  • Inter national Criminal Court - A permanent International Criminal Court should be created with the competence to prosecute plotters and perpetrators of gross human-rights violations to arrest them and to convict them.

NGOs

  • Greater influence for NOOs-The dialogue between governments and NGOs needs to be improved and intensified. At the moment this is usually confined to formal rounds of consulations. NGOs are serious partners in the discussion and should be treated as such. At an international level there is also a great deal of room for improvement in this domain. NGOs must be recognised as an important additional element to the sphere of influence of the UN, nation states and multinational companies. They must be given structured access to the UN and its sections and to regional organizations.

  • Coordination among NGOs-Conflicts do not come into being from one day to the next. NGOs need to be far more alert in the run-up phase and to consult one another on opportunities for prevention. They must also prepare themselves for the situation that will ensue if things go wrong. NGOs need to raise the alarm more forcefully at the UN and with regional organizations when they observe that a situation is getting out of hand. Furthermore, greater efforts need to be made to build bridges between rulers and civilian authorities in potential contact zones. NGOs could do better in coordinating their mutual activities. Listening to one another more is a first prerequisite here.

Coalition-building by NGOs in the North-type of tasks that could be fulfilled:

  • clearing-house function;

  • multi-sector dialogue-platform function for all the various types of organizations/actors;

  • attuning of early warning;

  • support of and catalysis of activities;

  • mutual preventive actions towards pre­explosion crisis areas;

  • facilitating of policy debates;

  • research, training and education; t liaison to international networks.

  • Code oj ConductJor NGOs - There is a need for a code of conduct for relations with the local population, preparation and training of staff to be sent out, etc. NGOs must no longer be allowed to go to work in a situation with which they are not familiar and which they do not understand. The same goes for military personnel, observers, etc. Supervising the observance of a code of conduct is a nuisance, but now is the time for NGOs to make a start on opening up their organizations to this idea.

  • Policy debates-The international community, including NGOs, is confronted with a whole range of new problems, which will drastically change their traditional roles. They have to consult themselves - internally and mutually - about these changing roles.

NGOs have to make important pragmatic, political and ethical choices. At what stage in an escalating crisis do they pull out employees? Can they refuse to help certain groups? Is it permissible to ignore human rights violations in order to keep on providing humanitarian assistance? Should they accept armed protection for their operations? In what way do NGOs escalate conflicts through their mere intervention? In order to decrease the risk of erosion of terms and ideas/ concepts, and to take responsibility in the case of ethical choices, NGOs have to give more weight to the setting of their standards.

 

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Author : Mr. Paul van Tongeren is the Executive director of European Platform for Conflict Prevention and Transformation at Utrecht, the Netherland. He has been involved in numerous Dutch NGOs in the field of development, cooperation, peace and environment

Article Source : Anuvibha Reporter ( Special Issue : Dec. 2000 )
Ahimsa, Peacemaking, Conflict Prevention and Management Proceedings and Presentations
Fourth International Conference on Peace and Nonviolent Action ( IV ICPNA )
New Delhi : Nov. 10-14, 1999

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