Intrastate Conflict

China's “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI) has attracted significant attention, based on expectations that it will have a transformative impact in fields ranging from economic integration to geopolitics. One aspect that has so far been mostly overlooked is the BRI's impact on conflict dynamics in fragile states throughout Africa and Asia. These countries have been able to attract significant amounts of Chinese infrastructure investments despite the high levels of conflict risks. This may turn out to be a boon for reconstruction and development efforts and promote sustainable peace, but also carries the danger of exacerbating conflicts through an uneven distribution of costs and benefits, increased corruption or geopolitical tensions.

This project studied the BRI’s impact on a range of fragile and conflict-affected states, with an initial focus on the cases of Pakistan, Myanmar, Kyrgyzstan and Uganda. It sought to establish how local attitudes towards BRI projects fall along existing conflict lines, and how its projects have reshaped these conflict dynamics. It examined what strategies Chinese companies and other actors are employing to secure their investments, if and how they mitigate local conflicts, and how they understand their own agency within these settings. Finally, it aimed to provide practice-oriented suggestions for how BRI-related economic investments can be made more conflict sensitive, and how Chinese, local and international actors can better coordinate their actions to reduce conflict risks.

The project was jointly undertaken with Saferworld and also included cooperation partners from China and the affected countries themselves. It aimed to build an international network for regular academic exchanges, civil society participation and practitioner outreach, with an initial kick-off event in March 2021.

Development co­operation is increasingly being conducted in conflict-affected states. As violent conflicts grow and spread, so does the ex­pectation that develop­ment co­operation will constructively contribute to their resolution. At the same time, current con­flict dynamics put decades of development progress at risk. The develop­ment-peace nexus is not only of central importance for the Global South, but also for countries in the Global North. The latter contribute substantially to shaping the link between development and peace and are increasingly affected by the reciprocal cycle of violent conflict and development setbacks. However, insights on the exact interplay between develop­ment and peace dynamics remain limited. Similarly, recent practical experiences that target the develop­ment-peace nexus are yet to be systematically evaluated and assessed.

Against this backdrop, this report reviews and summarizes the state of the art on the develop­ment-peace nexus. In doing so, it analyzes contem­porary trends, experiences, and challenges and de­rives practice-oriented recommen­dations for German and international development cooperation. This report was commissioned by the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Develop­ment (BMZ). It is based on 30 interviews with experts from different world regions and complemented by a comprehensive review of current policy documents and academic research.

Three ongoing global trends shape the relation between peace (building) and development (cooperation): First, many of the interviewed experts emphasize a worldwide wave of domestic trans­formation featuring authoritarian backlash and novel protest dynamics. Second, environ­mental and climate change, and the related resource conflicts, are identified as a critical contemporary challenge. Third, shifts in the global power structure point towards an alleged decline of the “West” and an ascent of non­western actors. All three of these trends in turn affect the general conditions under which work on the develop­ment-peace nexus is conducted.

This report’s analysis generally confirms the positive empirical relation­ship between development and peace while specifying that inclusion is the central bridge between the two elements. Nonethe­less, the processes of development and peace are complex, may even be at odds under certain circumstances, and do not follow a linear logic. These com­plexities are inadequately reflected in the ongoing political debate, which reduces the development-peace nexus to a simple reactive stabilization of social and political order. This over­simplification has problematic implications for a nexus-oriented peace and development policy.

More on the publication “Peace and Development 2020” 

Project duration: September 2019 – June 2020

Since the turn of the century, indigenous and social movements across Latin America have in­creasingly challenged the model of liberal democracy that had been almost undisputed during the 1990s. In Bolivia and Ecuador, under the governments of Evo Morales and Rafael Correa, these challenges translated into far-reaching constitutional reforms. The on­going transformation of democracy in the two countries is shaped, inter alia, by a direct clash of different governance concepts, with the mainstream model of liberal (“good”) democratic governance competing with alternative (partly indi­genous) ideas that refer to forms of direct, participatory and commu­nitarian democracy, a “plurinational” conception of the state, and local (collective, indigenous) auto­nomy. Although a basically demo­cratic regime (so far) remains in place in both countries, the struggle about the future shape of the political order calls into question basic rules of the game and spe­cific principles of justice that had formed the basis of respective political systems since the transition to democracy. The trans­formation of democracy is, therefore, both prone to (violent) conflict and shaped by claims to legitimate entitlements (i.e., justice claims).

