Communities play a key role in resolving conflicts. In this field, we can accomplish very little alone, and we are always at our most effective when we unite with those who care about the same issues and devote themselves to the same work. Our ties with fellow conflict resolvers, with those who dedicate themselves to work on the same challenges that we do, are often central to our success. Technology and growing global connections have made our communities much larger and have given us the opportunity to work with those on the other side of the globe; yet there is something irreplaceable about our own physical community, close to home. Each of the articles in this quarter’s Reflections come from scholars, practitioners, and others working in the local community of the Center, and their ideas, experiences, and personal reflections give us a great deal of hope about the impact of our community.
Sonja Koehler, a social change consultant who has worked on diverse projects across the world, asks why humans are drawn to collaborate and what we can gain from people coming together, from all walks of life, to tackle a problem. Through her personal experiences and lessons learned from working in collaborations, she shares how collaborations can be made most effective. Ed Laurance, a professor at the Monterey Institute and an expert in the subject of small arms and light weapons, tells us about the development of his field: how disillusioning the work of the last decades has been, and yet the progress that has been made to pave the way for further advances in this area. Julie Reynolds, a research fellow at CCS and journalist with the Monterey Herald, provides an interesting take on the struggles of prison inmates to explore their identities: what are the deeper implications of profiling prisoners as members of dangerous prison gangs based on what they read and study?
In our quarterly column “Pedagogy of Conflict”, Dr. Pushpa Iyer addresses the frustration often faced by conflict resolvers, especially students, when they discover that they cannot overhaul the system. Change, she says, is small: we cannot aim to change the entire structure, rather, we must focus on changing it piece by piece, over time.
This quarter’s cover photo and story comes from local artist Jim Needham, whose simple yet compelling rock formations have a powerful meaning for peace. Finally, our Picks of the Quarter touch upon the continuing violence and humanitarian crisis in Mali, burgeoning tensions over water along the Mekong River in Southeast Asia, and the New York City police’s new tactic of using social media to prevent gang violence.
The common and oft-repeated critique that the field of conflict studies is weak on literature and in the practice of resolving conflicts is most exemplified when discussing structural conflicts. Root causes of conflicts are almost always rooted in the system and therefore in order to resolve a conflict, one is almost always required to deal with the challenge of having to transform imbalanced and oppressive structures. Not only does it sound daunting but it also raises questions of where to begin, how to begin, and when to begin.
It is not unusual for newcomers to the field to seek answers to questions that have plagued them for years. How does one go about resolving conflicts if one cannot remove the root or the source of the problem? After all, as a field of study and practice, conflict resolution needed to have more concrete, tried and tested, and defined ways of resolving structural conflicts. But instead, potential conflict resolvers are introduced to a field that still has a long way to go in providing those solutions for conflicts that arise from structures and systems. Larissa Fast, in her article ‘Frayed Edges: Exploring the Boundaries of Conflict Resolution’ published in 2002, laments the fact that the intersection of theory, research, and practice in the field has led to very little movement from the analysis of conflicts to the resolution of structural conflicts. A decade later, these problems still remain in the field.
It is not that practice has not provided for stronger theories on the nature and scope of structural violence. It has. We have practitioner-scholars like John Paul Lederach who have elaborated the process of dealing with structural violence. Theories on the many different aspects and levels of structural violence provide a great deal of insights into the complexity of the problem facing conflict resolvers. Equally, these theories have stressed the fact that dealing with structural conflicts demands a long-term commitment on the part of the conflict resolvers.
The discomfort in making the long-term commitment stems mostly from an obvious lack of quick-fix solutions. For future practitioners of the field the complexity of the conflict, the long draw, and unclear process of resolution is both disconcerting and disappointing.
The field is clear that just as analysis of conflicts needs to be holistic, the approach towards resolving them also needs to be holistic. This means you tackle the issue from all possible angles, and that any change you bring to the structures will therefore happen only incrementally. It is not possible to find that one method that will dramatically alter structures that have for time eternal been discriminatory. Instead, by making small changes to all aspects of the structural change, one can see the change slowly happening with the structures.
Yes, it is difficult to see this slow process through when transformation is imperative for bettering the lives of all those who are suffering now because of this imbalanced structure. But seeking the tool to make this change happen is as unlikely as hoping for a magic wand that will grant your every wish.
