ABSTRACT
Of the many accounts of the tragedy of the war in former Yugoslavia, and particularly of the belated and reluctant international response to this catastrophe, one story is often told. In 1993 the US considered invading Bosnia. It had become increasingly clear that Serb militias were stepping up systematic attacks on the Bosnian Muslim population. But then President Clinton allegedly got Robert Kaplan’s widely acclaimed bestseller Balkan Ghosts for Christmas. Kaplan’s is a typically primordial explanation of war. It portrays the region as plagued by ancient hatreds and eternal violence between ethnic groups. According to numerous accounts, the book had a profound impact on Clinton and other members of the administration shortly after they came into office.1 In his 1997 book on the war, Sarajevo-based editor Kemal Kurspahic wrote: ‘At a time of crucial decisions [President Clinton] simply read the wrong book, or more precisely drew the wrong conclusions from Balkan Ghosts by Robert Kaplan, which led to the comforting thought that nothing much could be done in Bosnia “until those folks got tired of killing each other”’ (1997: 32). Behind every analysis of violent conflict is a set of assumptions. Assumptions about
what moves human action and how to study it, and about the interests, needs, instincts, structures or choices that explain why and how people resort to violence. These assumptions are usually very basic, and fundamentally subjective. Assumptions form the base of academic theories of conflict. Indirectly, they also inform the ways policymakers and politicians ‘read’ a conflict. Their interpretation of a conflict determines – to a certain extent – what sort of intervention politicians and policy-makers design. If a conflict is understood as stemming from ‘ancient hatreds’ between ethnic groups there is little outsiders can do: for as soon as ‘third parties’ pull out old animosities will flare up again and violence will be resumed (‘they’ll be at each other’s throats again’). With the benefit of hindsight, it can be safely concluded that the Clinton administration’s interpretation of the conflict in Bosnia was not, or insufficiently, based on solid case analysis. And it does not stand alone. Lack of grounded and critical analysis of violence and war results in misreading and inaccurate strategies and interventions, with at times dramatic consequences. This calls for a defined specialist field of study which provides analytical frames, research methodologies and skills to explain and understand contemporary violent conflict. Why and how do wars happen? Why are people prepared to kill and die in the name of an ethnic or religious group? How are people mobilized to join in? How can ‘neighbours turn into enemies’? And, more fundamentally: what is the role of identity, deprivation, structural change, rationality and discourse? What is the impact of social media and the Internet on repertoires of contention, and what are the connections between the global spread of neoliberalism and local
forms of violence? There has been sustained debate in academic disciplines on the causes, dynamics and consequences of violent conflict. However, despite the wealth of material on violence and war there remains much to understand and there remains much to learn from earlier insights and theories of conflict. This book has a threefold aim. First and foremost, it brings together a diverse
range of theoretical frameworks that try to explain and understand how and why (groups of) people resort to violent action against other (groups of) combatants, civilians, organizations or the state. Second, it addresses the idea of multidisciplinarity. Conflict Studies is a field of study, not a discipline. As such, the view is widely held that violent conflict is a complex social phenomenon that can only be understood and explained from a multidisciplinary approach. In practice, however, scholars largely remain within their disciplinary boundaries. The various approaches to conflict and violence that the academic field seeks to combine under the heading of ‘multidisciplinarity’ are not simply heterogeneous, but in fact often depart from fundamentally different ontological and epistemological stances. Certainly, there are affinities between some of them, but there are strong tensions as well. The field of Conflict Studies bears a multivalent, and at times even contradictory theoretical burden. This book explores the ways in which a selection of theoretical traditions relate to each other. It aims to review these theories by tracing their underlying assumptions, their ontological and epistemological stances, so as to identify the affinities and contradictions between them. We will see how each of the selected approaches revolves around a different puzzle, and is very capable of explaining certain components, dynamics, processes, mechanisms and/or relations but not others. This book aims to further your capacity to analyse violent conflict in a theoretically knowledgeable way. It also hopes to improve your capacity to recognize and assess axioms and paradigms underpinning explanations of contemporary violent conflict in, for instance, the media, policy reports and academic research. Had Clinton received another, ‘right’ book on the Balkan wars for Christmas, one
which stressed that there was nothing ancient or innate about the ‘ethnic’ violence in Bosnia, a book that showed how violence was carefully orchestrated by political elites and local strongmen looking for ways to gain power, would he have opted for another strategy? Possibly. Probably not. We all know that political strategies and military interventions are shaped by other elements than case-analysis alone (domestic and international politics, economic interest, public opinion, routine, belief, doctrine and ideology, even fashions) and that indeed, politicians tend to select the interpretation of a conflict that best supports their interests. It is this insight that brings us to the third aim of this book, that is, to carry out
conflict analysis in a reflexive and critical way. The selection of a form and level of explanation of violent conflict is not only a difficult but also a delicate act, for by categorizing and labelling a conflict, the analyst, intentionally or not, becomes engaged in discussions on legitimacy, blame and responsibility. As a field of knowledge, Conflict Studies is situated in and shaped by highly political and messy practices of categorizing and coding. It is therefore not only important to engage in systematic research on individual cases of violent conflict, but also to study the ways conflicts are labelled and coded (by policy-makers, in public debate and in the media) and to think through the consequences of these representations. This book thus not only aims to review the explanatory power of theories of violent conflict, it also aims to gain insight into how theories of conflict themselves are produced, shaped and applied in contexts of power.
