Conflict analysis in times of war
lessons and reflections
Talk at the VU seminar The War in Ukraine and European Security, 9 May 2022, by Jolle Demmers, Utrecht University, on the occasion of the newly founded Dutch Peace and Conflict Studies Network.
It is difficult to make sense of any ongoing war. But this time, analysis is not only hampered by a lack of access to solid evidence but also by the current ‘war mood’. Any attempt to make sense of this war is assessed in terms of its immediate relation to good or evil, compassion and care, principle and character.
War mood
I’ve never experienced, as an academic, so strongly what a war mood is, what it feels like, as in these times.
Violence invokes emotions. And the more horrific the image the more we feel we have to take a stand, and choose sides, and DO something.
This sudden and widespread support for war that takes hold of entire populations is what Richardson (1948) named a ‘war mood’. The language of war contains two classic dualisms. First, the dualism between ‘self’ and ‘other’ (or: us/them), where the self is associated with courage and civilization while the other is represented as barbaric and diabolical. The second dualism is that between ‘conformity’ and ‘dissent’. Individuals and groups refusing to participate in the war effort are seen as at best naïve and unscientific, but more often as traitors to their community and therefore deserving of censure or banishment.
And although this reaction is perhaps to be expected in these extreme times, it hampers an analysis of what this war is about, including finding alternative ways out. To take negotiations seriously. It has led to a dangerous dynamics of escalation, and a politics of emotions that deeply worries me.
Conflict Studies
This is where the field of Conflict Studies comes in, with its classic set of questions. How and why do parties in conflict turn to violence? Who are the main parties in conflict, and what are their interests, fears and needs? Who are the secondary parties, what alliances are forged between them, and why? How are actors mobilized to join in, or pushed out?
How is this war sustained, for who is this war politically or economically functional? What dynamics of escalation do we see, and why? How is the war justified, and how and why do certain war stories resonate, why are they meaningful to certain audiences, and not others? And how are they distributed, disseminated, and contested? And if we zoom out a bit: What reworking of geopolitical and economic order do we see?
In the next 10 minutes I’ll draw lessons from the field of Conflict Studies: and share with you a selection of voices that can be helpful in our conversations on what this war is about.
1. Representations have political implications
“The selection of a form and level of explanation for contemporary violent conflict is a serious political act in the sense that representations have political implications. The way in which violent incidents and conflicts are coded and categorized will play – intentionally, or not – a role in casting blame and responsibility.”
(Paul Brass 1996: 4)
Words matter, labels matter, and it is key to any conversation about this war to look at (and question) the categories and frames that are applied, but also the periodization used. Do we start our analysis on 24 February of this year, or 1999, or 2014? And why? If you study this war through the lens of a state’s right to self-defense you engage into a different kind of conversation than if you’d look at it in terms of the obligation (under International Human Rights Law) to avert the risks of war.
This has implications for casting blame and responsibility, but also impacts the way we imagine solutions and find ways out of this war.
LESSON: Try and be curious and interested in asking why we use certain lenses, time-frames, or vocabularies?
2. Wars are produced
This insight comes from David Keen, and relates to how wars are always destructive ánd constructive at the same time.
“Part of the problem in much existing analysis is that conflict is regarded as simply a breakdown (…) rather than the emergence of another, alternative system of profit, power and even protection. Yet events, however, horrible and catastrophic, are actually produced, they are made to happen by a diverse and complicated set of actors who may well be achieving their objectives in the midst of what looks like failure and breakdown.”
(David Keen 2008: 15).
Wars are not always about winning: it is not hard to see how this is relevant today for certain militias on the ground, but certainly also for the military industrial-tech complex, and oil and gas industries.
Keen’s observation relates very much to the essence of war, as the always uncertain reworking of order through violent means (Barkawi 2011).
The lesson here is that in trying to think through remedies or solutions, be it sanctions or arms supplies, we have to study how these are economically functional to certain parties, who may have an interest in the war not ending.
3. The mutability of war
Violence mutates and transforms, and war is always about “becoming”. Rather than seeing war as an institution of violence, this processual approach to war sees war as the instituting of violence. War is never stable.
“What are the various bodies, objects, ideas, practices and affects that assemble to constitute collective violence? How do they come together and cohere as conduits of lethal combat? What are the particular processes, operations and protocols by which the emergent capacity for war coalesces, unfolds and dissipates?”
Bousquet et al (2020: 103)
The lesson here is how to carve out methodologies to study this mutability of war. For this implies a focus on more process-oriented ontologies of becoming, so how do we do this?
We need to study the interconnections between manifestations of violence: how in the case of Ukraine a civil war can mutate into an inter-state war and escalate into a multi-state war or world war. How and why do these mutations take place, and who is involved?
We see how the role of offensive weaponry and US intel leading to “real-time-targeting” allows for the shift away from inter-state war based on (collective) self-defense (article 51 of the UN Charter) to the West becoming an actual party in the war. This move from defensive to offensive weaponry is leading us into a more complex, and possibly nuclear, European or world war.
We are at a very critical moment of escalation.
I see a failure to think through the political consequences of our military strategies. And a “politics of emotion” steering the EU escalatory move to militarization and sanctions as the only response. And a LACK OF IMAGINATION, a LACK OF CREATIVITY, to find a way out of this dangerous setting.
And I wonder why that is. Yes, the war mood plays a role, and yes, this war is profitable to some, but if I try and make sense of this, of why our answer to the Russian aggression has been so escalatory in nature is that we have NOT woken up to the reality of a multipolar world.
The Biden administration (and also recently Truss and Stoltenberg) made their position clear last week: “We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it cannot do the kind of things it has done in invading Ukraine”, stated Llyod Austin, the US Secretary of Defense. But what does that mean? What does it entail? When is Russia weak enough?
What I see is that with these reactions we step into the script of the past two decades, were the West, with the US as its hegemon could lay out its will onto the world, without political consequences. The illegal invasion in Iraq, the disastrous war in Afghanistan, the bombing of Libya, all included strategies of “regime change”: all ending in massive civilian harm and the implosion of societies, but left the West largely unharmed. And likewise, we got away with targeted drone killings in places such as Somalia, Pakistan and Yemen, causing thousands of civilian casualties.
But a confrontation with Russia is different. This is a nuclear power that is increasingly forming a block with its Chinese neighbor, and is building an alternative monetary and economic system at the same time.
We have to wake up to that reality, and get serious about how to end this war through diplomatic means. The tragedy is that this could have worked the first weeks. For as with any war, suffering invokes revenge, and more violence.
As things play out now, with the heavy weapons support and remote intelligence, former US diplomat Chas Freeman may well be right in his critique that the Biden administration “is willing to fight Russia until the last Ukrainian”.
It is up to European leadership and civil society to not let this happen.