Violence against Conflict: Radical Peace, Radical Violence and the Paradox of Conflict Transformation

Abstract

Strategies of conflict transformation are intended to transcend violence and promote peaceful change (see Miall, 2007; Lederach, 2005). Yet these strategies may be premised on a specific form of violence: violence against conflict. In other words, they may enact violence against conflictual forms of world-building, including the threatworks I have described in Chapter 1. This is due largely to the assumption that conflict, left unchecked, causes violence, and indeed that the forms of physical, material and structural violence which these strategies are designed to ameliorate, are forms of ‘violent conflict’. This chapter will raise a counter-hypothesis: that conflict itself can neither be conflated with violence, nor is it necessarily a cause of violence. The incidences of conflict and violence are indeed very often correlative, and even causally related, but not in the way that theorists of conflict often assume. Conflictual forms of world-building, I shall argue, are used to manage, minimize, cope with or resist radical threat. When these forms of world-building are breached or made impossible through acts of coercion or violence, the breach is responded to with violence. As Arendt (1965) argues, violence is purely instrumental and reactive, and occurs only when human action is impossible. Conflict, on the other hand, is a powerful means for creating, asserting and protecting elements of plural worlds, as theorists of agonism aver (see Chapter 4 and Mouffe, 2000; Honig, 1993; and Conolly, 1995). In ‘conflicted’ contexts – that is, contexts where threatworks and conflictual forms of world-building are constitutive of daily life – violence occurs where these phenomena are breached or precluded and the radical threats they resist become irresistible (see Arendt, 1998).