Every step that conflict resolvers take, at whichever level – policy, institutional, or grassroots – moves them closer towards the core of the structure. Along the way they will have a face off with all those who guard the structure, and even if it means taking a few steps back to move forward on a slightly different path, the courage, determination, and resilience to continue moving forward emerge as distinguishing characteristics of the conflict resolver.
In the absence of a clear path to tread, and as someone comfortable working in the grey zones of conflict while committed to staying in the process of resolution for as a long as it takes, I find structural violence daunting but not frustrating.
It is not that practice, theory, and research in the field have not found the tool for changing structural conflicts but that practice, theory, and research have stressed that every step counts. Taking the nested model developed by Maire Dugan as a tool, it is clear that every issue is nested within the broader relationships of the conflict parties, which in turn are nested within the sub-systems and structures in place. For the same reason, it seems as if resolution too is complexly nested in those layers of conflict. Tackling one layer does not resolve the conflict in another layer.
I do now believe that the critique against the field is misplaced. Maybe it is tempering our desire to be the kind of resolvers that can rush into a situation and dramatically change centuries old deeply embedded structures that is the problem; not the field, which is both cautious and creative in providing solutions for structural change.
Despite nearly twenty years of growing attention to the problem of armed violence in the world, the latest statistics and news headlines tell us it remains a critical impediment to achieving the Millennium Development Goals. The prestigious research institution Small Arms Survey in Geneva estimated in 2011 that “more than 526,000 people are killed each year as a result of lethal violence. One in every ten of all reported violent deaths around the world occurs in so-called conflict settings or during terrorist activities, while 396,000 intentional homicides occur every year. Fifty-eight countries exhibit violent death rates above 10.0 per 100,000.” While we now are witnessing the use of major weapons such as tanks and artillery in Syria, producing massive violations of international humanitarian rights and humanitarian law, this remains an anomaly. Most of the violence is perpetrated using small arms and light weapons (SALW) – handguns, assault rifles, grenades, etc. The recent revolt in Libya revealed that massive numbers of these lethal weapons disappeared from government stockpiles. Most are unaccounted for. The tools of violence remain a critical problem for conflict resolution, peacebuilding, and development.
For that segment of the international community who has worked for years to reduce armed violence by focusing on the weapons being used, this is not the picture that we had in mind. The end of the Cold War led to a significant increase in intrastate, armed violence. And the international community, first the United Nations then governments and eventually civil society, developed and implemented a host of global efforts and agreements designed to control the proliferation, availability, and misuse of SALW. What has been accomplished? What did we learn? What do we have to show for these efforts? What is the way forward?
It is more than the guns, so what is the way forward?
In 1994, Mali was racked with armed violence because a minority ethnic group, the Tauregs, had taken up arms and was destabilizing the country due to the treatment they had received. Most development projects stopped and donors insisted on a peaceful context before resuming such development aid. The United Nations, and a new president of Mali, negotiated with the insurgents and reached an agreement whereby they would turn in their weapons in exchange for their integration into the society. Some joined the police force, others were given land and the tools to make a living.
This success story sparked a hopeful global effort to produce similar results elsewhere. At the Monterey Institute, for example, research was conducted on hundreds of voluntary weapons collection programs throughout the world. The result was a handbook in five languages on how to most effectively conduct such programs. In 1995 the Secretary General of the UN gave a major speech calling on the world to deal with the real weapons of mass destruction: small arms and light weapons. Throughout the remainder of the 1990s regional agreements also focused on reducing armed violence by focusing on the tools of violence. All of this work resulted in a consensus agreement in June 2001, the UN Programme of Action to Prevent, Combat and Eradicate the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons in All Its Aspects (UNPoA). This consensus agreement established norms for governments that if complied with would reduce the likelihood of SALW leaking or diffusing into the wrong hands – terrorists, criminals, insurgents, etc. For example, the UNPoA calls on governments to control the manufacture and export of SALW and safeguard their stockpiles of weapons and ammunition.
