Memorandum submitted by Ministry
for Peace
Introduction
1. Inspired by the ongoing initiative
of US Congressman Dennis Kucinich to establish a Department of
Peace in the US government, ministry for peace was founded
in July 2003 by Diana Basterfield and John McDonnell MP. Three
months later John introduced a Ten-Minute Rule Bill in the House
of Commons calling for a Ministry for Peace. With cross-party
support it was passed unopposed, but fell for lack of Parliamentary
time.
2. Since then our thinking has continued
to develop through our dialogue with politicians, academics and
peace workers, and through the monthly open meetings - supported
by a variety of excellent speakers - that we have held in the
Grand Committee Room at the Houses of Parliament. We have brought
together a number of ideas in Why We Need A Ministry For Peace:
For a less violent Britain, a less violent world.
3. Not only has our thinking developed.
October 2005 saw the launch of an international initiative for
the creation of Departments of Peace in governments throughout
the world, supported by representatives from some eleven countries
- Australia, Canada, UK, USA, Japan, Spain, Italy, Netherlands,
Israel/Palestine and Romania. While the exact role of the department
will differ in each country, its basic functions will be to:
- Foster a culture of peace;
- Research, articulate and help bring
about non-violent solutions to conflicts at all levels, both at
home and abroad; and
- Provide resources for training in
peace-building and conflict transformation to people everywhere
4. Since then, the Ghanaian government has announced that a Peace Building Support Unit, to be called the Department of Peace, is being established by the Interior Ministry and will become fully operational by June 2006.[67] Additionally, two of Canada's most prominent figures in the field of human security, peace-building and disarmament - Lloyd Axworthy, former Minister of Foreign Affairs, and Douglas Roche, former Canadian Ambassador for Disarmament - have recently called for the creation of a Canadian Department of Peace.[68]
5. So how, briefly, would a Ministry
for Peace make a difference to what the UK government is already
doing in the field of peace-building and post-conflict reconstruction?
To answer this question, we first need to examine the nature of
violent conflict.
Background thinking
6. The pioneer of peace studies,
Johan Galtung, identifies three categories of violence. Direct
violence is the name given to the physical manifestation of
violence, which ranges from verbal abuse to killing. It is the
type of violence that most people would immediately recognise.
According to Galtung, however, direct violence is merely the visible
tip of a much larger 'iceberg' of violence, most of which is hidden
from view but which sustains and gives rise to direct violence.
The invisible part of this iceberg consists of structural violence
and cultural violence.
7. Structural violence refers
to social, economic and political structures, built on unequal
power, that repress, harm and kill people. Examples include apartheid,
slavery, colonialism, imperialism, totalitarianism, autocracy,
the negative aspects of economic globalisation and international
debt. The enormous human and financial resources spent each year
by the military-industrial complex is another form of structural
violence, since it denies those resources to education, healthcare,
nutrition, social infrastructure and human development. The estimated
30 million people who die each year from hunger are victims of
structural violence. Structural violence is often imposed by direct
violence or the threat of it, and often leads to violent protest
or revolution.
8. Cultural violence is the
name Galtung gives to those aspects of a culture that legitimise
and normalise direct and structural violence. Films and video
games that approvingly show the use of violence to 'resolve' conflicts
are one example. Religions and ideologies that condone violence
towards non-believers or opponents are another. The concept of
cultural violence also helps in understanding how a community
or individuals view themselves in relation to those they regard
as different, and often inferior - women, for example, or people
from another ethnic group. Cultural violence is usually so deeply
embedded in a society, however, that its members are unaware of
its effect in shaping their thinking.
9. Direct, structural and cultural
violence are interlinked, and tackling only one aspect of the
'iceberg' is ineffective. The problem is like a three-legged stool
- omit any one and the whole thing falls down. Confronting
direct violence with direct violence might appear to work for
a time, but if the underlying structural violence is not addressed
the direct violence will reappear in the future, often in a stronger
form. This is the basic pattern of many guerrilla/terrorist conflicts,
and much crime. On the other hand, it is virtually impossible
to deal with structural violence if direct violence is ongoing.
