How should ‘new’ forms of violence in the developing world – as opposed to ‘traditional’ civil or intra-state war –be understood; and through which policies could they be prevented and/or mitigated? This paper presents evidence from four case studies suggesting that contrary to the early post-Cold War accounts of ‘barbarism’ and ‘senseless bloodshed’ – the violence that can be observed in many countries and locales today is about something. Yet, analyses also show that the triggers, manifestations and effects of this violence – characterised as diffuse, recursive and globalised – cannot be captured by using the analytical tools developed to explain armed conflict within states. Strictly speaking, it would be misguided to label the violence in the Niger Delta, Marsabit County, Egypt and Sierra Leone as ‘civil war’, ‘internal armed conflict’ or ‘new war’. Instead, it is more accurate to speak of highly heterogeneous situations of violence or ‘fields of social violence’. At the same time, it is crucial not to dissociate these situations of violence from political processes by, for instance, reducing them to manifestations of criminality, such as homicide and illicit drug trafficking, or reflections of social problems like rampant youth unemployment, the use of prohibited psychoactive substances, and gang culture.
Recommendations include:
- Violence mitigation should be understood as a long-term process involving both formal (state) and informal institutions, and affected communities and citizens. Interventions should be designed to operate across and between several fields of public policy, e.g. improving education, reducing youth unemployment, increasing citizen and human security, and protecting human rights.
- Outside support for violence mitigation (understood as a deeply political process) should aim at mitigating the risk factors associated with external involvement and interests, such as those of the transnational oil and mining companies in Nigeria and Sierra Leone. Rather than direct intervention this requires initiatives that help enable both local elites and citizen groups to build political settlements that are more peaceful and support development as they become less predatory and violence-inflected.
- Long-term and essentially indigenous processes of transforming political settlements in violence-affected countries and societies have to grapple with the key problem that the (strategic) use of violence – or its condoning – by both state and non-state actors is often a constituent element of the settlement. It is therefore paramount that violence mitigation efforts are effective with respect to taking violence out of the exercise of public authority and the struggle over the distribution of resources and wealth.
[Summary adapted from source]