It was in the post-UNPoA period that many began to question the effort to focus exclusively on the tools of violence. Not much was changing on the ground. The availability of weapons both within and outside of conflict areas had not changed. In the late 1990s, pro-gun groups went global and began to emphasize the right of citizens to defend themselves in the face of a corrupt and ill-trained security sector. In Kosovo, where almost everyone had a gun of some kind, the United Nations Development Program’s efforts to lower violence through disarmament met stiff resistance. Human rights groups had in effect dismissed the UNPoA as folly, given that it made no mention of these weapons being used to perpetrate massive violations of international human rights and humanitarian law. Most importantly the UNPoA called on states to periodically report on how they have implemented the UNPoA. An international treaty or agreement has no effect until it is internalized by national governments. The landmine treaty of 1997, which bans antipersonnel landmines, has been internalized in most states. Governments have ceased manufacturing, using, and exporting this inhumane weapon, and have destroyed their stockpiles. Much the same was expected with the UNPoA regarding SALW.
After eleven years, have governments complied with this “politically binding” document? The UNPoA had no agreed reporting format, with the result that reports are all over the place and cannot be used to assess implementation. Over forty states have never submitted a report. But the real answer is that we do not know much about implementation because the nature of the UN does not allow it to independently assess compliance with such accords. At a recent UN conference assessing the UNPoA, governments continued to call for an independent assessment of compliance with the norms of the UNPoA. This is hypocrisy. Governments know full well that none of them would accept an outside assessment of a matter directly related to national security. Once again proponents of arms control to reduce armed violence had to be satisfied with “raising awareness.” The changes on the ground envisioned by the UNPoA have yet to be realized.
After twenty years of work at the global level, has it all been for naught? After all, the gains in Mali in 1994 have been reversed as the Taureg minority now controls the north of that country, using weapons that leaked out of a disintegrating Libya. But I do think that the global environment is different than it was twenty years ago. The attention given to the role that small arms proliferation and misuse plays in armed violence is now accepted. It is not just about the root causes of conflict. In Syria, for example, analysts track the weapons being used in that conflict in terms of how certain weapons may “turn the tide” in favor of one side or the other. The violations of international humanitarian law related to weapons uses and effects are made clear. But it is also clear that what weapons a sovereign state exports and to whom remains under the control of governments, as does the desire of states to acquire weapons for its security. The recent failure of the UN member states to agree on an Arms Trade Treaty, after four very expensive years of UN meetings and NGO campaigning, sent a powerful message that when it comes to the exporting or importing of arms, sovereignty reigns supreme.
The good news is that after twenty years of research and practice on the ground, we now have a better idea of what it will take to reduce armed violence. We know that the weapons alone are not the only factors we must work on at the local level. The 2005 OECD document Reducing Armed Violence: Enabling Development, co-authored by development, security, and peacebuilding experts, established four lenses that those working to reduce armed violence should use to design programming to reduce armed violence. One of the lenses is tools of violence. Another is looking at conflict through the eyes of the perpetrators. Why is there a demand for these weapons? A third lens is that of institutions. Even with well-developed programs designed to gain better control of SALW, do the institutions have the capacity to implement them? And the final lens is people. For example, is there a gun culture that has to be taken into account?
The task of those who choose to work with those organizations on the ground attempting to lower the demand for and control the proliferation and misuse of SALW has been made easier because of the global work on norms and standards of the past twenty years. Many governments are now developing and implementing laws and regulations as to who should possess SALW, how they should use them, and what types of weapons should remain safeguarded in government hands. In the end the hard work remains to be done at the local and national level, convincing governments that complying with standards that will reduce armed violence is in their national interest. States have begun to request technical assistance to build the capacity to comply. The work continues.
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Dr. Edward J. Laurance graduated from the United States Military Academy in 1960 and served ten years, including a combat tour in Vietnam. He has earned an MA from Temple University in Political Science in 1970, and his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in International Relations in 1973. Since September 1991 he has been Professor of International Policy Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies (MIIS), where he teaches courses in global governance, armed violence, security and development, public policy analysis and program evaluation. Since 1994 Dr. Laurance has focused his work on the full range of issues related to the proliferation, availability and misuse of small arms and light weapons (SALW). Since 1992 he has served as a consultant to the United Nations on six occasions. including his current assignment developing international small arms control standards.
Last year, hundreds of California prison inmates went on a statewide hunger strike to protest conditions in the system’s Security Housing Units, the most tightly controlled isolation cells known as the SHU. Among the occupants of the state’s two SHUs, which function as prisons-within-prisons, are those deemed to be members of any of the state’s validated security threat groups, more commonly called prison gangs. A chief complaint behind the 2011 hunger strike was that the criteria used for deciding who is a member of one of those gangs were unfair. One man quoted in the press said he was given an indefinite SHU term simply because he was heard speaking Swahili and he possessed a book written by the late Black Panther leader George Jackson.
