There are some people in recent years who become quite optimistic about trends and conflict.
The lowest number of conflicts ever, the least number of conflict deaths and giving a lot of kudos to the international community.
The U.N., successful peacekeeping, etc. I'm not one of those.
I think we have absolutely no reason to be complacent. Are the numbers can say whatever the numbers wants to want to say.
But we know that we live in an incredibly violent world where the numbers of conflict may be very small.
But we all know how brutalising they are, how they fracture the kinds of relationships and make the healing process so difficult.
How they relapse, how unaccountable.
And the fact that now we see that the burden of violence is not just restricted to the borders of countries which have,
you know, the over 1000 deaths and about battle related deaths.
It's much, much more pervasive now, endemic an epidemic than that across all borders.
In fact, the latest study of the global burden of violence shows how probably, you know,
just about a little bit over 50 percent of actual violent deaths are directly conflict related.
And the rest of them are actually indirectly conflict related or armed violence outside of what would be defined as a political conflict.
What's wrong? I mean, we could each of us have our list of what we find previously wrong with, I would say,
all the three areas, conflict prevention, conflict resolution or peacemaking and peace building.
I focus on what I think is the common factor across those three phases and which is
particularly relevant for what we're talking about here at the grassroots aspect.
One, I would say what's wrong is the experience and the perceptions of the actual
populations within the countries that experience conflict is completely ignored.
It's inconsequential or a little after part that's added in for a brief moment.
And second, even more egregious than that, the people themselves.
So it's not just that their experiences and perceptions are left out when the important people talk,
but the people themselves are left out of the equation.
They're not a part of any of those three processes, except sometimes as an afterthought or attention should part,
which means they bought both the what what kind of conflict are we trying to avoid?
What kind of peace are we trying to build? And the who or who is trying to prevent conflict or who is building the peace?
It's completely faulty. It's standing on the wrong legs.
And it means that those who are lucky enough to have benefited from the intervention and the attention of the international
community to either have their conflict prevented invisibly as well as some of our speakers pointed out earlier,
or lucky enough to have a peace agreement and a peace building process with a lot of
money and international actors coming in still remain societies that are deeply divided,
deeply fragmented. As our Phil explained yesterday in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Bosnia, South Africa,
where we saw the anti-immigrant riots just are just less than a year ago.
It's truly across the board. Negative peace, the peace of the cemetery.
Each of us have been there. We smelted. We felt it.
And this is as good as it gets. And I don't want by this to lash out at or reduce the achievements of the international community.
I consider myself a part of the international community because in most of the conflicts where I've been involved,
all said and done, I may be dark skinned. And I've grown up in India. I have been part of one of the outsiders coming in.
And I think to our credit, we are exceptionally good at looking from time to time and recognising our own mistakes and inadequacies.
The problem is we are trapped within this huge machine and even when we recognise our inadequacies, we can't figure out the way out.
How do we get out of this massive thing we've built up and do things differently?
And I hope that this discussion will be a tiny bit of the path towards thinking off that.
And also, I would say I would situate this whole discussion within two little moments in my life.
The start of my journey, one could say, as a post-conflict peace, but or a conflict worker,
which was a particular moment I was working in your part of the world.
I was based in Ethiopia, but covering the Horn of Africa and most of African conflicts and a particular day.
And after a mission in Somalia where I came with all my great Peary's,
my P.H. team from Cambridge on post-conflict justice and, you know, my great belief that the problem was out there.
And I was one of these people with a solution to fix it.
And as I went from conflict to conflict and looked and worked with the local communities and saw what they were doing,
I realised that we, with all our advocacy skills and with all our.
Yes. To those higher levels of power. We're missing two critical dimensions.
One was the main thing was we weren't appealing to or responding to the spirit of the people, as you your mom just mentioned so beautifully earlier.
We were missing out on all that was the art, the artistic expression that often said the things that people could not dare to say in other ways.
And we were missing out on the culture of these people by having all of our technical solutions.
That was the beginning of my piece of my journey in this area in 2000.
And then I situated where I was a year ago in Sri Lanka, where I was heading up local Research and Peace Institute in Art in Colombo.
And what I saw was, you know, there was the the conflict 25 years and more reaching an incredibly terrible stage.
And whereas before throughout this conflict, civil society, local, brilliant people from all the different areas,
lawyers, political scientists, youth artists had been involved in trying to feed in their solutions.
The NGO that I ran had been critical in having these groups of people sitting in a back room from different
dimensions and seeing how about a language policy which would get people to study each other's languages.