The project analyzes the trans­formation of democracy in Bolivia and Ecuador as contentious processes of negotiating complex justice conflicts. The over­all research question is: To what extent and how does the type of justice claim in­fluence (limit/fuel) conflict escalation in processes of transforming democracy?

Project duration: January 2011 – June 2019

Most conflict parties in a civil war substantiate their professed objectives with justice claims. Regardless of whether a victory or a peace agreement ends the civil war, the parties must decide on which of the demands among them are to be implemented, in part or in whole. Post-civil war orders institutionalize these decisions and differ in the extent to which they either encompass only the demands of one side or balance the competing claims. The present project focused on this particular aspect and investigated whether stable peace is better secured by comprehensive compromises among the conflict parties or by only implementing the claims made by one side. Is a relapse into civil war more likely in a balanced or in a one-sided post-war order?

The project investigated developments following 48 civil wars that ended between 1990 and 2009. It followed a multi-method approach in order to make use of the respective advantages of quantitative and qualitative methods. As post-civil war orders are among the major factors that can directly be influenced, the findings from this study should prove particularly relevant for peace policies.

This project was conducted in cooperation with Professor Margit Bussmann (University of Greifswald). The German Research Foundation funded this project for three years.

Since the signing of the peace agreement between the Colombian government and the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) in late 2016, most indicators of violence and armed conflict have declined. Against this overall trend, one type of violence has seen a marked increase: the assas­sination of social leaders. The social leaders that are particularly targeted include represen­tatives of local citizens’ committees (Juntas de Acción Comunal), of in­digenous, Afro-Colombian, and peasant asso­ciations as well as of social movements and organizations active in the fields of human rights, land reform, or environ­mental concerns. This form of targeted violence is, thus, directed towards the very people who, particularly at local level, advocate for the concerns and rights of disad­vantaged societal groups and push for the local-level implemen­tation of the reforms envisaged by the 2016 peace agreement.

While the current wave of assas­sination of social leaders in Colombia is frequently attributed to the presence of armed non-state actors and their fight for control over illegal eco­nomies, this project aims at investi­gating the explicitly political logic behind this worri­some phenomenon. More specifically, it studies whether and how the very modus operandi of local autho­ritarian orders in Colombia’s peripheral regions shapes this type of targeted violence against civilians. Metho­dologically, it uses statistical analysis, Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) and qualitative case studies.

The project was conducted in cooperation with ICESI University in Cali, Colombia, in the context of the Instituto Colombo-Alemán para la Paz (CAPAZ). It has received financial support by CAPAZ and the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung in Colombia (FESCOL). Non-PRIF members of the project included: Juan Albarracín (University of Notre Dame, United States), Juan Pablo Milanese and Inge H. Valencia (both ICESI University, Colombia). The findings of the project are made available in academic studies as well as in policy-oriented publications.

The project examines the inter­relationship between the (de-)legitimation of military force and the emergence of world order thinking. Starting from the assumption that throughout the history of inter­national relations interstate violence was always in need of justi­fication, the research project examines to what extent continuity or change can be identified in the way the justi­fication of war relates to the construction of world order. In particular, we want to find out which patterns of reference to inter­national order can be deduced from war justi­fications in historical perspective. The crucial question here is to what extent legit­i­mization practices of political actors refer to an inter­national normative order, to what extent they shape this order by referring to it and, finally, to what extent they are influenced by what they perceive to be the ‘ruling’ normative order. Along this line, does it make sense and is it possible to observe ‘progress’ in the way the justi­fication of war and the emergence of an inter­national legal order relate to each other?
 

Although the justification of war is constitutive for the emergence of the modern normative world order, there is a lack of systematic and comparative reflection on the linkages between justifying war and modeling world order in theory and practice. This applies in particular, but not only, to an empirical comparison of contemporary justi­fication narratives with those in the ‘forgotten’ 19th century. The project addresses this research gap initially as a publication project: In addition to existing publications, a historical-comparative anthology with articles by leading scholars from the fields of inter­national law, legal and political history as well as political science is in preparation.

In addition, a larger project on the questions outlined here is to be developed from the research context.