In other words, he was trying to learn more about his identity and roots.
None of this surprised me when I heard about it. Whether that particular man was truly just a curious reader trying to learn his community’s political history or was part of something more nefarious, I will never know. But I am a criminal justice reporter specializing in gangs, and I have learned over the years that all the major prison gangs put great effort into schooling members about their ethnic identities and history.
A former Nuestra Familia leader in the Security Housing Unit of Pelican Bay State Prison.
A death row inmate named Steve Champion has argued in S.F. Bay News that corrections officials are motivated by much more than concerns about prison gangs. Champion sees a broader agenda of political suppression. “Prison administrators know that if even one prisoner shuns George Jackson’s books or other leftist material because he thinks he might be labeled a gang member and placed in the SHU, then the strategy of suppression is effective,” he writes.
The fuss over books in prison cells seems a bit extreme, perhaps Orwellian. To those of us outside the prison world, that kind of reading matter sounds like typical college homework assignments. Yet it is among the clues corrections officials rely on to decide whether an inmate is a member of the Black Guerrilla Family prison gang—which, it turns out, was founded by George Jackson. While inmates, their relatives, and supporters of the strike say the system is stepping on prisoners’ rights to learn about their own history and identity, prison officials argue that a man’s possession of such materials can, along with other factors, indicate that he is a member of a violent criminal organization. It is a fact that the practice of studying ethnic and political roots is part of all the major prison gangs’ “curricula.” Along with the Black Guerrilla Family’s interest in Swahili and Jackson’s political theories, members of the Aryan Brotherhood learn about Odinist religion and write in Nordic runes. Nuestra Familia and Mexican Mafia members study the indigenous language Náhuatl and read biographies of Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata.
The study of ancient, “exotic” languages is a good example of what prison investigators worry about. These languages are regularly employed in coded messages that convey criminal orders outside prison. I have seen handwritten letters in a mix of English and Náhuatl covering topics that ranged from the details of managing statewide drug-trafficking operations to orders to kill. So when prison guards find lists of Náhuatl words in a prisoner’s cell, they confiscate them and are likely to send that inmate to the SHU.
All of this has me wondering: when is a prisoner’s exploration of identity a legitimate search for knowledge and when is it a clever criminal ploy? How can any of us know the difference? A few years ago, I had to decide those questions for myself, and it was not easy. As a reporter on gangs, I write to various acquaintances and sources in prison, and I occasionally send them books. One young man asked me to mail him a copy of “An Analytical Dictionary of Náhuatl,” by Frances Karttunen, a research scientist in the Linguistics Research Center, University of Texas, Austin. This sounded respectable enough, and I could appreciate that this man—a former gang member—might now truly be interested in his ancestors’ culture and history. I happen to love the rhythm and beauty of the Náhuatl language and always enjoyed overhearing a modern version of it when I lived in western Mexico years ago. I have picked up a book or two on it myself over the years.
But I hesitated. Would the mailroom officers put my name in some secret file as an alleged gang sympathizer? There was a bigger reason I held back, though. A part of me knew that, despite having left his gang, my young friend had not quite left the whole criminal mindset behind. My guts told me he would use his expanded knowledge of Náhuatl for some kind of illegal communication. In the end, I did not send it.
I hated myself for being so cynical. But even worse, the book- and learning-lover in me wondered this: since when had the thirst for scholarly knowledge become so dangerous?
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Julie Reynolds reports on criminal justice and youth violence at The Monterey County Herald. Her writing has been published or broadcast in The Nation, MotherJones.com, The San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, PBS and other outlets.
Recently, she was a Three Strikes Reporting Fellow for John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. Before that, she was a class of 2011 Steinbeck Fellow at San José State University specializing in creative nonfiction, and a Nieman Journalism Fellow at Harvard University, class of 2009.
She was a Justice Reporting Fellow at the Institute for Justice and Journalism at USC Annenberg in 2007, studying the impacts of life sentences in California prisons. Her reporting on that topic earned the PASS Award from the National Center on Crime and Delinquency.
