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.[81]
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.[82]
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.[83]
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% 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:[84]
(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
81 www.peoplesinitiativefordepartmentsofpeace.org/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=31
Back
82
www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/January2006/10/c0994.html.
Back
83
"Escaping the Subsidy Trap: Why Arms Exports are Bad for
Britain", Ingram and Isbiter, Oxford Research Group, September
2004. The authors say the hidden value of the subsidy may be as
high as £930 million. Back
84
Evaluation of the Conflict Prevention Pools, Bradford
University, Channel Research Ltd, PARC & Associated Consultants,
March 2004. Back
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