Image: Soldiers in the Franco-Prussian War. Painting by Augustin Chenu (1870): Les Trainards: effet de neige. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Socioeconomic reforms sat atop the political agenda in Egypt and Tunisia from 2015. Following a certain degree of political and institutional stabilization in both countries in different regime contexts, the governments responded to the worsening economic situation by aggressively tackling highly contested issues such as subsidy cuts and public sector reform. This led to heated struggles which were of immense importance both for the reconfiguring military dictatorship in Egypt and for the democratization process in Tunisia, which was still ongoing at the time, as well as for its subsequent failure, and remain so to this day.

The re­search team consisting of Middle East and Latin American experts from Egypt, Germany and Tunisia has analyzed the consequences of the contentious negotiations over socioeconomic reforms for societal peace and political order in Egypt and Tunisia. As a follow-up to the project “Socioeconomic protests and political transformation: dy­namics of contentious politics in Egypt and Tunisia against the back­ground of South American experiences” (see below), this project continued to look at protest actors but also in­cluded the role of established political actors as well as business asso­ciations, think tanks/NGOs and international financial institutions into the analysis. A political economy frame­work was used to study the interactions between contentious and routine politics.

Looking at different policy fields (e. g. fiscal policy, social policy, public sector and regional development), the project has:

• identified the most important reform de­bates in Egypt and Tunisia since 2011 as well as the involved actors, their positions, power resources and strategies;
• analyzed strategies and interactions of actors involved in the (institutional) handling of conflicts in order to draw conclusions about the inter­actions between contentious and routine politics;
• analyzed the outcomes of the conflicts with re­gard to differences in issue areas and countries;
• analyzed the impact of these struggles over socioeconomic reforms on social conflict and political develop­ment in these countries.

For each reform de­bate, the results were compared between Egypt and Tunisia as well as with selected experiences from Latin America. Finally, the project developed policy recommen­dations and con­tributed to active knowledge transfer.

The project was carried out in cooperation with Dr. Amr El Shobaki and Dr. Nadine Abdalla of the Arab Forum for Alternatives, Egypt, and Dr. Bassem Karray and Dr. Hamza Meddeb of the Uni­versity of Sfax, Tunisia. The key findings have been published in the journal Mediterranean Politics as a themed section entitled “Socioeconomic reforms in times of political transformation: Conflicts over the political economy in Egypt and Tunisia post-2011”.

The project was funded for three years by the Volkswagen Foundation.

Project duration: December 2018 – December 2021

The project built on the previous work of the project “Socioeconomic protests and political transformation: dy­namics of contentious politics in Egypt and Tunisia against the back­ground of South American experiences”. From 2014-2018, the same partner institutions researched the neglected socio-economic dimension of the early transformation processes in Egypt and Tunisia, also with financial support from the Volkswagen Foundation. The focus here was on the dynamics of contentious politics, i.e. the interaction of protest groups and political actors, in the area of socio-economic conflicts. A focused analysis of South American countries and their diverse experiences with political change and socio-economic protests served to orient and systematize the detailed investigation of the Arab cases. The results of the project were published in the anthology “Socioeconomic Protests in MENA and Latin America. Egypt and Tunisia in Interregional Comparison” published by Palgrave Macmillan.

From 2017-2018, the Volkswagen Foundation also funded the project “The socio-economic dimension of Islamist radicalization in Egypt and Tunisia”, which focused on the socio-economic causes of Islamist radicalization and political violence in Egypt and Tunisia after the Arab uprisings. In this way, violent and non-violent forms of mobilization in the context of social justice conflicts and political transformation could be examined and compared across projects.

As part of the joint research initiative “ConTrust: Trust in Conflict. Political Coexistence under Conditions of Uncertainty” by Goethe University and PRIF, the project has been working on trust dynamics in the context of contentious politics, i.e. the interaction between protest movements and the state, since 2022. Firstly, the project brings together international research on the role of trust in and for social movements and develops a research agenda. The results appear in a special issue of the International Journal of Comparative Sociology entitled “Trust and Social Movements”, which also contains case studies from different world regions and political contexts.   
Building on this, further case studies dealt with trust dynamics in revolutions in West Asia and North Africa, in post-revolutionary transformation processes using the example of Tunisia, and in conflicts over the introduction of indigenous justice in existing legal systems in the Andean region.