Reynolds co-wrote and co-produced the PBS documentary “Nuestra Familia, Our Family,” which among other awards earned Investigative Reporters and Editors’ highest honor, the Tom Renner Medal for Reporting on Organized Crime.
She was editor of the national Latino literary magazine El Andar from 1998 to 2002, and is currently completing a literary nonfiction book about rural California gangs
Collaboration: it is messy. We have to deal other people, and confront ourselves. It demands commitment, open mindedness, agility. Our higher-selves must be present, to be honest, engaged, diplomatic, empathetic.
It is hard stuff. So why do we do it? Why do we collaborate?
Humans, like other species, are social creatures. In fact, E.O. Wilson, sociobiologist and conservationist, has proposed that one reason we have evolved to our current levels of intellect and motor skills is because we collaborate to survive, because we submit to the communal (for more, see his “The Social Conquest of Life”). It is our nature to work together. Also, working towards the collective good ultimately favors the individual. We need each other to survive – at the base level of human survival, and at the myriad of levels in our modern socioecology. That means individuals need communities, organizations need policy makers, civil society needs financial institutions, government needs business – and vice versa.
In the public sector, dwindling funds are forcing government and nongovernment agencies to join forces in order to keep their programs running. But more profoundly, we are realizing that to address the complex problems our local and global communities face with any semblance of success, we must look for equally complex strategies. Collaborations offer the broad spectrum of perspectives, expertise, and action from which long-lasting and cross-cutting solutions can arise. In other words, multiple angles of perception (from diverse members of the collaboration) beget holistic creativity, and multiple levels of action (policy, programs, behaviors) beget systemic change. Outside of primal tendencies and fiscal necessity, parties collaborate in order to achieve a goal they cannot achieve alone, in order to have greater impact.
Collaborations are known by many names, such as networks, alliances, or coalitions, and they can exist at local, regional, cross-border, or global levels. They usually have representatives from different arenas (government, business, civil society) that have a relationship with the same issue in one way or the other. They usually come together to affect change of some sort. Buzz phrases these days include collective action, collective impact, multi-stakeholder approach, and global action networks.
Steve Waddell, an expert on multi-stakeholder approaches and global action networks, has developed a concept he calls Societal Learning and Change (SLC). Waddell explains, “SLC is about changing relationships in profound ways and producing innovation to address chronic problems and develop new opportunities. These are not just inter-personal relationships, but relationships between big sections of society. Both the depth and breadth of the learning and change that SLC encompasses are unusual. SLC initiatives develop the capacity of a society to do something that it could not do before; they do the same thing for participating organisations.”
A meeting of members from the Community Alliance for Safety and Peace in Salinas. Photo by Stacy Hughes.
In a successful collaboration, the power hierarchies that traditionally evolve between siloed sectors (government, business, civil society) melt down into a “peer-based culture,” coalescing around a common goal. According to Waddell, “the SLC framework is one that emphasises ‘we’re all in this together’, that no organisation is privileged and that all are interdependent. With this simple recognition, important barriers to success are overcome and innovation can arise on a grand scale.” This common goal, which is often a vision for the greater good, is the glue that holds it all together. It is why we collaborate.
A sampling of the multi-stakeholder collaboratives that I have worked with include CEOs for Cities, a cross-sector network of city leaders to make cities more vibrant, sustainable, and economically competitive and successful (based in Chicago, IL); Chicagoans Against War & Injustice, a cross-sector peace and voter registration movement (based in Chicago, IL); and the Community Alliance for Safety and Peace, a cross-sector alliance to reduce gang violence and improve safety (based in Salinas, CA). From these experiences, I have seen several factors that lead to the success of collaborative efforts (in no particular order):
Transparency of process means greater trust in the process, greater collaboration, and thus greater impact.
Flexibility of infrastructure provides the agility needed to respond to changing environments and understanding.
Reduced competition allows resources to be more effectively allocated towards the common goal instead of between silos or agencies.
Relationships and trust must be cultivated, as it builds organizational resiliency and a “got your back” mentality.
Clear information sharing levels the playing field, contributing to a peer-based culture.
Members of a collaborative benefit from greater access to and better mobilization of resources (including information), the status that membership bestows, and the emphasis on commonality instead of separateness (creating a sense of “we” instead of “us versus them”).