How about redrawing the borders? Little by little, the government had pushed them out.
And when I think about if there is a resolution to the Sri Lankan conflict now, it will be made by the elite who prosecuted this war,
who have been bloody minded, who have completely overshot, run roughshod over the wishes of the population.
And all of those extraordinarily gifted people from all sectors of life.
Right.
Whether they are teachers, academics, women's groups, the media, all of them, the youth, the artists, the art, all of them will be left out of it.
And you think, is this what this is about?
I would say that the failures have been at each stage of this continuum, conflict prevention, conflict resolution and peacebuilding.
And I'll be very, very what's the word telegraphic in what the key figures have been in prevention.
We figured it out for ourselves. Most of this morning and early afternoon, the key factor of the very cause,
the plight or the primary underlying cause of conflict has been overlooked,
which is the deep grievances and the feeling of the inability to address those grievances through legal or politically acceptable means.
That has been brushed aside.
So even when you look at this great attention given within the UN to the conflict prevention and the culture of prevention,
and you look at this area of structural prevention, it's all about general development.
General governance and general education.
But nothing that addresses structural violence, systemic inequalities and feelings of exclusion, discrimination,
division that come about in the society and create the fertile ground for for conflict in conflict resolution.
We know it only too well that all of the processes and the beautiful talk by Jonathan Powell,
which was encountered by Phil Clarke's question to him, is an example that even in the best cases,
these are highly elite, highly exclusive, and they reinforce the reify the divisions within society,
which is why they create the peace of the graveyard.
And let's not forget, it's not just the negotiators on the two sides who are the elite, it's the mediators.
I mean, it's appalling that after all these years,
we have an accidental Covance after to the fact that today you happened to be in, you know, in a suit, in a suit.
But they happen to be white suited men for the greater part, who negotiate the if will mediate these conflicts.
Certainly that neither the outcome nor the process is something which can support a peacebuilding process.
And so the peat society that needs to rebuild peace inherits not just all at the legacy of the causes of conflict,
which were ignored, which led to violence, all of the consequences and the and the brutalities of conflict.
But they also inherit this legacy of our failure to really resolve their conflict and to give them a piece of paper,
which we think we've got done a great favour to them. The more important part is that that's the situation.
How to change. How to love this. This is an excerpt from a book by a very controversial guardian academic IBT.
Do you use it? George, I believe in Africa unchanged.
He talks about, you know, that more than 30 peace accords have been brokered in Africa since 1970 with abysmal
success record records because they adopted the Western approach to conflict resolution.
He talks, he says that the cornerstone of this approach is direct face to face negotiation between warring factions.
Then he says, Africa's own indigenous approach is different. It requires.
For parties and arbeter, the combating parties, the civil society of those directly or indirectly affected by the conflict.
This traditional African jurisprudence needs more emphasis on healing all the kinds of things that Skaf was telling us about earlier today.
Restoring social harmony. Furthermore, and think about this while thinking why the kinds of processes we see today of peacemaking,
the interest of the community surpasses those of the combatants.
If they adopt intransigent positions, they are out.
They don't keep getting bigger and bigger carrots just because they they declare that they will return
to the battlefield and their militia is bigger than the guy sitting in front of him at the table.
So how can we change this and start a different approach, which is the opposite of what we have inherited and continue to reiterate today?
I would start at the same place that I start in all of my work on justice.
I am always appalled and all of these years of working on post-conflict justice that we want to restore justice and build a just just peace.
We'll be don't start with the experience of the population that suffered the conflict.
And so we have to start at the same place, start with the population.
And if we think about it for a moment, we can see that what happens to the population,
the grassroots within a society that undergoes conflict to generalise to some extent as a stereotype.
Very often a good part of them become victims in one way or the other.
They are the direct victims, the indirect victims.
But I would add on to that, that the whole kind of, you know, the passiveness that comes in with the direct and indirect victims,
but also the aggressive tendencies, those who become the perpetrators. And then there are those who become either complacent.
What this feel, there's nothing they can do.
So they allow it to continue or those who become complicit, who become the beneficiaries are the bystanders of conflict and all of them.
I would put within the category of the victims not to demean the victims, but to say that all of these people become sort of lose agency.
They are being acted upon and they are not able to act to overcome their circumstances.
But and we know this in every single society.
And I would claim that this is a larger number that needs to be nurtured. You have the survivors and by the survivors.
