Author	Hussein Solomon
Publication	Searching for Peace in Africa
Year	1999

Keywords

conflict analysis

Analysing Conflicts

Africa faces the monumental challenge of attempting to hold in check the forces that are wreaking havoc on the continent. Effective conflict analysis is one small step towards an Africa which can live up to its full potential of peace and prosperity¹.

Future historians will certainly view the twentieth century as one of the bloodiest in the record of humanity's struggle against its more primordial instincts. From the bloody plains of Armenia to the trench warfare of World War I, the gas chambers of Auschwitz and Dachau, the killing-fields of East Timor, Cambodia and Sudan and now Angola and Yugoslavia, the twentieth century has seen mans' inhumanity to man descend to new depths of depravity. In total some 160 million people lost their lives as a result of war, genocide and state killings². In 1996 alone, Rupesinghe and Anderlini³ note that nineteen major internal conflicts were being fought world-wide, with a further 42 lower-intensity and 74 lethal violent political conflicts.
Africa contributed more than its fair share to this century's warfare. Of the 48 genocides and 'politicides' registered throughout the world between 1945 and 1995, twenty took place in Africa. In the same period, an estimated eight million people were killed in Africa as a direct result of war.⁴
These horrendous statistics reveal the challenge we all face: to effectively analyse violent conflicts or potential violent conflicts with a view to channelling them along more non-violent trajectories. To borrow a phrase from Kumar Rupesinghe, the goal of such conflict analysis is not conflict termination but conflict transformation. The reason for this is that conflict is an integral part of human relations and cannot be entirely eliminated. Indeed, under certain circumstances conflict can be a positive force. The purpose of such conflict analysis, then, is to aid in the ending of the violent expression of conflict and to have it re-channelled through such institutional arrangements as regular elections or procedures at the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
The purpose of this chapter is to provide a brief overview of steps towards effective conflict analysis. I will explain some aspects of the methodology employed by ACCORD's Early Warning System in its analysis of conflicts and potential conflicts.

Caveat

Our discussion of conflict analysis needs to be preceded with a caveat. There is a tendency to reduce complex social and political analysis into CNN-style 'sound-bites' - into easily consumable stereotypical phrases. Two such examples illustrate the point.
First, amongst academics and policy-makers there is a growing tendency to view inter-state conflicts as being replaced by intra-state conflicts. On closer inspection, however one finds that such a dichotomy is false; that historically there has been a strong interaction between these two forms of conflict and that this interaction continues today. Surveying the current state of Africa it is clear that several rebel movements - be they Jonas Savimbi's UNITA in Angola or Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda - would cease to exist in the absence of external support.
Second, there is a tendency in certain circles in Washington and in certain other Western capitals to equate 'Islamic fundamentalism' with terrorism. When African governments internalise these positions the consequences are disastrous. This sort of 'pseudo-analysis' does not deepen our understanding of why 'Islamic fundamentalist' Sudan would support the efforts of the 'Christian fundamentalist' Lord's Resistance Army to topple the secular government of Uganda's Yoweri Museveni. Equating 'Islamic fundamentalism' with terrorism effectively problematises over one billion of the world's Muslims and could in the long-term result in a self-fulfilling prophecy. Commenting on this, Rupesinghe and Anderlini⁶ note that 'Islamic fundamentalism':

'... is a popular reaction to western cultural domination and the West's support of often corrupt regimes. It is also a reaction to the increasing disparity between the rich and the poor in these areas. In Bosnia, the emergence of extremist Islamic groups is, in part, a consequence of the Muslim population's anger at what they perceived as western indifference to their plight. For the Chechens, on the other hand, the promotion of Islam as part of a new national identity is a means of distancing themselves from their former Russian rulers ... Care must be taken, however, not to oversimplify the issues through injudicious stereotyping.... The Islamic world is made up of a patchwork of nations, cultures, languages and histories. The danger is that by focussing on Islam itself, rather than on its politicisation by governments (and groups) this perceived threat could become a self-fulfilling prophecy'.

Many other cases can be used to illustrate what's at issue here, but I believe that the point has been made: over-simplistic analysis and injudicious stereotyping needs to be avoided in any conflict analysis.

The art of conflict analyses

A concomitant of the above point is the fact that we need to accept that the emergence of violent conflict is often the result of complex processes, often with deep historical roots. Following Barry Buzan's typology, ACCORD's Early Warning System views conflict as the result of five sources of insecurity: political, economic, military, environmental and socio-cultural variables.
Often in our analysis we are prone to emphasise the political and military dimensions of a conflict at the expense of other variables which are often more deep-seated and drive violent conflicts more directly. According to Stanley Samarasinghe⁷ a functional correlation exists between poverty and conflict. Consider in this regard the following statistics:

• In the past fifteen years, about fifteen of the world's twenty poorest countries have experienced violent conflict.
• About half of the world's low income countries are either engaged in conflict or are in the process of transition from conflict.
• Almost every low income country shares at least one border with a country in conflict if it is not embroiled in its own conflict.
• In the 1990s about seventy million of the world's poor have been displaced from their homes as a result of conflict. In Africa, alone, about one-third of the countries have produced refugees.

