Conflicts are natural and occur at all levels of human interaction within and between individuals, communities, cultures and countries. The general perception that conflict is negative emerges from the assumption that conflicts are inherently associated with violence, and the absence of any violence implies there must be no conflict. In actuality, whenever peaceful co-existence is interrupted or broken conflict exists. Unfortunately, perceptions of war and peace only reaffirm the status quo of ‘negative peace’ – a peace that focuses on ending violence without justice. This ‘negative peace’ perpetuates the conflict and does not allow for peaceful relations to be established because of its suppressive nature.
Kai Frithjof Brand-Jacobsen shares the view that, “what is important, is not whether conflicts themselves are good or bad, but how we deal with them.” Current approaches dealing with conflicts reveal that there is a tendency to focus too much on ending the violence by presenting selective short-term options without addressing the peoples’ aspirations and needs. Such approaches do not empower peace interventions for exploring settlements that are consistent with justice. The thinking, language and actions that contribute to long lasting change using nonviolent means have not replaced deep-rooted causes of the conflict. This effectively denies the spectrum of rights that is necessary for unrepresented peoples to experience rehumanization and dignity. Invariably, this prevents the people from determining its own destiny, and perhaps this is one of the reasons why self-determination conflicts have either spanned over an extended period of time or have reoccurred.
In protracted conflicts, Frederic S. Pearson says “attitudes seem particularly resistant where the conflict has witnessed a long history of mutual attack and atrocity.” He points out that the process of transforming conflicts needs to create a “perception of common concern” so that trust-building can begin to take place helping attitudes to shift. Initiatives to mobilize and involve people need to be an ongoing effort throughout the course of the peace process in various peacebuilding activities such as, trust-building, peoples-to-peoples dialogue, trauma healing, reconciliation, to rehumanize the image of the ‘cultural other,’ to encourage and support leaders in making conciliatory steps, truth-telling and envisioning a shared future. John Paul Lederach calls for “cultivating an infrastructure for peacebuilding” which is not merely interested in ending something that is undesirable, but “oriented toward the building of relationships that in their totality form new patterns, processes, and structures.”
Clearly, top-down approaches to peace-building, “peace imposed from above or from abroad,” and “resolutions by force or the threat of force”, will not lead to peace. Rather they may provoke the conflict causing further escalation. Any sustainable solution to peacefully transforming a conflict involves the peoples’ active participation at all levels of society, and a peoples’ values, needs and interests need to be integral in a peace process and upheld in a settlement. Attaining levels of transcendence requires empathy, creativity, sincerity based on nonviolence. There is no ready-made, one-size-fits-all blueprint for addressing self-determination conflicts. In each case, the parties involved must consider their distinctive context of “historical and political circumstances” and find a balance among various interests and values to make transformation possible.