What I mean is those who threw out on a daily basis, on an hourly basis, are finding ways to innovate,
to create, to adapt to in order simply to maintain what you would have called the inner peace,
to find ways to be human and compassionate amidst the violence and the degrading situation that's unfolding around them.
They're constantly referring both to their ancient culture, their cultural wisdom, as well as adapting it to cope with what's happening today,
which is why you see this extraordinary expression of creativity in all kinds of forms,
new forms of artistic expression, but other forms of cultural creativity which emerge in the terrain of conflict,
which we tend to ignore because we're not looking at that.
As you said, we're looking at the political and ignoring the cultural, the social and all the other dimensions.
So what I propose we need, therefore, if we want to start with the population,
is to create ways in which this year the survivor community is no longer a part or a minority or even maybe 50 percent of society.
That becomes the overwhelming path that begins to shape the new peace.
And for that, I say we need a two step approach, which is why I called my presentation to hew and to create.
And by the first part, I simply mean what you said so well today in your Takar Scott, which is to make whole is the first step.
Societies have been broken, fragmented, Moeed divisive are exclusive, both well before conflict became violent and during the process of conflict.
And we cannot expect that it will by itself. And so we need to ensure that that healing process is done.
So, for example, during the process, I will lead up to a peace agreement and then continue through building.
What can we do to ensure that that which was exclusive becomes influence at the back,
which was divided, becomes united or integrated in order to become a whole or integrated whole again?
And the second part, but it can only come alongside or after.
The first part is to create a new. And by that what I mean is to unleash, to nurture, to harvest and harness all of that creativity,
the cultural, the creative and the, you know, the spiritual wisdom which is within that society.
Of course, there is a very useful role for outsiders to play.
But the key part, the key component for both the feeling and the creating is the people of that society and their cultural and creative wisdom,
both of those cultural hot and refers back to their past. The creative refers to how they adapt back to the needs of the present.
And I use the word wisdom very specifically because since the beginning of my work, I mean.
Criticising or don't you know, if you go back to culture, I had this experience with the elders in the south of Sudan in Juba.
I was told, how can you possibly meet with the tribal elders in Sudan?
Because don't you know that they were the ones put in by the colonial leaders and they are the ones who advocate all of these kinds of traditions,
which we would not support? I talk about wisdom because within all of our societies we have the inherent wisdom of what is just what is right,
what is good, what is acceptable today and could help us to build for the future.
I end up just seeing I think there are certain principles that emerge from this approach,
principles which are open enough to be universal but applied in a sweet,
generous way to each case as appropriate, which, if applied to all the three stages of peacebuilding, could really help us to see a massive change.
It will mean crawling out of our box. It will mean shaking up on our little, you know, machinery a little bit.
But I believe that there's absolutely no reason to stay within that anymore.
And the cognitive dissonance, the discomfort it causes to beat us to continue that and be a part of that is so great.
We need to step out first. Simply inclusive as opposed to exclusive integrative and bi integrated.
I mean, not simply unifying, meaning homogenising,
but seeing how each different part because of its diversity and difference is so important and needs to be recognised as a part of the whole.
It means being substantive and cause oriented instead of instead of being pinned or in substantive and consequence oriented.
We gets so much attention to the consequences, but not enough to the causes.
It means being disinterested and impartial. The international community has the responsibility to protect.
But it doesn't have the right to act in ways which might be perceived to be interested, self-interested or partial, which involves,
while you're disinterested and impartial, being compassionate rather than technical and dispassionate and what you're doing.
It means being ecological, ethical and equitable.
All of us are appalled that not only do we ignore the terrible environmental and ecological devastation of conflict,
but in our plans for post-conflict peace building,
we don't really seek to redress them and bring in ways which would be as ecological as their ethical and equitable.
But above all, it means harnessing what I started off with the creative,
cultural and spiritual wisdom of the people within the society and allowing them to use that as the basis
to prevent conflict in the future and to and to build peace in a way that's in accord with their cultures,
but in accord with the needs of that present moment in their histories.
And I can't possibly ever speak or teach without art at some point, mentioning my favourite poet, Hafeez, of Shiraz.
And there's one particular verse of his which I think I would remember on a daily basis when I was in Sri Lanka,
which goes, I've come into the world to see this.
Men stopped their arms even at the arc of their reach, because they have finally realised there is but one flesh wound.
And I think that's in a sense, our common commitment to conflict prevention and peacebuilding.
And I wanted to send that. Thank you so much.