In the Summer 2012 edition of the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Clutchfield & McGloed-Grant cite the “sharing of credit” for action taken collaboratively as a benefit to the individual member. Waddell and his colleague Franziska Bieri talk about how collaboratives, specifically in global action networks, use positive reinforcement as an incentive to participate, instead of the negative/punitive reinforcement that often characterizes government policies and international agreements.
Trust threads through all of these factors and benefits. According to Waddell and Bieri, trust is more important than financial and political power within a network. There is both inter-network trust and public trust (outside the network). Shared language, shared intentions, and shared competency all build trust within the network. Public trust develops through a proven track record. Trust both results from a high-functioning collaboration and reinforces it.
The level of trust can affect a collaborative differently at various points in its life cycle. For example, voluntary work teams help to build trust within a group as it is forming or transforming, but relying on volunteers is insupportable over the long term and for large-scale efforts. Dedicated (read: paid) staff to complete administrative and coordinating efforts, at the least, is vital (these staff can be paid through a member agency, with all or part of their time allocated to the collaborative; the collaborative does not necessarily need to raise funds to hire staff). Consensus decision-making requires a high level of trust and usually results in a high level of commitment to its outcome. Yet, if there is any sense of distrust, or if alienation occurs, the collaboration might begin to disintegrate into competitive factions as alienated members seek to meet their needs outside of the collaborative. On the other hand, when trust continues to grow between members, the collaborative might consider scaling up or broadening its scope of work. Spinoff collaboration around a different yet related issue might ensue, such as taking a deeper look into one branch of the parent issue. With high levels of trust, these spinoffs become complimentary, not competitive.
While collaboration is not a new phenomenon, it is proving to be vital in addressing the complex issues that our highly networked society has faced in recent decades and will increasingly face at societal, governmental, and environmental levels. Over centuries of globalization, the world has developed around an economic framework of conquest, competition, and trade. Represented by centralized sports arenas, columned fortresses representing democracy, and glaring skyscrapers full of number crunching and trading of investments, that framework emphasizes black and white, winner and loser, insider and outsider. Collaboration presents another way of doing business, one based on relationships, inclusiveness, support, and nurture. Collaboration is characterized by fluidity, openness, a lack of walls and barriers, and commitment to the common good. These two frameworks might symbolize humanity’s masculine and feminine sides, and we need both equally to survive. By bravely and broadly applying the principles of collaboration, humanity – and its ecology – will thrive.
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Sonja Koehler’s life work is about making connections – between what happens locally to what happens globally, between vision and action, between people whose synergy creates collective good.
Sonja has partnered on diverse projects, from reducing street violence through supporting collaboration in Salinas, CA to organizing the (at the time) largest peace movement in Chicago, IL during the onset of the Iraq war. She has co-designed innovative workforce development programs for youth in Monterey County, CA and introduced secondary school students to careers in environmental protection in rural Benin, West Africa. She has published on transnational cooperation for research and development in the Mideast and North Africa, and built cross-sector networks for improving urban environments throughout the US.
Between growing up bi-culturally and internationally, and her BS in Microbiology and Masters in Public Affairs (both from Indiana University), Sonja has developed a broad, in-depth view of the world, its inhabitants, and how they work. Sonja facilitates executive and board strategic and project planning, designs learning experiences and events, provides leadership coaching, raises funds, and acts as “brain-and-brawn-for-hire” for anything that she deems exciting.
The sculpture seen in this photograph is one of the “rockstacks” which I have been making for nearly twenty years. These rockstacks by and large consist of two or more natural stones, placed in proximity to or balanced on top of each other. They are a composition of separate elements brought together in one voice.
Working with and in response to the materials at hand, I take one stone, just as I have found it, and put it on another. As I listen to the stone, it becomes a natural practice, a meditation. Touching the stone, I understand that each has its own unique qualities, its individual strength which I use in making the placement as I build the sculpture.
Tell us about the piece, Many Peaces.
I conceived of Many Peaces in 2004 while at Montserrat outside of Barcelona, Spain. I was participating in an event held by the Council for the Parliament of the World’s Religions, bringing together hundreds of religious and spiritual leaders to find solutions to critical issues facing the world, including religiously motivated conflict.