Social injustices are usually addressed after a war, not during
it. But even then, the violent overthrow of unjust or repressive
regimes has often led to equally or more repressive regimes -
for example, the Soviet Union that replaced Tsarist Russia. Equally,
trying to solve deep-rooted conflicts simply by changing attitudes
(cultural violence) rarely works. Educating Palestinian and Israeli
children alongside each other is laudable, but is unlikely to
end hostility between the two communities if the occupation of
the West Bank persists (structural violence) and the two sides
continue to attack and kill each other (direct violence).
Joined-up thinking
10. The awareness that direct,
structural and cultural violence are inextricably linked is growing
in the international arena. Reflecting this, in April 2001
the UK government established the Global Conflict Prevention Pool
and the Africa Conflict Prevention Pool, in an attempt to co-ordinate
the efforts of the FCO, the MoD, DFID and the Treasury to prevent
costly overseas conflict from turning violent. In the words of
the government publication that explains the Conflict Prevention
Pools (CPPs):
a. The UK has been successfully
working in the field of conflict prevention and reduction for
many years. But we want to keep improving the effectiveness of
our work. We have therefore begun to approach conflict-related
work by combining the different perspectives of security, foreign
policy and development to achieve coherent and creative solutions,
seeking to address the underlying causes of conflict as well as
tackling the consequences.
11. This suggests that government
thinking is developing along the integrated, 'joined-up' lines
that are vital to tackling the problem of violence 'root and branch'.
The statement is severely undermined, however, when one realises
that it was published just five months after the UK invaded Iraq
as part of the US-led coalition. Preventing violent conflict is
vital, it seems - as long as it is someone else's. Our own conflicts
answer to a different set of priorities.
12. Additionally, as one of the
world's leading arms exporters the UK is making a global contribution
to violent conflict that far outweighs the positive work of the
CPPs. Not counting peacekeeping costs, which are funded separately,
for 2004-05 the Global Pool budget was £74 million and the
Africa Pool budget £60 million. UK arms sales delivered in
2003 were valued at £4.7 billion, sales that a recent report
has estimated were subsidised by the government to the tune of
£450 million.[69]
This is an example of UK structural violence on a massive
scale, and is second only to that of the USA. What is especially
disturbing is that a large proportion of these sales was to developing
countries - taken together, the US and the UK were responsible
for 61 per cent of the value of all arms deliveries made to developing
countries in 2003.
13. Even within their own terms,
however, the CPPs are struggling in the face of some basic contradictions,
as highlighted by an exhaustive Evaluation conducted in 2004 into
their working and effectiveness. For example, the Global Pool
is led by the FCO and the Africa Pool by DFID. This structure
reflects a division of operational culture regarding conflict
prevention within government, and militates against the 'joined-up
thinking' the Pools are supposed to embody. To quote the Synthesis
Report of the Evaluation:[70]
a. The first operational culture
is what might be termed 'classic foreign and security policy',
and has traditionally been the remit of the FCO, the armed forces,
the MoD, and other intelligence and security services. In the
traditional diplomacy of the state, the goal of preventing - and
if necessary winning - wars of national survival was a key plank
of policy. Preventing deadly conflicts involving other states
in strategic locations, where the state's vital national interests
of a geopolitical and economic kind were perceived to be involved,
also occupied a central position in the traditional diplomacy
of a state. This threat-driven approach constitutes the classic
foreign and security policy approach to the causes of conflict
and appropriate policy responses.
14. In other words, the focus of
this operational culture is direct violence - how to prevent
it or, if necessary, how to use it (or the threat of it) most
effectively in the interests of the state. This focus makes a
poor fit with DFID's structural approach, as the Report notes:
a. The second operational culture
might be termed the 'security and development approach', which
in the UK has developed recently largely as a result of initiatives
by DFID. Its main feature has been [the] realisation that the
best efforts of donor governments and international organisations
to promote development in poorer countries were all too open to
reversal if violent conflicts could not be prevented or contained.