Supporting this view and relating poverty to the occurrence of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, Rupesinghe and Anderlini8 note that the poor Central African country was faced with a rapidly increasing population and decreasing agricultural productivity. The situation was exacerbated by a drop in tea and coffee prices in the late 1980s and structural adjustment policies in 1990 leading to even harsher living conditions. These developments eroded the government's legitimacy in the eyes of the people. Although these factors in themselves did not create sufficient conditions for the outbreak of civil war or the genocide of 1994, the authors point out that they were instrumental within the wider context. They contributed to the build-up of tensions in a country with a history of social and ethnic divisions and violence.
In addition to identifying a set of causes for violent conflict, good conflict analysis is boosted by applying a time frame to the course of the conflict. According to Stanley Samarasinghe9, any violent conflict has five basic phases. He distinguishes the Pre-Conflict Phase; the Conflict Emergence Phase; the Conflict and Crisis Phase, which is characterised by chaos and complex emergencies; the Conflict Settlement Phase; and the Post-Conflict Phase.
A question that might be asked at this point is what factors need to be taken into account when demarcating a particular conflict into phases or plotting the crisis life-cycle on a graph. In the search for an answer to the question as to how one can distinguish between different conflict phases, we can again resort to Rupesinghe and Anderlini10, who identified the following determining factors in making a gradation of conflicts:
[Table 1]

To this categorisation, I would like to add:

• The ability of existing institutions in the society to effectively redress the grievances of the parties and effectively resolve the conflict.

Two relevant phases

For the purposes of conflict analysis, the first two phases as listed by Samarasinghe are most relevant. The pre-conflict phase, according to Samarasinghe¹¹, represents conditions that are normal to the society concerned. At this stage, he says, disputes between groups do not result in violence. Samarasinghe: 'If the country has democratic institutions such as a freely elected legislature with minority representation and a free media, protest will be channelled peacefully through such institutional channels.'
In the conflict-emergence phase disputes become more evident and protesting groups more vocal and militant. Protest can take many forms, including boycotts, strikes, and mass demonstrations. The degree of violence that such protest entails, according to Samarasinghe's scheme, would depend on the specific conditions that prevail in the country. If the country has a democratic tradition less violence can be anticipated. If the political conditions are more authoritarian a higher level of violence can be anticipated. This phase distinguishes itself from the conflict and crisis phase in that violence, should it occur in this phase, is sporadic and random rather than organised and regular.

From analysis to action

It is during this second phase too that an effective Early Warning System should start monitoring the situation. Early warning, in my view, is concerned with forecasting the potential for violent conflict and framing an appropriate response that seeks not only to resolve the current conflict but also to create conditions that would result in sustainable peace. I think that preventive diplomacy has focused on short-term cessation of hostilities between parties for too long. As a result, the international community is often surprised when hostilities flare up again. The various attempts at peace in Angola are possibly the archetypal example of this phenomenon on the African continent. Addressing the root causes of a conflict is necessarily a longer-term project but its contribution towards sustainable peace can be more significant.
For an Early Warning System to be effective, it needs to be practicable. Despite alluding to the fact that Buzan's five sources of insecurity seen in a historical context are essential in understanding the origins and nature of violent conflicts, this is too broad to measure in an Early Warning System. Thus this categorisation needs to be subdivided and criteria to be measured need to be established. Once again Rupesinghe and Anderlini¹² provide us with some of the indicators which can be practically measured. Their indicators, which are captured in Table 2,

[Table 2]

vary from a regime's capacity to effectively run a country and its economy, the specific characteristics of the ruling elite, to the level of economic openness and international aid.
Whilst such a list is not exhaustive, it does provide us with some idea of the kind of criteria which need to be measured in a given conflict situation. It is important to recognise that the criteria used will determine the kind of interpretation or analysis that results from the process. This, in turn, would determine the kind of conflict resolution tools one will employ in a given situation, be it informal consultation, civilian fact-finding missions, arms embargoes and other punitive sanctions, or military confidence-building measures. Conflict analysis and early warning, it should be noted, are tools for action aimed at the immediate cessation of hostilities between parties as well as creating conditions of a sustainable peace.

¹ A more extended version of this article was presented as a paper to the Workshop on Advanced Negotiation, Mediation and Facilitation Skills. Organised by the OAU, ACCORD and CMG. 24 May 1999.
² Newsweek International, December 7, 1998.
³ K. Rupesinghe and S.N. Anderlini (1998). Civil Wars, Civil Peace: An Introduction to Conflict Resolution. London. Pluto Press, p. 2.
⁴ L. Reychler (1997). 'Conflicts in Africa - the issues of control and prevention', in Report of the Commission on African Regions in Crisis, Conflicts in Africa: An Analysis of Crises and Crisis Prevention Measures. Brussels. European Institute for Research and Information on Peace and Security, p. 17.
⁵ Rupesinghe and Anderlini, op.cit., pp. 10-11.
⁶ B. Buzan (1991). People, States and Fear: An Agenda for International Security Studies in the Post-Cold War Era. New York. Harvester-Wheatsheaf.
⁷ S.W. Samarasinghe (ed). Conflict Management Throughout the Crisis Life Cycle. Mimeo, p. 2.
⁸ Rupesinghe and Anderlini, op.cit., p. 12.
⁹ Samarasinghe, op.cit., p. 1.
¹⁰ Rupesinghe and Anderlini, op.cit., p. 67.
¹¹ Samarasinghe, op.cit., p. 1
¹² Rupesinghe and Anderlini, op.cit., p. 77.

About the author

Hussein Solomon is currently Research Manager at the African Centre for the Constructive Resolution of Disputes (ACCORD). In this capacity his primary responsibility is to manage ACCORD's Early Warning System and generate Early Warning Reports. Previously he was Senior Researher at the Institute for Security Studies and Research Fellow at the Centre for Southern African Studies.