I imagined the creation of a web of hopefulness, rockstacks made by individuals at such gatherings commemorating the many paths to peace. We recognize that a rockstack is constructed of individual stones and I see a correlation here with conflict resolution in that they are both comprised of individual voices coming together as one. My hope is to build a web of many sculptures, of Many Peaces, as a collection of monuments acknowledging the successes in bringing individuals and communities together in search of inclusive resolutions which bring peace, and balance, into our lives.
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Jim Needham is a photographer and sculptor whose artwork has been shown and collected internationally. His sculptures can be seen at Gravity Garden in the Carmel Highlands, California. See and read more about this work at www.rockstacker.com.
The conflicts that gain the most attention and media coverage tend to be those that are most sensational and violent. But there are many other conflicts we do not hear about, and those living through them must struggle to make their voices heard. This column seeks to bring attention to serious events, issues, and conflicts that receive little coverage but deserve our attention, our acknowledgement, and our best efforts in resolving them.
Mali
Mali, once considered one of the more stable democracies in Africa, has suffered from a violent conflict between ethnic Tauregs led by armed groups, some of them Islamists, and the government since January 2012. A military coup felled the government in March 2012, citing the government’s failure to politically check the Tauregs who held vast areas of northern Mali. Some of the areas in the North have declared independence, but have received no recognition from the regional or broader international community. In the aftermath of the coup, around 200,000 people (according to the UN) fled their homes. Many have fled the country while about 93,000 remain internally displaced. To add to its woes, Mali has suffered from acute food shortages for over a year caused primarily by drought and erratic rainfall. After the coup, the African Union suspended Mali. As coup leaders deny regional forces the chance to intervene and bring stability to Mali, African and Western leaders have been urging the UN to intervene militarily. However, aid organizations have cautioned the UN that any military intervention will cause a greater humanitarian crisis than what already exists. The presence of Al-Qaeda in the one of the armed groups, Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, has drawn the attention of western powers and therefore created a growing interest in intervening in Mali. One only hopes the needs and security of the ordinary people of Mali are equally considered.
Southeast Asia
Conflict over water continues to be a topic that is ignored by many. The thought seems to be that since there is no large monetary value associated with water in most developed countries, how could water serve as a source of conflict in less developed countries? But when over 60 million people depend on one river for a variety of purposes, it is easy to understand how water has been the source of increased tension among nations. The Mekong River, which originates in China and runs throughout Southeast Asia, has become a controversial issue in the region. The Mekong is the world’s 13th largest river and is shared by six countries through which it flows. The abundant resources provided by the river have already been strained due to several dams China has built in order to meet its ever-increasing energy needs, with more planned for the future. In addition to the dams built by China, Laos is currently building a $3.5 billion dam near Xayaburi without regard for the negative environmental impact it will have on the river. There are ten more dams planned for the future in the lower Mekong delta. According to the Mekong River Commission, these dams would turn over half of the river into reservoirs, having a hugely negative effect on the area’s fishing industry (which feeds about 60 million people) and agricultural industry (with losses estimated at $500 million per year) and displacing many living in the region. The countries involved must engage in multi-lateral efforts to solve their mutual dependence on the Mekong River. The governments of these countries need to take into account the effects these dams will have not only on their citizens but on the 17 million inhabitants of the entire region. Should they continue to ignore these obligations, it is likely that conflict will erupt – between countries as well as between groups living alongside the river – to the detriment of all. The increased tension over this river demonstrates how, if this issue is left unaddressed, water may become a significant source of conflict in the future.
United States
Gang violence has long been a problem in many cities across the United States. In New York City, law enforcement has turned to new methods in an effort to prevent gang activity as well as violence. Police are now using social media to track the trash talk that occurs between members of two gangs in particular, the Very Crispy Gangsters and the Rockstarz, as they utilize social media to share both their successes and to issue taunts and threats to their enemies, which usually result in violence. Until recently, the tracking was mostly done through public profiles, but the police are stepping up their tactics through the creation of internet aliases in an effort to “friend” gang members and build a legal case against them based on their social media activity. Addressing gang violence is an important function of law enforcement. But the real problems in these communities lie in the causes of gang violence. Gangs thrive due to poverty, a lack of opportunity, a lack of suitable schools, and a void of appropriate adult role models. Should law enforcement and city governments be focusing on solving these problems rather than spending their resources on tracking activity through social media? It is important to prevent violence, however, the gang violence resulting from social media activity in New York will continue until the root causes of the problems are addressed.