Another prominent feature of this operating culture is the importance
it attaches to grassroots politics, to civil society and to the
structural causes of violence. There has been a high degree of
bureaucratic determinism at play because development agencies,
such as DFID, have been the main advocates of the need to address
the root causes of conflicts where the UK's classic (geopolitical
and economic) foreign and security interests were not seen to
be in play. One feature of the security and development approach
has been its emphasis on 'human security', the need to protect
people, not just at a group or state level, but also at an individual
and personalised level, from the depredations of violent conflict.
15. An obvious source of tension
between these two cultures can be seen in the difficulty of forming
policy towards countries that the FCO might identify as advantageous
to support from a strategic perspective, but which DFID might
identify as having an appalling record on human rights and gross
structural inequalities. Uzbekistan is a good example.
16. The Evaluation also discovered
other weaknesses, such as the lack of training in conflict prevention
among the civil servants who run the CPPs, and the fact that they
all have other jobs around which they have to fit their responsibilities
for conflict prevention. Above all, there is the lack of a
single, permanent conflict prevention unit with the task of co-ordinating
and harmonising the approaches of the different ministries.
Indeed, in its response to the Evaluation, the government specifically
rejected the suggestion that such a unit be set up, arguing that
'it would detach strategic management of the Pools from the three
main Departments, and thus decrease Departmental ownership'; in
other words, each Department still wants to retain control of
its own turf.
17. We applaud the government's
initiative in establishing the CPPs as a definite step in the
right direction. But its response to the Evaluation shows that
it has not yet accepted that the challenges of conflict prevention,
conflict management, conflict transformation and conflict resolution
demand not just joined-up thinking but vision, consistency, resources,
ongoing training and research, long-term political commitment
- and a champion. They need, in short, a Ministry for Peace.
Recommendation
18. Building on the establishment
of the CPPs and the experience of the FCO's Conflict Issues Group,
we believe that the government should set up a permanent conflict
prevention unit, advised by leading practitioners in the field,
which could form the basis of a future Ministry for Peace.
This unit should be headed by a minister of state and based in
the Cabinet Office, for several reasons - it will be close to
the prime minister, which will signal its serious intent and also
give it clout; and it will enable the unit to take a view across
the breadth of government, free of departmental culture. In due
course, as it gains experience and expertise, the unit can grow
into a separate department, in a similar way to which the Overseas
Development Agency grew out of the Foreign Office to become DFID.
19. The permanent conflict prevention
unit, headed by the minister for peace, would be charged with
co-ordinating government policy to address the direct, structural
and cultural aspects of violent conflict overseas. Crucially,
this would include consideration of the UK's own contribution
to such conflicts, especially in the form of international arms
sales.
20. Since 1945 there has been civil
war, at some stage of development, in many African states. For
Africa alone, a unit within government devoted to conflict prevention
and resolution would be of great assistance in alleviating
the problems of that continent.
21. To conclude: There is a distinct
Treasury perspective in all government deliberations. There is
a distinct health perspective and a distinct environmental perspective.
There is not, however, a distinct peace perspective. We need one.
We need a minister specifically devoted to creating a culture
of peace internationally and at home; a minister devoted to helping
bring about non-violent solutions to conflict at all levels; a
minister who will fight within government to win resources for
training in peace-building and conflict transformation to people
everywhere; a minister who will work to see the establishment
of similar ministries in many other countries across the world.
And though he or she will be based first in the Cabinet Office,
how long before we have a Minister for Peace in the Cabinet itself?
'To work for peace is to
work to transform violence. The fundamental aim of a Ministry
for Peace is to reduce violence, both in the UK and internationally.'
January 2006
67 www.peoplesinitiativefordepartmentsofpeace.org/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=31 Back
68
www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/January2006/10/c0994.html.
Back
69
Escaping the Subsidy Trap: Why Arms Exports are Bad for Britain,
Ingram & Isbiter, Oxford Research Group, September 2004.
The authors say the hidden value of the subsidy may be as high
as £930 million. Back
70
Evaluation of the Conflict Prevention Pools, Bradford University,
Channel Research Ltd, PARC & Associated Consultants, March
2004. Back
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